• Welcome to the Cricket Web forums, one of the biggest forums in the world dedicated to cricket.

    You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community you will have access to post topics, respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join the Cricket Web community today!

    If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us.

News related stuff that doesn't really deserve it's own thread

StephenZA

StephenZA

Well-known member
theconversation_survey-shows-gloomy-public-wrong-about-crime-immigrants-and-teen-pregnancies

A new survey from Ipsos Mori reveals that the public in 38 countries have deeply inaccurate views about crime, terrorism and many other important social issues. And this is not just the result of random guessing – there is a systematic pattern to our errors. We tend to think things are worse than they are, and they’re going downhill fast.

The Perils of Perception study found that only 7% of people think the murder rate is lower in their country than it was in 2000 – but it is actually significantly down in most countries, and, across the countries overall, it’s down 29%.

Only 19% think deaths from terrorist attacks are lower in the past 15 years than they were in the 15 years before that – when they are also significantly down across most of these countries, and overall they are around half the level they were.

People hugely overestimate the proportion of prisoners in their countries who are immigrants: the average guess is 28% when it’s actually only 15%.

Teenage pregnancy is overestimated across the world, often by a staggering amount. Overall, the average guess is that 20% of teenage girls give birth each year when the reality is 2%. Some countries guess that around half of teenage girls give birth each year, when the highest actual figure in any country is 6.7%.
Click to expand...
 
StephenZA

StephenZA

Well-known member
Should probably go into the political correctness gone mad thread...
theconversation_virgin-boycott-and-the-daily-mails-strange-notion-of-press-freedom


the Mail has accused Virgin of “censorship”. Virgin would no doubt retort it has simply made a business decision – one that, as a fellow private company, it is at liberty to do. You pays your money, you takes your choice (there are, after all, plenty of other places to buy the Mail).

Indeed, to force private train companies to carry a particular newspaper selection would be just the kind of state interference the Mail so often rails against. The Mail steadfastly resists any attempt to regulate newspapers, so it can hardly argue that the state should intervene in its favour and oblige a private company to stock it.


The Mail’s use of the word “censorship” in a free market does, however, raise an interesting philosophical question: can a private company which chooses which information and viewpoints to offer its customers be guilty of censorship? I would offer a cautious “yes” – but the Daily Mail would reply with a thundering “no”. Does the Daily Mail offer its readers a balanced discussion or a wide range of views on immigration, Brexit or politics in general? Of course not.
Click to expand...
 
Spark

Spark

Global Moderator
Saw this on my timeline (courtesy https://twitter.com/ToryAnarchist): https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

It's an extremely detailed and very long demolition of the popular historical trope (popular amongst liberals and conservatives alike, although for somewhat different reasons) that humanity started out basically egalitarian but without social structures that involved hierarchy (and inequality), which were necessary for humanity to develop and grow into large social structures. Systematically debunks it using archaeological evidence.

Jared Diamond notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. Walter Scheidel notwithstanding, it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe. To take just one well-documented example: around 200 AD, the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with a population of 120,000 (one of the largest in the world at the time), appears to have undergone a profound transformation, turning its back on pyramid-temples and human sacrifice, and reconstructing itself as a vast collection of comfortable villas, all almost exactly the same size. It remained so for perhaps 400 years. Even in Cortés’ day, Central Mexico was still home to cities like Tlaxcala, run by an elected council whose members were periodically whipped by their constituents to remind them who was ultimately in charge.

The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place.
Click to expand...
 
Uppercut

Uppercut

Well-known member
Spark said:
Saw this on my timeline (courtesy https://twitter.com/ToryAnarchist): https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

It's an extremely detailed and very long demolition of the popular historical trope (popular amongst liberals and conservatives alike, although for somewhat different reasons) that humanity started out basically egalitarian but without social structures that involved hierarchy (and inequality), which were necessary for humanity to develop and grow into large social structures. Systematically debunks it using archaeological evidence.
Click to expand...
Their evidence base is deeply unimpressive. Ian Morris's book (which isn't even cited) is a history of the entire world, starting from the beginning of humanity. The strokes are inevitably going to be broad, and it's not going to fit everything. But nor can it be debunked by "we found this city in Mexico that did things differently".

Not that it really matters, because they don't even represent Morris's argument accurately anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top