But keep telling yourself everything is fine. The rest of us with our heads up and eyes open, hear you, but we know better. Shit, 47% of Americans voted for Romney! And more than that supported the murderous criminal bush administration.

Like I say, the rest of us will keep our eyes open and see that Obama has not saved us from going over the cliff.

The OP is 1 page long. Moreover, you don't get to say "TLDR" and then follow up by expressing an opinion on what you didn't read.

Either you read it and want to say something about it, or you limit yourself to saying that you find a single page to be a Tolstoy-esque intellectual challenge. Or you just don't respond at all, and not waste my time or anyone else's.

But since that common sense eluded you, I guess we can just move on to the opinion you did express. Namely, that lots of people voted for Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.

Guess what? Lots of people voted for Richard Nixon. We elected him twice, and if not for the Kennedys' mob influences in 1960, it would have been that psychopath with his finger on the button during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We've elected segregationist Presidents, we've elected fascist assholes who made it official policy to wipe out Indian tribes in the 19th century, and we've elected people who pursued murderous imperialism in the Philippines in the early 20th.

See, knowledge like that comes when you read things. Consider doing so as an alternative to not reading things, since the former is generally a better way to know what you're talking about.

I should have written, "TLDR most of it".

No, what Obama's speech reminded me of would be a speech he might give his daughters. Not the grown-ups. Of course Obama is younger then even I so there is that.

Since nixon, we have exploding nuke plants, climate change, an almost ruined environment and 3 billion more people on the face of the planet. Al queada, Pakistan and India with nukes, and a US financial deficit about idk, 100 times greater?

This world is a whole different place than it was 50 years ago, and it's gonna be a whole lot different in just a few more. Winking and nodding at it, as Obama has done, is not what i voted for. Oh well. I didn't really expect the hope and promised change, but it sure was nice to consider that maybe, just maybe, he could pull a rabbit out of the hat. I think even he has given up, and knows all he can really do at this point is make his daughters feel better, as any good dad would do. Peace.

"Since nixon, we have exploding nuke plants"

All whopping three of them in four decades, only two with any significant regional impact - which is now leading countries to move away from nuclear power. I'm not seeing the apocalypse there, or even a major global problem.

"climate change"

Renewable energy is cheaper and more widespread than ever, and in the case of PV solar appears to be approaching a logarithmic growth curve. Thanks to Tesla Motors, EVs are now economically viable, although still in the upper end of the price range. As inadequate as the global response to the issue continues to be, it is nonetheless stronger than ever before (Australia's backsliding notwithstanding).

"an almost ruined environment"

This is rhetoric, not a useful factual statement.

"and 3 billion more people on the face of the planet."

The majority of whom live better and safer than their parents and grandparents, thanks to technology and political/economic reform.

"Al queada"

They got lucky once, a dozen years ago. Other than that, more Americans are killed by lightning than by Al Qaeda.

"Pakistan and India with nukes"

A hundred or so low-yield fission bombs that would have to be shot as artillery or dropped from aircraft. They can't even mutually annihilate - the vast majority of their people would survive all-out attack. Not quite the terrifying development that the USSR getting the H-bomb in 1953 was, let the Cuban Missile Crisis, is it? Or were the history books on the Cold War TLDR?

"and a US financial deficit about idk, 100 times greater?"

As a percentage of GDP, it's only about twice as high - and even that much is only because Nixon inherited a down-swing. But the national debt today is actually lower (again, as a % of GDP) than it was in 1950.

"This world is a whole different place than it was 50 years ago"

I know - it's vastly improved, across most of the world, on most metrics. That's just a matter of fact, not opinion. I can throw as many numbers at you as you want. And it's not just China - it's Asia in general, and also South America. The revolution in mobile technology is really starting to have an effect in Africa as well.

"Winking and nodding at it, as Obama has done, is not what i voted for."

Telling the truth when you don't want to hear it isn't "winking and nodding." And if you didn't vote for him to hear the truth, then you probably should have voted for the other guys.

"Oh well. I didn't really expect the hope and promised change, but it sure was nice to consider that maybe, just maybe, he could pull a rabbit out of the hat. I think even he has given up, and knows all he can really do at this point is make his daughters feel better, as any good dad would do. Peace. "

He did pull a rabbit out of a hat. What kind of amnesia does it take to forget that this country was on the verge of total economic dissolution? That we had just escaped from a mad dictatorship where an invasion of Iran was practically already scheduled when this President said "fuck that" and pursued dialog instead? That millions upon millions of Americans now have healthcare who didn't before, because of this President? That millions have jobs who wouldn't otherwise?

Remember Sully Sullenberger, that pilot who miraculously landed a plane full of passengers safely in the Hudson river when it started going down? That's basically what Barack Obama did for this country. That's what an American President is supposed to do, but rarely does.

Human life in general is better than it's ever been. I can bury you in hard facts if you want to debate that, on every level - life expectancy, sanitation availability, prevalence and mortality of war, on and on. But I suspect this has nothing to do with reality. I have a much quicker and easier solution to your negative feelings about the state of the world than demanding that it turn on its head: Read history. I guarantee you will like the present more, the more you learn about history.

Fifty years ago children went outside and played and rode their bikes, sometime to a distance of miles from their home. A nine year old could get on their bike and ride to the other side of town to the local swimming hole and the parents thought nothing of it. Now a nine year old is not allowed to walk two blocks to a playground unaccompanied. No parent would allow their nine year old child to just ride off on their bike and be gone most of the day. It is the fear or maybe just distrust that can never be eliminated from our daily lives. We are bombarded daily with stories of horrors that have happened to others. Fifty years ago we may have actually been in a less safe world, we didn't feel it.. Now it is built into our psyche. I regret that part of "Progress".

People's perspective being skewed due to information overload, and developing an irrational image of the world.

But what you're talking about probably has more to do with America being a lot more urban than it was in 1955. If you live in an Iowa farm town whose residents all know each other, your kids wouldn't have many opportunities to get in trouble or danger. But, from what I've heard, if you grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s with responsible parents, your life as a little kid was basically playing on the street immediately in front of your house or apartment while your mother watched from the window or sitting on the stoop, and not being allowed to so much as turn a corner out of their view.

To the extent it occurs in suburbia, I agree that's paranoid and socially damaging. But there's another side to it: People had more solid communities in the 1950s because there was rigid social conformity - everyone had to dress the same, "stay in their place" as determined by sex and race, obey rules of social etiquette that today would seem quaint, and most destructively, keep to their own kind racially. They felt safe because they constructed a false social picture around themselves of being surrounded by sameness, only living among people who looked like them, talked like them, thought like them, worshipped like them. It was lazy and a lie.

That America looks orderly from a distance, but it was morally weak - it was the country that went on to produce the Vietnam War, murdered our greatest citizens, and essentially was a military police state brutally trying to suppress the transition to what we have now: Diversity of thought and form, dynamically unified by fundamental values. They wanted an America carved in stone; instead they got a surging ocean full of life that flows around all obstacles. And that profound nature only feeds the fear of the intellectually timid and weak-minded that the media panders to.

Because the media and politicians focus on doing what their donors/advertisers want and telling the stories their constituents/audience wants to hear, everything that's happening under the thin layer of "mainstream" America is completely hidden to you. That's why it seems like you are living "in the best of all possible worlds", and you have no fear of imminent infrastructure collapse or wars breaking out.

The veneer is very thin and getting thinner. If you think #Ferguson is social media distortion, you are very wrong my over-optimistic friend. That is symptom of a vast disease, the pus breaking through very thin skin.

Humanity may be good, but sometimes it chooses to be deliberately blind. Right now "humanity" is allowing serious human rights violations, some of which may be classified as torture, to take place on U.S. soil by allowing rampant problems in the welfare system to escalate unchecked. People are being driven into homelessness, stressed into mental illness, suffering from exacerbated physical health problems, being driven "out of town", being driven to unspeakably undignified resorts such as prostitution and begging, and being driven indirectly to their deaths. Where's your "good humanity" now?

The perceptive surface area of humanity has increased exponentially with social media and personal electronic communications.

If anything, everything looks a lot worse because things that were hidden before now aren't.

I don't see policymakers treating social media as "signal". This post is claiming social media distorts historical context rather than expands "perceptive surface area".

Radical expansion of perceptive surface area leads to a glut of negative stories, causing the present to be compared unfavorably with an idyllic past that never existed.

It's no different than thinking the world was a safer place when you were 5 because kindergarten teachers don't scare their students with world news.

Ignorance is only bliss after the fact. Self-aware people don't fall victim to that kind of fallacy.

The only way to judge the state of the world is through rigorous knowledge of the past.

And I must say, my knowledge (rigorous or not) makes me very happy to be living in an era without a military draft or a world-girdling totalitarian empire pointing 30,000 hydrogen bombs at me. It's also nice to be able to talk to non-whites in public without provoking hard stares and police intervention from the local gentry.

It's also convenient to find whatever information strikes my curiosity at a moment's notice rather than having to write it down on paper, go to a library on a weekend, and browse through card catalogs on the off-chance that my local branch had the information I wanted. If I need help on anything, I can seek it from millions of people, and actually receive it from hundreds or thousands.

I'll put it to you bluntly: The vast majority of people from any era in the past would rather be living now than then. The fact that some of them talk about the "good ole days" in their old age doesn't mean anything, because that's them being old, not the world getting worse. Any Golden Age you want to fantasize about had exactly the same kind of talk, how "far we'd fallen" in 1965 from the halcyon days of 1925.

It's all crap, and that can be objectively proven just looking at the HDI statistics and statistics about deaths in warfare. The world is way, way more peaceful than it was, way richer, and way more broadly humane. The fact that you can name heinous anecdotes of horrors doesn't mean anything when you're making an objective comparison - only the numbers matter. And the numbers say we're better.

But hell, don't trust the numbers, trust your eyes without a news media filter. Travel the world at random and you will find shockingly well-developed cities in numerous places where a generation before were hovels and un-air-conditioned mud brick buildings. Go to sub-Saharan Africa. It's not as bad as you think. Not many places are remotely as bad as the media makes them look. Humanity grows and develops. While we live at all, that is an immutable fact of our nature. The bad things are at worst complications along that path.

Call me and then tell me what your eyes see.

Got anything else brilliant to say?

You can survive on a fixed income like Social Security.

Welfare can be no direct cash income for necessities at all. It can be negative income. It can be a miniscule check to a landlord that is precariously negotiated then randomly taken away, leaving you homeless. It's a pile of contradictory rules intended to grind people down, to make them homeless and mentally ill. Perhaps it's unintentional because the "State" has better things to do, and it's easy to grab money from this system where no one's looking. Perhaps it's utterly intentional because making survival impossible will drive people "elsewhere" or, more sinisterly, kill them off. In any case, it has become a form of torture on American soil, and it's part of the reason why things like Ferguson are happening.

The situation is not comparable to being on SSI at all, which is a fixed, reliable income. You're extremely poor, but you're not being tortured - unless you count those months where you don't have enough money to buy food on your fixed income.

Now YOU got anything else brilliant to say?

You say you're worse off than me, fine - I believe you. Now can you find an actual point to offer? Nothing you've said has in any way made any sort of argument - you've just made a bunch of negative assertions out of context, and then appealed to authority fallacy by saying your life is hard so the world must suck.

That basically boils down to "It was cold yesterday where I live, so global warming isn't happening." Well, it works both ways - just because the Sun isn't shining on you doesn't mean the Sun isn't shining.

Personally, I take solace in the world getting better, especially when my own life is not. But it's your prerogative to be offended that the world doesn't revolve around you.

Good luck with that.

The point was that Obama is wrong about social media distorting context.

And you are wrong about this being "the best of all possible worlds".

Both of you are unable to see a lot of what is going on beneath a very thin layer of political propaganda and statistics.

The very fact you thought SSI was comparable to the welfare situation says it all. You're just spreading propaganda without knowing what you're talking about.

All you've done is deny, deny, deny.

I'm denying, or rather dissenting, from a reality you obviously know nothing about it. Perhaps you should consider learning more about some of the issues you don't know very much about.

Unlike the infallible, absolute truth that one is able to access through sheer emotional self-absorption.

Dude, stop citing your "history" - and again you are just spouting propaganda here - from whatever book you are reading, and actually do some research on the way people are living below that "official propaganda" layer. We're talking about facts here, not emotions.

Seriously, everything you say just sounds like you're spouting B.S.

I think you're probably right, overall, though I think the one problem that has been brought up that could be a bigger danger than ever is climate change. Not because the world's attitude to it has got worse, but because it hasn't got any better, and the expansion of economies means the effects are much larger now. For each invocation of Tesla EVs, we can point to Canadian tar sands, US fracking, and Australian coal mining, all expanding quickly.

A significant group of US politicians denies there's even a problem, and the rest of the world has, as its main policy on the subject, "how can we get away with the minimum change to our lifestyle and hope someone else does the heavy lifting on this?"

I'd also dispute your claim that the USSR was the dominant superpower until about 1985; but that doesn't really matter.

So it's a natural challenge that eventually a civilization ends up confronting the unintended consequences of its history on a larger stage - almost like the world is a school, and the tests become increasingly more challenging.

The good and bad news on that are both the same: If we succeed at dealing with the threat of climate change, we will grow to a larger and deeper context where entirely new and even more dynamic problems arise. That's the nature of progressive civilization: There is no plateau at which problems cease - only higher and higher levels on which to struggle, higher mountains to climb.

Think about WW1 and WW2. When you trace them all the way back to their utmost roots, those roots are the petty squabbling between the sons of Charlemagne whose respective kingdoms evolved into France and Germany. But the only reason their squabbles rippled forward over 1,100 years to shake the world is because of all the other things those societies contributed to humanity along the way.

So we can say that some problems - even unbelievably nightmarish, horrific problems - can be understood in context as the "good problems" that only exist because humanity has moved forward. We only have the problem of the NSA because we have the internet, and I doubt many people would rather we ditch the internet as a result. We only have the problem of climate change because we've successfully built worldwide industrial civilization, but we would obviously do better to change the energy pathways of industry than to retreat from the very concept.

And as to the climate denier politicians, consider this: Why are they even bothering? Why not just ignore the subject completely? It's because there is a massive and accelerating groundswell to deal with the problem, coming not just from academia, but from all sectors of society who stand to lose from climate change - the insurance industry, agribusiness, coastal cities, air travel, on and on. Climate scientists provide the ammunition, but the rapidly growing clean tech industries pull the trigger. So all that obstruction you see is another one of those "good problems" - those corrupt politicians and their fossil fuel industry backers are under siege from every direction, because reality moves over, under, around, and through all obstacles.

What's more, the smart ones know it - they're just waiting for the point in time when the clean tech industry can pay them more money than the fossil fuel industry. The minute that happens, they will have a miraculous conversion.

As for the USSR being the dominant superpower, I'd recommend military histories of the Cold War that delve into the logistical details of the two sides' forces. The reason the Kennedy administration conducted a massive ICBM buildup was because the Soviet Army was far more powerful than ours by 1960, and only overwhelming nuclear deterrence (it was thought) was going to stop them from invading Europe. A democracy not at total war can only devote a small fraction of its GDP to armament, but a totalitarian state can devote the lion's share of its economic output to military buildup.

If they'd felt like it and hadn't feared a nuclear attack, Soviet tanks could have rolled over the entirety of NATO's European forces like so much dough. That's why the West was terrified of them, not mere Red hysteria - they literally had the military might to obliterate us without using nukes. Thus we built up our nukes to stop them, and they built up their nukes in response. Moreover, they had direct or indirect political and economic control of a much larger swath of mankind than we did, and a much larger share of physical resources. The fact that Communism is economically inefficient (i.e., slaves make poor workers, and bureaucrats make poor innovators) is all that stopped those advantages from being decisive.

Don't get me wrong: We were a lot more popular, but the raw balance of power was theirs from 1945 until practically 1976 - and we didn't start to realize anything had changed until almost a decade after that.

-Laelth

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We're actually quite lucky in many ways.

Doesn't mean things aren't just pure shit in some cases, but we're still quite lucky to be living right now.

Americans tend to look pretty fondly on the 20th century, but for most of the world it was a fucking charnel house.

It's an emergent property of a highly useful technology - no one's claiming social media is bad because it creates false impressions about the prevalence of negative events. That's just a downside to an otherwise very constructive tool.