What is wrong with the world today?

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But it's never the fault of the person doing the blaming. That's the problem. We need to tell the judges to cut the and actually dish out some justice. ANd if the government bitches about the cost, then tell the politicians to stop skimming off the top and pay the bloody bills!

 

The world has some pretty lame events going on, but it's nothing exceptional. Indeed, it's probably better off as a whole than it has been in the past. The key totalitarian regimes that honestly threatened everything have largely collapsed, leaving only second rate dictatorships and standard corruption in the 'democracies'. All the bad things - and many bad things that we tend to forget about while making these sorts of threads - were going strong back then to.

So yeah, there's stuff wrong with the world today, but don't go looking back to some nostalgic past. It probably wasn't all that great.

 

Rubbish like this has been going on all throughout history, we're just more aware of it now because of the multimedia and because we're, well, living now. There's probably more horrendous things that we don't know because it was well hidden. Doesn't make it okay, though, and I think the aforementioned multimedia is partially to blame. When you can Google up ways to kill people in the comfort and privacy of your own home...

I wouldn't be surprised if our water starts turning to blood anytime soon...

 

Nah, the latest plague is "Reality Television"...

 

amen to that gnarfflinger, how i loathe reality tv.

 

I don't think this is correct. The 20th century was extraordinarily bloody, from WWI&II to Turkey to the Holocaust to Rwanda to the Congo to the Killing Fields to SE Asia to the USSR to the PRC to...

On a day-to-day basis, okay, life in the developed world is much better than it used to be. But catastrophes are, well, more catastrophic than they used to be.

 

I think it only seems that way because the 20th Century's catastrophes are both more recent and more easily documented. The 19th century had the American Civil War, the Napoleanic wars, the slave trade, the El Nino famines, Venezuela, tons of fun famines and plagues - hell, the Taiping Rebellion alone accounted for 20-30 million deaths. Then you have the century before that, which, in addition to even more famines and plagues, brought us such hits as the Seven Years war (incredibly bloody for it's eponymous brevity), the ritual murders in India, Spanish Succession, the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the slave trade (again), the extermination of the native Americans, etc.

The further back we go, we hit things like the Crusades and Rome's outings and the Mongol conquests and all the fun nasties who'll eventually get their own movies and it's hard to come to the conclusion that the world was less catastrophic and f***ed up in years gone by than it is today. I agree that the Second World War does push the 20th century into the top position, but my original point still stands I think - we're a species determined to kill each other. Also, the world's population has grown steadily over the centuries, so I'm thinking that's a factor of the high numbers as well. More people = more killin and dyin.

 

I am more inclined to agree with AM, for two reasons:

Technology and the media: It's made killing on a larger scale not only possible but more anticeptic. Look at the war in Iraq, we have been responsilble for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Do you think Americans care? They put one face on all those people: Saddam. And they believe that they are actually doing these people a favor by killing their fathers, mothers, daughters and sons. Yet, they really believe that all Iraq will be "free" someday (like never).

The media actually controls our perceptions of mass killings within almost any context. What they choose to show us, as the result of our actions, plays a large part of how we feel about ourselves in the process. I've seen old newsreels of how the Germans were actually shown pictures of Jewish families in phony "camps" and of how much "better-off" Jewish families were during the attempted genocide by the Nazis.

How do we close the distance between the order of the prez to kill hundreds of thousands of people and the understanding of the morality of our actions on a personal level? The answer is that we have to come face-to-face with our perceived enemies in order to understand the "fullness" of our actions.

If Americans were more aware of the bloodshed on a personal level it would make a difference, IMO. There is that memorable scene in "All Quiet on the Western Front," where Paul finds himself in the foxhole with the dead Frenchman, only to discover that the Frenchman was not really the "enemy" after all. The enemy was really the misinformation that made Paul believe who the enemy was. But isn't that almost always the case? Whether it is a ranting priest inciting the population to "Take up the Cross, because God wills it," or the electronic media showing moving pictures of 9/11 alongside the face of Saddam, the results are same: Only now it is on a much larger scale, and it can occur, as did the Iraq War, before anyone has had any time to think it through. That's pretty scary, IMO.

 

It is now within the realm of possibility that human actions will destroy an immense proportion of the world's human population in as little as a day. Hell, a few hours. That alone would tip the present day toward the worse end of the suckage scale.

Back to the original argument: while there had previously been catastrophic events on a scale equal to those of the modern age, the modern age is unique in that the catastrophes have been more closely packed

 

We've rarely been on the same page, but this time I fully agree with you. We get more and more bizarre crimes, the age of those committing them gets lower and lower, and how did the government here respond? By asking judges to keep as many criminals as possible out of prison. What...?

I wonder if that's a direct result of the world's population increasing exponentially. The more people there are, the higher the chance one of them will go nuts at any particular point in time?

 

You'd have to make that a societal argument. Hitler didn't kill all those people by his lonesome. Ditto Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.

 

Add to this the stories like spawned the (no) honour killings thread, and you have a recipe for genocide. Just like with WWI, the people were desensitized to what was being done and did not count the Jews as humans. Likewise, the people in the Middle East are being dehumanized. The only difference is that George W. is not interested in Genocide...

 

AMaster brings up an interesting point. I read an essay way back in university that talked about how living creatures behave differently if there are too many of them packed together -- the essay cited experiments wherein lab rats were forced to live in crowded / confined conditions. The author then cited studies / statistics about the fact that living in crowded cities is stressful (especially if poverty is factored in) and can influence people to behave in ways they otherwise wouldn't.

 

Now that you bring attention back to it LKD, I heaerd about this in college too. There was more violence, an increased rate of homosexuality and increased difficulty getting to the feeder...

 

I wouldn't put too much stock in the homosexuality part, Gnarff. Urban areas tend to be more accepting of each other's differences than rural ones. A gay man from the "conservative" rural south -where people are still threatened and harassed for interracial dating- is a lot more likely to be in the closet than a man in an open-minded, accepting city like San Francisco.

 

Uh, Drew, The segment of my post that Gnarff was talking about was regarding rats in a controlled lab experiment. What the scientists found was that male rats forced to live in close quarters were more likely to engage in homosexual behaviour than rats in more spacious accomodations. I don't think that rats in bigger cages were somehow "redneck rats"! The essay didn't extrapolate THOSE findings into a conclusion that urban humans were more likely to be gay.

 

Hey i resent that ! I'm the biggest redneck on this board & i don't have a probelm with anybodies sexuality. One of my workout partners is gay & if you don't mind a gay man's crotch half a foot from your face when he is spotting you on the bench press/decline press you sure as heck ain't prejudiced against him because of who he sleeps with.
That is just another stereotype that isn't always or even mostly true, IMHO.

 

Ahh, Martaug, my deepest apologies, though at some point someone on the board is going to throw that admission right back in your face. Allow me to amend my post then:

Better?

 

@LKD: My essential point is that humans aren't rats. Not even in our prisons do we pack ourselves so closely*, so a direct comparison isn't really all that feasible or practical (and would likely constitute a severe human rights violation).

@ Martaug: Obviously not all rednecks are homophobic. This doesn't change the fact that hate crimes on the basis of race, creed, or sexuality are more frequently committed in areas where the population is less dense. The south isn't actually the worst place to be gay in this country. Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado actually share that dubious honor.

* and the increased homosexual behaviour in our prisons probably has a lot more to do with the lack of women than it does with over-crowding.

 

Thanks LKD, didn't mean to rant so bad just kinda bugged me

Dang, i can't believe i'm saying this but i agree with what drew said(ducks & waits for lightning to strike)
With the exception that i think that every area has a particular group that is looked down on or blamed for more of the crimes than others. Not to say that this is deserved just that this is the way it seems to be.
I have black friends who hate asians & a couple that hate white people but like me(go figure), an asian friend who doesn't even like to go to movie theatres because of what she sees as a mob of blacks just hanging out & of course several white friends that dislike/hate various groups. None can give me a good reason for their dislikes/hatreds.
Life is too short to spend it hating others yet i get torqued when i see someone use religion(or the appearence of such) to keep basic rights away from all people. I don't dislike religion, i think it has a place however i think it should have some limitations when it comes to certain basic rights.
Ok my peace is said thanks for letting me rave, sometimes you just gotta