The best year ever...

[Gob]

.....was just last year!

[Crackpot]

I know you like to think of yourself as ahead of your time but this is ridiculous.

[rubato]

1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer.

Except in the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. is 26th in the OECD and in Russia it has actually gone down.

2. Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, and the world is getting happier.

Not in the U.S. where poverty shot up after 2001 and the median income has gone down for 12 years.

3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly.

Ah, not for us. But the Pax Franco-Americana has a price. And we're happy to help out all the little countries.

(and thanks to the French for picking up the slack like their intervention in the CAR last week. It really helps.)

4. Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.

Here too, and for the same reasons. Getting the lead out was the right thing to do.



I've posted this before. The connection between getting lead out of the environment and reducing violent crime and mental retardation is proven. So to all the nice liberal environmentalists we owe a big "Hey Thanks!"

5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world.

And we have had a lot of progress here too. Good for us! The improvement in civil rights for blacks, women, homosexuals, and religious minorities has been very very rapid (in geological terms) and entirely due to liberals! The feminist movement produced the most dramatic social change in the shortest time and with the least violence in western history. The world which a woman was born into in 1955 and the world in 1985 were wholly different.

So I'd give us a C+. Not leading in the gay rights movement but in the vanguard. We used to lead in environmentalism (30 years ago) but have slipped behind Europe and Japan in the past two decades, we have led in removing lead (which is fun to read) and California has led the world in vehicle emissions. (good for us!) But political changes in 2001 have fucked us in the area of economic justice and we have held ourselves back in the health care area by refusing to admit the obvious; capitalist systems have been a continuous failure for 40 years. And with regard to war if we keep stupid liars out of the WH (no more Republican presidents!) we can avoid stupid wars like Iraq but being the only power deserving the "super" modifier we're stuck until a few people in addition to France (great food, beautiful women, wonderful comedies, AND the Force de Frappe!) grow a set of balls and pick up the slack.

The 20th century has been the triumph of Liberalism.

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[MajGenl.Meade]

What's all this French kissing about then?

[rubato]

The general point, that on the whole many things are improving steadily over time, is worth making and even underlining.



But its had little effect on the industry that churns out books and sermons on how western civilization is on the skids and compares the US to "the last days of Rome" because we don't hate foreign languages, foreign food, foreign people and Gays enough. The meme that 'everything always used to be better' is very resistant to facts. Sturdy.



yrs,
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