The Great War
Published on 24 Feb 2018Ask your questions here: http://outofthetrenches.thegreatwar.tv
February 25, 2018
Amphibious Landing Craft – Widow Compensation – Repatriation I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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Assassin’s Creed: Games with a Libertarian View of the World
ReasonTV
Published on 23 Feb 2018A look into the philosophy of Ubisoft’s long-running franchise.
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Video games have become one of our most influential, popular, and creative forms of media. Last year, the industry generated almost $150 billion in revenue worldwide, rivaling books and films and dwarfing music.
Gamers spend over three billion hours a week in the virtual worlds of their choosing. And more so than other contemporary forms of media, video games explore the themes of freedom and personal agency, allowing players to go where they want and do what they please — as long as they’re prepared to bear the consequences. Two of the three best selling video games of all time are Grand Theft Auto 5 and Minecraft. They’re polar opposites in terms of violence and target audience, but both were designed to offer players the opportunity to make their own destinies.
But it’s the Assassin’s Creed series, published by Ubisoft, that puts the conflict between liberty and authority at the center of its plots, its characters, and the alternate history in which the games are set. Reason takes a look at the series’ narrative merits, and at the titular creed.
Written and edited by Ian Keyser. Read by Andrew Heaton. Gameplay footage by Sean Keyser.
“Plague” by Kai Engel is used under CC BY 4.0.
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Masculinity and homicidal violence (aka “Not all men…”)
In Quillette, William Buckner looks at the violence inherent in the (biological) system. “Help, help, we’re being repressed!”
Understanding patterns of lethal violence among humans requires understanding some important sex differences between males and females. Globally, men are 95 percent of homicide offenders and 79 percent of victims. Sex differences in lethal violence tend to be remarkably consistent, on every continent, across every type of society, from hunter-gatherers to large-scale nation states. In their 2013 study on lethal violence among hunter-gatherers, Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg’s data showed that males committed about 96 percent of homicides and were victims 84 percent of the time. In her study on violence in non-state societies, criminologist Amy Nivette shows that, across a number of small-scale pastoralist and agriculturalist societies, males make up 91-98 percent of killers. To illustrate the consistency of this relationship even further: we see the same pattern among chimpanzees, where males make up 92 percent of killers and 73 percent of victims.
To be sure, there is some cross-cultural variation. While I can find no well-studied population where women are known to commit more lethal violence than men, there are some societies where women make up an equal number, or even the majority, of homicide victims. These societies generally seem to have low rates of homicide overall, as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime mentions in their 2013 study on global homicide:
Available data suggest that in countries with very low (and decreasing) homicide rates (less than 1 per 100,000 population), female victims constitute an increasing share of total victims and, in some of those countries, the share of male and female victims appears to be reaching parity.
Hong Kong, with a low homicide rate overall, has a comparatively smaller sex difference in homicide offending, and women make up a majority of homicide victims at 52 percent. Yet even in Hong Kong, males commit 78 percent of reported homicides. The world over, the majority of homicide offenders and victims tend to be reproductive-age males, between their late teens and early 40s.
To understand why this pattern is so consistent across a wide variety of culturally and geographically diverse societies, we need to start by looking at sex differences in reproductive biology.
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Predictably, among humans, males engage in more direct, violent competition for mates than females do, and females provide more caregiving than males do. However, humans are unique in that some male participation in caregiving is ubiquitous across cultures. Human infants are particularly helpless during early development, requiring extensive provisioning and caregiving. Human males face the same tradeoff between securing mating opportunities and providing parental care that males of other species face, and the extent to which males utilize either of these strategies can vary significantly due to social and ecological factors.
Noting these sex differences in reproductive biology and parental investment is important because they help explain why males tend to engage in more violence than females. Aggressively engaging in violent conflict is more likely to reduce a female’s fitness, as it may bring unnecessary danger to her offspring, or cause an injury that may prevent her from reproducing in the future. For a male, however, violent conflict can potentially increase his reproductive success through increases in status, or by aggressively monopolizing access to key resources. Among the Yanomami of the Amazon, and the Nyangatom of East Africa, for example, males who participate in more violence and warfare have increased reproductive success. Even in the contemporary United States, there is evidence that more violent males have more sexual partners.
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Feature History – Russo-Japanese War
Feature History
Published on 28 May 2017Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring a Russian and Japanese disagreement, and why you don’t record when sick.
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QotD: Trade deficits
No economic statistic is reported more dolefully these days than the country’s trade balance.
Ever on the alert for signs of impending economic disaster, the press routinely couples reports of record monthly trade deficits with warnings of experts and Government officials of the dangers of the deficit.
Just what is so dangerous about receiving more goods from foreigners than we give them back is never actually explained, but it is often suggested that that it causes a loss of American jobs.
News reports sometimes even provide estimates of the number of jobs lost owing to every billion dollar increase in the trade deficit. Heaven only knows how these estimates are made, but presumably they are based on the assumption that imports deprive Americans of jobs they could have had producing domestic substitutes for the imports.
It almost seems tedious to do so, but it apparently still needs to be pointed out that buying less from foreigners means that they will buy less from us for the simple reason that they will have fewer dollars with which to purchase our products.
Thus, even if reducing imports increases employment in industries that compete with imports, it must also reduce employment in export industries.
Moreover, the notion that the trade deficit destroys domestic jobs is contradicted by the tendency of the deficit to increase during economic expansions and to decrease during contractions.
The demand for imports rises with income, so imports normally tend to rise faster than exports when a country expands more rapidly than its trading partners. The trade deficit is a symptom or rising employment — not the cause of rising unemployment.
That balance-of-trade figures are misunderstood and misused is not surprising, since their function has never been to inform or to enlighten. Their real purpose is to provide spurious statistical and pseudo-scientific support to groups seeking protectionist legislation. These groups try to cloak their appeals to protection with an invocation of the general interest in a favorable balance of trade.
David Glasner, “What’s So Bad about the Trade Deficit?”, Uneasy Money, 2016-06-02 (originally published in the New York Times in 1984).
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