status quo is equally backed with guns, so we should be equally suspicious of "x is good"
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Hey, no fair sneak tweeting a parting shot after I said goodnight!
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But yeah, "x is bad" = "I am going to ban x with guns" is a foundational argument for me, meaning to blog it. Because...
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...decline of violence argument (Pinker etc), end-of-history/Democratic peace argument (Fukuyama etc) is a Big Idea for me
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In other words I do believe modern democracy+capitalism system is much less backed/stabilized by guard labor, violence.
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It's all anchoring. It's fun to compare American cops shooting blacks to (say) Praetorian guard, but latter was way worse
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has any civilization incarcerated such a high % of its population in all of history?
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Depends on what you mean by incarceration, and whether you judge modern institutions by U.S. alone or all lib dem ones
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Maybe it's a bit of claim credit, assign blame, but I attribute incarceration to ghosts of slavery from non-lib-dem past
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I give you: the Opium Wars and how China got de facto colonized without the land wars that were needed for India :)
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Not trying to condone everything about status quo. Just calibrating tiny secular signal buried in big cyclic swings
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I guess you've read the many criticisms of pinker's thesis so you will understand why I am skeptical
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