Re: sigh

Never mind Chicago and D.C.

DC was #15 on the list of top 25 most violent cities last year. Chicago didn't even make the list. DC is technically in the South anyway, and cities have to be considered inside the larger context of states and regions. But none of this detracts from my point: the most violent places are those that have the greatest access to guns combined with poverty--that would be predominantly inner cities (ghettos) and the rural South, wouldn't it?

Still I claim a victory. At least now you are blaming violent crime on gun ownership, which is, really, a much more sociologically sustainable proposition than women's rights. So there you go, you admitted women's rights are not as important as other factors for violent crime.

Your "victory" is built on a bed of straw. And you look at the evidence, you will see that my point about female rights still holds. Both inner city blacks and Hispanics and rural Southern whites are more mysoginist on average than the rest of the population. They also happen to be among the most superstitious. It's all cyclical and interrelated.

And most of the violence in the USA comes from Blacks and Hispanics, but you will still refuse to say it, even though you know it too.

I just did, although technically most violence is still by white males, but blacks are overrepresented for the actual percentage of their population.

Since much higher women rights do not make the Anglosphere have less violent crime, we have to look for something else.

I think the lower rates of violence in the Middle East can be answered mostly by two things: one, Middle Easterners take justice much more seriously and use crueler forms of punishment, which can be a deterrent; two, there is much less cultural diversity, causing far fewer misunderstandings. The latter also helps explain the low rates of violence in the East, as well as their strong identity with honor. But this stuff is complex; there is no one fix, and neither I nor Pinker have said that female rights was the only or even the biggest contributor to decreasing violence in the world. There are many reasons, some of which cut across all cultures and some of which do not.