World peace?
 

World peace? These are the only 11 countries in the world that are actually free from conflict

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...t-9669623.html

And the US ain't one of them. They do go through how they picked them.


"With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine, it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.

But experts believe this is actually almost universally the case, according to a think-tank which produces one of the world’s leading measures of “global peacefulness” – and things are only going to get worse...."

Hmm, seems that countries with a high percentage of individual ownership of firearms are more peaceful than countries where only the government has all the firepower...

Economists...
 

"The GPI is developed by IEP under the guidance of an international panel of independent experts with data collated and calculated by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

It is composed of 22 indicators, ranging from a nation’s level of military expenditure to its relations with neighbouring countries and the percentage of prison population."

http://economicsandpeace.org/researc...al-peace-index

I assume arms exports as an indicator of "national peacefulness" is based on voluntary/admitted/known weapons exports.

I wonder how they account for countries exporting weapons to proxy forces where there is no public reporting?

World Peace or whirled peas. What difference does it make now?

Is "world peace" an artificial progressive liberal construct like a communist utopia?

Does human behavior at the micro level prevent "world peace" at the macro human behavior level?

For me, I am increasingly concerned with attitudes I perceive coming from progressive liberals.

I sense a whole lot of 1st world folks confusing technological revolution with human sloth-like evolutionary behavior.

Just because technological change is accelerating towards Star Trek does not mean human behavior is more than a few seconds removed from cavemen.

Personally, I think that particular form of idealistic naïveté is incredibly dangerous.

Stop wondering and ask them.

Let us know what you find.

Excellent post.

I'll give humanity in the 1st world west and some developing world countries a tiny bit of progress in the form of instruments like the US Constitution, Magna Carta, Elglish Common Law to codify natural justice and a set of both freedoms and limitations to acceptable human behavior.

But when "some are more equal than others" accelerated the fall of communism(due to communism' failure to account for human behavior) and is currently polluting the US Republic, those bits of paper being treated like toilet paper instead of separating us from our cave dwelling ancestors leads me to think the gulf between today and the Neanderthals is shrinking.

I look at the Swiss as having the least flawed system due to the Swiss drilling down to the ultra local level.

You want citizenship? You're neighbours who've lived next to you for the last 10 years have a say.

It's like a combination of the best parts of a modern democratic country with the best parts of a local community.

I reckon the Swiss are at least a couple hours out of the caves. :)

Earlier this year I hopefully saw the last first hand mark one eyeball example of cave dwellers in Afghanistan(Bamyan).

One of the more awkward meetings I had in that "country" was with a fairly senior minister who spent about 15 minutes laughing and making jokes about cave dwelling "Afghans".

iPads don't put distance between ourselves and caves, but documents like the Constitution recognise we are cavemen at heart, and provide us with a fair set of freedoms and rules to leave the cave and land on the Moon.

I'm proud to be a caveman who has agreed to abide by a set of rules and is comfortable with how to leverage technology and rudimentary tools to hunt and make fire.

If the rules ever theoretically became too lopsided against the average caveman then modern technology and tools become force multipliers for modern cavemen to hunt and make fire.

I just don't see how the technological revolution in the last 40-50 years has in any way made us less likely to commit acts of mass violence on one another.

More likely. Yes.

Less likely. No.