Thomas Piketty: Clamping down with law and order will not be enough • Hacker News Board

Re: Thomas Piketty: Clamping down with law and order will not be enough

#181

Post by iofj » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 7:04 AM UTC

jules wrote: post #126

iofj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2) is not true. Violence committed because of islam has been pretty steady since the end of WW1 and was much higher before that.

No, it has increased a lot. This is a Dutch newspaper, but you should be able to read the graphs: http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/nmc/red/frameset/2015/te...

This is over a short period and doesn't count stuff like the Sudanese "civil war" muslim raids on Southern villages, which would have made that graph look like a rounding error.

Re: Thomas Piketty: Clamping down with law and order will not be enough

#182

Post by mercer » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 12:35 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #33

So in the Middle East the top 1% control 26.2% of the wealth (under a "high inequality model"), and in the US the top 1% control 22.83% of the wealth. Just 3.5% more and the US will turn into a medieval barbarism state. When will people stop believing this crap. There is one variable that explains a tremendous amount of human misery: surrender of the mind to a supreme authority (human or god). Of course there are oth…

I don't think 'we' have trouble acknowledging your elephant.

Rather, simply pointing at the elephant smashing everything in the room of the Middle East seems unproductive in light of the fact that we have such an elephant in our very own room. Ours just happens to not be smashing things currently.

It did do so quite recently though (and rather more violently that ISIS), and not just throughout our entire history, but the history of all of humanity. The elephant is part of human nature.

Isn't it much more productive to look at the many underlying factors that might cause elephants to go berserk, both external and internal to the human individual, and then try to find solutions based on that?

Increased income equality might be such a factor, or it might not. But at least it acknowledges all the elephants in all the rooms, and offers a possible way out. Pointing at the one elephant somewhere else does no such thing, and is likely to enrage ours (in fact, it already seems rather agitated).

Finally, I actually do think that the increasing inequality and centralization of power in the US does significantly increase the chances of a regression to a more 'medieval barbarism state'. It's just not happened yet.

Re: Thomas Piketty: Clamping down with law and order will not be enough

#183

Post by criley2 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 8:02 PM UTC

hsod wrote: post #155

criley2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't understand why we shouldn't believe what's coming straight out of ISIS' mouth." Because they're proven masters at propaganda and messaging. To take prop at face value is the definition of naive. "ISIS has said they're killing us because of their interpretation of a book written in the first millennia." That's their justification for their actions, not the reason. Come on. Recruiting for ISIS pays $5000 - $10…

> We call that quid pro quo, and yes, it's intentional. If Islam itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority, then it stands to reason that Christianity itself is responsible for the actions of a minority of a minority. So long as conservatives blame Islam in general for ISIS, we will blame Christianity in general for Westboro Baptist, for Clinic Terrorists, for Jehovah Witness child negligence…

"You are mimicking the rhetoric of the worst, most extreme segment of your opposition,"

No, we're not mimicking the rhetoric of the "worst, most extreme".

To suggest that is hyperbolic, and ironically itself represents the exact rhetoric you're trying to accuse me of engaging in.

The worst and most extreme segment of the opposition says "lets use violence to terrorize those who disagree". This level of violent discourse is far worse and more extreme than the rhetoric we mimick.

We're not engaging in that rhetoric, rather we're engaging in the mainstream popular rhetoric of people who don't agree with those extremists.

"Whoever fights with monsters..."

Honestly, the hypocrisy of you engaging in unfettered hyperbolic bullshit for the sole purpose of demonizing me as a monster is hard to overstate. Talk about monsterous, you should be teaching me how to distort words and demonize others, as you clearly are my superior in this area!