4 ms·

> Point is, you may not like it, but merely being cancelled rather than straight up executed is why we live in the good times. Yeah, but we lived in (slightly)

> Point is, you may not like it, but merely being cancelled rather than straight up executed is why we live in the good times. Yeah, but we lived in (slightly) better times a decade ago. This reminds me of the discourse around crime rates. People who want to downplay the soaring crime rates tell us that we have nothing to be upset about--sure, homicides are up 70% on the decade, but if you zoom out to the 90s, homicides are actually DOWN--reversing 20 years of progress is nothing to worry about! IMHO, these sort of "if you go back far enough, things were worse" arguments are generic arguments against progress.

mancerayder 4y ago
>IMHO, these sort of "if you go back far enough, things were worse" arguments are generic arguments against progress. Or rationalizations for bad policy/cultural values in the present.
ben_w 4y ago
> Yeah, but we lived in (slightly) better times a decade ago. Unless you literally mean the year 2013 (which was mostly OK IMO), I disagree. As a broad trend, groups were different, and the responses harsher in the past. If you were gay a few decades ago, "don't ask don't tell" was a way to keep you safe in the military because of an extraordinarily vicious murder. I've seen documentaries about polyamory which end with "this person was fired as a direct result of having appeared in this show". I've read books by Wiccans talking about the times bullets went through their hotel windows. The world is shockingly different even compared to my childhood; mostly for the better, even despite that I feel there are several things that have become worse.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I didn't mean "literally the year 2013" but something more like "2000-2010" give or take a few years. I was also speaking narrowly to the context of the parent comment i.e., repercussions of unpopular speech. Of course, not everything is worse today than it was in the above timeframe, but there are lots of things that have degraded considerably: violent crime (especially homicides) are up, racist groups are more numerous, partisanship is high, people are less healthy, support for civil liberties (apart perhaps from LGBT rights) is down, support for objectivity/neutrality values are lower, etc. I don't know that I would go so far as to say that things are categorically worse across the board, but these are all broad social indicators as opposed to individual anecdotes. Certainly I was hoping we could make some reasonable progress on treating LGBT and religious minorities better without trading off all sorts of other stuff.

mancerayder 4y ago

>IMHO, these sort of "if you go back far enough, things were worse" arguments are generic arguments against progress. Or rationalizations for bad policy/cultural values in the present.

ben_w 4y ago

> Yeah, but we lived in (slightly) better times a decade ago. Unless you literally mean the year 2013 (which was mostly OK IMO), I disagree. As a broad trend, groups were different, and the responses harsher in the past. If you were gay a few decades ago, "don't ask don't tell" was a way to keep you safe in the military because of an extraordinarily vicious murder. I've seen documentaries about polyamory which end with "this person was fired as a direct result of having appeared in this show". I've read books by Wiccans talking about the times bullets went through their hotel windows. The world is shockingly different even compared to my childhood; mostly for the better, even despite that I feel there are several things that have become worse.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I didn't mean "literally the year 2013" but something more like "2000-2010" give or take a few years. I was also speaking narrowly to the context of the parent comment i.e., repercussions of unpopular speech. Of course, not everything is worse today than it was in the above timeframe, but there are lots of things that have degraded considerably: violent crime (especially homicides) are up, racist groups are more numerous, partisanship is high, people are less healthy, support for civil liberties (apart perhaps from LGBT rights) is down, support for objectivity/neutrality values are lower, etc. I don't know that I would go so far as to say that things are categorically worse across the board, but these are all broad social indicators as opposed to individual anecdotes. Certainly I was hoping we could make some reasonable progress on treating LGBT and religious minorities better without trading off all sorts of other stuff.