I wonder how many 70-year periods there are for which one could draw up similar charts.
I would also like to see a chart with other forms of war-related injury. Battle deaths, fine, how about, say, non-battle deaths (is having a bomb dropped on you a death in a battle?), or any of the other forms of immiseration that can be visited on a populace whose state is involved in (or near to) a war without contributing to a death toll.
If conventional weapons were all being gradually replaced by permanently crippling non-fatal nerve gas, you could draw up a similar chart, but that wouldn't be an increase in peace.
Buzzfeed? As in Google Buzz? I thought I just shared that via Google Reader, and that I had disabled my Buzz. Are they still pushing it through?
Um, yeah, so: Pinker, you know? He's very good at finding lots of evocative correlations, but it would probably be best not to imagine that he has exhaustively modeled the phenomenon.
Weird.
Anyway, plenty of salt on Pinker, but all the Scandinavian place-names in the sources of that chart make me feel better about the data itself.
It's not war if the death rate is lower.
It doesn't take a master of the statistical arts to locate a relative decline in violence from a global conflict that killed circa 50 million people. But it's nice to see that Andrew Sullivan remains the pluperfect pseud.
5: I hold no brief for Pinker, but his upcoming book isn't the first or only place I've seen this particular claim.
Yeah, I'm pretty skeptical. It looks very impressive by starting during WWII, but I think if you've read a lot about WWII it's easy to decide that a) it was totally horrible and b) the great fear is having it happen again. What about the period between the world wars, or including the period before WWI? What if the levels were just as low then and then suddenly they spiked up at those wars? Couldn't the same thing happen now? Saying we're better off than WWII is is not reassuring b/c my great fear is returning to it, suddenly. Also I'm guessing that the chart has much better data for Europe than for anywhere else, and so the chart is very dominated by European stats. So yay, Europe is more peaceful than it was during WWII! Does that really console the rest of the world? And of course there's the idea that there are other ways that war causes death except battles.
9, 10: the larger argument of the book is that this holds across much large timescales; that even given WWII, per capita violence has been decreasing for an extremely long time. That he uses a graph which starts with WWII to illustrate this point is but one of many reasons I'm a bit suspicious of said argument.
I've read Mueller's book and it made a similar point (similar to the linked article in the post) and seemed very convincing.
Also, the decline in infant mortality means we don't hate babies the way we used to.
I think it's pretty clear that, from a planet-wide perspective, the past 10 years were pretty much a golden age. India and China getting much richer, even if you quibble with Pinker or the graph, it's clear that it was a relatively very peaceful period compared to most of the 20th century, etc.
Of course, (a) no human being actually has a planet-wide perspective, things generally sucked in the USA and particularly sucked if you lived in Tikrit, and (b) the result of this golden age may be accelerated global warming.
13: exactly, this is a trend that's been going on for thousands for years but for some reason is most convincingly shown with a graph starting with Hitler. And of course life in the 1940s wasn't modern at all, without blogs and Angry Birds and e-mail. Why would you fight war when you have the internet?
Sullivan is a moron.
I think its kind of disingenuous that this chart is on a deaths per-100,000 basis, rather than in absolute numbers of deaths.
What the graph seems to illustrate to me is that WW II was really bad, and also that the world population has grown from 2.3 billion to almost 7 billion.
But is not as if 1000 war-deaths in 2011 is any more or less morally abhorrent than 1000 war-deaths in 1940 or 1970. But I can't really compare 2011 and 1970 because the denominator of the equation - the populate of the world - has changed so dramatically since that time.
Ok, I guess that big hill at the beginning is the civil war in China and the Korean War, not WWII.
What the graph seems to illustrate to me is that WW II was really bad....
Dude, spoilers.
19 -- so it does. The graph's lesson seems to be that land wars involving China are really, really bad.
Dude, spoilers.
Meh, you already know what happened if you followed WW I. Same hackneyed plot - Germany tries to take over the world again - only to get beaten back by the plucky allies. Pretty shitty sequel, I think.
Why would you fight war when you have the internet?
And how can you win without PowerPoint?
OT: Seriously, anyone looking for an excuse to shake their fists at the sky in impotent rage need only look at what is going on in Yemen, and US policy towards same.
The chart doesn't seem very convincing, but isn't it really intuitively reasonable to think that people now are much less likely to die from violence than people at almost any other time in human history? I wouldn't even be surprised if that was true while World War II was happening, though it's hard to know how to calibrate the numbers in times without detailed record-keeping.
I have to say, it's usually much easier to figure out how Pinker fucked up the data. I find his WSJ column - linked by Sullivan - pretty persuasive on most counts.
Surprisingly, he directly contradicts his favorite way to be stupid: Overinterpreting the influence of genetics.
Why has violence declined so dramatically for so long? Is it because violence has literally been bred out of us, leaving us more peaceful by nature? This seems unlikely.
but isn't it really intuitively reasonable to think that people now are much less likely to die from violence than people at almost any other time in human history?
I guess it depends on how you account for disease and infant mortality.
The linked article claims that 15% of humans died violent deaths in pre-state, nonagricultural societies, as opposed to 3% after the formation of states.
That doesn't really seem plausible to me, but what do I know. If true, it means that people were living consistently in near-Khmer rouge like levels of violence before the rise of state governments, so the pre-state, post-state distinction would make every other improvement in the level of violence look like peanuts.
(Anyhow, I guess I'm committed to arguing that if the death rates were that high it was because everyone was a meat-eating badass not weakened by an agricultural diet.)
If true, it means that people were living consistently in near-Khmer rouge like levels of violence
I think this is wrong... the Khmer Rouge killed its 25+% percent of the population in a few years, whereas the 15% you cited was a percent chance of violent death over the course of a lifetime (or, presumably, at the end of a lifetime).
Still heinously violent, though. But I think closer to West Baltimore violent than Khmer Rouge violent.
Google turned up this comparing violent death rates in humans and chimpanzees. It claims they're similar. (But it's measured in deaths/100,000 individuals/year, so at least quickly skimming it it's hard to extract a number for the likelihood that a given death will be form violence, since I don't see any tally of all deaths to compare to.)
Maybe you're right. But you don't have a 15% chance of violent death over your lifetime in West Baltimore.
is not as if 1000 war-deaths in 2011 is any more or less morally abhorrent than 1000 war-deaths in 1940 or 1970
Isn't this basically utilitarianism vs., uh, nonutilitarianism? Presumably there's more than one alternative.
If I'm reading things correctly (and I may well not be) this dude claims that the violent death rate per year in primitive societies was between 400-600/yr per 100,000, which this other dude claims is a comparable rate to Russia in 1943 or the Rwandan genocide.
But whooo boy is this not real research.
32: Yeah, it's pretty safe here in West Balti
I about burst when I heard L Panetta claiming that Yemen was a threat to the US. Yemen exports jute and saltfish, produces less electricity than Rhode Island. But clearly very expensive weapons systems are called for.
Next week I look forward to hearing about the threats emanating from the dark side of the moon.
Of course per capita is the right way to count. Since it's cheaper to manufacture guns than it was a generation ago, static bloodshed per capita would be a gain.
Early statistics are hard to work with, but I think that both a much higher rate of violent death before 1800 compared to later in Europe is widely accepted, certainly holds for France and Hapsburg lands. Here's one survey:
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/41/4/618.full.pdf
This leaves out infanticide which wasn't worth mentioning. Wars of conquest left huge tracts of land depopulated-- population drops of 25-35% for the 30 years' war is what I've seen, and local drops exceeding 25% after the Norman conquest.
Lastly, is there a less casual critique of Pinker? He reaches sometimes, but he's pretty interesting, where I understand primary data I have not seen misuse.
Presumably there's more than one alternative.
Maybe, but I don't see it. In what year would you imagine that 1000 war deaths reach maximum abhorrence?
Same hackneyed plot - Germany tries to take over the world again - only to get beaten back by the plucky allies. Pretty shitty sequel, I think.
But the action sequences were much better, and Japan, Russia and Italy are all cast in more interesting roles. There are some gratuitous tear-jerking scenes involving extermination of racial minorities that detract from the overall work, though.
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Can anyone advise me on the practical merits of SAS vs. R?
I learned Stata in school, and got fairly adept with it, but SAS is what the office has a license for, and it will be installed on my workstation pretty soon; I inherited a bunch of manuals and there'll be opportunities for training. On the other hand, we recently hired a statistician who is talking about training people in R - that would be nice as I would be able to use it at home too for my occasional hobbyist datadelves, not to mention saving the company money.
The application would be analysis of large datasets, but not very sophisticated conceptually - multiple linear regressions and so forth.
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Not actually relevant to the 15% statistic, but interesting:
Despite recording its lowest number of killings in 20 years, Baltimore experienced 37 homicides per 100,000 residents [in 2008], ahead of Detroit, which had 34 per 100,000 residents, according to data compiled by the FBI.
To 40, from one of the links in 34:
WATCH YOUR BACK (30-49 [violent deaths per 100,000 per year])Citizens live in relative fear for their lives. Only a handfull of modern nations are stuck in this range. To give a comparison, during the Dark Ages of Europe, this was the level of violence the typical society endured... and that was with The Hundred Years War, and the homicide increase that came on the heel of the Bubonic Plague. Put bluntly, if your country isn't at war, yet you're in this category, then you live in a pretty barbaric place.
39: SAS is nontrivial to learn. It lets you manage data more easily than you can in Stata, but it is harder to learn the modeling. I'd want to learn SAS if I were thinking about building ny skill set, but purchasing Stata is almost certainly cheaper than teaching somebody SAS if there is some way to honestly account for time.
Either SAS or Stata should allow you to install it on your home machine if it is legal on your work machine.
I never used R.
37: Well, there's the view that all violent deaths are equally abhorrent and unjustifiable, so that the current world is *worse* than a thousand years ago because there are more people being killed. I can't remember the names of any alternate theories, though. Trollies.
Don't know anything about SAS, but if you use R you can drive it through a much pleasanter language, e.g. Python; apparently including huge datasets and parallel access thereto, although I personally haven't done this.
Just two minutes ago read Elizabeth Kolbert's scathing review of Pinker's book in the New Yorker (subscription only).
I think I have delurked to post a link to the New Yorker before, ugh. I need to diversify. But hey, uh, for discussion, will universal coaching make us less violent?
For as long as I've read books on this topic, it's always been conventional wisdom that lots of societies are much much more violent than modern states. I don't get what's supposed to be controversial about it? Death rates from violence in some hunter-gatherer societies are astronomical.* I'd guess it's hard to make hard and fast generalisations from that -- these are usually people in very marginal environments under extreme social/economic/environmental pressure -- but still, modern states have extremely low violent death rates, and a lot of people live in them. It doesn't seem statistically unexpected that the overall effect would outweigh periodic bouts of mechanised warfare.
* but also vary wildly. Some don't have particularly high rates of violent death at all.
45 not to be taken as endorsing anything Pinker himself says.
Hey, we did good, didn't we? There were some glitches and collateral damage, and border skirmishes will always happen, but I think we got it under control. Should have peace and security for the next 1000 years.
(Psst. Dude you are off by 1700 years, this this the Pax Britannica...no the end of history...the Greater Est Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere...wait which citizens of Empire are holding this Triumph anyways?)
43.2: I doubt there is a simpler drive for linear models than Stata.
No, Imperials, it is not cool to celebrate the pacification of the Provinces.
If they could kill us, they would. We deserve it. They have just given up...for now. And damn, the baths and aqueducts are kinda nice.
What I've read of Pinker always seemed to go wrong by saying really obvious things and acting like they were novel and even scandalous instead of obvious. Like The Blank Slate which I remember as hundreds of pages of "You might be shocked to learn that... identical twins often have some things in common due to their shared biology! No, really, I know it's heretical, but it's true!" Maybe I overlooked parts that were outright wrong, or was too ignorant to notice them, but wrongness didn't seem like his primary annoying characteristic.
Isn't it a basic human right to beat up your neighbour and take his stuff? If you can?
Is amazing just how unconscious is this bourgeois misunderstanding and horror of violence and war. There is peace and security for you because you, the bourgeois/capitalists/Americans have got all the fucking stuff and well-equipped fucking cops.
I would take everything you have and throw it on the streets of Sao Paulo.
This post is the non-violent morality of slaveholders.
Lurkey, I loved that article on coaching. But I would, since I've had sports coaches most of the years of my life.
Isn't it a basic human right to beat up your neighbour and take his stuff? If you can?
Can we kick the shit out of people for annoying speech too?
39: Minivet, feel free to send me an email if you want to know about SAS in more detail.
Pace yourself, bob. No one said you have to do the whole bag of meth in one day.
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What should my interest level in Occupy Wall Street be? My concern is it's fairly "Whatever It Is, We're Against It" as I've heard a casual wander through the crowd brings one face to face with Obama=Hitler posters and such. The other problem is my own persistently vague grasp of economics. The Gawker article showed folks holding signs that said "End the Fed" and I frankly have no idea why you should or should not do that. But my basic sense is that the underlying message is populist and anti-corporate, so maybe I should lend an extra face to the crowd at some point?
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I think the "End the Fed" people are likely worse people to have in charge of the economy than the Fed, but I'm guessing that isn't a huge part of the Occupy Wall Street message.
OT: Megan, do you still check your old blog e-mail (or have a new one)? I have to do a survey-ish-type thing for a class assignment on how people use certain types of information, and you're one of the few, possibly only, people I "know" whose work is likely to use a lot of these types of resources.
Also, would you be interested in participating in a brief survey-ish type thing?
Yep, I think this one still works.
I would participate in a brief survey-ish type thing for you.
Great! Thanks.
(Hm, the address isn't showing on that comment - I just see yahoo.com, which always makes me think of the TOS - but I think I still have the old address.)
My concern is it's fairly "Whatever It Is, We're Against It" as I've heard a casual wander through the crowd brings one face to face with Obama=Hitler posters and such.
I'd also watch out for that old dude in the white uniform who's getting pretty free with the pepper spray.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moD2JnGTToA
56: Someone should be visibly protesting, even if these aren't the ideal people, but the Fed is the only actor with the ability to do anything for the economy right now. The fact that it's way too focused on the "price stability" half of its dual mandate, rather than the "full employment" half, is a problem, but it's not one that would be fixed by "ending" it.
The pix of all the uniformed pilots marching was pretty rad.
62: Confidential to Mr Blandings: My brother was given a tshirt that says "Straight Outta Kamptal."
I would participate in a brief survey-ish type thing for you.
Do you like me? Yes/No
Will you go out with me? Yes/No
Stephen Colbert's producers managed to find some people at the protest with a coherent message.
The pix of all the uniformed pilots marching was pretty rad.
THough, contra a whole bunch of my Facebook acquaintances, the pilots' protest had nothing at all to do with the Occupy Wall Street protest. Aside from being in NYC at the same time.
68: Which, you know, fine! If it becomes a locus for pro-union activity and middle-class discontent with the fuckery of their corporate overlords, go that!
If it becomes a locus for pro-union activity and middle-class discontent with the fuckery of their corporate overlords, go that!
Agreed. It's really the first hopeful sign I've seen in quite some time.
I heard a surprising interview with a journalist who'd been spending time with troops in Afghanistan: she was asked whether troops were actually in favor, at this point, of the war they were fighting, and she explained that quite a few were not, but kept asking, "If people at home [in the U.S.] aren't in favor, why aren't they protesting? Why don't we see or hear of any, you know, protests, any dissent?"
So yeah, people in the streets is a good thing. Wisconsin was a pretty hopeful sign as well.
Vets played a huge huge role in VN war protests. Do any of the historians know the stats on that? Bob? Anyway, this is a much smaller pool now, since the same people keep going back to war year after year, rather than a continuing flood of new people. And because deployments are much smaller.
And, I'm sure, plenty of prospective participants protested. A pool that doesn't exist at all.
A pool that doesn't exist at all.
Yeah, for a majority of the population, the war in Afghanistan hasn't affected them in any immediately tangible way *at all*.
I've been walking by/through Occupy Wall Street all week -- that was the 'c0cksucker' sign I was talking about. Um, I sort of approve in a diffuse kind of way, but I'm not sure that it's doing anything useful. I sort of feel like I should be going over and sitting with them on my lunch hour, but I'm not sure exactly why, and I usually eat at my desk.
Oh, just go have your lunch sitting over there with them, LB.
I always get nervous eating with strangers.
I would make this a post, but I don't really know what to say about it. You should read it.
This is a really weird line from the piece Blandings links in 70:
"It's become too big to ignore," said one political consultant.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry!
78: that made me think I should maybe check out The Wire some time. "Every time I try to reach a level of cynicism that goes too far, I find out I've been outmaneuvered," is a great line.
"The good news is, it's going to get worse... Eventually, someone is going to pick up a brick." Is a depressing assessment of our situation, but it's hard to call it unrealistic.
I thought I was the only person who had not seen The Wire.
Nope. I've only seen season 1, half of season 2, and a couple of episodes of season 4. One of these days ....
It's a little weird when you actually live in Baltimore. A bit as though there were an intense, gripping series about how tremendously painful and awful it is in, oh, Pittsburgh or New York. And suddenly the rest of the nation thought the most interesting thing to do in your city was visit the neighborhoods from The Wire.
This isn't to say that it's not an amazing work (what of it I've seen).
I'm fairly certain nothing could make me interested in visiting Baltimore.
I spent about two hours, after watching Season 3 of the Wire, playing around with Wikipedia trying to figure out the location of various Baltimore police divisions and City Council districts.
how tremendously painful and awful it is
That's not exactly wrong, but the show is also extremely affectionate towards Baltimore.
If you torch your own house, but it isn't really your house since a judge ordered the proceeds of the sale to go to your ex, is your ex just SOL? The guy who torched the house probably doesn't have money and is going to prison. I don't see how the insurance company will have to pay. To make this topical, I think we should all be cheered that this guy used non-lethal violence.
I resist watching the latest hot TV show fairly vigorously, but I gave up and tried The Wire and it really was very good. If you watch TV at all, and you're not backed up with more TV you want to watch than you have time for, it's better as pure entertainment than almost anything I've seen.
It's probable at this point that the Wire is hard to watch if you've never seen it before due to everyone telling you it's the greatest thing of all time. I love it, it really is a great show, and does an incredible job of bringing a particular population to life, but it's not perfect. I've always said at its bottom it's a police procedural with some of the flaws of the genre.
As I always do in these conversations, let me recommend Heimat, the actual greatest TV show of all time, despite being in German and 13 episodes long.
If you're expecting uncanny realism, it's not that. Not that I know jack shit about the Baltimore underworld, but while lots of it may be absolutely what's going on on every street corner, lots of it was patently over-the-top. Omar? Awesome, but bullshit. Brother Mouzone likewise. But the thing is, it wasn't just 'great literature', it was wildly entertaining TV. You don't need to think it was the best thing ever to think it's probably more fun (not exactly the right word, but close) than you're going to have watching anything else available.
I like those Baltimore marble front steps. Anything architecturally local like that makes me happy.
while lots of it may be absolutely what's going on on every street corner
Heh. Uh, it's not. Just for the record.
I totally agree with that. A lot of the Wire commentary ignores that it's very entertaining and well done and smartly plotted* as a police procedural.
*Something something Treme grumble something, with apologies to Flippanter.
I must say that it would be really awesome if, in real life, Parsimon turned out to be Snoop Pearson.
96: I don't know what to make of that at all. Haven't seen the series, you see.
I resist watching the latest hot TV show fairly vigorously,
But why? This makes no sense! Like the Knecht post? There is such amazing stuff out there, and we don't have time to get to hardly any of it, but not on principle.
"Isn't it a basic human right to beat up your neighbour and take his stuff? If you can?"
Can we kick the shit out of people for annoying speech too?
Sometimes no you can't.
I resist watching the latest hot TV show fairly vigorously
I resist effortlessly.
Now, to pt 3 of 6 of The Human Condition
I don't have any TV principles, I just sort of found myself watching less and less of it until I wasn't watching anything but kid shows, cooking shows, and How It's Made .
I didn't participate in the general conversation about The Wire because I didn't see it until recently, so allow me this observation that's probably really hackneyed by now: The Wire did an amazing job of showing how the world is driven by institutions, and not by individuals.
The two least believable plotlines involved individuals attempting to subvert their institutions: Hamsterdam and the serial killer. And Hamsterdam was still pretty darn believable as the last move of a retiring officer with (he thought) nothing to lose.
As LB points out, Omar likewise failed in some ways as a character - but it was because he, too, was unrealistically successful in subverting the institutions. (And Muzzone, like Omar, was a bit of a Clint Eastwood-type superman/vigilante, and therefore, a little silly. But still cool.)
96. Beadie Russel.
At the risk of spoiling, I really liked how Stringer's dream became real, but not for him.
102 is an impression of Prez?
I am procrastinating overt tedious PTA paperwork. What's the right conjunction for "procrastinating"?
Google records "on" as 4x more more common than "over" Both are dwarfed by "where * at" so this probably is not the right way to look.
Add "-fucking." "I am procrastinating-fucking tedious PTA paperwork."
Just to be a contrarian, season 1 was like a big pile of homework and season 5 was like any other tv show that goes on one season too long. Everything in between was really good, though, if at times bewildering. The acting was mixed and the writing was better on the level of structure than on a sentence level, but it was sui generis and perhaps important.
I liked Season 1 a lot more than Season 2. Otherwise I agree- I liked 3 and 4 the most, by far.
Omar's on Community now, which is pretty great.
I was completely lost during season 1. I had no idea what was going on or who anyone was. Ordinarily I'd chalk this up to my addled brain but I've talked to enough other people who were in a state of complete WTF that I don't think it was. I got determined to watch the show because EVERYBODY LOVES IT so I would watch episodes twice and read a recap online in between. That was the worst part because the guy who wrote up The Wire on TWOP seemed to think he was quite the poet and I just wanted to know what the hell was going on.
90 102
What exactly is the objection to the Omar character? If it is just that he was lucky this is not entirely convincing. Some people are lucky. A career robbing drug dealers is certainly high risk but it doesn't seem to me that success (at least for a while) is impossible. Or is it that the character was prettified by understating the amount of murderous violence that such a career would necessarily involve? Perhaps a little more plausible but as I recall it was pretty clear Omar had a lot of blood on his hands.
the guy who wrote up The Wire on TWOP
At least it wasn't that other guy on TWOP who would write long dissertations on the madonna/whore complex and the sacred feminine and psychobabble and new age mysticism and god knows what else when I just wanted to know what the hell happened on Battlestar Galactica.
I must say, I'm really liking the OWS "We are the 99%" slogan that seems to be catching on.
Oh, Jacob is exactly who I meant. I must be conflating my Wire frustration w something else because it doesn't look like the horrible Jacob recapped The Wire.
I stick with the AV Club recaps. Mostly workmanlike; A+!
This thread has some interesting takes on The Wire. Of all the myriad people I've heard recommend it in person, virtually none have said anything about it being entertaining or amusing in any way. It's always the sort of reverential awe you hear about Faulkner's more complex books, or Jerry Seinfeld's mom talking about Schindler's List.
It's almost worth trying to dig up one of the more out-there specimens of Jacob's writing just because it's so incredibly weird. The man is getting paid to tell people what happened on a TV show and he turns in a novelette about his mother issues. And yet he keeps getting paid for this, year after year. He also did some recaps of Weeds that were truly remarkable.
I liked The Wire quite a lot in 1 and 3, and have come around to appreciating 2 a lot more than I did. Season 4 remains pretty good, but the characters have to carry it after the long arc ends in 3. Season 5 was a huge disappointment, only good when it was picking up stories carried from earlier, and sometimes not even then.
I can understand why people would have trouble with season 1, and with getting into the show in general, but it does a fantastic job of making legible and comprehensible a world that (I would guess) most of the audience (including me) knew very little about before. It makes lots of season 4 possible, in that you can concentrate on watching the kids get socialized into the corner without having to also learn how things work yourself, because you've already picked that up. I didn't think it was homework, because I love that kind of thing, but I can see feeling that way.
The second commenter gets it exactly right on the subject of the Jacob reviews: "Wooooow, that's a lot of bullshit."
Reminds me a lot of the thousands of baffling record reviews at anus.com, which has been up for at least a decade.
I don't know if they're still there, but HBO used to have unbelievably poorly written episode summaries on The Wire's own website.
Season 5 was completely redeemed by Marlo's fate.
The newspaper season was weak. Frank Sobotka, the forgotten charm at the end, and Beadie were great in season 2, which managed to be both theoretical (almost nobody gets to see the face of capitalism, which forgets why it's doing anything) and very realistic. I also found the show entertaining, but I bet that enjoying it correlates strongly with liking detective fiction, and it's worth watching even for those that don't.
On the police procedural side, I think the fact that there's a lot of police procedure, but you by no means see only police perspectives, makes a huge difference. I watched the first 2 or 3 seasons of Homicide, and will probably finish the series if I ever get something like Netflix again, but never got even close to as interested in that as I did in The Wire, and a lot of that came down to police being the only recurring characters.
For unrelated reasons, I started watching a lot of crime and noir movies from the 30s-50s a little after I finished the first three seasons of The Wire. I've heard that some of the writers were influenced by many of those old films (along with detective and crime fiction) and it does seem to show.
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/van-jones-october-to-be-turning-point-for-progressives/
I'll be the contrarian, but I only read the recaps of more than one show because I liked Jacobs crazy. He also correctly called and walked away from dr who when it got terrible.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, OVERT TEDIOUS PTA PAPERWORK PROCRASTINATES YOU!
118: The Wire is more like a late nineteenth century realist novel than it is like Faulkner. It's like Dickens with more cursing.
I've only seen the first two seasons, but the scene where Omar testifies at the Bird trial is the most entertaining court scene I've ever seen.
Is it too late to talk about the OP?
The chart measures battle deaths. In the last thousand years, battle deaths have been a helpful measure of the horrors of war during a period roughly covering the long 19th century (1789-1919). And even then, only helpful. Otherwise phooey. Let us observe:
- The mortality associated with the 30 Years War and the Norman conquest was largely due to the disruption of agriculture and local trade patterns, with a few spectacular civilian massacres which don't count unless you're going to add in the Lancet figure for Iraq to your 2000-10 number for comparison.
- Battle deaths in WWII were lower per number of service personnel/time involved for most (I think) of the major belligerent countries than in WWI except Russia. Actual deaths attributable to war were obviously much higher. Draw your own conclusions.
- The Khmer Rouge killed 25% of their population largely through making them undertake forced labour with inadequate diets. They also lined a lot of people up and shot them. I doubt if 0.25% of the population was killed in battle.
If the chart shows anything it's that the effect of war on population has reverted since 1950 to the pre-modern pattern, and that battle deaths are no longer a useful primary measure of the effect of war on the general population. Quite why Pinker finds this so striking is beyond me.
In the last thousand years, battle deaths have been a helpful measure of the horrors of war during a period roughly covering the long 19th century (1789-1919). And even then, only helpful
Wait, is the argument here that nineteenth century wars, uniquely, didn't lead to massive amounts of civilian non-combat death? Because that's bullshit. The nineteenth century included the second bloodiest war ever fought, and civilian suffering was monumental.
130. I was arguing the negative version of that, which was in some 19th century wars this was the case, whereas in no other period was it ever so. I probably didn't make this clear enough.
There is nothing at all modern or new about wars killing a lot of people not wearing uniforms. FFS, the Thirty Years' War.
But why? This makes no sense! Like the Knecht post? There is such amazing stuff out there, and we don't have time to get to hardly any of it, but not on principle.
It's not really a principle, more a rule of thumb. Generally, I get bored with TV described as amazing -- I have to pay too much attention to figure out what's going on, and then it's not worth it.
( I could see the 'homework' reaction to the first season. I didn't feel that way, but I think that was mostly that the speech-patterns clicked for me fast, so I didn't have much trouble figuring out what people were talking about.)
132: yes, and even more so - right in the middle of the period when supposedly this didn't happen so much - the Taiping Rebellion.
132/134. Which tend to support my assertion that a table of "Battle Deaths", which is what we're confronted with here, is not very helpful in assessing how "warlike" various periods are/were. I would argue that a preponderance of none battle-related casualties in war (through economic effects or civilian massacres) is the historical norm and is certainly the norm in the present day. So the stats Pinker is arguing from are not particularly useful or even interesting. My minor point was that during the period ending in 1919 it was possible, due to the deployment of professionalised armies against one another or against colonial peoples who had not yet acquired appropriate technology to fight back it was possible on some occasions to limit non-combat casualties more than in previous or subsequent periods. Someone with an ahistorical viewpoint like Pinker would therefore be susceptible to drawing misleading conclusions from the data in question.
If I wanted to be bloody minded I might argue that the Taiping rebellion is the exception that proves the rule in this period because it was the largest conflict in which no modern western/Japanese forces were committed. But I won't, because I wasn't claiming a rule of any historical interest but a tendency which might give rise to a particular misunderstanding. And I am perfectly well aware of the sack of Badajoz, the recapture of Lucknow, the pacification of the Philipines, etc., etc.
From what I gather, Pinker argues in the book that violence of all kinds -- not just battle deaths -- has been declining for a very long time. He marshals all sorts of data to this argument, all of which show very similar near-monotonic declines in violence. The problem is that none of them are on the same time scale, some of them (like the post in the OP) are on very suspicious time scales, and in any case none of them have any a priori reason to be related to each other. The bulk of the book is spent coming up with reasons (largely psychological, not historical) why they might, in fact, be related to each other, but to my mind that's because he thinks it would be great if they were.
I would definitely recommend watching The Wire with someone else. I got through Season 1 because The Missus is much better at keeping names and faces straight than I am.
Of all the myriad people I've heard recommend it in person, virtually none have said anything about it being entertaining or amusing in any way.
The subject matter is pretty bitter, and the show's brilliance isn't in the humor, but it really was very funny at times, both because some of the characters were jokers, and because there was some sharply observed situational comedy.
In the latter category, I'd put the conversation between Snoop, the assassin, and the middle-aged white male hardware store clerk who was selling her a nail gun.
Her summary of the conversation afterward:
Man said if we wanna shoot nails, this here's the Cadillac. He mean Lexus, but he ain't know it.
And for James:
What exactly is the objection to the Omar character? If it is just that he was lucky this is not entirely convincing.
My objection is that he was portrayed as a superman in a way that is common in movies but seemed over-the-top in the context of a more naturalistic drama like The Wire. Like Muzzone, but not quite as bad.
It's only one sentence but it was so annoying it stuck with me--Jacob recapping an episode of True Blood I watched right before I decided it was way too gross to keep watching. "There's blood in her mouth. It tastes like God." Does that...mean something?
138.last: I've read interviews with David Simon where he offered a relatively convincing explanation for why that was the case (basically that's how people in the neighborhood saw him -- as uncannily terrifying). Also, the character (and some of the most insane things he does) is based on a real person.
138.last: That's about right. Successful at robbing drug dealers isn't more implausible than anything else. Successful because he's just so awesome started looking improbable. Fun to watch, but improbable.
And I wouldn't call it amusing in the funny sense, mostly, but pure entertainment includes drama.
140: Simon, I've heard, says that the things he gets the most shit for, realism-wise, are things that actually happened. Twain said something like: Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick with possibilities.
Yeah, iirc, the window jumping stunt was something someone actually did and got away with.
Hell, I've lost a guy because me and a buddy I with both didn't think he'd jump out of a second story apartment with no balcony or anything onto concrete. He fucked his ankle up but he got away.
We'd gone to the apartment because him and his girl both had felony warrants. She opens the door and we cuff her with her hands behind her back and sit her on the floor. We're not getting any response to calling him out so we go back and are searching the bedroom and bathroom for this douche and all of a sudden we turn around and the girl is gone. We run like hell out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street and fuck, she's nowhere in sight. Some old guy doing yard work points down the block and we sprint down to the next corner and she's still nowhere in sight. We start checking yards and I find her crouched behind a garage a couple houses away. I say something to the effect of "all right you idiot get over here and let's walk back" and that crazy druggie takes off again. She barely made it across the street when I caught her and knocked her down to get her to stop running.
Never did find the guy, another agency got him a week later, I think at his grandmother's house.
There was a local story about a guy who ran from his car when the police stopped him. It was dark or he was in a rush or something. Anyway, jumped off what he didn't realize was a bridge and the officer followed. The officer lived and can walk but the suspect died at the scene. I don't know if it was luck or the officer was paying attention and thus able to land better.
145. The officer landed on the other guy and broke his fall?
Omar was unrealistic but a great character & a lot of great characters are. I thought Brother Mouzone was a little cartoonish, & when they teamed up together it was like "Superfriends."
I think I am turning socialist. There's an Occupy DC protest starting soon--actually two, one October 6 and one tomorrow for people who just can't wait. Between the kid & a new job I doubt I will log much time there but am seriously contemplating regular deliveries of homemade cookies or something if they seem like a nice bunch.