I think I expressed myself poorly. They aren't using banned things because they are banned. Instead, they go the easier route of killing people with non-banned things.
shows a wide variation among US states. Curiously, some of the states with the lowest stats have essentially no gun control. So its more complicated that it might seem.
So seems like it's easy in Brazil to illegally own a firearm. I suspect the UK avoided a similar outcome by not only making it illegal, but also policing in such a way as to make it difficult to illegally own a firearm.
I read a statistic stating that somewhere around 80% of the violent crime in America takes place in about 5% of the counties.
In other words, there are certain niche demographics in America that are pulling up those gun murder stats, and it's generally not a problem for most people who enjoy 2nd Amendment protections.
You are being very very selective with the data. Assuming good faith please refer to the rather larger dataset with gun ownership and gun crime data for many countries provided in another post.
> (1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author
does not appear to understand gender.
> I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1) ...
I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor
a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.
I was thinking the same thing. There a lot of points he brought up that Peterson brings up, especially about neuroticism and conscientiousness.
Maybe a little of Sam Harris thrown in there too. I saw people in the comments on gizmodo freaking out about the point about avoiding empathy. It's a nuanced point that is completely lost on them that compassion can be a better trait than empathy.
Yeah that was my impression as well. He's been travelling the same Jordan Peterson/Sam Harris circuit I have. I could probably list the reasons but just his use of Big Five personality traits makes it highly likely.
I think to some extent this Googler may survive his effort to Larry Summer himself simply because his arguments are so familiar at this point. If he had actually said true things that hadn't already been circulating as a standard counter-narrative, he'd probably have fewer supporters and die on his cross.
He may be a good psychologist, but he frequently speaks on political issues in which he appears to be consistently misinformed, especially his conception on postmodernism, Marxism and the nature of proof[0].
Postmodernism is a political issue, or at least, it is involved in critical theory which influences politics. Marxism is a critique of political economy. I didn't mean to group the last item in with "political issues", though the point that he is misinformed still stands.
Part of a philosopher's job is to take seriously ideas that no one else much does, and the modern breed tends to thrive on controversy because it shows they're being heard. I suspect that's a lot to do with why Skrbina uses Kaczynski as a hook on which to hang a fairly quotidian, if not to my mind misguided, opinion that our increasingly intimate relationship with technology poses a meaningful risk of deleterious effects too subtle to be obvious in the short or even intermediate term.
I don't think it does much, to help his thesis gain traction, that he should argue it the way he seems to do. But that's his mistake to make, I suppose, and even he strongly disclaims the "blow shit up and kill people" part of Kaczynski's analysis - and that's the only part of his analysis which is genuinely original; Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, just off the top of my head, predates Kaczynski's publication by over a decade.
So I'm not sure that we really can add one otherwise obscure adjunct professor to one otherwise forgettable NYT opinion columnist and end up with meaningful uptake of anything that Kaczynski actually had to contribute, rather than simply an early attempt to find in anarchoprimitivism what value may be there to synthesize with the culture in which we live. A subtle distinction, I concede - but, I maintain, a worthy one nonetheless.
