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Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

Sure, if you ignore the CIA torture, the NSA mass-surveillance, the US drone strikes, the protests in the US and Turkey, the Islamists in the Middle East, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the NATO/Russia stand-off in Ukraine, the lukewarm handling of the Ebola epidemic, the rising "anti-Islamic" neo-racist tendencies in Europe and everything else, 2014 was a pretty good year. But I guess most of these problems aren't entirely particular to this year.

EDIT: The article can be summarized with something my grandmother used to say whenever you asked her how she was: "Good, if you ignore the bad parts".

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No one says that there are no problems. The world is chock full of problems. But, from a long-term historical perspective, the problems we face today are relatively minor. And more importantly, fewer people live in abject poverty and more people are wealthier and healthier than ever before. IMO, this is a good thing.

Sure, I'm not questioning that the 21st century is doing relatively well (we had two world wars and several major attempts at genocide in the last one -- that sets the bar pretty low). Nor that we are, all in all, doing progressively better.

But I'm not sure that, it is meaningful to point out 2014 in particular as the best year in history. If we just go by "we're still making progress and third world nations are still becoming better places to live", of course 2014 is the best year in history so far. As will 2015 be. Or any year after that, world-wide catastrophes notwithstanding. But that's nearly tautological.

So depending on how you look at it, the article's claim is either trivial enough not to warrant ending up on HN IMO (any point along an upward slope is the highest point on that slope compared to those preceding it, by definition), or it's simply inaccurate (by sweeping the real problems 2014 surfaced under the rug and just saying it's all good).

Historical dark ages exist.

We take progress for granted, because we live in one of the most peaceful times in all of recorded history. But the Dark Ages were periods of centuries, where technology was lost and culture destroyed.

Of the seven great novels of the Greeks for example, only two remain: The Odyssy and the Iliad.

Look up the history of the Epic Greek tales, and learn just how much has been lost to the ages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle

One day, this great golden age around us will fall. All golden ages fall eventually, and we will lose our culture, our history to a dark age of true war once more. Future historians will look upon these times as the golden age of America.

But all empires collapse, and history always cycles between peace and war. And when the age of darkness comes, the current peace we have will be but a legend.

For now, we should be happy for the great age we live in, while striving to make it even better than how it is currently.

I think your point here is a great note on the topic, but sort of misses the very large, loud group of people out there who honestly think the world's improvement has inflected and is now going to hell in a hand basket.

As such, I prefer being reminded about how remarkably not-awful things are versus the next pointlessly negative everything's falling apart rhetoric. Mind, that may have to do with where I live, maybe, and I prefer balanced rhetoric. But it's useful to remind people that the general goodness of the world is monotonically increasing (perhaps with a 10-point moving average and a little spot of outlier filtering).

And yeah, this sort of conversation is almost necessarily a long-now topic. To talk about it over the course of a few months or just a year is a bit silly - there's a lot of noise. But over many decades and especially centuries, things certainly look better now. Things may be crap now in many ways, but it's only knee-deep crap. In the bad old days people waded through crap up to their eyeballs uphill both ways.

Fair enough. Yes, it's not getting worse overall. A lot of the stuff I mentioned wouldn't even have been news-worthy a few centuries ago.

But for Europe and the US this was most certainly not the "best year in history", regardless of general positive trends.

It may be trivial, but it's also often forgotten.

Did you even read? In like the second paragraph, it points out:

> Judging the world through headlines is like judging a city by spending a night in A&E – you only see the worst problems.

Yes, I did read it. How is "don't look" a valid answer?

You're comparing against an ideal, not reality, not history.

Let us not forget the recent past where things were not so great. From a global perspective much of the developed world existed under oppressive totalitarian governments up until the end of the Cold War. Also, as to the US alone, look back on: the McCarthyism, Jim Crow, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. Yeah, things aren't great right now, in some regards things are pretty awful. But things have always been awful, we just weren't noticing or we wrote that off as being normal.

I see your CIA Torture and raise you Middle Age Torture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_sawing

The world is a better place today than it was back then. Even in the 1900s, US Internment camps of the Japanese was clearly unnecessary racism designed to build propaganda for the war effort.

Oh yeah, and the historial norm of selling your prisoners of war as slaves. The great powers selling slaves (ie: Britian, US, India, Russia, etc. etc.) kind of isn't a thing anymore.

Minor powers condone sex trafficking, but it isn't anywhere near as bad as as it used to be. The greater powers in the world today police the minor powers and discourage the behavior.

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    Sure, if you ignore the CIA torture, the NSA mass-surveillance, the US drone strikes

I raise you the invention of the Gatling Gun, and the use of the Gatling gun against Zulu spearmen during the British conquest of South Africa.

Casualties in British conquest frequently numbered in the dozens of thousands per battle. We are far more careful and precise with our modern weapons than previous powers were.

Mind you, the US also used gatling guns and rifles to wipe out Native Americans in our conquest through manifest destiny. I'd take our modern "defensive conflicts" any day over our blatantly unfair policies of the 1800s and early 1900s.

   the protests in the US and Turkey

Protests? You do realize that protests in the 1800s and early 1900s were met with the sword. We have protests today because we care about free speech and have stopped slaughtering civilians.

I'll take modern protests any day over the historical norm of killing the protesters.

   the Islamists in the Middle East

Research the "Great Game" period please. Afghanistan has always been a hellhole, at least since the 1800s. The 8000+ Soldiers and 13,000+ civilians who died retreating to India (through Afghanistan) is proof of that.

Complete and total wipeout. There was a single British survivor in a major event during the Anglo-Afghan War in 1842.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1842_retreat_from_Kabul

    the NATO/Russia stand-off in Ukraine

Erm... Spanish American War. Great Game. Japanese Russio war. Genocide literally happened every 10 to 20 years throughout the 1800s.

Yeah, Russia stand-off in Ukraine is soft stuff. It is par-for-the-course for Cold War era politics, which is still far safer than historical norms.

    the lukewarm handling of the Ebola epidemic,

Modern Medicine was only invented for the past 150 years yo. Before that, people just died. The fact is, we can actually do something about the Ebola epidemic.

Islam has become a race?

No, but the relatively moderate notion of "criticising Islam" has provided an unfortunate opportunity for neo-nazis to present themselves in a more socially acceptable light. Just like "criticising the EU" did last year.

EDIT: Okay, seriously, what the fuck with the downvotes? The EU does have a nazi problem and the contemporary problems with the financial crisis and Islamists are very convenient vehicles for it. Ever heard of the demonstrations against Islam we had in Germany? The organizers are blatant neo-nazis. Heard of the interest groups like PEGIDA? Plenty of neo-nazis and even Holocaust denialists among their leadership.

Criticising Islam or the EU is perfectly valid and acceptable. Anything can and should be criticised. But don't be misled to believe that all these protests are orchestrated by liberalists and constitutionalists just because that's how they present themselves. The "Euro-sceptic" AfD we voted into parliaments have strong ties with other nazi organisations. Same with PEGIDA and its various offsprings.

I don't have the power to down vote. The Dresden marches have had at most, from what I've seen in the news 17 000 people - I don't think that is enough to say that the EU has a nazi problem. It might be considered that a single nazi is a problem, but in terms of nazis being a threat to the EU, 17 000 is not a problem. Somewhere in the region of 250 000 Brits declared themselves Jedi in the last census, if that puts it in perspective. The last video I saw of the marches showed a black guy up front: http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/dec/23/thousands... I guess that's open to interpretation. I think a problem the left have is that when they go around blanket labelling everyone racist they are as over-excitedly left as the neo-nazis are over-excitedly right. The left is seen as good, and so people on the left wanting to be more good keep jostling to be more left. The right is seen as bad and so there is a limit to how far right people will move before there is disapproval, that point easily identified as racism, but there doesn't seem to be this obvious limit on the left. It looks to me as though the left limit might be when the left start labelling everyone as racist.

Sure, but it's not just the Dresden marches. It's stuff like the AfD (which managed to con enough voters into believing they have no ulterior motives to make it past the 5% hurdle), the increasingly hostile sentiments towards asylum seekers, and the internal intelligence service's lackluster handling of the NSU murders, too. And that's just Germany.

I'm not seeing we're heading towards another beer hall putsch anytime soon (even if vocal left-wingers would have you believe that), but the various problems have made radical right-wing thinking more socially accepted than it had been a few years ago. And that's a bad thing.

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