Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 December 19

= December 19 =

The possibility of war between US and China
I'm looking for good academic sources that give some idea of the likelihood. I do not know where else to ask. Nobody here in Haikou seems to care. They will all be busy focusing on getting money right up until that bright flash. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 02:01, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Here's a recent article from The National Interest: - it's definitely a neocon-slanted source opinion-wise but the content is generally regarded as reputable. There's also a RAND Corporation study here. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 02:23, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you, NorthBySouthBaranof. Reading, learning, worrying, thinking about moving. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 04:15, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Neutral sources: The Australian - http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/risk-of-war-between-us-and-china-is-reaching-crisis-point/news-story/0993db6a89fa59caa09b54ad68168030 Reuters - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-commentary-china-apps-idUSKCN10I0WB Newsweek - http://europe.newsweek.com/south-china-sea-war-nuclear-submarines-china-united-states-barack-obama-xi-473428?rm=eu The Times - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/war-between-china-and-the-us-is-a-real-risk-0nzxpcrzd Wymspen (talk) 09:44, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi Wymspen. Due to blocks in China and registration requirements of the publications, I am only able to see a bit of http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/war-between-china-and-the-us-is-a-real-risk-0nzxpcrzd. Thank you, though. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 10:11, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * The risk of war with a nuclear power would seem to prevent that. If China pushes too far (say invading Taiwan), the US and Europe would simply cease to trade with China, which would destroy the Chinese economy, and be a boon to other Third World nations that provide the same cheap goods the Chinese currently export. StuRat (talk) 18:35, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Please cite a reliable source for this prediction of what "would" happen in a hypothetical future. --69.159.60.150 (talk) 23:25, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Hi StuRat. Thanks for the feedback. I must say I'm more worried about some country on the other side of the planet coming all the way over to make it their business and push too far. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 23:32, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

I didn't want to start a discussion about this. I just wanted to get sources that give some likelihoods. Even the hows and whys are not super important to me. I know it is all about money, and men playing with Earth like it's their own train set.

Of course, I always thought it illegal for one to make another fear for their life. Something about the "right to live in peace...". I'm sure there's a law like that, so it is probably illegal to for one person or a small group to make 6 billion live in fear. And that one or group is supposed to be there to serve and protect. Oh, the irony. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 23:38, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * One more, from The Atlantic, which has links to prior Atlantic articles on the subject. tl:dr is - no war. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:42, 20 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Did your post get garbled somehow ? StuRat (talk) 01:09, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Somewhat. Now fixed; thanks. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:19, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * What's the "tl:dr is - no war" part mean ? StuRat (talk) 01:36, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * tl:dr is a commonplace abbreviation of "too long, didn't read", and is normally followed by a pithy summary - in this case, reflecting Anna's question, I remark that the article suggests there will not be a US China war. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:41, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you all! Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:26, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

Mestizo, mulatto, and mixed-race people
In Social Studies, I learned that in Spanish-speaking countries, mestizo was a person of American Indian and Spanish heritage, and mulatto was a person of American Black and Spanish heritage. In North America, English settlers married Native Americans and Blacks. Yet, "white people" in America accounts for over 60% and American Indian accounts for only .7% in 2010. What happened to the Native American populations? Were they massacred in great numbers? Did they have decreased fecundity than the white settlers? Or were they absorbed by the European populations and their offspring "just pass as white"? 66.213.29.17 (talk) 17:58, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Disease killed off many Native Americans. Also, there weren't that many, relative to the people of European ancestry who immigrated to the US.  It's an interesting Q as to why natives living in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking parts of the Americas seemed to have survived better, despite the Spanish and Portuguese being particularly brutal towards them.  I credit geography, with tropical jungles being a better place to hide out from Europeans (who feared disease, alligators, ambush attacks, etc.) than the Great Plains.  Those areas of the US that did have a similar climate indeed allowed natives to hide out, such as the Seminoles in Florida. On the other hand, areas under Spanish or Portuguese control that were more accessible to Europeans, such as Caribbean islands, did have their native populations wiped out, and then replaced by Europeans and African slaves.


 * Also, exposure to European diseases may have been easier for a tribe to survive if they only had to deal with one at a time, due to minimal exposure, and could develop immunity, than if they were exposed to all of them at once. StuRat (talk) 18:17, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * If you want to know the answers, books like 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, its sequel 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, both by Charles C. Mann, the book Mayflower: a Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick, The Columbian Exchange by Alfred W. Crosby, as well as many others cover the ground of "what happened to the Native Americans" in exhaustive detail. The answer is basically twofold.  1) Diseases brought, unintentionally, by the earliest European explorers decimated the population of the Americas, often traveling faster than European settlement, meaning that Native Americans were wiped out by European diseases before Europeans even got there to settle.  That lead to the myth of the Americas as Terra nullius, where early settlers assumed that few if any Native Americans lived in North America, and those that did lived a nomadic, unsettled lifestyle.  In reality, until the generation before the Europeans showed up, they DID live in highly organized, settled, and complex societies.  What the Europeans found was their society AFTER the apocalypse of the diseases they brought.  2) The second part was deliberate genocide which destroyed most of what else remained.  For example, even though Native populations in New England had been basically been wiped out by as much as 90% by disease, the remaining Native Americans were reduced by a FURTHER 90% by wars like King Philip's War, either directly by the war, or by deportation and enslavement directly thereafter, meaning that by 1700, the Native American population in New England had been reduced to only 1% of what it had been pre-Contact.  The story is much the same throughout North America (i.e. Trail of Tears, etc.)  There WERE however some populations and pockets that remained and intermarried with White and African-Americans; see for example Melungeon.  -- Jayron 32 18:55, 19 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Our main articles on this subject: Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Population history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. --47.138.163.230 (talk) 00:36, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * There were never many before colonisation. Most Amerindians were hunter-gatherers so the holding capacity of the land was lower than agriculturists e.g. Eastern Agricultural Complex and Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest. Sleigh (talk) 10:28, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The Eastern Agricultural Complex refers to a culture some 3000 years before colonization. By the time of the first European contact, most North American indigenous peoples lived in settled urban life; that life was ultimately upset by the upheaval caused by massive die-offs due to disease in the 16th century.  If you want to know what Eastern North America looked like just before contact, Mississippian culture is what you are looking for.  And you'll note it brings up the fact that it was a settled, village-based culture (not nomadic). Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest also points to culture some 3000 years too early for us.  You'll instead want to look at Ancestral Puebloans, Mogollon culture, etc.  which again were all settled, village-dwelling (not nomadic) peoples.  The image of the Americas as settled primarily by hunter-gatherers is drastically wrong, and no serious scholar of pre-Columbian Americas has thought so for a hundred years.  You can, of course, read ANY of the books I cited above; the newer ones are probably better.  But no, most Americans were NOT hunter-gatherers.  Most lived in permanent settlements, and practiced intensive local agriculture.  The reason, of course, the Pilgrims chose to settle at Plymouth was that it was the site of a recently abandoned village with good irrigation, drinking water, and cleared farmland.  Exactly what most of Eastern North America looked like for many centuries.  -- Jayron 32 04:14, 21 December 2016 (UTC)
 * According to Population history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas there were between 2 and 18 million people in pre-Columbian North America, which doesn't sound like not many to me. It is much smaller than the 50 to 100 million in Central and South America, but several million people is still a lot.  For comparison there were only about 2.5 million colonists in the British Colonies at the time of the Revolutionary War.  Dragons flight (talk) 10:36, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * North America has a population of 565 million today. Sleigh (talk) 12:23, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * In a highly industrialised nation dependent on global trade – hardly relevant to the population dynamics of 200–600 years ago, and your linked articles deal mainly with earlier periods. In the 13th Century (AD) there was a single city in what is now Ohio that had a population of 30-40,000 – one of the largest in the world at that date, and it was primarily a religious centre: this hardly argues for a sparse population of hunter gatherers (though this particular city's decline predated and was unconnected to the European colonisation). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.136.117 (talk) 14:20, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure where this is going, but the Roman Empire depended on trade with all its known world, so it's not as if widespread trade is a new phenomenon. I hadn't heard of Cahokia, so thanks for piping to it, but I note that its population figures (the lowest maximum is 6000) are uncited. It was nowhere near "one of the largest in the world at that date", according to List of largest cities throughout history, which shows multiple cities then with hundreds of thousands, in some cases over a million, residents. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 14:43, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

criminal activity
Can somebody recommend me a resource that has *per-capita* heat maps of criminal activity throughout metropolitan areas? Benjamin (talk) 21:21, 19 December 2016 (UTC)


 * That per capita part probably makes the answer no. To do that, with precision, say per city block, you'd need to allocate population by city block.  Consider that, in the US, for example, the census is only done once every 10 years, and people tend to move around a lot in-between.  You'd also get the odd situation that any crime in an abandoned city block would mean it has an infinite crime rate. StuRat (talk) 15:19, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * That's a subset of a larger issue: how is population defined? Often it is thought of in terms of residences, but for this purpose, we have to take into account that people come out of those residences to commercial and park districts.  However, I imagine that the British with all their fancy Big Brother cameras could make a very accurate estimate of the population physically present in a block... and they have American imitators in places. Since the OP has already seen the regular heat maps, that is the only piece of data missing to complete the picture he wants, I think. Wnt (talk) 07:44, 21 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Do you mean "criminal activity" or "police reports"? &#40;&#40;&#40;The Quixotic Potato&#41;&#41;&#41; (talk) 16:28, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
 * "Per capita" is of limited relevance in the crime rate in certain situations which have large transient populations, such as tourist influxes, or even weekend nightclubbers. A neighbourhood which is largely residential, but has nightclub strips, may seemingly have a high rate of assaults, mostly committed by the drunks from the nightclubs. But the crime rate amongst those who actually live there may be much, much lower. So you need to consider the residence of the criminal, not just the location where the crime occurred. If you looked solely at crimes committed by those who actually lived in the neighbourhood, you'd likely get a drastically different picture. Eliyohub (talk) 11:11, 21 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Per capita is tricky indeed. If I draw a boundary enclosing a commercial (or industrial) district, office tower, strip of nightclubs and restaurants, baseball stadium, shopping mall, or any other non-residential area, one kid shoplifting gives the area an infinite (one crime divided by zero population) crime rate.  If the guy living in the apartment above the grocery store gets a roommate, they just cut the local per capita crime rate in half. Oops.
 * (And as The Quixotic Potato implies, the number of crimes actually reported often isn't well-correlated with the number of crimes actually occurring. Some communities may be more or less likely to trust the police, and therefore be more or less likely to report crimes.  And police may be more or less likely to patrol certain neighborhoods, and thereby be more or less likely to detect crimes in those areas.)  TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:27, 21 December 2016 (UTC)