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2012-04-18, 02:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Hey! Says who? :P I think a mass of solar panels focusing a laser at extreme distances sounds cool. Not all weapons need to look like phallic objects. ;)
I've dabbled a little in a game called Attack Vector: Tactical, and one of the stated purposes of mass driver weapons is to herd enemy ships around to make them easier to hit with other weaponry. This is at comparatively close range though, not at the extreme ranges the discussion has focused on.Last edited by VeliciaL; 2012-04-18 at 02:24 PM. Reason: Linky-dinks
LGBTAitP
"You can't just go around opting out of critical analysis by preemptively declaring yourself pointless."
- Mordecai, Lackadaisy Cats
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2012-04-18, 02:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Avatar by KwarkpuddingThe subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.
Whoever makes shoddy beer, shall be thrown into manure - town law from Gdańsk, XIth century.
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2012-04-18, 03:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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2012-04-18, 04:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Yeah I'm familiar with that theory, but I think it's utter garbage. Designed to make people feel better as part of this idea of 'progress'.
Way, way more people were killed in war and civilian violence in the 17th Century than the 15th. That is just an historical fact. 100 times more Witch-burnings, 100 times more religious violence. Entire cities depopulated. But the 20th Century as the worst of all. It made the previous 500 years combined look like paradise. World War II alone eclipsed all the other wars in the previous 500 years combined I think.
The difference is more in the distribution of violence. Whereas in the Middle Ages more people in the middle and upper classes were killed by murder today it's mostly poorer people, and people in poorer countries (i.e. the Third World).
Warfare which used to be practiced by all kinds of small entities from towns to individual clans and families, is now increasingly the monopoly of the State in most of the world. But this doesn't make us any safer, to the contrary. You get much less violence for a while, but then when two powerful States go to war with each other in full scale war which seems to happen every 50 or 60 years, there is no restraint whatsoever. It's industrial scale butchery like nothing the world has seen since the Mongols, and it's gotten worse every century since the State was invented in 1648.
If a State goes haywire as we also frequently saw happen in the 20th Century, it's the same thing only turned inward upon itself. How many people did Mao kill? Caligula could only dream of such excesses.
GLast edited by Galloglaich; 2012-04-18 at 04:51 PM.
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2012-04-18, 04:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Let's not forget the impact of the pre-industrial world on population here. Of course Caligula would not have access to the same amount of population numbers as Mao. But maybe you are referring the amount of civilian casualties compared to military casualties comparatively between the two, percentage wise? I do not wish to digress the discussion, just wanted to point that out.
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2012-04-18, 04:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
It certainly is rather mind blowing to form theory like that with atrocities from Red Khmers regime, trough Gulags to Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Holocaust committed in very 20th century...
The fact that this violence was often very 'dehumanized' and not quite as personal as good all splitting someone's head open doesn't really make it better.Avatar by KwarkpuddingThe subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs—I was a man before I was a king.
Whoever makes shoddy beer, shall be thrown into manure - town law from Gdańsk, XIth century.
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2012-04-18, 04:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Mathis, I think it's not just in whole numbers, but as a percentage, Mao did far worse than Caligula... so did Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ataturk, Franco, and so on. In the Middle Ages, for an entire city to be put to the sword did sometimes happen but it was a major event (outside of the realm of Tamarlane or Ghenghiz Khan) and it stood out, Rome in 1527, Magdeburg in 1631. These shocked the world then, and represented the limits of the excesses of how bad war could get. By contrast, I couldn't even count how many cities were destroyed in WW II.
Spyrit, exactly. I only hope we have learned our lesson, but it seems naive to think so.
G
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2012-04-18, 05:13 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
I don't really want to get into this discussion, you can track down and read the article yourself. However, they are not talking about total deaths, they are talking about number of deaths relative to the total population (or percentage of deaths). Certainly the first half of the 20th century had a lot of deaths, but population was considerably greater than it was in 17th century. The scale of wars in the second half of the 20th century was surprisingly small.
As has been noted before there was a population increase between the 15th and 17th centuries (leading to among other things a decrease in the amount of meat in peasants' and commoners' diets). They considered not only wars, but also murder rates, although I think they acknowledged that properly calculating such statistics can be difficult.
Also, I'll need to double check the article, but the correlation could be (should be?) seen across modern societies with varying levels of education. [Standard caveat that there are always outliers and variation]Last edited by fusilier; 2012-04-18 at 05:58 PM.
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2012-04-18, 05:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Aggressive, but not as technical as I'd have expected from him. Might be the nylon. But I admit I haven't seen him fight that often. Especially this year he's been almost constantly crippled by a variety of injuries.
He made short work of me in the quarter finals in Houston in 2010 but I hope next time we fence I'll give him more of a challenge.
Lopes is well regarded as a fencer, I'd guess he's in the top 5% or 10% of longsword fencers worldwide.
He's also well respected for his understanding of body mechanics, you should learn as much of that as you can from him.
Is that Ties Kool?
Try it out and let me know what they say, I'll be interested to hear.
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2012-04-18, 05:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
I suspected that might be what you meant Galloglaich, just wanted to mention it in case someone wasn't aware of what happened to population numbers after the industrialization. But I guess in this thread, most people are fairly well-educated anyway, however one never knows. I wouldn't mind reading the article, but I'm very suspicious of drawing a conclusion that links lower chance of violent death to a higher level of education, if that's the main point the article discusses. Considering all the other changes that has occured. Off the top of my head I would rather attribute such a thing to a more organized society, but the borders between those things become blurry at some point.
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2012-04-18, 05:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
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2012-04-18, 06:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
One thing I would point out, is that the mass killings of the 20th century were clearly much more organized than during previous centuries.
That *may* (as I haven't looked at the data myself) skew our perception of violent deaths. Many, many American Indians were killed in combat, or killed in brutal conditions of slavery, but while there was an intention, there wasn't nearly the organization that Stalin, Hitler or Mao would have had. Which might make them difficult to compare. We have reasonably good (they still vary by a lot), but perhaps more importantly *direct*, data on how many people died during Stalin's purges, that we can link to Stalin. Whereas calculating the number of American Indians killed in an innumerable number of skirmishes and battles, died in mines or on plantations as slaves, or were intentionally infected with smallpox, can be more difficult. --EDIT-- and can't be linked to one person, or even one government --EDIT--Last edited by fusilier; 2012-04-18 at 06:31 PM.
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2012-04-18, 06:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Hey thanks! My google-fu is weak and you have saved me much searching. I'll see if my library can get a hold of it if it doesn't already have it.
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2012-04-18, 06:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
I believe my comment stands up, relative to the overall population.
The scale of wars in the second half of the 20th century was surprisingly small.
I think Tacitus had a name for that, 'the peace of the graveyard'
G
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2012-04-18, 06:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Heh. All I'm saying is let's not dismiss this study out of hand -- it looks like it's gotten at least some peer review.
I also think that Mathis brought up a good point, about societies becoming more organized. When you stop thinking of your neighbor or a person in the next village as "the other", and start thinking of them as your "fellow countrymen", then that perhaps leads to a decrease in violence.
One statistic they do point out in the article, is that homicide rates in Europe have dropped from around 40 in 100,000 per year in the 14th century, to 1.3 by the end of the 20th century.
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2012-04-18, 07:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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2012-04-18, 08:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Originally Posted by George Silver, 1599Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!
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2012-04-18, 09:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Speaking from actual experience as a medic, a bad cut will incapacitate a person, but is treatable and survivable, with possible loss of function, but survivable. A bad thrust will let a person keep on fighting right up until he falls over from blood loss, but you'll never get that guy back.
We literally had to chase a guy up two flights of stairs and forcibly treat him for the big stab wound in the side of his neck. He would absolutely have died without rapid surgery, but he was able to get away from his attacker and run up two flights. The guy who had his forearm opened up could do nothing but grip his bleeding limb and keen in agony, but we just tourniqueted him and he waited hours for an OR.
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2012-04-18, 09:58 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
It's also worth noting that wars are not all that get included. The work I'm familiar with looks at assaults and murders, which have been drastically reduced. This isn't surprising, given that concepts like "killing people to preserve one's honor" have been on the decline for a long while, habitual low level raiding declined, so on and so forth. The observation about distribution is very much notable; modern wars (and genocides) are far larger than those in history, but habitual raiding, street violence, interfamilial violence, and similar have dropped off. Modern killing has been largely concentrated, though it is nowhere near totally concentrated.
I would really like to see a game made by Obryn, Kurald Galain, and Knaight from these forums.
I'm not joking one bit. I would buy the hell out of that. -- ChubbyRain
Current Design Project: Legacy, a game of masters and apprentices for two players and a GM.
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2012-04-19, 05:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Absolutely, but you're missing out on the context here. WW2 was one single war that dominated the entire planet. In the middle ages, there were thousands of little wars where entire towns were murdered.
A single emotional argument about the scale of WW2 does not trump actual statistics. The number of violent deaths per capita during the middle ages was far, far higher than during the 20th century. Several orders of magnitude even, I believe.
Note that absolute numbers also fail to take into account that there are a lot more people in the world now than there were during the middle ages. Back then, 10,000 people was a major city. Now it's a village.
The difference is more in the distribution of violence. Whereas in the Middle Ages more people in the middle and upper classes were killed by murder today it's mostly poorer people, and people in poorer countries (i.e. the Third World).
Warfare which used to be practiced by all kinds of small entities from towns to individual clans and families, is now increasingly the monopoly of the State in most of the world. But this doesn't make us any safer, to the contrary. You get much less violence for a while, but then when two powerful States go to war with each other in full scale war which seems to happen every 50 or 60 years, there is no restraint whatsoever. It's industrial scale butchery like nothing the world has seen since the Mongols, and it's gotten worse every century since the State was invented in 1648.
If a State goes haywire as we also frequently saw happen in the 20th Century, it's the same thing only turned inward upon itself. How many people did Mao kill? Caligula could only dream of such excesses.
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2012-04-19, 06:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
As far as wars go, there is an interesting (and more than slightly disturbing) table on wikipedia listing the conflicts with the most casualties. Now with the normal caveats on the accuracy of wikipedia I found the table to be very interesting. Of the top ten in terms of total casualties (i.e. not per capita) the majority took place in China and about half took place in the middle ages. As a percentage of world population, the conflicts in the middle ages were massive. For comparison in World War II they list 1.7%-3.1% of the world's population were killed. For the An Lushan Rebellion in China in 755, they estimate 14%-15.3% of the world's population were killed. For the Mongol invasions as mush as 17.1% of the world's population were killed (on the other hand that conflict lasted two and a half centuries).
I want to do a more sophisticated analysis and look at a moving average of the data on that table.
Also, it was sobering to realize that many of the conflicts on the list I had never heard of. I need to learn more about the history of China.There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
--Will S.
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2012-04-19, 07:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
I dunno, Caesar was pretty proud of his Gallic butchery and if we believe his numbers (and I am not necessarily convinced) the slaughter of millions of Gauls was effected by him and around 30,000 Romans during his conquest. Could be as high as 50% of the total population of Gaul at that time, if I remember rightly what was being said in papers ten years ago!
Last edited by Matthew; 2012-04-19 at 07:12 AM.
It is a joyful thing indeed to hold intimate converse with a man after one’s own heart, chatting without reserve about things of interest or the fleeting topics of the world; but such, alas, are few and far between.
– Yoshida Kenko (1283-1350), Tsurezure-Gusa (1340)
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2012-04-19, 07:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
What is the difference between a staff and a quarterstaff?
Obviously, they both describe a stout wooden stick 5-6 feet in length, with little or no embellishments. But why the two names for what, is supposedly the same object?
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2012-04-19, 08:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Quarterstaff as a whole word is a 19th century term. Prior to that it was a qualifier like 'quarter ash staff'. Supposedly the qualifier actually refers to the method of manufacturing, from quarterings of a trunk of a tree rather than the cheaper (and weaker) tree branch.
Another qualifier would be 'short' and 'long' according to Silver. For him, the 'short staff' was about 8 feet long, and the 'long staff' was about 12 feet long. 5-6 feet in length is more commonly from Eastern traditions, with the bo staff.Fhaolan by me! Raga avatar by Mephibosheth!
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2012-04-19, 08:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
So, at the time it was a popular weapon in Europe, it would have been referred to as a staff or a short staff? Would the following be a reasonably accurate description?
Staff (Japan: bo; China: kon (棒)): 6-9 feet long in Western tradition (McCarthy (1883): "both hands should be 2 feet 6 inches [76 cm] apart, and the same distance from each end".) East Asian version was 5.9 feet (jo was a related weapon about 4 feet long).
Long Staff: 11-12 feet long. No equivalent weapon appears to have been described outside of Europe.
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2012-04-19, 08:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
You mean the Hollywood style of staff fighting? I don't really know all that much about staff fighting, but I do know that they're often held at the end. Wikipedia says one hand at the butt and the other a foot and a half, though it also mentions that at the end of the 19th century, it was apparently held as you describe: equal distance from each end. I've also seen bo katas where they constantly switch from holding one end to holding the other end.
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2012-04-19, 09:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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In the English system, a quarterstaff is typically 8 feet, though proper length for a very short person might be about 7 feet, and 9 feet for the tall. It is called "quarter" staff because you grip it about the quarter point, like a spear. (The technique shown in Robin Hood movies is called half-staffing, but the weapon was never called a half-staff.)
A 5-6 foot staff would be called a shortstaff. A battlestaff was typically 10-12 feet, intended for use in formation. The proper length quarterstaff was judged to be the best combination of speed and reach. A shorter staff gives up reach, a battlestaff gives up speed and versatility.
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2012-04-19, 09:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
Edited for clarity. The kind of cuts that happened in Silver's time - sometimes penetrating six inches into the head -could prove immediately lethal.
The guy who had his forearm opened up could do nothing but grip his bleeding limb and keen in agony, but we just tourniqueted him and he waited hours for an OR.
As far Steven Pinker goes, I advise caution. While it's hard to contest the drop in killing since medieval times - the medieval German murder rate was as high as 100 per 100,000 - but Pinker tends to make stuff up when it comes to hunter-gatherers. There's little question that per capita violence in the form of direct butchery has decreased in recent centuries, but considerable doubt about the extreme numbers Pinker claims for so-called prehistory. As far as overall health outcomes, the archeological evidence shows hunter-gatherers had if anything longer and healthier lives than the vast majority of civilized folks until around 1850.Last edited by Incanur; 2012-04-19 at 09:34 AM.
Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!
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2012-04-19, 09:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X
I was trying to respond earlier, but the server has been continually overloaded...
No, entire towns (by which I'm referring to the 10,000 people cities) were rarely wiped out in the Middle Ages by war (the Black Death of course did wipe out several cities and a good chunk of the general population in the mid 14th Century)
Context is my specialty, so I don't think I'm missing it. Knaight summarized my actual point pretty well:
Originally Posted by Knaight
A single emotional argument about the scale of WW2 does not trump actual statistics. The number of violent deaths per capita during the middle ages was far, far higher than during the 20th century. Several orders of magnitude even, I believe.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/it...ook_sempa.html
Pinker is a psychologist not an historian, and it shows in his very optimistic interpretation of the facts.
As a percentage of the world population WW II might not have matched Ghenhiz Khan or Tamarlane, but for many parts of Europe, it far exceeded anything they ever experienced West of the Vistula. If you were a citizen of Brazil or frankly, the United States, World War II wasn't a major catastrophe, but Russia lost 13% of their population, Germany 10%, Poland 17%, Lithuania 14%, Greece 10%, Romania 8%, Hungary 6% and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_W...s#Total_deaths
And of course, I'm not referring to WW II solely, it's just the most titanic example. There were innumerable genocides and catastrophic industrial scale wars in the 20th Century, far more than in any other century, at least in the Western Hemisphere. You also have World War I, the Russian Civil War, the Korean War, the Partition of India, the Ottoman Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Greek Genocide, the Ottoman Assyrian Genocide, the Chinese Civil war, the Guatemalan Civil War, the Soviet - Ukranian War / Genocide, the French-Algerian War, the Khmer Rouge Genocide and subsequent invasion by Vietnam, the Sinio-Vietnamese War right after that, the Japanese-Manchurian War, the Yugoslavian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnam wars (French and American), and any number of massive wars in Africa... and on and on.
I googled "war deaths by century" and got these two charts.
*China, as others pointed out, seems to go through a titanic mass slaughter every hundred years or so, but China is arguably the closest thing to a modern State most of the world had going that far back. And of course both Ghenghiz Khan and Tamarlane made quite a notch in the human population. Enough to make forests grow ...
With regard to crime, you could also argue that Pinker is cherry picking certain areas of the world which are rich and sitting at the pinnacle of military and political power, while ignoring much larger parts of the world which are poorer (i.e the Third World). I can guarantee you that Kinshasa Nigeria, Juarez Mexico, or for that matter, Naples Italy are not substantially less violent today than the average Medieval Town of the 15th Century.
You don't think poor people got killed during the middle ages? They got killed in far greater numbers than the higher classes. Often, the higher classes could kill them with impunity. And did.
However it is a myth that even the highest aristocracy could kill with impunity, even poor people. Many of the most powerful princes and Kings of Europe lost their lives trying to subjugate peasants in the Middle Ages, I'd be glad to cite a bunch of examples if you like.
Wars are more large scale, but they're also a lot more rare. The two world wars notwithstanding, for most of the 20th century,
all of Europe has been at peace, and it might well be the first century where this has been the case.
Historically, large wars in Europe have happened every 50-60 years since the advent of the modern State, in 1648. I hope we won't see any more of them, but I think it would be naive to assume we never will again.
GLast edited by Galloglaich; 2012-04-19 at 10:04 AM.
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2012-04-19, 10:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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Yes, that would be akin to totaling up all the casualties of European/Russian war and resulting famines/epidemics from the Napoleonic onward and calling it "European conquests," then comparing the total casualties in one throw as a percentage... See? Merely adding the wars in the list gets us up to 7.3% by comparison with the WW2 figures. And I've ignored the European and Russian conquests in Asia and Africa during the same period, those should surely be included in European conquests. Then we add in all the "internal" conflicts like Stalin's purges and genocide, the figure climbs upwards.
No, if you aren't going to break the Mongol invasions down into stages historically, do it empirically by recognizing that every time the emperor died all the generals and nobles were recalled until the new emperor was crowned and established. If that averaged once every forty years (probably too long, but I can't be arsed to look up all those silly Mongol emperors) then divide the Mongol figures into 6 tranches of 5-10 million. Now we're down to a dynastic average of 1.25%-2.85% of world pop per emperor.