Oh yes, the 60s, when racism was still written into law, the Vietnam War was raging, and the world was on the brink of nuclear apocalypse but hey, at least we went to the moon.

The Syrian war (an echo of the Iraq war) is still raging, and the world is still every day on the brink of nuclear apocalypse (With a longer-term, slower, climate apocalypse looming in the distance.)

I don't care about the Moon, and besides it, the problems in 2019 aren't much different.

Just because the current time is worse in some aspects doesn't mean it's worse in all.

The Manhattan project was a military WWII project, and the Apollo project was a Cold War project with military and propaganda value. We haven't done any of those lately because we aren't involved in wars of that scale right now.

This is sadly likely to be the case but the sample size is too small to say for certain.

I'm kind of confused what taboos, abstractions, political correctness have to do with a sad era. Pessimism and escapism- do we have evidence they are increased today compared to the 60s?

Remember the 50's? Too long ago. Anarchist bombings, shootings all over American, the world. Today is so much safer and saner than back then.

The irony is that your statement about violence is true of both the 50s and the present day.

Are you implying the manhattan project was somehow a good thing?

I'm not.

'Political correctness' just means people can't be jerks to the less well off people and have to take responsibility for what they say about minorities, women, disabled people etc. Seems like the human race improving to me.

And people are pessimistic about life because of climate change that was helped to be created by the pollution of the past when we discarded crap everywhere and didn't care about the earth.

There are still very large project going on in the world. Libya's irrigation project (35th year and still going); various rail projects; International Space Station. I'm not so pessimistic.

Interstellar travel, colonies in space, traveling x10 faster and reversing ageing are comparable to the scale of the atomic bomb, the first space missions or the microprocessor. You drank the kool aid "everything is progressing so quickly".

Keeping up on medical news? Aging issues making progress weekly. Colonies in space? How many different billionaires are working on that now?

How did Lybia's irrigation project continued to move forward with the civil war and subsequent local conflicts?

Well, getting bombed by British jets didn't help.

There are multiple particle accelerators in operation today that are teaching us more about the universe than scientists in the 60s could imagine. Poverty is decreasing across the globe. Diseases are being wiped out. Infant mortality and child-birth deaths are trending down. We have multiple rovers on moons and planets across the solar system, and are preparing for a manned mission to mars. Different races & genders have opportunities today that they couldn't even dream of in the 60s. Freaking cars are starting to drive themselves.

I can't imagine the thought process of someone who looks at all this progress and comes away with "damn liberals are ruining the world today with their political correctness".

I don't even know who liberals are. I'm out of politics. Anyway, what you listed is all incremental improvement with the exception of computer vision (which is still in the very early days still). Interstellar travel, colonies in space, traveling x10 faster and reversing ageing are comparable to the scale of the atomic bomb, the first space missions or the microprocessor. You drank the kool aid "everything is progressing so quickly".