A new(ish) argumentative line on crime has become popular: The reason people are civilized now is because during the period 1000 to 1800, 1%-2% of the population were executed per generation, and that culled the population of violent people.
Yes, most of the time evo-psy is just not knowing anything about history. "Men are attracted to big breasts because that way their kids get more milk!" Me: shows pictures of statues of Aphrodite and Venus with about B-cup breasts.
I guess i am at least glad that a few smart socialists are refuting the arguments of fascist scum because these arguments or papers aren't even worth engaging with for lots of socialists and lots of social liberals. These papers or arguments are equivalent or on the exact same level as saying n words a bunch of times.
I am glad that these sorts of arguments are quickly refuted to help and prevent impressionable young people from becoming fascistic sewer rats.
To be fair, 1 in 1000 people executed per generation is still shockingly high by modern standards—the equivalent of 340,000 contemporary Americans being executed. I’m not sure I would call it “very little” state-sanctioned killing.
The Great Terror of 1937-8 saw about seven times as large a fraction of the Soviet population put to death, but that was a one-off anomaly.
But Icelandic sagas are rather famous for private war. When this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nj%C3%A1ls_saga gets the advice to do not kill two men from the same family, because it will trigger private vengeance. And it does.
So my question is, what is the difference if the state kills murderers or the relatives of victims kill murderers? Murderers end up dead anyway.
Having said that, I would not argue in favour of genetic changes.
It is instructive to look up 1914 Europe. Basically everybody in Europe was happy to go to war, partially saw this as some fun manly adventure, and partially they had that kind of oldschool nationalism of the really-hate-your-neighbor kind. This is hard to imagine for modern people. It is not even the same kind of nationalism as Trump supporters in the US today have, they might want to kick out Mexicans from their country, but they do not want to invade Mexico. Whereas back then it was the case.
A few years later France entirely lost their taste for war. Their idea of war was to never attack anyone and if Germany attacks then, just sit it out safely in the forts of the Maginot line. Germany of course still had the taste for one more round of war, but after 1945 completely lost the taste for it. Britan was an in-between case, it took them several defeats (Dunkirk, Norway, Crete) to slowly re-acquire the taste for war, but again after 1945 lost it again. The colonies were given up without almost a shot. Italy no matter how tough Mussolini talked, it was clear from their performance that they had no taste for war. Compared to their WWI heroism when they head-on assaulted the Isonzo river 12 times, they were far more likely to give up.
So we have a well-documented, recent case of people going from very aggressive to very peaceful in a short time.
It's not clear whether it is goodness or cowardice? Honestly it looks a little like cowardice, but that is IMHO ultimately not really a big problem. If people do not turn into violent criminals because they are afraid of the consequences, that is IMHO good enough. It is enough that people are law-abiding, they don't need to be saints.
Isn't the easiest way to interpret the low level of executions in Iceland compared to Europe as a product of eugenics as well? Since the starting population of Iceland was so small, it's highly likely that they would an unusual genetic profile compared to the mainland. Therefore, they may have had negligible amounts of whatever combinations of genes caused Europeans to commit capital offenses. So centuries of bloody justice on the mainland might have been "selecting" for a genetic profile Iceland achieved by dint of its unusual founder effects.
Evolutionary psychology, pfft. I miss the heyday of scientific blogs where EvPsych bros were routinely ridiculed
Yes, most of the time evo-psy is just not knowing anything about history. "Men are attracted to big breasts because that way their kids get more milk!" Me: shows pictures of statues of Aphrodite and Venus with about B-cup breasts.
I guess i am at least glad that a few smart socialists are refuting the arguments of fascist scum because these arguments or papers aren't even worth engaging with for lots of socialists and lots of social liberals. These papers or arguments are equivalent or on the exact same level as saying n words a bunch of times.
I am glad that these sorts of arguments are quickly refuted to help and prevent impressionable young people from becoming fascistic sewer rats.
To be fair, 1 in 1000 people executed per generation is still shockingly high by modern standards—the equivalent of 340,000 contemporary Americans being executed. I’m not sure I would call it “very little” state-sanctioned killing.
The Great Terror of 1937-8 saw about seven times as large a fraction of the Soviet population put to death, but that was a one-off anomaly.
But Icelandic sagas are rather famous for private war. When this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nj%C3%A1ls_saga gets the advice to do not kill two men from the same family, because it will trigger private vengeance. And it does.
So my question is, what is the difference if the state kills murderers or the relatives of victims kill murderers? Murderers end up dead anyway.
Having said that, I would not argue in favour of genetic changes.
It is instructive to look up 1914 Europe. Basically everybody in Europe was happy to go to war, partially saw this as some fun manly adventure, and partially they had that kind of oldschool nationalism of the really-hate-your-neighbor kind. This is hard to imagine for modern people. It is not even the same kind of nationalism as Trump supporters in the US today have, they might want to kick out Mexicans from their country, but they do not want to invade Mexico. Whereas back then it was the case.
A few years later France entirely lost their taste for war. Their idea of war was to never attack anyone and if Germany attacks then, just sit it out safely in the forts of the Maginot line. Germany of course still had the taste for one more round of war, but after 1945 completely lost the taste for it. Britan was an in-between case, it took them several defeats (Dunkirk, Norway, Crete) to slowly re-acquire the taste for war, but again after 1945 lost it again. The colonies were given up without almost a shot. Italy no matter how tough Mussolini talked, it was clear from their performance that they had no taste for war. Compared to their WWI heroism when they head-on assaulted the Isonzo river 12 times, they were far more likely to give up.
So we have a well-documented, recent case of people going from very aggressive to very peaceful in a short time.
It's not clear whether it is goodness or cowardice? Honestly it looks a little like cowardice, but that is IMHO ultimately not really a big problem. If people do not turn into violent criminals because they are afraid of the consequences, that is IMHO good enough. It is enough that people are law-abiding, they don't need to be saints.
Isn't the easiest way to interpret the low level of executions in Iceland compared to Europe as a product of eugenics as well? Since the starting population of Iceland was so small, it's highly likely that they would an unusual genetic profile compared to the mainland. Therefore, they may have had negligible amounts of whatever combinations of genes caused Europeans to commit capital offenses. So centuries of bloody justice on the mainland might have been "selecting" for a genetic profile Iceland achieved by dint of its unusual founder effects.
But the violence of Viking-age Iceland suggests that the original Icelandic population wasn’t particularly peaceful.
There are states in the US which also have a very low murder rate.