17 SEP 2025 by ideonexus
Statistics on Politically-Motivated Violence in the Unite...
Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.[1] In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks...16 APR 2018 by ideonexus
Video Game Violence is Not Violence
In the 1960s, as Bandura conducted his media effects research, the British folklorists lona and Peter Opie spent years observing and studying children's outdoor play. They watched children play games—many of them made up—with names like Underground Tig and Witches in the Gluepots and concluded, "A true game is one that frees the spirit. It allows no cares but those fictitious ones engendered by the game itself." When children commit to the games, they opt out of the ordinary world and "th...30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The South's Long History of Violence
Why has the South had such a long history of violence? The most sweeping answer is that the civilizing mission of government never penetrated the American South as deeply as it had the Northeast, to say nothing of Europe. The historian Pieter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that “democracy came too early” to America.85 In Europe, first the state disarmed the people and claimed a monopoly on violence, then the people took over the apparatus of the state. In America, the people took...Folksonomies: violence vigilantism
Folksonomies: violence vigilantism
30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence and the Concept of Social Justice
The main reason that violence correlates with low socioeconomic status today is that the elites and the middle class pursue justice with the legal system while the lower classes resort to what scholars of violence call “self-help.” This has nothing to do with Women Who Love Too Much or Chicken Soup for the Soul; it is another name for vigilantism, frontier justice, taking the law into your own hands, and other forms of violent retaliation by which people secured justice in the absence of ...Folksonomies: violence social status
Folksonomies: violence social status
30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
States Reduce Violence
So did Hobbes get it right? In part, he did. In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids). And the numbers confirm that relatively speaking, “during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war,” and that in such condition they live in “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”
But from his armchair in 17th-ce...30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Means of Quantifying Violence
Now let’s turn to the present. According to the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. It was one of the country’s worst years for war deaths in decades, with the armed forces embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together the two wars killed 945 Americans, amounting to 0.0004 (four-hundredths of a percent) of American deaths that year.57 Even if we throw in the 18,124 domestic homicides, the total rate of violent ...Folksonomies: violence quantification
Folksonomies: violence quantification
30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence Must be Considered Proportionally When Compared ...
In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree ...Folksonomies: violence quantification
Folksonomies: violence quantification
30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Bible is One Long Celebration of Violence
Like the works of Homer, the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was set in the late 2nd millennium BCE but written more than five hundred years later.12 But unlike the works of Homer, the Bible is revered today by billions of people who call it the source of their moral values. The world’s bestselling publication, the Good Book has been translated into three thousand languages and has been placed in the nightstands of hotels all over the world. Orthodox Jews kiss it with their prayer shawls; witn...Also mentions King Solomon and how his solution to carve a baby in half was horrific. The prostitutes must have known he was capable of doing it.
30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Violent Past of Otzi and Kennewick Man
In 1991 two hikers stumbled upon a corpse poking out of a melting glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. Thinking that it was the victim of a skiing accident, rescue workers jackhammered the body out of the ice, damaging his thigh and his backpack in the process. Only when an archaeologist spotted a Neolithic copper ax did people realize that the man was five thousand years old.2
Ötzi the Iceman, as he is now called, became a celebrity. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine and has been the subj...29 MAY 2015 by ideonexus