http://www.radioopensource.org/iran-demographics-and-democracy/

perspective: us oil consumption (20.73 million bbl/day-2004 est.)

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/us.html

global oil consumption – 80.1 million bbl/day (2003 est.)

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/xx.html

us population @ 298,444,215

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/us.htmlwith

global population @ 6,525,170,264 (July 2006 est.)

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/print/xx.html

that’s @ 4.5% of the world’s population burning 25% of its oil. why are we we so misunderstood?…why do we need such a big military?

average price of gasoline in canada 102.6 cents a litre..home of one of the world’s largest oil reserves (tar sands) @ 180 billion bbls barrels, second only to saudi arabia’s 264 billion bbls.

http://www.energy.gov.on.ca/index.cfm?fuseaction=oilandgas.gasreport

http://www.rense.com/general37/petrol.htm

in us dollars thats 87.30206 cents a liter or @ $3.30 a gallon

average price of gasoline in usa..$2.38

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html

how do you account for this disparity? canada’s next door…imo we are behaving like armed addicts with our gluttenous consumer habits and the bills are coming due.

on young demographics:

iran has incredibly young demographics as well as high literacy and higher education levels…President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not as popular as one might be led to believe..could get interesting.

you are preaching to the choir on that one..

i’ve been working for years on this stuff. don’t let china off the hook btw..they are the ones with the oil concessions that are encroaching on darfur…as for exxon..google “exxon chad” it gets interesting.

our lifestyle simply can not continue as is..and too many people don’t care.

i was responding to your statement “I don’t see any evidence that we are less violent.” substitute hypocritical for violent and we grow closer in agreement.

i do still, in spite of it all, hold out hope that once people’s eyes are opened, that they will change for the better.

Sure, but look what it takes to do that: They’re consuming a HUGE portion of the earth’s resources to maintain the standard of living that keeps their lives from being nasty, brutish and short. In a sense they’re importing oil, other raw materials, and manufactured goods by exporting the poverty and social stresses that are resolved with violence. One of the reasons why we can’t make any progess in Darfur is because France is pursuing oil exploration in Sudan and doesn’t want to queer that deal. Much of Europe’s stability-giving wealth came from Africa, which has become one of the most hellish places on earth.

Then there’s demographics : violence is a trait of young men – populations with lots of young men tend to be more violent, or they require stricter state control to prevent it. But Europe’s population pyramid is inverted, as a % of their total population they have fewer young men than almost anyone.

if it is per capita..violence is definetly down compared to most millenia..for example..we don’t need to carry swords anymore and most of us don’t wear our savings accounts in the form of jewelry for fast getaways.

the population of the earth @ 1000 ad was @ 310 million…
today it’s @ 6.5 billion…
i can say with some certainty that i am more secure today than most people were back then…

but then that’s a 1 in 6.5 billion opinion.

europe has enjoyed more stability as of late than it has in its entire history.

now have we become less NASTY to each other?..again the parameters need to be defined. genocidal behavior has been around for most of recorded history…

are we more moral? most of us are more aware of certain things anyway. racial segregation et al, still around to be sure but it is less tolerated generally. although arabs and moslems are having a tough time of it right now.

britain’s answer to its trade defecit with china..the introduction of opium..is probably lower than that country will ever stoop again..but we’ll have to see. will germany ever repeat its worst?

rwanda..darfur? are these new? do they match the relative scale of the small pox epidemic deliberatly unleashed on indigenous americans?

i see a more aware and socially conscious world emerging today..now if we can only bring our gov’t in line.

we do still have a long way to go in living up to our potential.

as we may be moving to a greater collective awareness as demonstrated here. my hope is that thinking is more subject to the scrutiny of public discourse. back to the stoa. rational thought can only occur in open public discourse in which all sides of the equation are considered and balanced…real growth, stewing away on your own is fine for some but probably not for most.

look at ROS for example..don’t just casually say something that you can not defend. “very nice albert but SHOW YOUR WORK..-15 see me after class.”

this is not a transmit only affair..fantastic..statements are scrutinized, responded to..the future of our species society? could be for better or worse..i’ll put my money on better.

Pinker’s comments attack the idea that, “humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions”. But that’s a straw man I don’t know anyone who believes that.

FWIW, I think humans are violent by nature and while modern institutions may manage to impose a thin veneer over such traits, when strong social controls are lifted or break down we get Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, etc. This is essentially the “Lord of the Flies” thesis.

I don’t doubt that the modern state can impose controls on violent behavior, or that modern economies can create enough alternative forms of stimulation and entertainment, enough rewards for peaceful behavior, and enough overall wealth so people don’t have to compete as much for scarce resources, in order to tamp down on people’s violent tendencies. But it’s artificial and takes a tremendous amount of effort and maintenance to sustain.

I also question Pinker’s claim that we are much less cruel. There are a huge number of videos on the web showing beheadings and firefights and other nasty stuff. And there’s an epidemic of sport attacks on the homeless . . .
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/19/homeless.attacks/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/29/homeless.attack/index.html
I think the main thing that’s changed is that public dispalys of such cruelty are no longer fashionable. And even this is highly cultural. For example, the Spanish love their bullfighting even though such cruelty turns the stomachs of most of the rest of us.

BTW a major technical flaw in Pinker’s data is that he compares battle death rates and homicides of the past to today. The problem is that today’s death rates would be dramatically higher were it not for our modern medicine technology.

I’d love to see your evidence for that. As an engineer with a good science background, and no religious beliefs I’m obviously inclined toward the “thinking” side of the discussion.

But my thinking does not persuade me that you are correct. In the 21st century there is more rationalism than at any time in human history but I don’t see any evidence that we are less violent. A great deal of our thinking is devoted to developing better methods of hurting or prevailing over those groups of people we don’t like, and coming up with more sophisticated rationales for doing so.

Furthermore, from a scientific standpoint we are what we are. That is to say, strong irrational passions and violent impulses seem to be a hallmark of our species. Hoping that we will become some other way seems to be an instance of the sort of thinking known as “wishful”.

einstein

We flatter ourselves if we believe that thinking has much to do with it.

Virtually all human societies have a religions, so whatever it is that induces people to irrationally believe things for which they have no objective evidence seems pretty universal or hard-wired. Likewise (typically young) males like to get together in groups and engage in violent or aggressive behavior, especially against the “others”. This has been true throughout all human history and across all kinds of different cultures, and among rich, poor, white, black, brown, etc. We can dress this behavior up in whatever political, religious, economic or other clothes we like, and call them armies, gangs, mobs, police, warriors, etc, but it’s a remarkably resilient trait in our species (not to mention some other primate species).

In light of this it’s not clear that the “kind of thinking” we do really has much bearing on our problems. My undergrad major was neurophysiology so I got to study lots of psychology. In clinical psychology there is a practice called CBT – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which attempts to change the way people think about themselves and their lives. It has proven very effective for certain kinds of anxiety and depression. But other forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which have biological roots, do not respond much to CBT, and usually require drugs or other more aggressive intervention to manage.

There simply IS no science of human behaviour (sociology, social psychology, etc) robust enough to give us confidence that a geopolitical version of CBT would be able to contain the violent, irrational impulses characterized by things like the invasion or Iraq, the conquest of India, or the carnage we see today among the Iraqis.

el cid liberated spain fom moorish colonialism and destroyed priceless libraries in the process..libraries that may have contained the lost books of aristotle.

the price paid for colonial ambition is a heavy one for everyone. with the bill to be be paid by many generations. people have enough trouble figuring out their own cultures and problems.

of the contemporary popes there does not seem to be a mention of this monumental meeting in the catholic encyclopedia. interestingly enough though the pope @ muhammad’s death Honorius I had been bishop of alexandria and was branded a heretic.

curious that the catholic encyclopedia indicts muhammad’s bio because of a lack of contemporary text.

we do seem to have been banging heads from the start, muhammed smacked a few christians around himself.

einstein

Normally I try to exhibit some modicum of respect for the other posters on ROS, even when I disagree with them, but I really have to ask what you’re smoking.

More to the point what “1000 years of peace and harmony” are you referring to?

Do the Crusades ring a bell? How about the Ottoman invasions of Europe? How about the conquest of Spain by the Moors and their subsequent eviction 700 years later? Good grief.

i have heard that a meeting occurred between the pope and mohammed while
mohammed was still alive, in mecca. the result of this meeting was
peace and harmony between the two religions for about 1000 years.
it’s an interesting story – apparently mohammed had written the pope a letter
saying ‘i think you should change your religion to mine’, and the meeting
was more than likely the pope’s legitimate fear of competition in a
business sense.

this is referenced by a book named ‘the idiot’s guide to islam’.
also ref john-loftus.com for confirmation – it was during his
conversation with Dave Emory that i heard of this reference.