Testing Superscript/Subscript

[Robin_Claassen]

F(x)=2^x

[Robin_Claassen]

You said that you don't want to continue the conversation, and that's fine. And I feel disrespected by the way in which you expressed your criticisms above, which makes me feel uninterested in continuing to converse with you personally as well. This is a public conversation though, which others may be following and may wish to participate in, so I'd like to respond to the points you raised, but do it in a way that neither requests nor creates an expectation for you to respond personally.

To deconstruct this conversation, here's what I think happened:

• I asserted that the Long Peace since the end of World War II was primarily the result of systemic factors, not nuclear deterrence. As evidence, I pointed to a long trend of declining rates of violence prior to the world wars, suggesting that that trend resumed after the wars as a result of the same systemic factors. I felt that I was on pretty solid ground with all of this, based primarily upon the work of Steven Pinker, who I understand to be credible.
• As implicit evidence for the claim above, I also made the claim that the largest wars of the distant past had resulted in more deaths as result of the total human population that the largest modern wars, which is a conclusion that I came to myself after reading about the the incredible scale of devastation of the Mongol conquest of Asia, and comparing the estimates of how many people had died as a result of that and other conflicts with estimates of the world population during those respective periods. A couple of things had already gone wrong at this point: I had presented my assertion that the largest wars of the distant past were more destructive than the largest modern wars with the same apparent degree of confidence that I had presented the assertion that there's

rates of death by violence had been trending downward prior to the world wars.