Comment by Double_Cast

This comment sounds like post-modernist pap. Beware -- modernism isn't the ultimate ideology, but post modernism isn't the bee's knees either. (Fyi, that "notion of continuous progress" of yours comes from Hegel.) Your comment comes off as handwavey and I think you've been "swayed" by the emotional rhetoric just as much as the next guy. It's as if you became disillusioned with communism, so you decided to become a libertarian. (No, this isn't an appeal to the balance fallacy. I'm saying reversed stupidity isn't intelligence.)

Also, what's this about cycles? Have you ever seen a population graph? It literally looks like a backwards L. But from your comment, one might expect a sine wave. And if you've been following say... Bill Gates's blog, the third world has significantly and measureably improved in the past 50 years.