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December 9, 2023 - January 14, 2024
We cannot be complacently optimistic about climate change, but we can be conditionally optimistic.
Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves,
According to the historians Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, “Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history.”
yet an imperfectly enforced law is better than no rule of law at all.
The moral value of quantification is that it treats all lives as equally valuable, so actions that bring down the highest numbers of homicides prevent the greatest amount of human tragedy.
The reasons were explained by Cesare Beccaria two hundred and fifty years ago. While the threat of ever-harsher punishments is both cheap and emotionally satisfying, it’s not particularly effective, because scofflaws just treat them like rare accidents—horrible, yes, but a risk that comes with the job. Punishments that are predictable, even if less draconian, are likelier to be factored into day-to-day choices.
Neither right-to-carry laws favored by the right, nor bans and restrictions favored by the left, have been shown to make much difference—though
Wealth buys life.
when properly designed and built,
and maintained
of hundreds of terrorist movements active since the 1960s show that they all were extinguished or faded away without attaining their strategic goals.
Indeed, the rise of terrorism in public awareness is not a sign of how dangerous the world has become but the opposite.
The media can examine their essential role in the show business of terrorism by calibrating their coverage to the objective dangers and giving more thought to the perverse incentives they have set up.
Good luck with that
Russia and most of the other republics to make the transition.
And some of them transitioned to.Democracy in name only shortly thereafter.
It also saw transitions to democracy in Myanmar and Burkina Faso,
Not that this undoes the trend but I think both of these along with two countries neighboriing BF have returned to military rule. History always moving.
Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.
Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.
children achieved their current status as “economically worthless, emotionally priceless.”
Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer. At least it does if the education is secular and rationalistic.
Flynn has speculated, and I agree, that abstract reasoning can even hone the moral sense. The cognitive act of extricating oneself from the particulars of one’s life and pondering “There but for fortune go I” or “What would the world be like if everyone did this?” can be a gateway to compassion and ethics.
And yet there are smart people who are real scumbags. And I'm sure Dr. Pinker would answer by the difference between individual examples and overall trends.
How does immigration tie in?
the worry that all that extra healthy life span and income may not have increased human flourishing after all if they just consign people to a rat race of frenzied careerism, hollow consumption, mindless entertainment, and soul-deadening anomie.
Even if true at least they're alive to recognize the problem ans do something about it.
proposing that the ultimate goal of development is to enable people to make choices:
but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.
Except for what China's great firewall screens from their populace.
People seem to bitch, moan, whine, carp, and kvetch as much as ever,
Damn right.
John Mueller summed up the common understanding of modernity at the time: “People seem simply to have taken the remarkable economic improvement in stride and have deftly found new concerns to get upset about. In an important sense, then, things never get better.”
Partly it came out of the social critic’s standard formula for sowing panic: Here’s an anecdote, therefore it’s a trend, therefore it’s a crisis.
The very sadness and agitation from which suicide would be a release also addles a person’s judgment,
As the saying goes you shouldn't kill yourself when you're suicidal
In her 2013 article “Abnormal Is the New Normal,” the psychologist Robin Rosenberg noted that the latest version of the DSM could diagnose half the American population with a mental disorder over the course of their lives.
A recent one entitled “Is There an Epidemic of Child or Adolescent Depression?” vindicated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.
Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them.
But as George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
Not every problem is a crisis,
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.”
Excellent book
You can’t worry about everything.
Biologists joke that to a first approximation all species are extinct, since that was the fate of at least 99 percent of the species that ever lived.
The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.”
But disaster sociology (yes, there is such a field) has shown that people are highly resilient in the face of catastrophe.53 Far from looting, panicking, or sinking into paralysis, they spontaneously cooperate to restore order and improvise networks for distributing goods and services.
Whether or not nuclear war would (as is often asserted) destroy civilization, the species, or the planet, it would be horrific beyond imagining.
He left out that economies would collapse, power grids and the Internet would at the least be disrupted if not destroyed which would lead to the loss of other utilities.
NATO exercise
Able Archer
As we saw with climate change, people may be likelier to acknowledge a problem when they have reason to think it is solvable than when they are terrified into numbness and helplessness.
were deterring an attack that the Soviets had no interest in launching in the first place.
Hind sight is 20/20
Iran.
Not true anymore
For the first time since 1946, no non-nuclear state is known to be developing nuclear weapons.
Also now false
and the possible war between Iran and the United States or Israel that was much discussed around the end of that decade.
And today appears much closer.
but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the Soviet Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.
You forget the US had effectively blockaded Japan and their supply lines were cut.
nuclear weapons turn out to be lousy deterrents (except in the extreme case of deterring existential threats, such as each other).102
So they deter nuclear first strike so they do work.
banned antipersonnel landmines, cluster munitions,
This isn't accurate. The US never signed it and has and uses both
New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START),
Russia has withdrawn
In the medical realm, a lab-on-a-chip could perform a liquid biopsy and detect any of hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood or saliva.
Sorry. That was a scam.
In another page-jumper, Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with the maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants. But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).36 This doesn’t mean that most Trump supporters are racists. But overt racism shades into resentment and distrust, and the overlap suggests that the regions of the country that gave Trump his Electoral College victory are those with the most
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