Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Field Theory: The Cup Continues, in reply to Hadyn Green,
I thought Wolverine was Maxime Médard?
Him too. It made us quite happy to think that there was apparently a Wolverine in every game (that we watched).
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“I don’t kno-oooOOOOW, why does love, do this to me? I don’t know. I don’t know.”
In my experience, this is pretty much the one song that every New Zealander will sing the chorus to, no matter the situation. It’s just that catchy, apparently.
Bugger, just noticed that the text on image on the main page covers up Kleeburger and his amazing beard
Me and my geeky American rugby-watching friends immediately started referring to him as "Wolverine" the first game we saw him in.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Amy Gale,
Female age 65+ who is interested in fishing, baseball, and formal wear, apparently. I won't be preparing for my new computer overlords any time soon.
Basically, Google thinks I am my father. Or possibly grandfather. Hard to tell.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Very common rule at primary school cricket when I was young.
It’s quite possible I was told it in that context and self-extrapolated out to the professional version of the game, but I really, really believed it either way.
Being a vegequarian, I thought this shot over the back fence up here was a stark reminder for meat lovers.:)
BREAKFAST, LUNCH AND DINNERSorry to disappoint, but I’m pretty much good with that.
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to Steve Parks,
Anyone wondering what DB and Lucy were referring to, or who hasn’t seen the talk Pinker gave on violence at a TED conference (which would be hard to believe, as I seem to have linked to it on every web panel on the net) can watch it here.
For those who can't be bothered with videos, there's also an essay here.
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to DCBCauchi,
. Doctors before the 20th century could do a lot more than stop bleeding. For example, they could remove a damaged limb before it develops gangrene and kills you. How they went about doing that, i.e. the degree of care and attention, would have a major effect on your subsequent quality of life, and capability. They could also treat your pain with drugs such as laudanum, if they chose to do so of course.
Oh, sure, and you know how likely you were to survive amputation?
I don't dispute the genuine desire of pre-twentieth-century doctors to help, or the efforts of most to do so. But the fact was that there simply wasn't a lot they could do. Basically all the major health advances are late nineteenth-century at best, except inoculation. When you don't have germ theory, antibiotics, antivirals, vaccination....remember, infectious disease was the big killer. And there was fuck-all doctors could do about that, once people were sick. You really underestimate the degree to which healthcare was pretty awful for everyone.
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to Islander,
Emphatically there was a distinction in quality of medical care – none for the poor. Let’s take Victorian England and workhouses & baby-farming for starters -
Yes, obviously. You just made it sound a bit more deliberate than that, rather than the (highly disturbing, but inevitable) result of massive income inequalities and a total lack of state healthcare.
It's also worth remembering that before the twentieth century, medicine was essentially a gamble that killed as many as it cured. Once you got past stopping bleeding to death, you weren't much better off with a doctor than without one. Genuine medical breakthroughs like the epidemiology of cholera were very rare. Things like living conditions and nutrition that made far more of a difference to people's outcomes than actual medical care.
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to BenWilson,
However much Pinker righteously points out that the world was a more violent place, the huge anomaly of the ultra violent wars that technology makes available to us, and we have availed ourselves of periodically, makes me uninclined to be complacent about our capacity for a sudden, horrible reversal
Yeah, I guess I meant that the presence of death for non-murder-related reasons, every day, would bring those urges a bit closer to the surface.
I, too, am totally unsanguine that this is a permanent sort of change. Sure, it says good things about the evolution of society, but sans society...you only need to look at the various genocides of the last two decades, most of which involve people going "Hey, let's rape, torture, and massacre our neighbours!" to see that the basic instincts are still there. If current societal constructs go down the tube in a serious way, I'd expect to see those violence statistics go right back up.
I think his conclusions are much more valid for murder than for war, too. As for the possibility of nuclear war...yeah, well, that too, but disasters and wars have killed very large percentages of the human race before. Depends whether you count a war that kills, oh, 20% of a population as "more violent" when the population is 1 million than when it's 1 thousand. I don't think Pinker does, and I'm not entirely sure it's a comparison I find useful.
Also, if a thousand people die in one war and a hundred do in another because of better medical care, does that make the second war "less violent"? Is Iraq less violent than Vietnam? My understanding is the casualties are the same, but the airlifts and medical attention are better, so deaths are fewer. How do you deal with that sort of statistic?
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to Islander,
It wasnt just murder & battle-death: there was a significant sieving out going on in Euro societies.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Are you saying there was a deliberate distinction in quality of medical care given to different people?
Certainly another reason life was "cheap" was that people died often and early, of unpreventable diseases. Childbirth was (is, in some parts of the world) dangerous. Giving birth to a live child was not a guarantee you'd have one a year or five years later. Possibly the range of other ways to die, and nearness of death in people's lives, influenced people's willingness to commit murder and violence?
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OnPoint: Set it on fire, then, in reply to DCBCauchi,
We’re mostly there (cf, in kind of a related way, Pinker on violence), especially the educated western middle classes, who have always been the most successful revolutionary class, the vanguard for all the rest.
Pinker's conclusions seem mostly valid to me, although I'd like some explanation of whether, when they looked at the data for extant hunter-gatherer populations, they took into account the fact that they have universally been marginalised and are operating in low-resource situations (maybe not some of the ones in the Amazon, but def. other groups) which could impact levels of violence. It's also not necessarily a world-wide phenomenon (c.f. places like Somalia).
Nevertheless, it's some very nice research, and it's a good counter-balance to everyone who thinks the world is falling apart. It's easy to forget just how common murder was in medieval societies, compared to today. Life absolutely was cheaper.