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What book(s) are you reading at the moment?

Discussion in 'Books' started by Minxy, Jun 7, 2013.

  1. The Raging Oxter

    The Raging Oxter Well-Known Member

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    Erm, didn't tens of millions of people die in just two conflicts alone in the last century?
     
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  2. Mick

    Mick Probably won't answer PMs
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    Well, that's one of the interesting bits and the sacred cow killers, as it were. It's a big bastarding book and I can't (won't) go into all arguments - but the main one being in this case the average death toll per war is dropping (even averaging in the WWs, which had record breaking death tolls) and the number of individual wars is dropping. In the middle ages armies liked to slaughter entire groups of people all the time (Cromwell killed half of Ireland, Napoleon killed 5m across Europe etc) - lots of nasty little wars killing 500,000 people+ averages higher than our more recent wars, for instance the N.I. Troubles the death toll is about 3,600 over 30 years. This averages the 50m dead from WWII downward, etc.
     
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  3. gas

    gas ACCOUNT DELETED
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    That theory will be tested when the Yanks and North Koreans start throwing a few nukes around.

    Now on the 5th Game of Thrones book, it's a bit slower than the previous but then most of the main characters are already dead.
     
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  4. The Raging Oxter

    The Raging Oxter Well-Known Member

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    Does this book perhaps ignore Africa by any chance?
     
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  5. Mick

    Mick Probably won't answer PMs
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    No, he includes the likes of massive 18th century ethnic cleansing as Shaka united the Zulu, as well as the modern genocides in the likes of Rwanda. Africa is one of the only continents propping the current levels of war and violence up, whereas 300 years ago every continent on earth had nations / tribes which were constantly at war with each other - for instance, before the last half of the 19th century there was barely a year in the last thousand where at least one of the great powers of Europe was not at war with another great power.
     
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  6. Sandor Clegane

    Sandor Clegane 'The Hound'
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    Haha yeah, they all start dropping like flies. At this rate there'll only be 4 characters left in book 7.
     
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  7. luvgonzo

    luvgonzo Pisshead

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    Just got a copy of the Border Trilogy by Cormack Mcarthy, I've read All the Pretty Horses before, it's a brilliant book. Looking forward to getting into the other 2.
     
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  8. ManDingo 20"/20"

    ManDingo 20"/20" MDMA Guru

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    Filth - Some **** want to explain the ending of it to me.

    Don't read if you don't want to ****ing know about the book.
    [NSFW]Obviously the ****s supposed to be suffering from schizophrenia and the parts ae the book about Carole are just him dressed up like a wummin.

    Correcto or?[/NSFW]
     
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  9. The Raging Oxter

    The Raging Oxter Well-Known Member

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    Been a while since I read it but aye, kinda. Don't think he's a schizo, it's more about a complete nervous breakdown after the break up of his relationship.

    That's how I remember it anyway.
     
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  10. ManDingo 20"/20"

    ManDingo 20"/20" MDMA Guru

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    Aye but the parts about Carole are supposed to be him. Which means hes suffering from multiple personalities = schizo, crazy as a coconut, mento etc.
     
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  11. The Raging Oxter

    The Raging Oxter Well-Known Member

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    Possibly, but it could simply be a result of a total breakdown. I read it when it first came out so it's been a while.
     
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  12. Mick

    Mick Probably won't answer PMs
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    #32
  13. The Raging Oxter

    The Raging Oxter Well-Known Member

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    #33
  14. Mick

    Mick Probably won't answer PMs
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    These days one other gloomy scenario is on people’s minds. Global temperatures are increasing, which in the decades ahead could lead to a rising sea level, desertification, droughts in some regions, and floods and hurricanes in others. Economies will be disrupted, leading to a competition for resources, and populations will migrate out of distressed regions, leading to friction with their unwelcoming hosts. A 2007 New York Times op-ed warned, “Climate stress may well represent a challenge to international security just as dangerous—and more intractable—than the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War or the proliferation of nuclear weapons among rogue states today.”288 That same year Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their call to action against global warming because, according to the citation, climate change is a threat to international security. A rising fear lifts all the boats. Calling global warming “a force multiplier for instability,” a group of military officers wrote that “climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror.”289 Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing. In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature.” Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.


    Pinker, Steven (2011-10-06). The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes (pp. 376-377). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
     
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  15. ManDingo 20"/20"

    ManDingo 20"/20" MDMA Guru

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    **** knows.

    FTP.
     
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  16. The Raging Oxter

    The Raging Oxter Well-Known Member

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  17. Albert's Chip Shop

    Albert's Chip Shop Top Grafter
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    Just reading the Istanbul Puzzle
     
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  18. charlienicholasismydad

    charlienicholasismydad Active Member

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    Jsut finished Filth (wanted to compare the film to the book) after reading skagbobys on holiday. Loved the Millenium trilogy and about to start on Jo Nesbo.
     
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  19. Nidge

    Nidge New Member

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    Too heavy on the brain for me, but I admire anyone who reads plural.
    Presently nearing the end of the Nesbo. - Hole books.
    Nearing the end of the Leopard. The Phantom on the locker.
    Personally I have no hesitation recommending Harry Hole to anyone that listens <ok>
     
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  20. User Deleted

    User Deleted Well-Known Member

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    Just finished the final installment in Conn Iggulden's 'Emperor' series. A bit dull, got better towards the end though.
     
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