Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Come on …

… Skeptic — Wednesday, January 9th, 2013. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


Or take another long-term trend—the decline of violence—thoroughly documented by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. This trend has been so slow and steady across so many domains (wars, revolutions, homicide, rape, crime, child abuse, spanking, animal cruelty, racism, lynchings, bigotry, homophobia, and the like) that it took Pinker over 800 pages to document it all, and throughout I cannot think of a single random, Black Swan-like event that triggered anything but a minor wrinkle in the centuries-long trend. (Italics mine.)
How about World War I? Or, come to think of it, the Civil War.

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