I look at the global news every day and I see much more violence that good news in most parts of the world.
Will these countries ever experience a drastic reduction internal violence?
I think you know that a lot of these countries are highly traditional and pious.
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Don't believe the news. They are more interested in their own profit margins than giving the least possible biased view of the world.
Violence sells, and that's why the news is full of violence. Would you watch a news program that told you that less people were killed last year in Boston, than watch a news program that contained graphic images of an exploded car in Paris? Good news doesn't sell, or atleast news organisations think they don't sell. Also it's easier to report a shooting, than to dig up data on how things are getting better. It's harder to report about things that didn't happen, than things that did. Violent news also allow for more follow up stories about who did the violent act and why, than good stories. Who wants to hear that after years of hard work with drug addicts and pleading for more funding social workers managed to get more people into rehab and into the work pool. BORING! Get me some xplosions, and some popcorn maybe? Or who really wants to hear that Africa's economies are the second fastest growing in the world? To be sure, the economies are not growing fast enough for the population growth, but still. I want to get my feelies on with all the sad faces.
Overall violence is going down in the whole world, not just the west, with the only exception of civil war, which is still lower than in the end of the 1900's, but higher now in the 10's than in the 00's. Today more people kill themselves each year than are being killed violently by others, atleast in developed countries. That's kind of sad, but also excellent news.
That said things propably will be getting worse in the years to come with global warming creating famine and strife.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOUR TALKING ABOUT.
Which country has ...
1. The freedom of speech of the western countries
2. The media capability of the western countries. (Satellites to hand phones.)
3, Non-suppressible governments.
4. A sales position based on number of viewers and so a built in money making basis for exaggerating tragedy in NEWS to gain viewers/
Of course you see more violence in Western Countries. No one is there to film Muslims tossing homosexuals off roofs or stoning to death women unless they are willing to risk being killed themselves. No one is in Africa filming the burning of witches by the good Christians without risking being burned themselves.
If news gets our of a non-western country it is because a western team of reporters have gone there to get it.
Speaking of burning witches the ones in Tanzania need to get busy and start casting some serious spells on their enemies =
"Thousands of elderly Tanzanian women have been strangled, knifed to death and burned alive over the last two decades after being denounced as witches."
https://www.enca.com/africa/five-women-beaten-and-burned-part-of-rising-...
Education.
rmfr
Should have added a few more words.
A populace that has had education.
The more education a person has, the more they will spend time pondering all sorts of different things which may help in diverting a person's thoughts away from criminal thoughts/activities.
It is in The God Delusion, somewhere. I know I paraphrased the hell out of it, but it is in there.
rmfr
LOL - America is not 29th in the world in Education. Apparently the government does not agree. We are something like 32 in health care. Those are disgusting statistics for a country at the top of the food chain.
Good news is everywhere, but it doesn't sell many newspapers, so it tends to be excluded. I think journalists spend so much time covering horror stories and talking to politicians that they think the whole world is like that and that all people are self-serving scum.
Here's some good news from Japan. A week of torrential rain caused flooding and landslides in the area around Hiroshima and Kurashiki. This has been followed by a record heatwave, raising fears of epidemics.
In addition to a massive government response, thousands of volunteers from other parts of Japan have rushed to the area, taking food and other supplies, to help with the cleanup. Many large companies have given employees paid leave to go and work as volunteers in the disaster area. The same thing happened after the Kobe and Tohoku earthquakes.
People are basically decent and want to do the right thing for their fellow-apes.
This kind of thinking is what makes me want to go to Japan soooooo very much!
I still swear out loudly, whenever I remember failing to get into the exchange program. Grrrr!!!...
This kind of thinking comes at a great cost. Confucianism is at its root. Individualism is sacrificed for group well being. "It is the nail that sticks up that gets pounded back into place."
How does this work in society. The boss rules the company, information flows from top to bottom. Everyone is afraid to make a decision less they offend the boss. Marriages are based on roles. A marriage is a social construct and if everyone does their job the family will be a happy one. The father earns money from the company, the company comes first. The money is turned over to the wife who runs the home. The first make child is special because he will grow and become the supporter of his mother and father when they become old. Everyone has a role to play.
I saw a movie once about a Korean or Japanese teacher who had a student who left school. The teacher went after the student on a long journey through seedy communities and ended up saving her from a prostitution ring. What westerners did not understand about this movie is that the teacher had no choice. That is the teacher's job. (Not as much in the modern countries.) The teacher was responsible for the education of children not the family. If the teacher lost a child, he or she could be held directly responsible. The parents blame the teacher and the school blames the teacher. "If you were a better teacher the child would not have run away." THIS IS ASIAN EDUCATION.
This results in teachers lying on report cards. If a student receives an 'F' grade they are likely to jump from the top of a biding. At my university we have a jumper at least once every other year. This is kept extremely quiet.
You don't need an exchange program. With a university degree you can find jobs all over Japan.
I'm well aware of those problems, but it is still a culture I'd very much like to see with my own two eyes. To have my own experiences among them, hear out as many opinions of the locals as they openly give. And, of course, go to Akiba... *drools* *wipes*
I would've gone a long time ago, if i had a degree. The year after not getting accepted for the exchange program, I left my uni to address the much more pressing financial issues at the time. TLDR version - It's barely over a year since I can afford to even think about such a trip. Currently it is definitely not my priority in life. A wish - yes, and I intend to eventually do just that. I just can't help but feel fascinated by Asian cultures.
I am sure all of us have run across (for example) a YouTube video with an intriguing label and clicked on it to view. And it turns out to be crap. And thus the term "clickbait". Why do the authors do this? Because for them, just one thing matters, the number of viewers. So-called "news" services do exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason, they put aside any moral considerations in the interest of viewer numbers because more viewers equal more money.
I have a personal saying "people like to feel good about feeling bad". Bad people and bad news fascinates people, many of us have this impulse to check out a horror story, and then derive some form of satisfaction clucking to themselves and feeling icky over something nasty.
Bad news sells, good news is a poor investments for any news service.
Second point: Are we sure we are not perceiving news of this world without a filter? I go to a news site, and I see horrors and cruelty right at home. Is our own nation, are our own people exempt from cruelty? We have a prejudice that "our" nation and people somehow are better, have higher moral standards and conduct. It's nice to make clucking sounds at the news from some other nation where those heartless and savage beasts do horrible things, while domestic horrors have become so common-place that it barely registers on our brains.
Children are raped and murdered in some desolate part of Africa. Another mass shooting at a high school. Those savage Africans.
Slave Trade in America: "he practices of slavery and human trafficking are still prevalent in modern America with estimated 17,500 foreign nationals and 200,000 Americans being trafficked into and within the United States every year with 80% of those being women and children."
Where is the NEWS?
According to the FBI’s uniform crime-reporting data for 2016, 90.1 percent of black victims of homicide were killed by other blacks, while 83.5 percent of whites were killed by other whites. While no life is inconsequential, the statistical evidence shows that—just as for blacks when it comes to black-on-black crime—whites are mostly victimized by other whites,
WHERE IS THE NEWS?
The topline numbers indicate about 1,000 POLICE officers arrested per year over the eight years of the data set, and nearly 1,140 arrests per year from 2008 through 2012.
AMERICANS JUST DON'T CARE. They live in their little bubbles with entertainment systems and just don't care.
I agree that we should be careful when reading news. For my part, when I look for news on the global scale, I tend to just look through minimal informations without opinions from the reporters etc,...
I don't think that we Westerners are inherently betters than our brethens, but it seems to me that we have forsaken a lot of past habits that cause a lot of troubles.
Finally, a lot of problems in these countries are not the faults of the people themselves.
A concept of TV doesn't exists in my household for years now. I only rely on a single radio station with single sentence factual news. I can afterwards research the topic on the net, reading through articles while filtering bias out is far more efficient than listening or watching offered interpretations.
As for the problems actually around the world... I believe the reason for well over a century has been the same. The best example coming to mind being the Soviet union. Some theists blames atheistic communist leaders for 'banning' or 'exiling' religion, but that isn't true. Their leaders didn't do that, people did that by themselves, and even that wasn't in any way connected to communistic philosophy. Rather it was the chasm created by rapid industrialization, making them realize the redundancy of supernatural beliefs. Something that has been happening in the whole world for the past couple centuries, and is only gaining momentum. The unprecedentedly rapid emergence of different cults and religious/ideological followings over the same time frame is another side effect of this.
Jordan Peterson touched the topic very nicely in my opinion here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knEZN9U-9xc
This video and other opinions of this man makes me cringe, as I don't agree with many of his stances. But his analytical approach is spot on in so many cases that one can't ignore what he has to say. Definitely worth at least some of your attention.
As for possible solutions in both media ugliness and the problems around... Education, Education, and even more Education. No other way around that. And not just natural sciences, which are creating the chasm, but also some basic psychology and philosophy, preferably on an equal pace, so people could keep up with their struggling world views.
In all honesty, I detest how our rapid advances made results in keeping up with them impossible. At best, one can hope to keep up with a rather narrow field of study in a certain subject. Yet for functioning society, we need each individual to at least grasp the basic concepts in many of them. A tall task, but one necessary to avoid a possible disaster in the future. Like one pictured in the movie "Idiocracy" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
@Muashkis
I agree at 100%. But many people in the world don't see the need to educate themselves until a certain point, although a lot of them have more urgent matters.
For democracy to work, we ought to have at least basic knowledge on a lot of topics like, you said it, psychology and philosophy, also in economics, social sciences, core concepts of physics and chemistry. We have to be careful on a lot of psychological bias too.
I have the feeling that a lot of people distrust science because it doesn't fulfill their emotional needs.
.
Violence is in a multi century decline world wide.
Extreme poverty is in a multi century decline world wide.
Lifespans are increasing is in a multi century growth world wide.
Starvation is in a multi century decline world wide.
Slavery is in a multi century decline world wide.
Religion is in a multi century decline world wide. (This is a good thing!)
Democracy and the rule of law is in a multi century growth world wide.
Communication is in a multi century growth world wide.
I could go on and on.
Yes, you are right. But i think it happens at different paces depending on where you are looking. I just want to add that for violence, are we talking about all forms of violence?
I would have to look up the exact statistic, but I am guessing it is: all forms of violence as an average, compared to per per person percentage average.
Yes i think it is something like that. I was stressing a type of violence like intra-conjugal one, which is,as far as i know a product of traditional and religious reasons.
@talynEarth03
Some links:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_is_there_peace/
https://ourworldindata.org/
https://www.humanprogress.org/
https://www.gapminder.org/
Thanks for the links!