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In his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Stephen Pinker argues that humanity is getting less bloodthirsty and more civilized. But Humphrey Clarke, of the Medieval history blog Quodlibeta, takes issue with some of the numbers that Pinker uses to argue that the 20th Century was, proportionately speaking, less bloody than [...]
Posts Tagged ‘World War II’
Fact Checking Pinker On World’s Bloodiest Atrocity
November 10th, 2011 
Daniel Fincke World War II Riddled With Cliches And Implausible Plot Turns
July 12th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Via Yglesias, comes this review of World War II: But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning. I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called [...]
Dispelling The Myth That Nazism Was An Outgrowth Of Darwinian Atheism
August 16th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In April of last year, Richard Dawkins wrote this letter (which should be read in full) to someone duped by the slander that Darwinian atheism led to Hitler’s ideals and goals: His horrible bidding was done by millions of ordinary German footsoldiers, and the great majority of them were Christians. Many were Lutheran, and many [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Christianity, Ethics, History, Metaethics, Politics, PZ Myers, Religion, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism 
Tags: Adolph Hitler, Artificial Selection, Ben Stein, Christian Anti-Semitism, Darwinism, European Anti-Semitism, Expelled, Herbert Spencer, Hitler and Atheism, Hitler and Catholocism, John D Rockefeller, Mein Kampf, Michael Shermer, Natural Selection, Political Ethics, Richard Dawkins, Science and Ethics, Social Darwinism, World War II 
No Comments »Were The 20th Century Wars A Rebuke To Reason?
August 2nd, 2009 Daniel Fincke City of God argues that the New Atheists need to learn from history that reason is no guide to world-improvement If religion had motivated people to die for God and King, surely reason and science had made the dying that much nastier through the innovations of gas, flame-throwers, bomber aircraft, bigger artillery and the like. [...]
“What Makes It Immoral If You Lose And Not Immoral If You Win?”
July 6th, 2009 Daniel Fincke The recently deceased Robert S. McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, once hit upon the harsh and unpleasantly outcome oriented way that in practice we judge actions of comparable type and from comparable motivation. “We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Ethics, Morality Tags: Consequentialism, Immorality, Japan, Robert S. McNamara, Tokyo, Vietnam, War Crimes, World War II No Comments »Authoritarians, Not Fascists
July 2nd, 2009 Daniel Fincke Daniel Larison complains Obama’s critics have no sense for important distinctions in their zeal to criticize: When Orwell used the phrase “objectively fascist” during WWII to criticize pacifists, he at least had the advantage of talking about a situation in which there were actual fascists involved. Roger Simon, on the other hand, is complaining about [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Tags: Barack Obama, Daniel Larison, Fascist, George Orwell, Honduras, Iran, Objectively Fascist, Politics, Roger Simon, World War II No Comments »
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