"If one is going to talk about history back to the Wild West days, then there were a couple of things called the World Wars that went on in Europe and Asia and various other atrocities around the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but America is notable for letting our minorities survive the 1940s for the most part.
The real difference is that America seems to have more of a trickle of violence, while other places seem to have periods of peace punctuated by sybaritic binges of violence."
"Killing in the US tend to be numerous but fairly small in scope, so it’s six people here, and twenty there, and it gives the impression that there are a lot. Killings in Europe tend to be less frequent but more accomplished. England’s Harold Shipman puts the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer to shame in terms of pure volume.
Also consider Anders Brevik. If nothing else, a single person killing that many people in one day with nothing but hand-held arms that he carried on his person is an amazing accomplishment. I enjoy firearms and am an excellent shot, and at least I used to be unusually strong and robust, but just the pure logistics of carrying that much lead and firearms, which after all do eventually overheat and fail in various ways with that high use, boggles my mind.
Yet Norway’s reaction seems largely concerned with treating Brevik well to maintain an image that Norway is civilized. Well, it’s still a rather massive killing, and nothing like that one day has ever happened in the US, not with individual, hand-carried arms by one person. Though we’ve had some bombings that killed more people, the logistics are easier. Norway, in terms of size and population is comparable to Atlanta, where I live. If something like that happened in Atlanta, the reaction would be quite different. Atlanta went nuts over the child killings in the late 1970s by Wayne Williams. Cultural differences, y’all.
Happenings in other cultures always seem more strange and alarming than happenings in one’s own culture. This is why anthropologists take the view of cultural relativism, the idea that to understand any particular thing in a culture you have to understand the rest of the culture for context. This doesn’t appear to be a popular view, though.
At this moment, I’m pretty sure that there are people reading this who are outraged and offended at what I’m saying, who jump to the inaccurate conclusion that what I’m saying is based on cultural chauvinism, whereas in fact it’s precisely the opposite. They’re looking through Google to find effective put-downs, which they’ll deliver in rapid fire, and then they’ll feel superior to me. People do this all the time. I’m pretty sure that my saying that I’m aware of it will not forestall the reaction, based on my experience that as soon as people see red, they stop reading.
But what will they find? The most egregious serial killers I can find in the US in recent years were people like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and, of course, the aforementioned Wayne Williams. But taken together, all three took several years each to amass the kind of carnage that Brevik managed in one day.
So people from outside the US look at the US and say “so many incidents, they’re barbaric” while people inside the US look outside and say “such effectiveness, they’re barbaric.” Both are wrong or at least blinkered due to cultural expectations. If you look at the total number of killings, amortized over enough time and over a large enough land area and cultural extent and avoid fairly arbitrary classifications, concentrating primarily on the number of killings, I think you’ll find that it’s pretty much a wash."
@snejdarek @TheDivineInfidel @McWonderBeast
