Greg Scoblete flags a study:
According to a new report from the Human Security Report Project, the number of deaths from armed conflicts around the world continues to fall, even while intercommunal wars have jumped and other conflicts have become increasingly difficult to bring to an end. What wars are fought are less lethal, too. "The average annual battle-death toll per conflict in the 1950s killed almost 10,000 people; in the new millennium the figure is less than 1,000," the report states.
A final bit of housekeeping on this thread. A reader writes:
The fact that your correspondent is unfamiliar with a journal is hardly damning (and it’s amusing that he or she misnamed the other journal, which goes simply by “Neurology.”). The Journal of Neurology is actually a perfectly respectable peer-reviewed scientific journal. And the funny part is that The Journal of Neurology is a society journal (European Neurological Society); it is increasingly common for society journals to be handled through commercial publishers. Its publisher, Springer-Verlag, is one of the largest and most respected scientific publishers in the world; good journals can be found among commercial publishers as well as scientific societies.
I do agree that the originally cited article, an isolated case, doesn’t amount to much in isolation, and that a PubMed search doesn’t show much in the way of harmful physical side-effects of psilocybin.
P.S. I even have neuropathy! And I’ve published in Neurology, but not in the Journal of Neurology.
Today on the Dish, we caught up with the escalating religious cleansing in Egypt, and Claire Berlinski annhilated Marty's knee-jerk reaction about Islam. Andrew choked on this sentence about Iran's efforts to unseat the regime and seconded Goldberg on Israel's recent transformation. Andrew pushed back against Ross Douthat on the paradox of America's unborn, and Lindsey Graham promised permanent occupation for good behavior in Afghanistan.
Nate Silver and Krauthammer sized up Palin's chances, the neocons and liberals aligned, and Andrew called it her shark-jumping period. Palin quit Fox, Captain Owen Honors boldly went where others don't go with the military's video equipment, and Will Wilkinson captured why it's legitimate to criticize America's military policy. Rumors of a presidential run could help the ambassador to China (but not the GOP), and could lead to an advantage in 2016. The Dish destroyed Rich Lowry's arguments that Americans (and the politicians who keep repeating so) are the greatest. Andrew defended the concept of the (much improved) press from Professor Reynolds' takedown. Bruce Bartlett called out the GOP on the debt limit, John McWhorter argued ending the drug war would end the "black problem," and Ta-Nehisi had some tough questions for him. We eyed the 2011 energy crunch, Andrew questioned George Will's unlikely column, and Rudy Giuliani contradicted himself. Andrew Breitbart drank to get through college, and our computers had to lie to us so they wouldn't freak us out with their intelligence.
Beer and monogamy correlate and Andrew revealed his mental colonic for the holidays. Rob Horning ruminated on boredom, Cosma Shalizi defended the lottery, and the soundbite shrunk (with good reason). Joanne McNeil composed a brief history of blogs, i-phone alarms rebelled against the new year, and Dave Barry roasted the year in review. Andrew looked forward to the Christmas Epiphany, DC was livable (the graph edition), readers weighed in on their magic mushroom experiences, and nature could still blow our mind.
Chart of the day here, FOTD here, cool ad watch here, 50th Odd Lie of Sarah Palin here, VFYW here, quote for the day here, FOTD dissent here, MHB here, and video heralding the New Year here.
–Z.P.
John McWhorter has a compelling theory about imagined futures:
[E]ven dystopian visions [of the future] are about simplicity. Orwell’s alternate vision of the 1980s … depicted a mind control that prevented engagement with complexity and nuance. Or, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that in 2045 computers will become more intelligent than people and allow a presently inconceivable superintelligence. The notion of the human essence ceasing to be is unsavory – but also as much about escape as enhancement. Superintelligence will render trivial what confuses us – and possibly even confusion itself. This, again, evades the essence of modernity, in which there are always many answers.
Echoing the Dish, Ezra Klein wants presidential handicappers to focus on conditions rather than candidates. He argues that the 2012 conditions won't be kind to GOP moderates like Huntsman. But 2016 might be different:
The sort of election Huntsman could win – and the sort of election he seemed to be preparing himself for when he took the Obama administration's offer of a job – is a 2016 race where the retiring Obama is quite popular in the country, and the GOP is willing to make some fairly serious sacrifices to win back power. In that world, Huntsman can offer both some level of continuity and some level of change.
An image of Jesus Christ hangs on the wall in the house of Egyptian Copt Fawzi Bakhit who was killed in the New Year's Day church bombing in Alexandria as priests pay condolences to his family in Egypt's Mediterranean port city on January 3, 2011, three days after the bombing in which 21 people were killed. The attack targeted Egypt's Christian communicty, the biggest in the Middle East. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty.
Ta-Nehisi has questions:
[W]hen John proposes legalizing all drugs, I wonder precisely, specifically, what that means, and what would be the effects of it. Would we be faced with more drug addiction? Would that drug addiction be concentrated more among the poor, and thus among blacks? Would we have to put more money into treatment? Would that, in and of itself, become a race issue? Would we see more children addicted to drugs? Are we prepared for the spectacle of kids ODing on legal drugs? How much would we cut the prison population? Would states be willing to put out money to make sure ex-cons were reintegrated into society? And what does it even mean to legalize drugs? Is this a matter of state law? Federal law? How would this actually happen?
I don't mean to be overly harsh here. But I've heard this argument before, but I've never seen it sketched out in a detailed way. I'm willing to be convinced, but I'd like to see the downsides confronted.
Yglesias considers the economics of McWhorter's proposal.
A reader writes:
After receiving an MTS in Moral Theology (Ethics) from Notre Dame I decided to attempt to become a Marine Officer …
I think Just War Theory is a plausible theological way to deal with the annihilation of large swaths of humanity at the hands of others, and I cannot even vaguely justify our foray into Iraq in terms of it. Afghanistan initially may have filled some criteria, but it certainly doesn’t any longer and hasn’t for some time. Admittedly, I had to do some ethical contortions to justify my choice to try to enter the military. Some were pathetic: as a woman I would never technically have a combat MOS and as such would always have some moral separation from actual killing. Others were more honestly reasoned, but none of them were in complete harmony with Catholic doctrine—how could they be? Ultimately, I decided that I could take responsibility both for disobeying an order I found to be immoral or for making a decision that violated the very core of my conscience.
That Fr. Hesburgh would say that Notre Dame’s ROTC was a way to “Christianize the military” falls far beneath his demonstrated moral and intellectual par.
It is a way to get bright, competent and well-intentioned people into the military and thus improve it in myriad ways, but it’s a laughable, un-Christian suggestion that enfeebles the mission of both Christianity and a national military. I don’t mean to suggest that it is ipso facto un-Christian to serve in the military, rather that a certain amount of compartmentalization and humility is necessary to live with and possibly atone for the lack of concert between one’s religious and worldly commitments. I think the University would do well to deal with a more tractable moral issue of its ROTC program: that it’s primarily utilized because ND has priced itself out of the reach of most students.
The appeal of the military for many Catholics is obvious: we like rigor and pageantry. We also take seriously the call to put our faith into action. In light of our current wars, I now more than ever question the legitimacy of acting out one’s faith in military service—though I cannot bring myself to pacifism—but I think that it’s a decision best left to each individual and his or her conscience. Mainly, I decided to join the Marines because I thought it afforded me the opportunity to make a positive impact in the world in ways that pursing the life of an academic ethicist wouldn’t. Ultimately, even though my job now is very different than the one I would’ve had had I managed to make it through OCS, undoubtedly I’m still in the same predicament I would have been in: hoping but unsure if what I’m doing is making the world a better place.
Larison uses the silly Jon Huntsman 2012 speculation to think about Huntsman's place in the GOP:
What Huntsman means by tacking to “the middle” on immigration and environment is to take up positions that have been almost universally rejected within his party. On immigration, Huntsman is advocating moving away from a solid majority of the public, and there are hardly any voters who base their voting largely or primarily on environmental issues. This is not just a matter of a “moderate” being at odds with a more “conservative” party base. Relatively speaking, almost every Republican nominee has been much more “moderate” than the party base, so that would not be anything new. Huntsman’s case is different.
Huntsman has staked out positions that have little or no support anywhere in his party. Even most “reformist” conservative wonks are unsympathetic to liberalizing immigration policy, in part because they correctly see mass immigration of unskilled laborers as something that exacerbates social and economic inequality.
That last point is debatable. But all of this is premised on the notion that current Republican shibboleths – no tax hikes ever, climate-change is a hoax, mass immigration is a problem, we need to stay longer in Afghanistan – will not collapse even in the ideologized brains of the GOP base by the time Huntsman actually does run – in 2016. Huntsman merely has reality to wait for – like most actual conservatives.
Steven Levy illuminates the ultimate irony of Artificial Intelligence:
The lesson is that our computers sometimes have to humor us, or they will freak us out. Eric Horvitz—now a top Microsoft researcher and a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence—helped build an AI system in the 1980s to aid pathologists in their studies, analyzing each result and suggesting the next test to perform. There was just one problem—it provided the answers too quickly. “We found that people trusted it more if we added a delay loop with a flashing light, as though it were huffing and puffing to come up with an answer,” Horvitz says.
The Dish 