Europe’s experiencing the longest hot war since World War II. The war in the Gulf seems to be escalating as we speak. Extremism has been on the rise for years now. Is it actually getting worse or is it simply the fact that we can access information from all four corners of the world so easily as never before?
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The first school shooting in the US was in the late 1800s.
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During an 18 month period between 1973 and 1975 there were an average of five terrorist bombings a day in the US.
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There were more serial killers in the 1970s than any decade since.
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Before 1974 a women could not open a bank account unless she had her father’s or husband’s permission.
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Do yourself a favor and do not research what Belgium was doing in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s…
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At the peak of the Irish Potato famine British companies were exporting 150 tons of beef a week out of Ireland. In fact the Irish Potato famine meets all the criteria of state sponsored genocide.
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1816 is called the year without summer. A volcano erupted in Singapore and put so much ash into the air summer never happened. In North American there were heavy snowfalls into July. So many crops died in Europe that food riots erupted and massive disease out breaks occurred.
These factoids are not meant to depressed you. They just illustrate that there have always been major problems and fucked up things to solve. We should not destroy ourselves because of them, we have to address them.
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Hol up, I think I’d have heard about a nuclear exchange in Europe
What are you even on about?
It’s multiplied and accelerated, so yeah.
History always had power struggles, empire exploitation, death disasters, etc. but the modern era has significantly expanded on that with the boom in technology and the global population.
Add to the fact that we are digging our own grave in several forthcoming critical problems that the world is already starting to see the effects of.
Climate change makes it worse. Not yet, but soon.
Definitely now when it comes to many islands.
It is a wave of volatility not seen since the end of the Cold War.
Both
Authoritarianism is increasing globally and with it come atrocities.it’s just the downfall of the west
most of the world is doing better than ever and rising
I think that it was just the last 30 years being an anomaly. In Europe you had lots of very interesting stuff happening pre WW2. Also pre WW1 was calm just briefly. After WW2 you had communist revolutions in the east which took a while, then in the west you had Basques, Northern Ireland, extremists in Italy and Germany doing interesting happenings. And decolonization struggle in the rest of the world. All very eventful. Real calm for Europe came after end of cold war up until 2014 Ukraine. And that is if you disregard the wars in ex Yugoslavia that was ongoing for 10 years! And included eventful things like a genocide and several ethnic expulsions. So maybe real calm was for all in all 14 years in the 21st century…not to say that Middle East was anything but calm in that period. And that Russia ended its civil war circa 2008 and invaded Georgia that same year. That leaves us with 6 whole consecutive years of calm on European continent.
Abundance. Everything looks smaller in the rear view mirror. As someone who’s been in both decades, it actually feels a lot like the 80s all over again.
Yes, there was a long period of post WWII stability, though there were still lots of problems including the Cold War that ended by 1990. Then there’s also been a series of slowly escalating Middle East conflicts. I think a lot of people are pointing to that period 1990-2001 or so with no “major” global conflicts happening. But even then, there was genocide in Rwanda. But the information/reporting was less global at the time.
It was always volatile. It’s more volatile lately than 30 years ago, but if you go farther back I don’t think this is unusual.
Abundance of news and remember the golden rule. Modern day journalism sacrifices the core principles for more clicks. Doomscrolling makes more money at the end of the day.
“If it bleeds, it leads” is as true as ever
It’s the information.
Before, what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you, so, when someone on the other side of the country did something, it would have to be REALLY important for people to talk about it here.
Tv gave us national news, but still, they were limited by broadcast time. Not every little bit of news can fit in a 24 hour day, and they’d have to repeat the important stuff just in case someone wasn’t watching at the exact time it was reported.
Now, there are no limits. Every local drama, every crime committed, every break up and make up, and every plate of food is recorded and immortalized on the Internet.
Statistically, crime is lower than ever, less crimes go unsolved, and more people have more rights than ever before. This world is literally the best it’s ever been, but we’ve also never been exposed to so much injustice before. It’s quite the Faustian Contradiction.
The extremism thing is definitely real.
People are conditioned to pay attention to bad news.
It’s a survival mechanism. If you find out there’s lions in the savannah to the left, then you want to know that so you can go to the right, you know?
News organizations profit off of that survival mechanism by constantly telling you that the world is ending so that you keep paying attention to them so that they get ad revenue.
There are bad things going on, but it’s not as bad as it seems.
It’s just the bad gets so much more attention because it is actively being shoved into your face, whether you’re looking for it or not.
