Nov 21, 2019, 10:56 AM NO, VIOLENCE (harm) is evolving (progressing) along the spectrum from physical, to financial, economic, to informational. There is more HARM than ever in human history and on far greater scales. It’s just distributed across time across the entirety of human capital. Measure it.
—“Pinker addresses this in the FAQ on his site. Metaphorically extending the term ‘violence’ to practices you want to stigmatize(financial crime, inequality, etc) with rape, homicide and genocide confuse moralization with understanding. … Certainly, there are new financial, economic and informational practices that are bad and may even be increasing, but Pinker’s work is focused on violence, not “bad things”.”—
I know law and philosophy are my specializations but I would think that was pretty hard for you to say that with an outside voice. Ergo: why is violence a ‘bad’? And why make the claim in the first place if not to claim harms are declining (they aren’t). In other words, (a) false promise to people by the sophism that harms are declining (they aren’t),(b) false promise of disambiguation of physical from net harms? So what if physical harm declines while net harm increases, for no other reason than physical harm is less profitable? All Steven is saying is what every other economist says: harms are NOT decreasing, it’s just that physical crimes are more costly and less profitable than at any previous time in history. So why not state Whole Truth? Another system of lies like Boas, Freud, Marx, Cantor? See? This is the problem with the left of center “Pseudo -Intellectual’ public intellectuals: They produce what sells but is only half true and that’s because they rely on correlations not as economists or physicists: OPERATIONALISMS. Tell the WHOLE truth not half-truth: lying.