Random Nuclear Strikes

At the Valley 6 drive-in with The Wife to see the last Harry Potter (and Green Lantern). Hope your evening is going as well as mine.

Jonah H., commenting to this post:

I wrote my dissertation on The Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes. It’s an obscure manuscript, a cosmology by a former merchant to India who was now a monk.

Anyway, aside from procuring me a worthless Ph.D. the read did provide a few interesting insights.

In the middle of it he makes an offhand comment that the Roman Empire, which was by then Christianized, would never fall. That God would allow Barbarians to chastise it from time to time but it would always stand. And he was speaking of the whole empire, not just the empire in the east that would later become the misnamed Byzantine Empire.

What’s fascinating to me is that the end of the Roman [Empire] is usually dated to either 410, the siege of Alaric, or to 476, the death of Romulus Augustulus.

Cosmas wrote this around 550.

In the midst of the collapse of the Roman Empire, no one really thought it would ever end. No one thought at the time that later historians would put the end of their civilization more than a hundred years before their day.

So my question is this.

Have we already passed the siege of Alaric, that point in our history all future historians will agree was the decisive turning point in our collapse, and we don’t know it?

In light of recent events transpiring in Norway (lone bomber/gunman trying to blow up the Prime Minister & killing 7, then attacking a camp for young political activists and slaughtering about 80 kids & young adults; a camp the Prime Minister was supposed to be speaking at), I’ve already started seeing comments on news sites about how “if someone had been armed/allowed to carry at the camp, this could have been stopped!”.  Such comments are A) not helpful, B) make you sound like a right wing SA nutjob, and C) demonstrate a remarkably piss-poor understanding of the Norwegian culture (something I tell a lot of lefties who point to Norway when talking about social welfare and say, “See, it can be done, Norway does it!”).

Norway is a country where the homicide rate is consistently 1/100K or less.  Violent crime is also abnormally low, and is usually domestic (or criminal on criminal) in nature.  The likelihood of a law abiding person being a victim of violence, where you do not know your attacker, is so small as to be almost non-existent.  Hell, the police don’t even carry guns, and it’s not a problem.  Even if the population was allowed to carry, I doubt they would.  Even in the US, where most states permit it, only a tiny fraction of the population carries on a regular basis.

Norway is a place where the people don’t fear their government, they don’t fear the police, they don’t fear crime, and they don’t fear each other.  The possibility of such a slaughter happening probably never even entered their minds.

Just landed. Much to report, but the absolute highlight of the trip was visiting the exhibition of Jefferson’s entire library at the Library of Congress. Bibliomania heaven! My library is much larger, but his was better. I mean, I have some of the same titles on my shelves — Plutarch’s Lives of the Romans, for example — but I can’t say that I have both a three-volume English abridgement AND a twenty-plus-volume complete edition in the original Latin. You might think TJ’s intellectual muscle evident in the number of polyglot dictionaries and treatises on various foreign languages on his shelves, but when you notice the teach-yourself Greek book written in Spanish, not to mention the slim treatise on Arabic written in French, mind-boggling is not too great a term.

A prime example of one.

That payed off well.

Money quote:

When I got home, I began to reflect on what had happened, and more disturbingly what could have happened. I am in contact with the LGBT unit of the police department to file a report. But I’ve thought a lot about the turning point of the situation — the fact that one of them thought that I might have a gun. None of them said, “There’s a law against antigay hate crimes!” That wasn’t the deterrent. It was the possibility that I might have had a gun that saved my life Friday night.

H/T CATO via Balko

Tim Harford @ TED