{"id":1260,"date":"2013-03-08T16:20:30","date_gmt":"2013-03-08T22:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=1260"},"modified":"2013-03-08T16:10:40","modified_gmt":"2013-03-08T22:10:40","slug":"freethought-fridayreads-the-end-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2013\/03\/08\/freethought-fridayreads-the-end-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Freethought #Fridayreads &#8211; The End of War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/files\/2013\/03\/endofwar1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1262\" src=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/files\/2013\/03\/endofwar1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"186\" height=\"271\" \/><\/a>Usually my Friday posts are about a book I&#8217;ve already read, and usually the book has to fit a few selection criteria: profundity, fictionality, and freethinking authors or themes. This week, I&#8217;m throwing out my usual selection criteria in favor of just one: Does the book attempt to answer a vital question? It seems to me that the question of whether we can progress as a species towards ending organized violence is inestimably vital, and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-End-War-John-Horgan\/dp\/1936365367\/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0\">The End of War<\/a> goes a long way towards answering that question in the affirmative.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>While accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama declared that \u201cWe must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.\u201d Horgan does yeoman&#8217;s work here in proving him wrong, drawing on such disparate fields as genetics, anthropology, and policital science in the process. While I myself will probably never be as optimistic as Horgan, he has at least convinced me to stop being so damned fatalist about it. Now I just need to find a new line of work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Usually my Friday posts are about a book I&#8217;ve already read, and usually the book has to fit a few&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friday-reads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}