Eh, not that hard to give examples in the US either. The most recent that comes to mind. And that’s just the most recent fatality. If one extends to just people being “beaten up” the set will be much larger.
I (perhaps incorrectly) understood him to be speaking of within the US.
Claims must be specific and backed with evidence. The claim as he stated it is false. If he wants to limit it in scope, then let him limit it as he will, and its significance then becomes proportionaly limited in a similar way. From a claim about the world entire, it becomes a claim for about 1/20th of the global population, and thus attains 1/20th its former significance, at which point we ought give it about 1/20th the weight we otherwise would.
I want parochialism and assumptions of parochialism to have no place in this forum. If we can discuss many-worlds and if we can worry about what we’ll be doing for fun a million years from now, then people can bloody well lift their noses up to perceive there exist countries outside the USA.
On the one hand, of course the whole world matters. On the other, we can make much more specific claims about smaller regions, and test them more easily.
In this particular case, I think both are overwhelmed by concerns of conversational pragmatism. If you can defeat his arguments in the framework where he made them, you win. If you make an objection outside that domain, and he says “but that’s not what I meant”, then squabbling about particularities of domain, word choice, and inference is a frequently observed failure mode. Noting and criticizing US-centrism (or any other -centrism) is worth doing, but should be considered an aside.
I (perhaps incorrectly) understood him to be speaking of within the US. Otherwise, Libya also has some significant, very recent counterexamples.
Eh, not that hard to give examples in the US either. The most recent that comes to mind. And that’s just the most recent fatality. If one extends to just people being “beaten up” the set will be much larger.
Claims must be specific and backed with evidence. The claim as he stated it is false. If he wants to limit it in scope, then let him limit it as he will, and its significance then becomes proportionaly limited in a similar way. From a claim about the world entire, it becomes a claim for about 1/20th of the global population, and thus attains 1/20th its former significance, at which point we ought give it about 1/20th the weight we otherwise would.
I want parochialism and assumptions of parochialism to have no place in this forum. If we can discuss many-worlds and if we can worry about what we’ll be doing for fun a million years from now, then people can bloody well lift their noses up to perceive there exist countries outside the USA.
I have mixed feelings about what you say here.
On the one hand, of course the whole world matters. On the other, we can make much more specific claims about smaller regions, and test them more easily.
In this particular case, I think both are overwhelmed by concerns of conversational pragmatism. If you can defeat his arguments in the framework where he made them, you win. If you make an objection outside that domain, and he says “but that’s not what I meant”, then squabbling about particularities of domain, word choice, and inference is a frequently observed failure mode. Noting and criticizing US-centrism (or any other -centrism) is worth doing, but should be considered an aside.