Never Forget: Is our world a better place than ever before?

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 5:13 pm

There's a flame war going on my friend's facebook wall. It started about a simple question about what exactly we were never supposed to forget. it devolved, like many things-internet, into a flame war about a completely different subject.

The comment that started it was my wife* who said that we are a better place than we have been ever. Her exact words were:

My wife is wrong wrote:
I like to think we're slowly improving. The number of Athenses (sp??) is up and the number of huns down, that kind of thing.

And then people started to fight about whether this is true.

My point is that the world has neither gotten better or worse in the long run. Sure, we've had medical and scientific advances. But as war mongers and destroyers, we still haven't changed. For every Hun & Alexander the great, we've had shit like imperialism, Cold wars, Hitler and Hiroshima-Nagasaki.

We might have increased scientifically but it hasn't brought as any closer to being a peaceful world than before.

*I do love my wife but she is wrong in this argument.

Editted in disclaimer because I had to justify myself (for some odd reason)

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 5:23 pm

Well, it is pretty difficult to compare atrocities. And yes, human nature hasn't terribly changed.

What has changed other than improvements in technology is that we have governments that try to curtail the worst outcomes of humanity's depravity.

Technology aside I would rather live now than any other time if only for advancement of human rights. Sure, lots of places are not doing very well, but lots of places are doing better now than they ever have in the past, purely on a human rights point of view.

Your wife is right and the sooner you accept it the happier you'll be.

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 11, 2012 5:37 pm

In terms of just raw suffering, now is a pretty awesome time.

I'm not sure that you truly understand how shitty the past was. In the US Civil War, there were single battles where over fifty thousand people died. Now we can have an extended ten-year war and only a few thousand die in the whole thing. Hell, just having access to clean water means that millions who would have died badly will get to live.

It may seem like there is as much suffering in the world because we now get news from all over the world. Even a hundred years ago, we never would have heard of Darfur or Somalia, and we definitely would not have cared enough to count the casualties.

In terms of human dignity, a sizable portion of the world has access to that at all. The right to work, human rights, and an enforceable rule of law has made life better for millions of people. The fact that billions are without those things means that there is still a lot of work to do.

It's a sign of just how awesome things are that we actually care about other people at all.

Ted the Flayer · Post by **Ted the Flayer** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 6:29 pm

I think being able to drink water without shitting myself to death is pretty cool.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 6:42 pm

K wrote:Now we can have an extended ten-year war and only a few thousand die in the whole thing. Hell, just having access to clean water means that millions who would have died badly will get to live.

I'm sure you're not talking about Iraq since that conflict has at least 100,000 casualties, possibly 10 times that.

Afghanistan still has a few thousand a year as a result of the war. That isn't to say that if there was no war that nearly as many people wouldn't be dying to the Taliban anyway.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 7:31 pm

There is a lot of ups and downs on a year to year and month to month basis. I'm sure that human welfare a day after a tsunami is pretty shitty compared to the day before. But the era is certainly better than any previous era. People perish in wars and shit, but infant mortality and child mortality is so low that I only have one sibling and so does my wife. And unlike in ages past when such a scenario would have been brought about by the brutal cullings of scarlet fever and small pox, it's simply because both our respective parents chose to have two children.

There is absolutely no comparison between today, where the people in half the world can confidently have the number of children they want to raise with the basic expectation that they will live to adulthood and the hundreds of thousands of years in which every family would try to squirt out eight kids before the mother died in childbirth so that at least a couple of them could escape the ravages of starvation and disease. The gains in human dignity are so profound that you cannot even compare the past and the present without the Progressives ending the comparison with "Tada!"

-Username17

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 7:46 pm

If we disregard the medical advances and the amenities that give us a better chance at living, I posit the whole idea of war has stayed the same and we suffer the same proportion of ill-effects now that we did before.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 7:57 pm

Cynic wrote:If we disregard the medical advances and the amenities that give us a better chance at living, I posit the whole idea of war has stayed the same and we suffer the same proportion of ill-effects now that we did before.

If we disregard the fact that our world is much safer and nicer to live in, then it is little better than the past. Of course, to do that you have to have your head up your ass.

-Username17

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 7:57 pm

So, if you start throwing out the things that make the world less shitty, then you can point to all the bad things you haven't thrown out and say the world's still shitty.

Um... Why would you disregard good stuff so that you can maintain the world still sucks? Is this some burning desire to be right about the world sucking, or some burning desire to living in a sucky world?

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 11, 2012 8:00 pm

erik wrote:
K wrote:Now we can have an extended ten-year war and only a few thousand die in the whole thing. Hell, just having access to clean water means that millions who would have died badly will get to live.
I'm sure you're not talking about Iraq since that conflict has at least 100,000 casualties, possibly 10 times that.

Afghanistan still has a few thousand a year as a result of the war. That isn't to say that if there was no war that nearly as many people wouldn't be dying to the Taliban anyway.

You do understand that, even in the article you linked, "casualties" includes people who were merely wounded.

That being said, the US has had ten years of war and had a few thousand troop deaths. Considering that we lost about 670,000 lives in WWII and 58,000 in the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem pathetically small. The numbers of wounded skew those numbers a bit, but not by much.

The fact that the Iraqi's and Afghani also lost tens of thousands of people to starvation and disease caused by the war is more a symptom of them being a hundred years behind the first world in terms of access to technology and less of a result of the war, but even then the war has gone pretty well for them. For a conflict of this size, the fact that they don't have four million dead is a testament to the advances made in modern warfare.

Cynic · Post by **Cynic** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 8:38 pm

I'm not trying to live in a sucky world, I'm just not sure if our world is any better. I suppose throwing out everything that is good would make the world a sucky world. That is an idiotic thing to say or believe in.

So let me narrow the focus. Is the world a better world today than it was since NEVER FORGET? Again, sure we've had medical and scientific advances but has this bullshit war nullified it? I'm not saying this is what I believe. I'm just asking the question.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 8:53 pm

Well, apparently The most awesomest thing ever was created in 2009. Yay progress!!

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 10:49 pm

K wrote:
erik wrote: I'm sure you're not talking about Iraq since that conflict has at least 100,000 casualties, possibly 10 times that.
You do understand that, even in the article you linked, "casualties" includes people who were merely wounded.

Well, that would normally be a very reasonable assumption, but in this article I linked the table has "Casualties" and directly beneath it a number for the estimated amount of people who died as a result of the conflict. So in the article I linked, it does not have an inflated count for people who were merely wounded. At least not on the relevant table whose count I referred to as being at least 100,000, possibly 1,000,000.

I suppose it is true that this war could have been bloodier by previous standards. Just didn't want to fall into the trap of believing that only American deaths counted. I recall in high school when my mind was blown when our Social Studies teacher asked us how many people died in the Vietnam War and many people gave very tight estimates to how many Americans died in the war (about 60,000), and the teacher reminded us that over a million people died (estimated between 1.5-4 M), and I realized I was a douche for only counting one side.

[editx2: tags. my eternal nemeses]

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 11:01 pm

Cynic wrote:I'm not trying to live in a sucky world, I'm just not sure if our world is any better. I suppose throwing out everything that is good would make the world a sucky world. That is an idiotic thing to say or believe in.

So let me narrow the focus. Is the world a better world today than it was since NEVER FORGET? Again, sure we've had medical and scientific advances but has this bullshit war nullified it? I'm not saying this is what I believe. I'm just asking the question.

That's stupid. Wars happen all the time. The wars we've had for the last ten years and change have been all kinds of bullshit and terribly expensive, but they've been super small potatoes compared to wars of the quite recent or ancient past.

For fuck's sake, the United States has spent the last 20 years becoming less violent. Even as the population has increased, the homicide rate has fallen enough that the absolute number of murders has dropped. The reduction in American dead from murder since the early 90s is literally over nine thousand. Per year. That's more Americans than died in Afghanistan in all eleven years combined. And you know what? While the numbers of deaths of Afghans in Afghanistan are way higher, they were losing more people to combat and poor sanitation a few decades ago than they are now.

The Bush invasion of Afghanistan was super shitty because it was planned poorly and backed up by extremely crap diplomacy and laughably simplistic neocon ideas of how wars are fought and won. But you have to understand that despite all of that it was actually less of a bad thing than the unfunded Bush tax cuts, because the extra drag that put on American finances and economic growth seriously causes more harm to the people of Earth in the long run than which countries happen to have wars in them this year or last.

-Username17

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Tue Sep 11, 2012 11:07 pm

Cynic wrote:So let me narrow the focus. Is the world a better world today than it was since NEVER FORGET? Again, sure we've had medical and scientific advances but has this bullshit war nullified it? I'm not saying this is what I believe. I'm just asking the question.

A quick google search found the following:

Ten Great Public Health Achievements --- United States, 2001--2010

The 17 December 2010 issue of Science includes special sections highlighting the Breakthrough of the Year and Insights of the Decade.

The First Decade of the 21st Century: Five Remarkable Accomplishments

K · Post by K » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:05 am

What is Never Forget, and why is it bolded?

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:13 am

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:18 am

Oh wait, I mean

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:18 am

I had a forehead slap moment when I asked my wife why the flag was at half-mast at the pre-school. She didn't know why either. Then NPR played a piece about 9/11 at that moment and we remembered what day today is. We both went 'ohhhhhh'.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:22 am

or as one of the cynical bastards at work called it:"International (No) Fly Day"

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 12:29 am

Let me chime in as a hopeless optimist.

Yes their are still bad things things out there, wrongs that remain unrighted, and new injustices arise everyday. Think how far we have come.

1000 years ago most humanity toiled in the dirt without end and still went to bed hungry more often than not. Illness, violence, and deprivation. claimed a toll that we would find hard imagine today. They were ruled by an elite few who claimed that right not by consensus nor by the will of the people but by violence and a supposed divine right.

You think we have wars now, I'll bet more people die in traffic accidents world wide than in a year than in any of our modern wars. 70 years ago the world was wracked by violence but since then we have never had another war even comparable to that one, and after almost a millennia of blood soaked history there is finally peace between Europe great powers. Do you have any idea how crazy that would have sounded at the beginning of the last century. The fact is that this is a more peaceful planet than it was 100 years ago.

In the past century we've taken the fight against infant mortality and infectious diseases across the world and we're wining it hands down. 7 billion people share this planet with us. 1/4 of them are children under 15 and I'm convinced that they still have a future. I believe that within the next century we can and will end world hunger, solve global poverty, and create a sustainable planet. Don't underestimate humanity. We went from powered flight to walking on the moon in under 70 years.

K · Post by K » Wed Sep 12, 2012 1:01 am

I reserve the right to forget anything that happened on a single day over a decade ago.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 1:15 am

I asked my 88 year old Chicano grandfather if he thought things were better in the past once and he pretty much laughed me out of his house. For perspective, he and his siblings are all still alive despite the majority serving in WW2 and having no aunts, uncles or parents who lived a day over 57.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 1:16 am

Also, he has a DVR now.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Wed Sep 12, 2012 2:05 am

Wait, that was yesterday? I completely forgot. Oh well.