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Comment by ballmerpoint | Hacker News Reader

> My favorite suggestions of Postman’s are:

> Spaceship Earth – we’re all in this together; let’s take care of each other and our planet

> The American Experiment – let’s revive our sense of wonder, curiosity, and responsibility about what America is and can be

> The World Makers – as a student of McLuhan, Postman would be remiss if he didn’t invite students to make the tools and narratives that thereafter make us

These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.

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A lot of people still feel this way, possibly the majority. I think we're already starting to see a backlash against the cynical politics of the past decade and a renewed interest in shared values.

I don’t really agree. Carl Sagan and other public intellectuals popularized these sorts of memes but no one really stepped in to replace them. The Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the contemporary world are not in the same class. And the culture is so much more anti-intellectual than it was back then...

Nate Silver’s early 538 work absolutely was this. He was spitting out minitab output from the command line straight into articles to answer fun questions like, “Is Tom Brady the most efficient passer of all time?”. It’s a capital offense that the NYT scrubbed the web of everything from 538.

Yes, I think a lot of us feel this nostalgic yearning for a revival of more science&techno-optimistic times.

We are tired of the constant cynicism, negativity, and small-minded thinking. It's too easy to be a cynic. To put everyone & everything down, and to feel intellectually superior. You see it all over on the Internet and in the real world too, it's a true mind virus. It'll never die, but one can only hope more people just get tired of it.

I will teach my kids that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Grand thoughts always meet reality poorly. Does Spaceship Earth mean that you live in the forest to be surrounded by the greenery or live in a high-rise to preserve the greenery? Do you allow the other to exist to preserve Spaceship Earth? Environmental organizations in San Francisco treat this question like Shiri's Scissor. It is not so easy to coordinate people - disagreements on the specifics can easily fragment coalitions.

None of that makes you a “citizen of the world”.

That’s just a moniker wealthy elites who feel more connected to other wealthy elites in largely indistinguishable major metropolitan cities, than they do to people from any specific place or nation.

Anyone who disagrees is either

1. not internationally wealthy 2. drank the kool-aid and never stepped too far away from their family money.

Maybe! I hope so!

But the more I hope, the more one single cynical sociopath seems to co-opt the entire commons for their own purposes. The leverage of sociopathy is incredible.

> These memes make me nostalgic for the pre-9/11 era. I remember being taught to consider myself as a “citizen of the world.” That seems exceedingly quaint now.

That resonated with me. As someone not even in the US, I think about this a lot.

But I think the timeline change was the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore (2000), which halted the Florida recount.

If Al Gore had won, so much of our timeline would have remained in the realm of the unfathomable/impossible. Pax Americana would have continued possibly for a few more eons who knows.

I'm not gonna claim it would be star trek but I would likely be a lot less worried about my kids in that world than what I currently am.

The death of Cecil the lion, harambe, Zoe Quinn doing whatever the heck caused gamergate.

These are far more important points in time to fix as a time cop than a stupid election. You would also go back and kill Hitler, instead of simply letting him get into art school…

I think Spaceship Earth goes a bit further back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth

Well it was still completely meaningless back then, too.

For a completely meaningless notion you do seem able to dispute its meaning in the sibling thread.

Not that it matters much to me whether it was or is meaningful or not. Nostalgia is simply a feeling that doesn’t imply much about its object.

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