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Showing posts from July 3, 2014

MEASURING PEACE AND JUSTICE

Photo from the Rise up Times Some people divide the world into optimists and pessimists, into positive and negative thinkers, into “glass half-full and glass half-empty” types. Those people will probably try to tell you that it’s negative to focus on “the bad stuff” and conclude from this that the world is becoming an ever more violent, dangerous and heartless place and that this kind of thinking is, in the end, merely a perception brought on by ever-increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. They’ll tell you that there was always violence and chaos in certain parts of the world, but that those of us who didn’t live in those places simply didn’t know about it, whereas, today, everybody’s connected to everybody else all the time, so unlike before, we now know what’s going on in the rest of the world—instead of being blithely ignorant, one might conclude. Therefore, they will tell you, the idea that the world is growing more violent and war-like by the day is a mere erro