I've met Pinker and it is my considered opinion that he is an elitist dick. (Sticks tongue out.) Srsly, not surprising that an eminent prof at Harvard provides emotional felatio for the moneyed class at every opportunity. @skillissuer

https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/9372418

also a thing about warfare. only really from franco-prussian war on combat-related casualties started outnumbering non-combat related casualties. (think napoleon's army dying of hunger and exposure during march on moscow). casevac got so good that during intervention in afghanistan american doctors started doing hemicorpectomies, that is amputation above pelvis. also, phaseout and ban of chemical and biological weapons didn't happen because we've got morally better, it's because this shit doesn't work in modern wars

this shit must have been infuriating to get in contact with when you’re expert in the area (i’m not)

He’s not the world’s most annoying man for nothing! (Article has been discussed on old sneerclub, I think)

@skillissuer @swlabr To judge from the pod's summary, it's specifically *classically liberal philosophers* who lead the rest of the elites to virtue, with the masses following after

I am not an expert, but I did take a couple of semesters of history, and I find him rather annoying.

Somebody who should have been infuriated was Manuel Eisner, who wrote the paper Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime. It's a really good paper, and I have seen Pinker misquote it, so he can't claim ignorance.

Eisner's argument, which I find persuasive, is that it was not the state power increase as such that decreased private violence. Because if that was the case, southern Europe wouldn't have lagged as much as it did. Rather it was the transformation of the nobility from personally very violent knights and lords, to officers and bosses who wields state violence. And that happened at different times, matching the decline in private violence. With the nobility no longer needing personal violence, it goes down. Quite different from Pinker's take.

And then there is the question of where that state capacity for violence was wielded. I don't think Pinker includes Queen Victoria in his rouge gallery, yet the famines in India killed about as many as the ones in the Soviet Union and Communist China, and those are usually counted as state violence.

On the rise and fall of violent crime in the west during the 70ies and 80ies, there has been many candidates, but most fall away because they can't explain it both in western Europe and the US. One good candidate is leaded gasoline leading to lead poisoned babies growing up and becoming more violent in the crucial young adult age. It matches, but I haven't seen any proper attempts to really test it, by for example comparing cities to the countryside.