We are talking about global social forces. Pretending they are measured from the perspective of one person is so disingenuous. This is why debate online is so pointless. We are talking about centuries long social trends and you think “but what about the one Iraqi” is a point scored.
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On a long enough timescale humanity will go extinct, the sun will supernova, and the universe will collapse.
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So you agree that things tend to get better
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Things in general got a lot better after germ theory became a thing.
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I’m looking at roll call votes for confirmations to see which Republicans are voting yes and may be kind of sometimes almost reasonable.
Martin Walsh for Secretary of Labor: Blunt, Burr, Capito, Cassidy, Collins, Cornyn, Cramer, Fischer, Graham, Grassley, Hoeven, Lee, Marshall, Portman, Romney, Sullivan, Tillis, Tuberville (not voting: Blackburn, Murkowski, Toomey)
Vivek Murthy for Surgeon General: Cassidy, Collins, Marshall, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Sullivan
Xavier Becerra for HHS Secretary: Collins
Rachel Leland Levine for Assistant HHS Secretary: Collins, Murkowski
Deb Halland for Secretary of the Interior: Collins, Graham, Murkowski, Sullivan (not voting: Barasso, Hagerty, Lummis, Marshall, Rubio, Toomey)
I agree. If we want online conversations to be fruitful, we should avoid disingenuous interpretations of the points people are making.
Consider the option you have of reading Tom’s post charitably, which would mean that he was using but one example of an Iraqi that is representative of the millions who have suffered.
I’m still not at all convinced that things can be said to have gotten better over the course of whatever. There are the enormous problems of defining both what better is, and who things are better for. Not to mention trying to subjectively compare your own lived experiences with times and places that are far removed from it.
It’s all very self-serving and woolly. Like I said, it’s a religious belief that can only be sustained by faith.
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Lots of cis white male privilege going on here.
Steven Pinker argued in “The Better Angels Of Our Nature,” that objective measures such as average life expectancies, numbers of people killed in wars, percentage of people living in poverty, percentage of people enslaved, etc. all show continued improvement over the past few thousand years.
This is not really up for debate, technology has improved many things dramatically. The real issue is does one attribute that to any political system or not.
We don’t understand what time is. We don’t know the ultimate fate of the universe. The sun isn’t sufficiently massive to go out as a supernova.
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Nit
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I find it annoying that there are persistent attacks at all on the forum, I am pretty comfortable with the whole range of views here. I feel like my straight up hatred for the Republican Nazis makes me pretty tolerant of both centrists and more left wing people. What bugs me is lazy but tremendously strong opinions, which are present across the UP community (including me, I’m not exempt from human shortcoming).
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The one person was an illustration of the point which is the arc of history is only really for the winners of history and it’s kind of a tautology because they define “improvement” on their own terms. At the moment we seem to be defining improvement as more material things at the cost of destroying the planet, and less obvious in your face discrimination within some countries at the cost of extreme discrimination in other countries. And half the people in the apparently good countries are insane with anxiety and depression.
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That Manchin thing is a big deal. Can they pair infrastructure with taxes in the next reconciliation bill?
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So it sounds like things are getting better.
Manchin can consider the infrastructure bill after hr1 is passed. Otherwise WV gets literally nothing.
It’s not faith. It’s science.
Here is one small example.
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HR1 is doa, right?
Like the Senate is never getting 60 votes for anything close to it.