Comment by epolanski
3 days ago
I will spare saying the obvious illegality of such actions and how serious this is.
I will just say something else: I grew up as a kid between the 80s and 90s, when the world felt like it was going towards a brighter age of peace and respect. Berlin wall falling, China opening, Apartheid ending in South Africa, even Palestine and Israel were moving towards a more peaceful future.
But since then the world has just progressed toward darker and darker ages.
General public not caring anymore about any tragedy, it's just news, general public being fine with their press freedom being eroded, journalists being spied and targeted, more and more conflicts all around.
I just don't see nor feel we're heading where we should considering how developed and rich we are.
We should boast in how well we raise our kids, how safe and healthy our cities are, but it's nothing but ego, ego, money and money.
This is all turning worse and worse.
I agree with your condemnation of this and other conflicts, but disagree that this is in any way new or worse than any purported golden age.
One month after the Berlin Wall fell the US invaded Panama to kidnap its leader so he could stand trial in the US on drug trafficking charges [1], an almost identical situation to this one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...
Isolating similar events doesn't negate what the OP says.
There's a wider picture involved here which has more global leaders helping to paint that picture with blood and darkness.
The sentiment I’m pushing back on is that 30 years ago the world was bright and is now painted over with blood and darkness. I pointed out that during the bright times an almost identical event occurred. Other commenters have listed the many other horrible conflicts and genocides that occurred during those bright times. The invasion of Panama was not an isolated event.
I do fear for the US domestic situation, which has been deteriorating in increasingly alarming ways, but lawless aggression against Latin America is not new.
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I agree that the outcomes were largely how Americans wanted them, but in the 80's and 90's we had plenty of big and little problems as a world:
- USSR vs. Afghanistan.
- The chaos after the collapse of the USSR
- Russia vs. Chechnya
- US interventions South America
- US in Somalia
- The Gulf War
How much of our upbringing was our limited media exposure?
to continue your list
I remember these happenings, but still from personal rights to major events we had serious step forwards.
Now we have only the bads but none of the goods.
It seems like a cycle. Peace --> war --> new world order --> peace.
Also, there's probably correlation between wealth inequality and war. Wealth inequality leads to radical leaders which can lead to wars.
I think the cycle is because people forget how destructive war is for all sides, how much human wealth is thrown away in order to achieve enormous human misery. If it's happened in recent memory, people are reluctant to let those who think they might benefit from it to pursue it. The more time that passes, the easier it is to distract people from the misery and the easier it is to persuade people that it's justified.
"But since then the world has just progressed toward darker and darker ages." For a different perspective you should read Better Angels by Pinker.
We didn't have the internet back in the 80's and 90's to doom scroll all day. We read the events in the newspaper and watched it on on the news at 6pm and that was it. This might be partially why things seem darker.
Yeah as someone being born in the early 90s to Eastern European parents who experienced generational joy when Causescu and his wife were shot dead, the globalization that followed hasn’t exactly delivered for people - mostly so in the West.
Yes, millions of people in the poorest nations have been raised out of absent poverty since, but beyond that, wealth has flowed to the top 1% any country you look at (check median wealth ownership in the US, basically plummeted for the average Joe since the mid 80s), the environment has gone to shit and the generational promise that the children will have it better than their parents has gone over board with asset prices ballooning.
I‘m right there with you, the societal promise of meritocracy and the middle class was broken in the early 90s and so far there is no replacement in sight.
> Yes, millions of people in the poorest nations have been raised out of absent poverty since...
That... seems like something that shouldn't just be waved by.
And if you include China and India it's more like hundreds of millions. Like, if you think about the people of the world and not just "the West" the standard of living since the time Causescu was overthrown has increased dramatically.
Nobody "waved it away"?
What is at work is that you cannot treat it like electrical charges and say that the sum is neutral (and even there distance matters, such a statement would only be within a very small distance).
What happens elsewhere is elsewhere. If you get sick, do you want to be sent home because the public health statistically educated doctor tells you that overall health has increased worldwide (just using it as an example, I make no statement about actual worldwide health)?
There is this public discussion phenomenon that in every discussion somebody will inevitably use such a "neutralization" method to "balance" somebody's statement. I find this less than helpful for any discussion.
If we talk about too few good bakeries in the state of Idaho, there is no point in saying that New York has more than enough of them.
Similarly bad discussion phenomena: We cannot even talk about problem X, never mind do anything about it, as long as completely unrelated problem Z exists elsewhere. Or, we should not spend money on X as long as there is Z.
It's like some people assume a Single Global Lock mechanism exists, and the lock is set whenever somebody somewhere attempts to deal with some problem, preventing others from doing anything about theirs.
> the societal promise of meritocracy and the middle class was broken in the early 90s and so far there is no replacement in sight
That was less of a "promise" than a bait-and-switch, and we're in the switch part.
>I will just say something else: I grew up as a kid between the 80s and 90s
We didn't start the fire, it was always burning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire#Histo...
Nothing happened in the 50s.
isn't it the case by pretty much every quantifiable metric the world is better than ever?
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>Across the world, people are living longer.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
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> a brighter age of peace and respect
The first thing to learn from a well-examined life and study of history is that we must always be vigilant and active to protect progress and human betterment.
The second thing to learn from recent history is that transnational petroleum interests will not quietly and meekly surrender their control, influence and interests.
That's because the WWII generation who created these institutions and laid the groundwork for many of these change were still around for all that time. Around 2016 the last remaining members passed away. Now we have the boomers in charge and they are at long last able to enact all their fantasies without restraint in their final few years before they too pass.
There’s probably something to theories of generational cycles. But the people in charge are put their by voting populations who aren’t all one demographic.
The "blame is on the boomers" idea is rather poorly supported by facts or even rational ideas.
Having a democracy heavily weighted in voting numbers by people with the smallest timescale left (and no prospect of being drafted into the armed forces) to consider has consequences. This compounded by the fact younger voting block often unable to spend much time in voting related activities due to working 2,3 jobs to afford the housing that cost boomers 1/2 the price in real terms, either because housing was cheaper or it was legal to live in an urban ~hovel that would now be declared violating one of a million regulations that have since been enacted.