I’m sitting in my air conditioned house, watching not one, but 2 HD screens, one of which is playing cheers because I love that show and I can watch it all I want anytime I want. The other is my phone which is a absolute miracle of human achievement allowing me access to the sum of the worlds knowledge which I’m currently using to look at funny shit that amuses me. Also I didn’t move a finger to say any of that. I just said it and it typed it for me, correcting most of my mistakes. And you, who are reading this, might be literally anywhere on this planet right now. I also used my phone to order my food which was promptly brought to my home for my enjoyment.
The world certainly has a lot of shit aspects but on the whole, we are living in amazing times right now for those of us fortunate enough to be in a safe country.
The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.
We’re still here.
Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)
Pretty sure Japan wouldn’t agree with that last point…
the south lost the American civil war,
They’ve been trying to play the long game
The cultural victory, if you will.
The south won the war when they killed Lincoln.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Pick any human development index measurement and view its progress over the past 10 years
I try to be a “silver lining” type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I’ve been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There’s even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.
The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.
the common cold
the WHAT?
THE COMMON COLD
(well… just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)
I believe we are statistically in the most peaceful time in world history right now. Unless someone triggers a nuke.
Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket
ive said to my kids "you have the sum total of all human knowledge available at your fingertips 24/7 and youre bored? "
Wait so now I’m in trouble for not being on my phone? Make up your mind! /s
There’s a big difference between doom scrolling and education.
Give them welbutrin and there mind will be on overload. Worked wonders for me. no sarcasm.
Do you feel this “overload” all the time or in bursts?
It was all the time because couldn’t get my mind to connect to all the things I was thinking about. Now I can and it just comes out. For example I never wake up in the morning hungover or anything my eyes just go bing and I am wide awake. I then rune 3 miles then read about an hour of wiki for whatever my mind comes up with. Then I got to my job for 48 hours.
The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing they’re smart — all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.
Oh, of course. There are negatives to everything for sure. But I think as a whole it’s made life better in a lot of different ways.
Humans domesticated wolves in this timeline. Imagine being in one of the dogless hellscapes.
Instead of sleeping in a cave and spending all day trying to kill food with a sharp stick, you can use your pocket internet to have food delivered to your door. In your very comfortable living space. Thank you Science and all the smart people in history that brought us here. Life is not as bad as the losers would have us believe.
And there are so many foods that can’t be grown in certain parts of the world, but I can get almost anything.
Even something as commonplace as a banana has to be shipped to a large portion of the world where it doesn’t grow natively.
I mean, we’re communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?
On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it’s pretty cool. Um.
Hi. :waves:
Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?
I often worry about things that don’t makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.
I like you. Never change.
Hi! How’s it goin?
Hi!
I’m OK, mostly.
Had some good Chinese takeaway tonight, which was a treat. Ate that while watching my countrymen descend into some kind of froth for dystopic, authoritarian autocracy. That’s kind of a bummer.
I abide. Trying to, anyway
For now.
I’m more a visual person, so let me show you some graphs: Famine rates are down: https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Famine-death-rate-since-1860s-revised_850.png
We can do so much more with our computing resources - Note, logarithmic scale: https://www.singularity.com/images/charts/MicroprocessorClockSpeed.jpg
Billions of people live in a democracy, before 1850 almost none did: https://bigthink.com/the-present/democratic-rights/
Indoor plumbing, heating and air!
Good people still exist, so does love.
Can’t confirm. World is dark. Life is pain.
US centric, violent crime is down. Not the lowest it’s been currently, but better than it was when I was growing up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191129/reported-violent-crime-in-the-us-since-1990/
