Sitting here in my comfortable home in the heart of Midwest America on a Sunday AM… I got myself to wondering if World War III hasn’t already started???
Is the battle ground North Africa? Are these people fighting what looks like each other…...but in reality, they are all various groups falsely propped up by funds and armaments from all the corners of the Earth?? How many years….how much blood will flow before their is a resolution?? Decades??
It is a proxy war. The North Africans play the pawns (the blood and guts) while on this Sunday, we can sit back, have a beer, eat chicken wings and watch another fake battle on a football field?
Sitting here in my comfortable home in the heart of Midwest America on a Sunday AM… I got myself to wondering if World War III hasn’t already started???
Is the battle ground North Africa? Are these people fighting what looks like each other…...but in reality, they are all various groups falsely propped up by funds and armaments from all the corners of the Earth?? How many years….how much blood will flow before their is a resolution?? Decades??
It is a proxy war. The North Africans play the pawns (the blood and guts) while on this Sunday, we can sit back, have a beer, eat chicken wings and watch another fake battle on a football field?
Despite what you see on the news every day, the world is more peaceful now than it has ever been in recorded history.
Really? How so? There may be less wars or battles, but our current (and recent) wars were far more deadly in scope. Just the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan probably account for more deaths and injuries and strife than several hundred years of “battles from history”.
Just the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan probably account for more deaths and injuries and strife than several hundred years of “battles from history”.
Not when you compare rates of death resulting from violence relative to population size.
Just the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan probably account for more deaths and injuries and strife than several hundred years of “battles from history”.
Not when you compare rates of death resulting from violence relative to population size.
This isn’t one of those cases where % matters, but rather the absolute number. For example, if in a city with 2 families of 5, one family gets killed by a bomb, you’d have 50% death rate from violence. If you had another city with 100,000 families of 5, and 10,000 famlies are killed by a nuke, you’d have a 10% death rate. By your estimation that one family suffered more than the 10,000 since percentage-wise there was more death by violence. Obviously you’d be wrong.
Well, I am no Clinton, so maybe I am not explaining it clearly enough for you, but it seems to me that one has much better chances of not getting killed in a city with a death rate due to violence of 10% than living in a city with rate of 50%.
Not counting percentages but the atomic bombs killed approx. 200,000 while the total battle casualties of World War II number conservatively over 68 million making it the bloodiest war in World History and I’ll leave it to you to work out the percentages. Yes, we are becoming a less violent people compared to our ancestors. Ex. Hunting is down 40% and the decline seems to be do to an increase in settled areas. I know you didn’t like the book George but I’m going to use it as a reference, see a Pinker’s “Better Angels…”.
That makes it more tricky to adequately label because many “small wars” could be considered world wars by that definition. The Cold War was sort of a world war.
Just a side note, Jack, but I think Pinker did an excellent job providing the evidence to show that violence has been declining. It’s only when he tried to explain why it was declining I found his book unsatisfactory.
Actually, it seems to have been the patern in many books I have read this year, where the authors do a great job at identifying a certain problem and then fail to explain its cause. I saw it in Pagel’s “Wired for Culture,” in Murray’s “Coming Apart,” and the biggest disappointment was Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind.”
That makes it more tricky to adequately label because many “small wars” could be considered world wars by that definition. The Cold War was sort of a world war.
That’s literally true Mike, but all of the casualties from the Cold War don’t add up to those of World War II if that’s what you mean. Let’s go from 1949 to 1989 and they still don’t match the KIA, MIA, and WIA of the War, not to mention the civilian casualties and the total destruction of cities, towns and villages.
I’m going to go with he’d be a silly ‘I love you MAN’ drunk. 
