The article has a good number of statistics that should be relatively easy to verify. That puts it a step above just about anything else you read in a newspaper.
Sure it would be nice if they linked to sources, but that's not the standard for articles like this in newspapers like this.
Agreed. I really wanted to agree with it because it has a nice sentiment, but when the author claims that war has historically been mankind's biggest killer, I completely gave up hope.
Sorry, I should've been more clear on that. I was figured disease might be the biggest killer, certainly more than war anyway. Whatever it may be, I'm pretty sure it's not war.
Several of the claims, such as the success of the UN's Millennium Development Goals project and the fact that we are currently living in a world free of war, are pretty easy to check for yourself.
Viewed in terms of what really are some of humanity's big goals - reducing poverty, warfare and disease - we are living in a wonderful time. Unfortunately, the article soft-pedals the environmental stuff a bit.
Nearly all of humanity. If you think those are "wars", you should get some perspective. The Battle of Passchendaele alone killed roughly 600,000 men. Compare that to the total number of casualties in every one of the conflicts above.
I'm not trying to minimise things, and I understand that those who face state violence have a rough time of it. But taken as a proportion of humanity as a whole, war is at an all-time low. That is something to celebrate.
Yes we haven't had a "World war" and your intention isn't to minimise things but you've just minimised things - those wars are not simple conflicts. The second Congo war alone took more than 5 million lives. Although officially over, lives are still being lost everyday from its aftermath. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War - more recently, not even a month ago, there was another fight that saw a city fall in rebel arms and thousands of people flee from their homes.
I do not support wars. That said, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the Iraq war killed less people than the Vietnam War, which in turn killed less people than WW2.
A mere 70 years ago, my country was occupied by some of the most brutal oppressors in the world. Now, our biggest problem is that we eat too much food. Most of my fellow countrymen will never have to know what it's like to be starving, to have our homes destroyed, our family members enslaved or worse.
