Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• Even if you subtract all the killings with firearms and count only the ones with rope, knives, lead pipes, wrenches, candlesticks, and so on, Americans commit murders at a higher rate than Europeans.75 (Location 2212)
• Southerners do not outkill northerners in homicides carried out during robberies, they found, only in those sparked by quarrels. (Location 2333)
• The one great universal in the study of violence is that most of it is committed by fifteen-to-thirty-year-old men.102 (Location 2441)
• the early feminists of the temperance movement were responding to the very real catastrophe of alcohol-fueled bloodbaths in maledominated enclaves. (Location 2468)
• Many northern and coastal intellectuals are puzzled by the culture of their red state compatriots, with their embrace of guns, capital punishment, small government, evangelical Christianity, “family values,” and sexual propriety. Their opposite numbers are just as baffled by the blue staters’ timidity toward criminals and foreign enemies, their trust in government, their intellectualized secularism, and their tolerance of licentiousness. (Location 2479)
• informalizing process. (Location 2557)
• Sanity was denigrated, and psychosis romanticized, (Location 2583)
• “How can you be a mensch without a zager?” (Location 2601)
• They could count on even less protection from the criminal justice system than white Americans (Location 2689)
• new indulgence by the judicial system toward crime, of which they were disproportionately the victims.126 (Location 2690)
• “The idea that everyone has ingrained into them—that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse—is wrong. It was never right to begin with.”143 (Location 2760)
• For all these reasons, there is an optimum rate of incarceration. It’s unlikely that the American criminal justice system will find it, because electoral politics keep ratcheting the incarceration rate upward, particularly in jurisdictions in which judges are elected rather than appointed. Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent’s television ads as “soft on crime” and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. (Location 2858)
• the jurisdiction that spent the most effort in perfecting its police, New York City, showed the greatest reduction of all. Once the epitome of urban rot, New York is now one of America’s safest cities, having enjoyed a slide in the crime rate that was twice the national average and that continued in the 2000s after the decline in the rest of the country had run out of steam.167 (Location 2878)
• Only a sample of criminal behavior can ever be detected and punished, and the sampling should be fair enough that citizens perceive the entire regime to be legitimate. (Location 2929)
• Steven Alm, a judge who devised a “probation with enforcement” program, summed up the reason for the program’s success: “When the system isn’t consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn’t like me, or, Someone’s prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.”178 (Location 2942)
• The cliché about Generation X, who came of age in the 1990s, was that they were media-savvy, ironic, postmodern. They could adopt poses, try on styles, and immerse themselves in seedy cultural genres without taking any of them too seriously. (In this regard they were more sophisticated than the boomers in their youth, who treated the drivel of rock musicians as serious political philosophy.) (Location 2978)
• our third nature consists of a conscious reflection on these habits, in which we evaluate which aspects of a culture’s norms are worth adhering to and which have outlived their usefulness. (Location 2987)
• “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.” Maybe the time has even come when I can use a knife to push peas onto my fork. (Location 2992)
• Medieval Christendom was a culture of cruelty. Torture was meted out by national and local governments throughout the Continent, and it was codified in laws that prescribed blinding, branding, amputation of hands, ears, noses, and tongues, and other forms of mutilation as punishments for minor crimes. Executions were orgies of sadism, climaxing with ordeals of prolonged killing such as burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, pulling apart by horses, impalement through the rectum, disembowelment by winding a man’s intestines around a spool, and even hanging, which was a slow racking and strangulation rather than a quick breaking of the neck.3 (Location 3044)
• After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among Jews, but it survived as an ideal in one of its breakaway sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity. (Location 3104)
• “Their primitive world was full of dangers, suffering, and nasty surprises, including plagues, famines, and wars. It would be natural for them to ask, ‘What kind of god would create such a world?’ A plausible answer was: a sadistic god, a god who liked to see people bleed and suffer.”13 So, they might think, if these gods have a minimum daily requirement of human gore, why not be proactive about it? Better him than me. (Location 3132)
• A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with “Love thy neighbor” and “All men are created equal,” is the one on the bumper sticker: “Shit happens.” (Location 3213)
• But the greatest damage comes from religious beliefs that downgrade the lives of flesh-and-blood people, (Location 3224)
• the belief that one may escape from an eternity in hell only by accepting Jesus as a savior makes it a moral imperative to coerce people into accepting that belief and to silence anyone who might sow doubt about it. (Location 3226)
• People become wedded to their beliefs, because the validity of those beliefs reflects on their competence, commends them as authorities, and rationalizes their mandate to lead. Challenge a person’s beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. (Location 3228)
• When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them—or worse, who credibly rebut them—they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful. (Location 3232)
• One might think that Protestants, who had been persecuted so viciously for their heresies against Catholic doctrines, would take a dim view of the idea of persecuting heretics, but no. (Location 3266)
• They believed that people should not be baptized at birth but should affirm their faith for themselves, so Luther declared they should be put to death. (Location 3279)
• The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. (Location 3314)
• The 17th century is called the Age of Reason, an age when writers began to insist that beliefs be justified by experience and logic. (Location 3319)
• In view of the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself. (Location 3330)
• The man was asked whether this didn’t prove the power of the gods. “Aye,” he answered, “but where are they painted that were drowned after their vows?”47 (Location 3340)
• As with most forms of violence, the United States is an outlier among Western democracies (or perhaps I should say “are outliers,” since seventeen (Location 3462)
• According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he said, “So you’re the little woman who started this great war.” (Location 3565)
• They were obsessed with the problem of how a ruling body composed of fallible humans could wield enough force to prevent citizens from preying on each other without arrogating so much that it would become the most destructive predator of all.100 (Location 3680)
• the American implementation had a flaw that is best captured in the actor Ice-T’s impression of Thomas Jefferson reviewing a draft of the Constitution: “Let’s see: freedom of speech; freedom of religion; freedom of the press; you can own niggers … Looks good to me!” (Location 3694)
• The idea of democracy, once loosed on the world, would eventually infect larger and larger portions of it, and as we shall see, would turn out to be one of the greatest violence-reduction technologies since the appearance of government itself. (Location 3699)
• To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize, and yet when it comes to the greatest crime—waging war on another state—they praise it! (Location 3710)
• Though Christianity began as a pacifist movement, things went downhill in 312 CE when the Roman ruler Constantine had a vision of a flaming cross in the sky with the words “In this sign thou shalt conquer” and converted the Roman Empire to this militant version of the faith. (Location 3720)
• The preliminary steps were that peace treaties should not leave open the option of war; that states should not absorb other states; that standing armies should be abolished; that governments should not borrow to finance wars; that a state should not interfere in the internal governance of another state; and that in war, states should avoid tactics that would undermine confidence in a future peace, such as assassinations, poisonings, and incitements to treason. (Location 3790)
• He then outlined his three conditions for perpetual peace. The first is that states should be democratic. (Location 3800)
• Kant’s second condition for perpetual peace was that “the law of nations shall be founded on a Federation of Free States”—a “League of Nations,” as he also called it. (Location 3810)
• The third condition for perpetual peace is “universal hospitality” or “world citizenship.” (Location 3828)
• As the great thinkers of the Enlightenment predicted, we owe this peace not just to the belittling of war but to the spread of democracy, the expansion of trade and commerce, and the growth of international organizations. (Location 3845)
• As sensibilities change, thinkers who question a practice are more likely to materialize, and their arguments are more likely to get a hearing and then catch on. The arguments may not only persuade the people who wield the levers of power but infiltrate the culture’s sensibilities by finding their way into barroom and dinner-table debates where they may shift the consensus one mind at a time. (Location 3866)
• And when a practice has vanished from everyday experience because it was outlawed from the top down, it may fall off the menu of live options in people’s imaginations. Just as today smoking in offices and classrooms has passed from commonplace to prohibited to unthinkable, practices like slavery and public hangings, when enough time passed that no one alive could remember them, became so unimaginable that they were no longer brought up for debate. (Location 3869)
• People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience.127 (Location 3898)
• Here is a potted account of this philosophy—a rough but more or less coherent composite of the views of these Enlightenment thinkers. (Location 4109)
• men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. (Location 4111)
• Though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it. (Location 4120)
• Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. (Location 4155)
• They may not use violence against their citizens beyond the minimum necessary to prevent greater violence. (Location 4164)
• This line of reasoning may be called humanism because the value that it recognizes is the flourishing of humans, the only value that cannot be denied. (Location 4166)
• “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.”16 (Location 4422)
• “A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end”). (Location 5436)