Althouse: "The World Is Not Falling Apart."

December 23, 2014

"The World Is Not Falling Apart."

"Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times."

29 comments:

D. B. Light said...: It is important to remember this. The trend lines across a wide range of categories have been getting better for a long time and the positive trends have accelerated dramatically since the end of the Cold War. A plausible case can be made for the proposition that the long-term betterment of mankind has been related to the expansion of capitalist/bourgeois social orders, and that the recent rise in human well-being has been related to the emergence of the United States as a global hyperpower.; 12/24/14, 5:01 AM
Laslo Spatula said...: Something betamax3000 told me at the bar:

"The 'Old' End Times lasted nearly two thousand years. We are now in the 'New' End Times. If it's going to End we are closer to it than ever before. Sackcloth and ashes, my friend. Sackcloth and ashes."

I am Laslo.; 12/24/14, 6:03 AM
tim maguire said...: There's some truth to that, but a straight up body count only gets you so far. 1,000 incidents of 10 people dying may technically be more peaceful than 1 incident of 50,000 people dying, but it's cold comfort to those living near the 1,000 but far from the 1.

And 100 people dying under a government that is teetering may be more peaceful than 200 people dying under 200 acts of random violence, but which one is more unsettling?

Like the people urging Israel to embrace a "proportional response" or the people comparing terrorism deaths to automobile accidents, you miss a lot when you reduce it to a math problem.; 12/24/14, 6:29 AM
Laslo Spatula said...: Something betamax3000 told me at the bar:

"The 'Old' End Times were when God wasn't paying any attention to us, a blink of His eye. Now He has glanced our way again, and the Ant Farm is all Red Ants. Too many Red Ants. When you see it this way the End becomes obvious: too many Red Ants."

I am Laslo.; 12/24/14, 6:31 AM
iowan2 said...: So violence and death are lower that ever and still dropping.

Why the current riots, over police doing police things?

The Presidents chief of staff told us up front.

Never let a crisis go to waste.

If there isn't one. One must be invented.

Obama promised a national police force that was more powerful that the US military. Obama refuses to discuss stopping the flow of military equipment to local police forces, at the same time offers the idea that the current riots need a federal solution. So don't act so surprised when local police become nationalized.

Wont happen?

Look at your current local public school and convince yourself that the feds don't run it.; 12/24/14, 6:39 AM
George M. Spencer said...: "By now, the bomb has almost no reality and has become a complete abstraction, represented by a few newsreel shots of mushroom clouds."
-Stanley Kubrick; 12/24/14, 6:47 AM
Laslo Spatula said...: Something betamax3000 told me at the bar:

"Charles Manson was just about fifty years too early, that's all. Today he wouldn't even be noticed as extreme, much less evil, and the 'X' on his forehead would be a Signifier of the Believers, like a Che shirt or a Guy Fawkes mask. What he preached wouldn't be seen as crazy, it'd be Authentic, man: the Church of Red Ants, hanging on his every word..."

I am Laslo.; 12/24/14, 7:00 AM
jr565 said...: There is no rape culture. There is no war on blacks by cops.; 12/24/14, 7:19 AM
sparrow said...: It's just the lull before the storm. No serious person looking at European demographic winter, encroaching Islamization and the weakness of the West can believe it will get better. Radical Islam is strengthening and organizing. As it get's stronger we will see more blood, no doubt. Also the West is diminished in strength, numbers and crucially in the will to fight.
It also shows that stats by themselves aren't very helpful.; 12/24/14, 7:20 AM
dreams said...: As to the recent beheadings of women here in the US, never mind.; 12/24/14, 7:31 AM
sane_voter said...: News is anecdotal, and with the internet we see many more anecdotes and it leads us to think crime is worsening. Plus, exposure to terrible local crimes that we may not have heard about in the past (and seeing video that was not available in the past) all makes it appear worse now than then.; 12/24/14, 7:40 AM
Tank said...: The calm before the storm. Things change slowly, until they change all at once.; 12/24/14, 7:55 AM
chillblaine said...: Althouse reads Slate so I don't have to.

They left out catastrophic human-caused global warming. It may already be too late! There were tornadoes in Mississippi yesterday. TORNADOES!; 12/24/14, 8:00 AM
Joe Schmoe said...: Overexposure to sensational stories and pictures makes things seem worse. The internet & TV news is chock-a-block with anything ghastly they can dig up.

TV shows and movies are full of it too. Every evening show is a lawyer, cop, or hospital show, each one trying to outdo the other with more clever but horrifying plot twists.

You can't consume most media without incurring some sense of unease, and the more you consume, the more constant the unease.

Statistically things may seem safer, but we're much more aware of so many things that may kill us, even though the probability is low. When it's constantly in your face, it takes on a greater primacy than it otherwise should.

If things are so great, why are drugs like anxiety medication being administered at such high rates? Or maybe the drugs are the reason for the decline?; 12/24/14, 8:00 AM
traditionalguy said...: Concerning times and seasons ...you yourselves know very well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. For when they say "peace and safety" then sudden destruction comes upon them as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. (1 Thess 5:1-3); 12/24/14, 8:02 AM
chickelit said...: ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who can avoid the feeling that things fall apart, the center cannot hold?

Aside from it being Slate, it would be nice sometime to read more inclusive hyperbole -- something which didn't immediately "tell" the authors' biases.

Now I am as guilty as the next when it comes to bias. But I'm not demanding pay or being fed by my words.

By the way, did you read Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece on the NYPD police murders? Pretty even handed I thought. That explains why the left is ignoring it.

Peace Out.; 12/24/14, 8:04 AM
sparrow said...: I hear there are fewer murders on Detroit these days, but I would hesitate to say the city was getting better. Stats without context are insufficient.; 12/24/14, 8:18 AM
dreams said...: As late as the fifties our country was about 90% white and 10% black, we had a shared heritage and patriotism for our country. Today we have a racist anti-American president who was raised in Hawaii, who is largely ignorant of America's history and was taught to hate America by his fellow traveler mother.

And not to forget about all the muslims like the Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev who we've allowed into our country and they continue to surround us while Obama and the liberal media incite racial hatred which might be providing a fertile breeding ground for future terrorists.

Ominous.; 12/24/14, 8:33 AM
George M. Spencer said...: Who was it who said that war is the natural condition between states and that peace is a brief aberration?

Churchill? Teddy Roosevelt? Can't find the quote.; 12/24/14, 8:34 AM
dreams said...: Airport security, never mind. TSA, never mind.; 12/24/14, 8:52 AM
Bob Boyd said...: "The world is not falling apart."

Thanks, Slate. I actually wasn't thinking that. But having you guys tell me is the opposite of reassuring.; 12/24/14, 9:10 AM
Big Mike said...: It's Slate. Do you expect anything other than "all is glorious in the reign of our glorious leader Barack"?; 12/24/14, 9:15 AM
Big Mike said...: Not that the Left is doing it's dead level best to make them fall apart. Witness CUNY student newspaper calling on protesters to arm themselves and "wage violent war" with cops.

In my day that might have worked -- a number of us were on the GI Bill and had at least been through BCT if not actual combat. A bunch of students who barely know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of against trained police? Ri-i-i-ght.

@Althouse, isn't CUNY your alma mater?; 12/24/14, 9:51 AM
mikee said...: As Laslo notes, we get closer every day to the final reckoning.

Eventually everyone from the suicide cultitsts to Jehovah's Witnesses to Yeats will be correct, and the rough beast's hour will have come around at last.

Until then, however, it will not have happened, and things are looking up, up, up!; 12/24/14, 10:00 AM
Mark Caplan said...: Dysgenic breeding, softer environmental pressures, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are causing the average worldwide IQ to plunge. Eventually, we'll all be saying, "between you and I."; 12/24/14, 11:19 AM
richard mcenroe said...: Linking to Slate is probably not a sign of poor character, certainly not on a level with linking to Salon...

...but it's getting there.; 12/24/14, 12:44 PM
Alex said...: Turn off the internet and TV. I guarantee peaceful times!; 12/25/14, 1:03 AM
Alex said...: Go back to the early 1940s Soviet Union when millions were dying every year brutally and ask them if it was the "worst times ever". They would definitely agree.

Point is, thank your lucky stars you're not sitting in a besieged, bombed-out city starving to death.; 12/25/14, 1:04 AM
Rusty said...: Could be worse.Could be the plague. Eh Alex?; 12/25/14, 6:38 AM