Something I like to remind myself of is that all past wars, even ones thousands of years ago, took place in as vibrant colors and fluid detail as we experience today, not in grainy black and white photos or paintings.

Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.

Probably more fluid details than today where someone can push a button and level a building 1000 miles away without seeing the faces of any of the people torn to shreds. Maybe there would be less appetite for war if people had to still physically hack up their enemies with a sword or axe.

There was an idea that the key to the nuclear launch codes should be surgically implanted adjacent to the heart of the president’s assistant. If the president should desire to launch the nukes, they would have to personally cut down a man and pull the key from the man’s entrails.

It was essentially not done because it would be too effective.

It’s John von Neumann’s idea, at least from the biography I read. Before too much praise is heaped upon him, he also strongly argued for a nuclear first strike on Soviet Union before they got their own nuclear weapons because it was best strategy from game theory POV.

I think there is a general distance to a lot of things in today's society. Very few of us have to farm or hunt for our own food, or clean an animal carcass. I don't have a strong view on the moral aspects of eating animals (I'm not a vegetarian or vegan), but I think it'll probably do some good if anyone that eats meat at some point slaughters, cleans and butchers one of the animals they eat.

I agree, a society shielded from blood either grows callous to it as long as the blood is somebody else's or becomes too traumatised to even defend itself even if the aggressor is perfectly fine killing them

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee

I think it was Call of Duty 2 (when the franchise was still WW2-based) when they would show, in my recollection, an anti-war message including this one every time your character died. I think this was absent from later incarnations of the franchise.

Cod 4, World at War, and MW2(?) also did this to my memory. At least one of them did for sure. Not always necessarily anti-war, but historical quotes related to war.

Thanks, I didn’t recall

And the quotes showed up longer, like 5 seconds, so you could read them in full. Later games would display the quote for 1-2 seconds, which often wouldn’t be enough time to process the full text

I was at Auschwitz in summer. It was beautiful weather, the birds were singing, flowers everywhere. Hard to connect this to the conditions in a concentration camp. It would have been much easier in winter.

Much much smaller scale but we did a 'Salem Witch Trails' tour and it was a grey dreary autumn day and I felt it complimented the story.

I was at Dachau a couple summers ago in similar weather. I actually found it worse and hit harder because it was such a pleasant day as I watched people stroll around the grounds, taking selfies, kids running around playing. It made me feel like I couldn't even breath.

I too was at Dachau on a day like that, over a decade ago. My partner recently asked me about it, and just thinking back to how I felt made my skin crawl. It's terrible to remember, and I hope I never forget.

It is so well preserved, because those who were liberated from it, were so horrified at what they witnesses, that they did not want anyone to forget. It was a herculean effort, many wanted to bury it,because of the pain, and many more wanted to bury it, like it never happened.

A personal salute to all those who fought to preserve it.

There is a great video on the Poles who worked to preserve it. A lot of it is ... Unspeakable.

It might have reflected the experience of the guards. One of the most astonishing facts i heard was that the guards used to get prisoners to play music for them and would even be moved to tears!

It reveals something deep about the human condition. Auchwitz was a perfectly lovely place for many of the employees as long as they disassociated themselves from all the suffering and evil around them.

I visited Dachau years and years ago. It was a nice summer day, but a pallor fell over when we went inside the camp. It felt like the sky darkened and the color drained from the entire environment.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in February of 1995. It was well below freezing and there was some type of ice ball precipitation, perhaps because it was too cold to snow. I was the only person there.

I walked all the way back from the famous entrance gate, along the train tracks, to the monument at the back. The place was huge and imagining people suffering there during that type of weather was especially heartbreaking. I was luckily able to convince the taxi driver to wait for me. I have some black and white photos I took of it somewhere on my shelves. That visit sticks with me more powerfully than almost anywhere else I've been.

I was fortunate enough to once have the daughter of a client I took care of in a nursing home ask me if I would escort her dad and her on a day trip as he needed help into the bathroom and such. We ended up going to a Ukrainian hall in Vancouver BC where he was going to meet some old friends.

The older ladies busy making handmade perogies was such a delicious treat.

But I also got to meet Stefan Petelycky. He wrote the book: Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine

He ended up there and was one of the lucky ones who made it out. When he pulled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo, the number he was given there, a chill crossed my entire body and an overwhelming sense of sadness hit me.

I of course had heard about the concentration camps but seeing a tattoo in person made the event much more real where I could connect to the tragedy in a way I never did.

When history becomes prehistory, we have to go through it again

A lot of war stories get embellished and no one is going to challenge it.

There's the story about the guy who says he was the hardest working man in Vietnam, and then when pressed about what he did, he states he was a trucker to the great surprise of anyone listening.

When asked why he thought that, he says "well I was the only one."

If you're talking about the ones who drove supply trucks during the war years, the hardest working men were women.

https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/947180/female-drivers...

The story wasn't actually about the trucker being hard working (or not), though I'm sure he was. He wasn't actually trying to make people believe he literally was the hardest working.

The joke is that everyone else he went to war with was claiming to be something else, so he must have delivered all the supplies himself.

The response is interesting to me, because having fought in a war, though I am not a US veteran -- I instantly got it. And the place I heard it from was more veteran dominated, and everyone instantly understood/appreciated the joke.

I didn’t get it until you explained it. It makes a lot of sense - people who have actually gone to war know of stolen valor and embellishments - you can sniff them immediately. People who have never been and don’t hang around military types much have much less of this kind of context

I suspect that for every grandpa who likes telling war stories, there are probably a hundred who get quiet and sullen when the war comes up and have to excuse themselves and go be alone for a while.

> Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.

As someone whose parents, grandparents, and entire family lived in Italy through WWII (and one grandfather who lost an eye in WWI), nobody liked talking about it.

If they did talk about it, it was usually brief and imbued with a feeling of "thank God it's over. what a tragedy that we were all used as pawns by the political class for nothing more than selfish ambitions."

Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

Same in Sweden, the majority popular opinion started shifting away from supporting Germany late in the war as they were obviously losing.

Citation please.

> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

And there's no doubt about it - it was a myth. Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944. Ivan and Uncle Sam were kicking down the door, extermination camps were working overtime, yet most people were still fully behind him.

The hardest thing for people to admit is that they've been duped.

> Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944.

Most of Germany had seen the defeat of 1918. Once a war is started the only way is forward.

And they liked it so much that 1918 nearly resulted in revolution.

Anyone picking up the paper could tell that the war wasn't going to be won by them in 1944. It was two years after Stalingrad, a year after Kursk and Italy's surrender, France was being liberated, Finland was collapsing, and Germany was fighting a three-front war.

Compared to all that, 1918 at the time of the armistice looked down-right optimistic.

And yet mention any of that to your husband/wife would likely get you and all your relatives killed.

> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

Another way this observation is manifested is how out of nowhere you have countries voting in extremist parties and politicians.

"Out of nowhere" just like how the Germans elected Hitler for no reason at all.

As a point of fact, Germans never elected Hitler. The National Socialists never achieved a majority, and their share of the vote had been decreasing over successive elections.

Hitler was appointed to the chancellorship by senior political leaders (the president and the former chancellor) who thought they could control him. Unfortunately Germany at the time embraced the "unitary executive" theory of government.

We all know how that worked out.

The German people certainly elected the coalition government, which the NSDAP was the leader of.

You’re completely correct about the conservatives and others thinking they could control Hitler

No single human is smart enough to manage unitary executive an optimal long term form of government

Fascism was quite fashionable at the time.

> but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

I can't tell you what my relatives were like leading up to the war (I certainly wasn't born at that point), but they were illiterate peasants from the south, far removed from the cities and politics.

My suspicion is that, if anything, they were like most southern Italians, who seem to have a profound distrust of the government and politicians.

If I'm honest, they didn't have any moral objections to the war--they just felt used.

People forget that the popularity of being anti-war is relatively new, like maybe 100-150 years old. World War 1 popped off so quickly specifically because moral objections to war from the standpoint of "violence is wrong" were just not even part of the discussion. Even during World War 2, most objections within the US to entering the war were based on it just not being our problem.

Up until the last century, violence was seen as just another necessary part of living, and morality only came into play when it involved you're own community.

Up to some point not that long ago, public opinion as we know it didn't exist, and for some time after that it didn't matter much. I'm mentioning this because the poster you are responding to is writing about Italy. Italy's entrance into WW I was deeply unpopular in the south of Italy, and not all that popular elsewhere, I gather.

Just some other fascinating things about WW1 and Italy. Mussolini was heavily was heavily in the Italian socialist party. His family was socialist. World War 1 breaks out, he leaves/get kicked out of the party for his support of WW1. And it wasn't just Mussolini, it caused a huge fracture in the socialist party. The main party line was neutral with a heavy anti-war stance. Which I would suggest leads Mussolini to what would become Mussolini and perhaps with a lot less opposition. I would say there is probably some evidence there giving credit to the claim that today it is probably much more easier to maintain an anti-war stance than in the past.

Some book on WW I, I think by Alistair Horne, claims in passing that the French bought Mussolini.

I was just adding color to the statement that they didn't believe their family's objections were necessarily moral objections.

And it is not the only case. The French people went to war in 1914 "la fleur au fusil"[0]. Jean Jaurès is assassinated for his pacifism and (his assassin would be found not guilty - despite being totally guilty - in 1919).

[0]: a more nuanced take that is illuminating can be read here: https://www.france24.com/fr/20140730-grande-guerre-poilus-vr...

I wouldn't necessarily call it comforting fantasy, people change their minds all the time. I think we're all to some extent able to justify some negative sides of any political movement as tensions rise.

I've felt this myself a few times now. Both when Trump was attempted assasinated and now with Charlie Kirk. I am sad that public discourse and our democracies are kind of unraveling these days and that this is just a sad reality of that fact. As far as Trump or Charlie Kirk go, I have no sympathy what so ever.

I'm not sure I really want to blame anyone for things becoming like this, it all seems like par for the course in the world we've created for ourselves. I just wish we were able to stop before this.

I don't think anyone remembers war fondly, but least of all those who lost.

We've always been on a knife edge it's just streamed straight into your eyes balls 24/7 now and social media means everyone has to have a black or white opinion about everything.

While that may be true to an extent, the 24/7 nature of it now is the equivalent of constantly red lining the engine. It used to be you'd go to meetings/gatherings of like minded people to get hopped up and your engines revved up like that, but they would for the most part cool back down after getting back home. Now, the engine never gets back to idle and stays red lined. At some point, the engine will break down, only instead of throwing a rod or ceasing up, something non-engine related will happen.

> It used to be you'd go to meetings/gatherings of like minded people to get hopped up and your engines revved up like that

I would go so far as to say going to meetings physically was also a counterbalance.

When you're around other people, even ones who share your beliefs, and say 'I think we should murder that guy!' then in most crowds someone is going to say 'Hey fellow, are you okay?'

It's when you exclusively socially exist in online spaces that the most extreme actions suddenly become encouraged.

Or as Josh Johnson recently quipped, "The internet is all gas no brakes."

> someone is going to say 'Hey fellow, are you okay?'

We might be thinking of different types of gatherings/meetings. Specifically, I was thinking of someone with a particular set of extremist ideals that get together for a monthly meeting with others with those same extremist ideals. Someone in that group would likely not say "are you okay" rather they'd say "hellzya brother!" or whatever they'd actually phrase it. These types of meetings are also known to have someone speak intentionally seeking to get a member to act as a lone wolf to actually carry out the comment you're hoping someone would tamper. Now, one doesn't need to go to meetings for that encouragement. They just open up whatever app/forum.

Anything I say on the internet, someone will always have a compelling but sometimes wrong argument as to why im wrong. If you listen to them for confirmation you'd never be able to do anything, and im not exaggerating. I could probably say the earth is round here on HN and some astrophysics PhD would tell me I failed to consider the 4th dimension or something and it's actually unknown if we can call it round.

Where are these people going that they just see encouragement without resistance?

Maybe not only encouragement, but it's certainly easier to quickly label any opposition as bots/trolls/idiots/woke/boomer/racist/commie/nazi/etc, ignore them, and move on online. Someone's single sentence to you wasn't a perfect pattern match for your acceptable criteria? No need to interact with them, just ignore them and move on. Better yet, get a quick swipe in on them to score some points with your in-group.

Being right all the time on the internet is such a curse. Those damned learned people with PhDs thinking they know things going up against such an obviously more intelligent person. They should have their degrees revoked!

It's not perfectly spherical, actually.

The shape of the earth depends on your speed

If you walk slow the earth looks like a plane

If you go faster the earth looks like a sphere

If you travel really fast the earth looks like a dot. A tiny blue one.

> When you're around other people, even ones who share your beliefs, and say 'I think we should murder that guy!' then in most crowds someone is going to say 'Hey fellow, are you okay?'

There are crowds where that guy is not there, is not heard, or doesn't speak up at all.

In those crowds, people reach out for their pitchforks and outright murder people.

If you take a frank look at history, you will notice those are all too frequent. Even in this century.

I was at a political rally a long time ago. One of the speakers said "let's hang all the people in <rich suburb>". As I remember it no one spoke out against him but neither did people cheer. Anyway I realized the rally was a bit too much for me and left. The speech was entirely inconsequential - no violence resulted nor was anyone arrested.

I'm telling this story because I think it's how things usually go, and I think you are quite mistaken.

There doesn’t even need to be anyone saying no. When you’re standing with a crowd shouting “murder! murder!” it’s much harder to say “I’m not one of the bad guys” than when you’re online and you can say “well OK, there are a few bad apples in our group, but I’m not one of them!”

From a personal point of view I agree, it's completely unhealthy, but from a global perspective it's always been fucked up all the time, open a wiki page for any year between 1900 and now and you will find loads of assassinations, terrorist attacks, wars, famine, genocides, coups d'états, &c.

Yup - you’d just never hear about all the ones that weren’t right next to you. At least in gory detail while they happened.

Here, I get to read all about the latest insanity in the last 24 hrs from…. 4 major countries in Crisis?

Tchau, from central Brazil (today).

Insanity...

There aren't many times when there's quite as much happening at the same time.

Over the last week or so we've had: serious riots in France, catastrophic riots in Nepal, a scandal in the UK featuring the ambassador to the US, hostile drone incursions into Poland, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the ICE raid on visiting South Korean workers, soldiers on the streets of DC and a threatened incursion into Chicago, a school shooting, revelations about the biggest paedophile scandal of the century and its links to the rich and famous, including the current president, and Israel attacking most of the countries around it.

In the background is the continuing war in Ukraine, China's increasing militarisation and threatened technological lead over the US, the situation in Gaza, the disassembly of the established US federal system of government, existential and economic dread over the impact of AI, and climate change.

If everyone's feeling a little edgy, there may be good reasons for that.

Interesting how different circles see different things though. Around me the biggest thing prior to Charlie Kirk was the murder of the Ukrainian refugee on a train in Charlotte.

Are you saying you didn't know/hear about any of those things or that your circle didn't consider them very important?

Your comment sounds like a new verse in Billy Joel's "we didn't start the fire" song. When Trump was elected, I knew, at least, that the news wouldn't be boring for the next four years.

Granted, I live under a rock, but I only knew of one of those events you mentioned (Kirk’s death). I intentionally dont read or watch news. It does absolutely wonders for my peace of mind.

I genuinely hope none of the bad stuff reaches you or the folks you care about under your rock.

I'll take my chances waiting for something to affect me directly rather than watching news channels 24/7 to get outraged every single second of my life about random shit happening in places I mostly can't even locate on a map or spell.

That's what people did for 99.99% of humanity btw

Luckily those aren't the only two options!

This is business as usual. Look at the 20th century section of this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe

And that's just the big events in Europe, if you looked at newspapers you'd see hundreds of horrible things happening every single day.

Even terrorists attacks are way lower than not so long ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Terroris...

My parents had the cold war, petrol crisis, September 11, dotcom, 2008, my grandpa fought in wars in the 60s, my grandma was born right before ww2 and talked to German soldiers when she was 6 and her village was occupied, &c.

Young westerners get scared because they're used to people dying far away, now that it's getting a bit closer they think it's the end of the world, the truth is that it's always been fucked up, we just got locally lucky for a bit

Get out of the news cycle, it really isn't that terrible out there

Men of Virginia! pause and ponder upon those instructive cyphers, and these incontestible facts. Ye will then judge for yourselves on the point of an American navy. Ye will judge without regard to the prattle of a president, the prattle of that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness; without regard to that hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."

-- James Callender, The Prospect Before Us, 1800

  You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.

Interesting how this quote can be interpreted in fully opposite ways depending on what "side" you were on during covid

I think COVID proved we're not smarter now in multiple ways and from either side. Human nature is a weird thing that we clearly are still grasping to understand

"Either side"? The virus or humanity?

We had the technology to push out a vaccine in less than a year. Modern medicine is of course smarter than it was a century ago.

What went poorly is our society's collective response. From the medical and governmental establishment, there was much hemming and hawing over what measures to take for way too long (masking, distancing, closing of public spaces, etc). Taking _any_ countermeasures against the spread of the virus also somehow became a culture war issue. I'm assuming GP meant "left or right" by "either side" so make of that what you will.

Yeah but, at least in my bubble in Europe, being for or against covid measures had little to do with left or right. It was about listening to mainstream media or having alternative source of information

I followed the mainstream media exclusively and still realised immediately that nobody actually had a clue what they were doing. My trust in MSM died then. Most alternative sources are even less reliable but i believe spreading a wider net gives me a better judgement. Whatever you do, don't exclusively outsource your opinions and judgement to the MSM. Too often they take up the same wrong narratives. This is easier said then done. Read the opinions and news even from people you despise and be honest with yourself.

Try to participate in any government...went to a town hall in a US city and both the company I worked for and unions were having people hold spots in line for FIFO comments body swapping for 'natural' opinion people. Media didn't report on it...ruined any trust I had in them.

Yeah - no

All (virtually all, it's not hyperbole) of the "misinformation" during covid turned out not to be that at all

There was no science behind social distancing, or masks, or the (so called, it's not an actual one) vaccine

Edit: I would like to remind people that downvotes do not, and never will, make me wrong

But being wrong can cause downvotes.

Popularity doesn't determine fact. If you cared about science instead of The Science you'd know that.

> All (virtually all, it's not hyperbole) of the "misinformation" during covid turned out not to be that at all

> There was no science behind social distancing, or masks, or the (so called, it's not an actual one) vaccine

These assertions are provably wrong. Regarding "social distancing" specifically:

  There was adequate empirical evidence for the effect of 
  social distancing at the individual level, and for partial 
  or full lockdown at the community level. However, at the 
  level of social settings, the evidence was moderate for 
  school closure, and was limited for workplace/business 
  closures as single targeted interventions.[0]

As to the science behind "masks" and "vaccines", the former can be trivially shown to limit the distance of oral particulate expulsion and the latter has enough published medical research to make verifying vaccine efficacy a matter of accepting facts.

> Edit: I would like to remind people that downvotes do not, and never will, make me wrong

It is not the downvotes which make you wrong.

0 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9002256/

I don't think "push out a vaccine in less than a year" is such a good flex especially when they also demonized and rigged the studies of the alternative drugs that must not be named

Fauci himself was known to say that vaccine development takes at least 5-10 years or something like that (and never mind the fact we had Event 201, that the virus contains code BY MODERNA) or else all hell breaks loose (he was also known to say masks aren't effective)

I wish it was as simple as this :(

This comment too can be interpreted either way. Well done, I guess.

> depending on what "side" you were on during covid

It's bizarre that there should be "sides" for how to deal with a public health issue. I can understand differing approaches, but it's the extreme polarisation that flabbergasts me.

I don’t think we should have shut down the country like we did and still believe that COVID is real and affects those who are at risk. But the shutting down did more damage than the virus itself

Hmm, the number found online is that Covid killed 1.2 million in the US, so guessing the shutdown and vaccines probably saved millions. But your take is different. Guessing you disagree with the the 1.2m deaths figure? (not trying to be pushy, just curious on your take)

The 1.2m number is what’s reported, but whether shutdowns and mandates prevented multiples of that is something we can’t actually prove. What we do know is that shutting the country down caused deep economic, educational, and mental-health damage that will take decades to unwind.

We had no idea what we were dealing with. It was unprecedented. People were doing the best they could. All the anger didn't help.

I’m not sure it’s right to say we didn’t know what to do. Beaches and playgrounds were closed even though the risk of outdoor spread on surfaces was minimal. Those kinds of choices made the shutdown damage worse without clear public health benefit. We had the science to tell us that viruses don’t survive on beach surfaces for example

It was frustrating to have some of the outdoor ban stuff at a point when it was pretty clear that things were safe in highly ventilated environments. But in my opinion, that was relatively harmless compared to the backlash against common sense precautions, like properly fit N95 masks when sharing enclosed space.

There's a lot of criticism of places that kept schools closed for longer than was necessary, in retrospect. But we really didn't know whether it would always be the case that the risks to children were low. The virus could have mutated in a way that brought more risk. Or there could have been chronic effects that could only be seen after the passage of time. Given the infectiousness of the virus, it could have been so much worse.

I get the vaccine hesitancy. But I think a lot of people were not willing to accept that vaccination is not just about their own safety, but a collective safety issue.

> We had no idea what we were dealing with. It was unprecedented. People were doing the best they could.

So public policy should have reflected that, instead of going into counterproductive authoritarian clampdown mode. In my country the authorities literally switched overnight from threatening to jail parents who took their kids out of school to announcing mandatory school closures.

You can vaguely understand it by looking at hospitals overwhelmed by mass casualty events and then imagine it happening over the course of a year.

Would you, personally, be willing to die to save the economy? Or is your expectation that others would die to save the economy for you? The opposite end of completely unrestrained COVID spread could've been the Spanish Flu, which decimated and destroyed entire areas.

It’s not about letting people die. The issue is that broad shutdowns caused massive long-term harm, and targeted protection would have been a better balance.

I don't disagree with you, but the Spanish Flu killed 50 million. That's twice as much as died in WWI. Seems like it was, overall, a reasonable trade off, to save possibly tens of millions, the world went into a protective state.

And the next time this happens (which it probably will given the statistics), the US will probably handle it much better and the lock down will be less severe. I'm Korean American, and something like 10 years before covid, Korea had gone through an earlier pandemic (swine flu?), so when covid hit, it wasn't that big a deal. They already all knew what to do and the lock down wasn't as severe.

Yeah, our lockdown was overkill in many instances, but it was all so new to us. There's a good chance it'll be a lot better managed the next time.

Some would argue that the deaths by covid are the same as every year deaths by other pulmonary infectious diseases. I've read a ton of books and analysis done by statisticians. So I doubt we should have went crazy like we did.

Interesting. Just looked into it and it seems like there are some researchers who estimate the lockdowns saved a lot of lives, but the economic toll and subsequent deaths from this toll may not have been worth it (as you mentioned). But they also said that now, "we have more tools to battle the virus. Vaccines and therapeutics are available, as are other mitigation measures." Implying we wouldn't have to do lockdowns in future pandemics.

https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-...

So yeah, I do see your point in the lockdowns were probably unnecessary, but as others have mentioned, pandemics were new to the US at the time, and we didn't have the knowledge and procedures on how to best deal with it. Yeah, we did probably go overboard, but what happened is understandable given how deadly Covid was.

We know now that social distancing and masks (for those that are willing) would probably have been enough, as other countries used to pandemics already know, like South Korea.

I don’t believe that at all. COVID was real and serious, especially for vulnerable people. My point is that shutting down the entire country caused damage in areas like education, mental health, and livelihoods that also cost lives and well-being. Protecting those at risk could have been done without blanket shutdowns that hurt everyone.

There are countries that did not shut down (Sweden comes to mind). Do you have some quantitative comparison of the reduced damage done there?

Overall, Sweden didn't fare worse than other European countries with harder measures. But these things are really difficult to compare due to geographic and cultural issues. Sweden is quite rural. Swedes value personal distance, and from my limited experience they easily more readily conform to rules and social norms, so I would assume there was less close contact, and better adherence to the few rules given out.

The US btw. also is largely rural/sub-urban, which should significantly reduce the risk of infection. I think almost all of my colds and flues I got on the metro or the overcrowded super-market.

Yes, there was one study showing that Sweden fared better than the US. However the US as a whole, some of the States, are the sizes of countries. So you get a patchwork comparison. We would have to find a state with similar demographics, culture, economy, etc to compare.

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/sweden-during-pandemic-pariah-or-p...

You too will be old and weak one day.

My in laws are old and weak. They just played it safe. But didn’t stay isolated from their grandkids unless they were sick

My mother in law has two forms of cancer. FIL before he died post COVID had all sorts of complications. He didn’t stop living his life.

Anecdotal, Dunning Kruger. Just look at the fucking statistics. Old and weak people died, because we didn't lock down enough, for the sake of the fucking economy.

Unbelievable.

Have a blessed day

If you don't want there to be sides during a pandemic, you have to engineer the pathogen such that it causes every infected person to melt in a puddle of grease with near 100% probability in about a week, with near 100% probability of transmission via any casual contact with infected persons at any stage of their infection. You just watch everyone scramble to the same side!

And look. The government doesn’t have to do anything!

> If you don't want there to be sides during a pandemic, you have to engineer the pathogen such that it [...]

Interesting phrase. "Engineer the pathogen".

> If you don't want there to be sides during a pandemic, (...)

Why do you believe a pandemic has sides?

I believe it was recently observed.

It was mainly observed in parts of the USA

1. Yes, parts of the USA inhabited by people.

2. Divided attitudes with regard to the locus of issues around Covid-19, and public policies, are far from exclusive to the USA.

> It's bizarre that there should be "sides" for how to deal with a public health issue.

It's a political issue no matter how you look at it, and it was a very political issue at that, considering what the state (throughout the Western world and elsewhere too) proposed doing.

To paint it as merely a "public health issue" is doing people who don't agree a tremendous disservice, and it is very much part of the othering that has led us here. Please stop it.

Calling something a public health issue doesn’t take anything away from people who don’t agree (with what, exactly?)

> with what, exactly?

The measures.

Clearly, illnesses and diseases are public health issues as are systems to manage food safety. People who don't agree with trying to find the best way to manage public health are obviously sociopathic, though that doesn't mean that everyone has to agree on particular approaches e.g. masks may or may not be effective (though they seem to have now been shown effective in masking ICE agents which is ironic).

Certain methods of dealing with public health issues have historically been shown to be incredibly effective (e.g. vaccination, milk pasteurisation etc), so it's disconcerning when there's a political movement that pushes an agenda that is clearly based on fear and not rational evaluation of the issues. It seems to me that there's a push to make the poorest sections of society become less healthy and more vulnerable.

> People who don't agree with trying to find the best way to manage public health are obviously sociopathic

That's rich. People who want raw milk are sociopaths? Etc? Once again we have name-calling as a way to shut down debate. Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you, and I bet you have done just that. These false equivalences and exaggerations are in fact incitements to violence. You and all who do this should be ashamed of yourselves.

I didn't intend it as name-calling, but as a more literal statement. Not caring about other people's health is a trait often exhibited in sociopathy.

I can understand people wanting raw milk and that's fair enough as it goes, but selling it or providing it to others is risking their health to some degree - this is shown by the relatively high level of people falling seriously ill from drinking raw milk - this is due to the high level of bacteria that is often found in it. If someone does care about the health of others, but believes that raw milk is safe to consume, then it's more a case of ignorance than sociopathy.

> Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you

You're out of order with that comment.

It was simple. People without ethical limits seen their opening to weaponize fear and discomfort ... and succeeded.

Your sentence can also be applied to both ‘sides’

I don't think that applies if one of the sides is using rational arguments and statistics. However, during the initial COVID outbreak, there was a lack of knowledge and statistics about it, so there was some element of guesswork involved (e.g. face masks may be effective as they help with some other infectious diseases, so let's try wearing them to see if that helps).

There is a difference between 'lets try something out' and we will use the force of law to compel you to do something. A lot of people seem worried about over use of law enforcement but really its not a general problem with law enforcement but rather a problem with what laws are being enforced. They are happy to have law enforcement cracking down on people flouting a mask mandate but less happy when law enforcement is going after shop lifters.

Yes, there's often a lot of discussion about law enforcement priorities.

In general, law enforcement is used to prevent harmful behaviour that disrupts society, so preventing theft is typically high up on the list. I think the people decrying shop lifters being targetted are highlighting the hypocrisy of societies that celebrate people who can steal huge amounts of money (e.g. not paying for work/services provided due to them being a large organisation) and yet demonise people who are struggling to survive and end up stealing food.

I was somewhat on the fence about mask mandates (I'm in the UK by the way) as I didn't think the evidence for masks being effective was particularly strong, but I had no issue with wearing a mask in public as it seemed like a sensible precaution that wouldn't cause me any harm. Then, we had social distancing laws introduced which were fairly draconian, but most people tried to observe them. The real kicker was when Boris Johnson and his cronies were caught not following the laws that he himself had introduced.

  I don't think that applies if one of the sides is using rational arguments and statistics

In most debates I follow, each sides have their own statistics to back their reality. And from a purely rational and scientific point of views, statistics do not prove anything when they mean something, they are always manipulated and most qualities of our existence cannot be measured / put into quantities anyway. Stats are not a tool to prove you're right at all.

> Stats are not a tool to prove you're right at all

I agree - stats are a tool to try to figure out non-obvious links and trends to figure out what is actually happening. They can certainly be distorted (see mainstream media), but we shouldn't allow bad actors to prevent us making use of probably the best way to investigate population level effects.

No, I do not think so. I am genuinely curious whether you actually mean it ... or whether you are playing semantic game.

Absolutely not playing a semantic game. I chose my side of this crisis -- but steelmanning your own argument and understanding the other side is good to do

   It was simple. People without ethical limits seen their opening to weaponize fear and discomfort ... and succeeded.

People without ethical limits = people not wearing masks and not practicing social distancing

weaponize fear and discomfort = get close to others (masked) in public and breathe in front of them

People who are scared award power to leaders, and leaders use that power to advance their social agenda rather than merely try and solve the problem that scared people. It was ever thus.

Public health is not a technocratic field where there's always clearly one right answer. It presents itself as deciding on things that may hurt individuals but help the collective, and so it naturally attracts collectivists. In other words it's a political field, not a medical one. That then takes them into the realm of sides.

There’s nothing wrong with disagreement and discourse. As long as it’s founded in fact not emotion.

What’s sad today is how much of “sides” today is based on emotion not fact.

Very few facts in life are absolute.

We know more now, but we're not smarter now.

> You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.

Not sure what the comparison with COVID is supposed to be. Spanish flu was not created in a lab. There was no vaccine for the Spanish flu. The only real similarity is social distancing, quarantines, and masks -- we did that back then too.

It has not been conclusively established that COVID came from a lab: https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...

Funny, back then Americans didn't wear masks for much the same reasons they wouldn't during the last pandemic, and they died in their thousands for much the same reasons.

Which reasons are you referring to? I've never heard this comparison between masking during two pandemics 100+ years apart.

It's quite well documented. Try this site:

https://liberalarts.vt.edu/news/articles/2020/08/virginia-te...

> Spanish flu was not created in a lab.

This seems vague. Can you elaborate on the claim you’re making?

> Spanish flu was not created in a lab.

Neither was covid-19: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

Your article is a little out of date. The general consensus of spy agencies is that it was definitely leaked from the lab. Created in a lab? Maybe.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o.amp

The article you linked says that BND thought the lab leak was likely in 2020. You're the one with out of date information.

> The review offered on Saturday is based on "low confidence" which means the intelligence supporting it is deficient, inconclusive or contradictory. There is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic.

The article literally says there is no consensus.

I was merely addressing your accusation of "out-of date information", I'm not the original commenter.

1. That's the CIA

2. The lab leak hypothesis is geopolitically convenient for the US

3. They explicitly state "low confidence" in their affirmation of this hypothesis

1. Nobody suggested we exclude inconvenient intelligence organisations.

2. Irrelevent because:

3. Low confidence, but probable merely implies plausibility, at least a somewhat higher likelihood than a wild previously unencountered zoonotic.

Based on all publicly available information it does seem more likely, the CIA will be better informed than the public, if they (and others) concur then I don't see why we need to dismiss it.

Yes, and their report was buried. It didn't say that they changed their minds.

From further in the article: "But the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies - and the BND is the latest to entertain the theory. In January, the US CIA said the coronavirus was "more likely" to have leaked from a lab than to have come from animals."

Clearly world leaders were afraid of anti-Chinese sentiment, didn't want to be seen "siding" with Trump, or just didn't want to piss China off.

> History books can tell you facts that happened, but they can never truly tell you how it feels.

Great quote. I feel the same way about 9/11 - the feeling of confusion, like "wtf is going on?!" IMHO, only those who lived it can really relate.

Of all the days I've been alive, if I could pin point one that I remember vividly with every bit of detail and emotion, that'd be 9/11... I was 14, and all of the sudden, even that younger version of myself, understood every single thing was about to change...

I can recall that day almost minute by minute starting with learning of the first plane hitting the WTC.

I don't live in the U.S but I watched 9/11 live from the television, and I can still feel it and remember it. It was so big deal.

It's time to revisit 9/11 and think about what it means in the modern context

We already did, on October 7th, 2023. Israel did not learn from our example, and they currently find themselves in a quagmire where they're spending billions to kill thousands of the people they're supposed to be saving from an authoritarian, terrorist-harboring regime, with almost no real benefit to their national security, and where they have most of the rest of the world bearing down on them diplomatically for their conduct and alleged war crimes. (This is the most charitable characterization I can muster.)

The response to 9/11 was one of the most foolhardy possible, and it's astounding that any other nature would attempt the same with it still in living memory.

> there is still broad support there for the war, because most israelis feel it's a matter of survival.

A phrase like "the war" glosses over a lot. If the IDF were not deliberately shooting children¹, would the Israeli public be clamouring, "shoot more children"? If food shipments were not being blockaded², would the public be demanding that Gazans be starved?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-... [2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-malnutrition-children-blo...

I'm sure some form of military action was necessary in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. Genocide³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ was not.

[3]: https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/isra... [4]: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/un-special-committee-pre... [5]: https://amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amnesty-Intern... [6]: https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide [7]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/middleeast/israeli-human-righ...

I didn't see anywhere in the article anything about israelis calling for more dead children. Even if that happened it's the actions of a fringe group, not idf policy. Food shipments are being restricted because it's not generally accepted that you have to feed your enemies while you're at war with them. In any case the GHF was set up to deal precisely with this problem and is doing a great job.

On the charges of genocide... Again what you say should be in harmony with reality. In truth all those sources have an anti israel bias. One can't help but think they started with a conclusion and found the evidence to fit in with it, which is the wrong way round. In any event other bodies like the UK government don't agree. Genocide requires intent and there is simply no intent for genocide from the Israeli government. One can also argue that if indeed genocide was the goal the war would have been much faster. anyway i hope that gives you a better perspective of Israels point of view and interpretation of events. Their stated goals in gaza are destroying hamas and ensuring gaza is no longer a security threat. Hamas is very large and quite well embedded in the civilian population and has a lot of infrastructure which means that even waging a war will lead to a lot of civilian casualties. Something that hamas exploits and people who claim genocide ignore.

>Food shipments are being restricted because it's not generally accepted that you have to feed your enemies while you're at war with them.

Funny way to put it. You do not feed the enemy, rest of the world feeds the enemy. You make all effort to prevent the enemy being fed, to starve the enemy to death. Starving the enemy is generally accepted as a war crime, but Israel disagrees. Oh yeah, and enemy in this case includes infants.

Actually it's more nuanced. See this https://lieber.westpoint.edu/war-crime-starvation-irony-gras....

From what i understand depriving active combatants from food is acceptable. In order to be a war crime there has to be intent to prevent civilians from accessing food and other things vital for their ongoing survival. Imo israel is very far from meeting both requirements. They claim there's enough food entering gaza, but hamas is stealing it. The GHF if anything establishes that the intent is missing. It is unclear to me how much actual starvation is taking place there. Certainly continued warfare creates conditions that are not optimal for human existence, but nobody challenges the legality of waging a war itself. This in no way reduces the suffering of civilians in gaza, but it does shift the moral and legal responsibility for it away from Israel so long as they are keeping international laws in good faith onto hamas. Which makes their speedy and complete destruction even more imperative.

You have to realise that genocide is not a realistic operational aim for the idf or the political establishment in any event because the cost is too high.

The enemy does not include children, but hamas cannot use them as a shield to protect or even deflect attention from their own fighters. Again it's awful but not criminal.

> there has to be intent to prevent civilians from accessing food

Intent, in cases of genocide, is basically impossible to establish except in retrospect. We can only establish what is happening right now:

> “The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza,” UN-backed food security experts said on Tuesday, in a call to action amid unrelenting conflict, mass displacement and the near-total collapse of essential services in the war-battered enclave.

> The alert follows a May 2025 IPC analysis that projected catastrophic levels of food insecurity for the entire population by September. According to the platform’s experts, at least half a million people are expected to be in IPC Phase 5 – catastrophe – which is marked by starvation, destitution and death.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165517

> It is unclear to me how much actual starvation is taking place there.

It sounds pretty clear to the UN.

Israel is in full control of this situation. If things were playing out differently to how they wanted, they could permit more aid to go through.

> They claim there's enough food entering gaza, but hamas is stealing it

The idea that there's plenty of food but Hamas has squirrelled it away so that everyone starves is ludicrous.

> so long as they are keeping international laws in good faith

The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel multiple times to permit aid into Gaza.

> You have to realise that genocide is not a realistic operational aim for the idf or the political establishment

Sure it is. They just have to keep doing what they're doing right now. It's worked so far.

---

I cited a laundry list of expert organizations specializing in identifying crimes against humanity. You've cited an op-ed. The balance of evidence and expertise overwhelmingly indicates genocide, and it's not even close.

The un has such a long and consistent anti israel bias i find it hard to trust anything they say. UNWRA basically is the de facto propoganda and civil administrators for hamas. Again the ipc changed their definition on famine in order to include gaza.

Israel is most definitely not in full control of gaza. They are trying to assert some with the ghf despite UN/Hamas strenuous opposition.

The idea that hamas isn't stealing all the aid is ludicrous.

And finally Israel does permit huge amounts of aid into gaza. I wonder what UNWRA are doing with it.

The only thing you have established is that gaza is indeed in the midst of a war and that resources are scarce for people there and lots of people are dying which is exactly what you would expect in a war.

Just because you want something to be true doesn't make it so. Israel isn't to blame for what has happened in gaza. Unless you claim having an interest in not being massacred, kidnapped and raped is unreasonable.

>Israel isn't to blame for what has happened in gaza.

That's an astonishing thing to say.

> The idea that hamas isn't stealing all the aid is ludicrous.

Bro what the fuck are they going to do with enough stolen food to feed an entire nation? It's not as if they can sell it. World's biggest mukbang tiktok stream?

You're either wilfully blind or unspeakably obtuse. Open your eyes or shut your mouth.

> The enemy does not include children, but hamas cannot use them as a shield to protect or even deflect attention from their own fighters. Again it's awful but not criminal.

When the Allies bombed Dresden, that was a war crime. When Israel kills children because it's operationally easier than figuring out how to just kill combatants, that is also a war crime.

Like, they appear to be able to do targeted attacks on Hamas people basically everywhere except Gaza, which seems pretty weird.

>because most israelis feel it's a matter of survival.

It objectively isn't and that's what's so tragic. Israel doesn't need to be understood, it needs to work harder to understand. And, per 9/11, it specifically needed to understand that taking Hamas' bait was a straight shot to dashing international goodwill and benefit-of-the-doubt.

There's some far-off timeline where Israel negotiated in good faith for the return of all of the hostages without dropping a single bomb. The anti-war movement that finds one of its most fervent centers in Israel itself is driven by the dawning horror that many of those hostages are never coming home precisely because Israel (again) chose blind fury over reason. And that's not a matter of perspective, it's a simple fact.

Bush threatened the Taliban, and they responded. How many is donald threatening?

The modern context is we have gone from a benevolent nation to a blidgerent nation. Not really progress. But the context is decisive.

Eh?

I think the point being made is that you can create your own enemies. In this case, meaning enemies of the United States or politics of the United States. Many of the radicals of the world become that way due to harm that became them or their family.

If your family lived in a village in middle east and the military of another country came and seemingly killed your parents, you would think that the person would grow to have certain opinions on the things and certain enemies.

A lot of the policies being enacted have the potential to create a lot of enemies. Just to name a few, there have been thousands of people fired from federal government. Those people and their families have had their lives changed. You have people from other countries who have lived here their entire lives who are now being separated and sent to other countries. You have people playing politics with Ukraine where many people are dying due to something that the rest of the world has the power to solve. Or people in Palestine being murdered while some talk of building a wealthy paradise on the land where they were raised.

I'm not taking a side on these things. But you have to agree that these tactics have the habit of making very determined and malicious enemies. Many political policies, and the people who have strong opinions on them, have to realize that their opinions and the policies they support, do impact the lives of real people. Potentially causing devastating repercussions, death and suffering. If said people are determined to enact revenge, it is no surprise that feel justified in doing so.

I'm not justifying their thoughts or actions. But you can understand that people who have felt these impacts aren't acting particularly rationally or are stable.

As I've grown older and gone back through history I've realized why so many decisions and actions seem kind of irrational to outside observers. This is why I think study of ancient history is so important, because we have so few connections, that the analysis does not seem personal.

Nevertheless, I realize that it's usually a zeitgeist more than any particular thing that really flows through history.

I agree. It's hard to capture 'the vibes' in a history book. For example, I firmly believe that in 70 years, almost no one will be able to explain 'wokeness' or the anti-wokeness backlash.

It’s not a historically unique phenomenon. The Weimar Republic ended 87 years ago. Progress isn’t monotonic. There are often periods of regression.

I really don't like how interesting these times are.

I don't like that I'm starting to understand Magical Realism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_realism

For a wild alignment of timing - https://www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some-etsy-witches-to-curse-c... - published September 8.

Yeah, Etsy is funny. On the basis of what I bought I got an ad for a spell to transform into a fox but if they had really looked at what I bought they would have realized I already had the material list.

The thread is part of that alignment. I mean, funny you got a left field chance to bring up the article in a tech forum. It is wild. The whole thing is strangely magical, too, considering the violent irony at hand. Twisted words, a curse, reap what you sow - as above, so below.

“Counting or not counting gang violence?”, Kirk replied. A rhetorical question, of course. He smirked and leaned forward, but to his surprise, he didn't find the hypnotic gaze of his audience, but a gray void. Instead of any thing at all, really.

AH, YES. THE QUESTION OF MASS SHOOTINGS IN AMERICA. A TOPIC OF MUCH DEBATE, I UNDERSTAND.

"Exactly. It’s an important distinction! So-", Kirk said.

I DARE SAY, I AM QUITE FAMILIAR WITH SOME NUANCES MYSELF. IT'S NOT IMPORTANT ANYMORE. NOT TO YOU, ANYWAY. THE UNIVERSE SEEMS KEEN ON IRONY. DESTINY AND SUCH. NOT REALLY MY DOMAIN.

"What- No! What irony?"

YOU WERE, AS THEY SAY, HOIST BY YOUR OWN PETARD. OR, IN THIS CASE, BY SOMEONE ELSE’S. BUT THE PRINCIPLE REMAINS.

"I was just talking! I am not finished yet.", Kirk objected infuriated. Well, the anger wasn't actually amounting to much, as one needs a body for these things.

TAKE IT FROM ME, YOU ARE IN FACT FINISHED. DO NOT WORRY. I AM SURE THEY WILL FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO ARGUE ABOUT STATISTICS. IF YOU PLEASE…

"But- This isn't fair!"

LIFE IS RARELY FAIR. DEATH, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS ALWAYS PUNCTUAL. NOW, IF YOU WOULD BE SO KIND AS TO FOLLOW ME. THERE IS PAPERWORK.

On Sunday, I was talking a Mexican friend about how politicians get killed in our countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico). Just in June, presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe was shot and killed in Bogota. In the head, in front of a crowd.

I remember being grateful about how that doesn't really happen in the US (Trump being the most recent, but he survived). I guess I was wrong... and, in that case, Garcia Marquez might agree with you.

The US had one killed within the last two months, with an attempt on another, and the attacker had a list of other targets.

You could be forgiven for not knowing, since the collective coverage and attention to it since has probably been less, total, than what this received in the last couple hours.

Also there was a string of events of a guy shooting at offices of a certain political party in Arizona not that long ago and also a candidate who lost who also tried to hire a hitman to kill the person they lost to.

A few years ago, a would-be assassin went to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's house and — when he couldn't find her — beat her husband with a hammer. Here's what Charlie Kirk had to say about that [1]:

> By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-...

It would be therefore fitting if someone started a conspiracy theory that Charlie Kirk was shot by his gay lover.

I mean a lot of people are saying that. Big if true etc.

> I remember being grateful about how that doesn't really happen in the US (Trump being the most recent, but he survived).

You are clearly not paying attention.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgv4y99n7rt

This is now the 5th comment saying the same thing, so I'll respond. I'm aware of these and they were terrible. In a just world, they would get as much if not more media attention.

The difference is the public nature of the execution. That is what makes it more similar to, say, Colombia or Venezuela _to me._ Within the context of 'magical realism', it is the perspective and mass dissemination of the violence that heightens that feeling.

Going back to the original topic, there is a reason that most of 100 Years of Solitude's pivotal moments happen around the staging of public executions (and not so much the off-screen violence, of which there is some but it's not focal).

The US is in the process of turning into a stereotypical Latin American country, caudillo and everything else. Driven by the same economic and social forces, and in some cases the same people.

>I remember being grateful about how that doesn't really happen in the US (Trump being the most recent, but he survived).

Excuse me? Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman were less than 3 months ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...

haha, yes, the president dismissing anyone in the federal government who disagrees with him, and trying to turn the national guard into his own personal police department, and inciting a riot/revolt 4 years ago but the US populace still elects him again, and allowing Elon Musk access to all the federal government which he slashes to bits in less than a couple of months (including science research) and having that same person soon after turn on president and the multiple assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful... and it's only been 8 months since he took office. Crazy times we live in

What times were not interesting?

He's semi-quoting the proverb "May you live in interesting times".

1992-94

Los Angelinos would disagree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

Just off the top of my head

Ruby Ridge was 1992, Waco was 1993.

1993 was the bombing of the world trade center.

In the US, from about 1975 to 2015 were less "interesting" (in the sense of "may you live in interesting times") than current times.

At least one year in that range where something happened.

IDK, man, the '70s sounded pretty wild: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

Which is why I wrote "1975" and not "1970" or "1972".

Like if nothing happened a day exactly 24 years ago...

1975-1988 we lived in the Cold War and the potential of nuclear strikes. The African, gay and trans communities (in particular but not exclusively) dealt with the AIDS epidemic. Iran moved to theocracy. In the 90s, we had the Iraq war that was not bad for the US but massively destabilized the region. In the 2000s we had 9/11 and let's not understate the fear from the Muslim community here. Africa has lived through famine and the pains of decolonization after their wealth was stripped and stolen over centuries.

This is worse, but we have always lived in "interesting times" depending on where you were in the globe.

I was restricting my imaginings to internal unrest because that is what caused most of the death and suffering historically in China.

I'd say that nothing since the collapse of the USSR has been as existentially threatening as the Cold War.

Yes, I for one am thoroughly tired of living in interesting times.

So are all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

> what to do with the time that is given us.

Doomscrolling, mostly.

Have you tried a mix of hyperfixation and eBay browsing?

I have ADHD, so I am a way's ahead of you there

[flagged]

Targeted vs untargeted violence. The former almost always comes with a broader message to society at large.

A school shooter isn’t trying to say “shut down all schools”.

But a terrorist flying a plane into one of the most important symbols of your most important city is certainly trying to send your society a message.

Same with this killing

Think about how you would feel if some guys beat you and your friends up in a bar fight, vs someone individually stalking you and beating you up outside your own house. You got beaten up in both cases, but the bar fight beating will unlikely make you feel as vulnerable and scared to leave the house as being stalked and targeted individually

The killing of Palestinians is targeted.

If it is, they are pretty incompetent.

Being totally amoral and incompetent are two different things.

Which is why it feels so much more despicable and awful than all the other conflicts that are currently ongoing in the world.

There was a school shooting in Colorado within about an hour of when Kirk got shot

I'm not too caught up with politics, but a (presumably) political shooting has the issue of being disruptive to the government and therefore the nation as a whole, since the USA is built on democratic ideals. And since it's a(/the) global superpower, its issues result in serious international problems as well.

He was a Youtuber, not a politician though.

Martin Luther King Jr. was just a preacher, I don't understand the the big deal about him getting shot. /s

Charlie Kirk is more analogous to Jerry Springer than Martin Luther King Jr.

It's a big deal because he's very important to part of the 30% that supports DJT.

This is the sort of violence that begets more violence.

What about all of the other violence I listed? It's orders of magnitude more severe. We don't know the motive of the shooting, but it could very well be someone who's related to the victims of the violence Kirk endorsed.

The main reason is that the side he's on his pretty unhinged and they think it's more important than all the other violence listed.

It's like when a conservative person is canceled they throw an absolute fit, then turn around and cancel someone on the left, without making any connection.

The US is already well into this cycle, e.g., the killing of Melissa Hortman.

Events like this have often been used as trigger to implement measures that were already planned. The nazis did that a lot (Reichstagsbrand, Kristallnacht), You could argue that Israel used the October 7 attacks to accelerate efforts to get rid of the Palestinians. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld used 9/11 to invade Iraq which they had wanted to do long before.

I am definitely worried what Trump and republicans will do as a response.

I agree to your logic, but scanning social media gives a totally different view: People feel like they need to take action now. The murder of the ukranian girl set a social fire, and the killing of charlie kirk put gasoline over it. You can feel the rage. I've never seen so many upvotes and likes for quite radical opinions like in the last hours on TikTok and X.

Looks like a storm is coming.

Just like when Trump got shot, right?

HN has thousands of comments debating the justification for killing tens of thousands of non-combatants in Palestine.

More posts debating the justification for killing 11 people in a boat in the Caribbean who did not pose an imminent threat.

HN rules do not prevent any of these discussions.

But here we have a individual who advocated those killings.

Here we have an individual who publicly justified school massacres by saying those senseless deaths are a worthwhile price to pay for gun rights in the US.

On HN it's perfectly fine to justify all this violence, to argue that the violence is regrettable but necessary, but any equivalent discussion about this one individual is somehow beyond the pale.

> Here we have an individual who publicly justified school massacres by saying those senseless deaths are a worthwhile price to pay for gun rights in the US.

I'm an outside observer, but isn't that the point of the right to bear arms in your constitution? I don't think the people who wrote it were naive enough to not understand guns could be used for evil purposes, so inherently they supported the price of the deaths of innocents as a trade off for the benefits of guns, right?

That constitution was written 250 years ago, after a war. Those people lived in different times, wilder times. How does their opinion matters today?

"Wilder times" is an interesting description of the early days of the country. When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere, etc. etc.), I feel like that description applies pretty well to our times as well.

That being the case, I would say their opinions and beliefs are pretty important to the current national climate.

> "Wilder times" is an interesting description of the early days of the country.

Wilder, in the sense of less Organization, less infrastructure, slower transportation and communication. People had to protect themselves, because there was nobody around who could do it. But today, the majority of people can be reached in a matter of minutes.

> When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere,

You don't understand that guns are the major reason for this?

It was also written at a point in time when the absolute peak of firearms technology was a musket.

The logic behind the 2nd amendment doesn't hold once Uncle Sam has nuclear tipped icbms and I'm not allowed to have them. I'm also not allowed to have tanks or rocket launchers or even high rate of fire Gatling style guns.

To paraphrase, "if you think the 2nd amendment is what's keeping the government off your back, you don't understand how tanks work"

The distinction is:

1. The goal of the second amendment was never "everyone should be able to have as many guns as they have, and if people use a gun to kill a dozen children then so be it", it was "it should be illegal for the government to take away people's weapons because the first step a tyrant would take is to disarm the populace so they couldn't fight back." That goal doesn't hold water anymore in a world where a computer geek working for the US military in a basement in Virginia can drone strike a wedding on the other side of the world. Instead, the NRA has made "guns good" into something that too many people make their whole personality, and the people who are actually trying to destroy society use that as a weapon to prevent any positive change when someone murders a dozen kids by making people feel like the only choice is between "anyone can have guns and children are murdered every day" or "the government takes your weapons and forces any dissidents into siberian-esque gulags".

2. Firearms were far less common, far less accessible, and far less deadly than they are now. Compared to what was available at the time, modern-day weapons like the AR15 are effectively weapons of mass destruction. If you went into a school with a civil war-era rifle and tried to kill as many people as you could, you'd maybe get one shot off which might not even kill someone if you hit them, and then you'd get tackled while you were trying to reload.

I think you've moved the goalposts here a little. You are making (good) arguments on why the second amendment maybe shouldn't apply any longer and that guns of now are different. You're arguing for gun reform.

However I was speaking in the context of the tradeoffs of danger and the awareness of what blood you get on your hands for agreeing. Although the writers of this bill couldn't forsee AR15s and drone strikes, I'm sure they could forsee that there was a cost to freedom to bear arms.

And yet the founding fathers made it pretty clear that they were all for every able-bodied man having guns, including private citizens owning artillery.

The relative lethality of a particular style of rifle doesn't seem to matter. Better guns than muskets were available at the time, and they didn't seem to think it necessary to limit that amendment.

I don't think your opinions about the history and purpose of the second amendment holds water.

They were also loose powder hand loaded weapons, you could fire three rounds a _minute_ if you were really skilled. Everyone in town had to store their powder in a (secure) communal location because it was, duh, an explosive.

I think it’s worth posting the actual wording of the 2nd amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

There’s endless legal debate how this should be interpreted, but it’s not obvious that there was an assumption that there would be mass individual gun ownership.

The Second Militia Act of 1792 clarified that assumption somewhat when it specified all free able-bodied white male citizens must be part of their local militia and are required to own a gun among other things.

What they couldn't have predicted is that the Bill of Rights would also apply to the individual state and local governments since that wasn't true until the 14th amendment almost 100 years later and didn't really kick off until the 1900s. This is obviously important to understand what the original amendments mean.

That's interesting. What is a reasonable alternative interpretation of "the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" than individual gun ownership though?

"The people" here were the states - the point was that the states could maintain their own militia (the modern day national guard). The 2nd amendment has been bastardized by a radical judiciary that is now unfortunately too entrenched to fix without repealing the 2A.

The supreme court ruled that the first clause of the 2nd amendment was just flavor text. We aren't going to be Switzerland, which has an actual armed militia where kids take military-issued guns into their community to support it (on the train even! although the bullets are kept somewhere else to reduce a suicide problem they had a few years ago).

I was responding to an assertion that the amendment authors must have known the implications of what they were writing. It’s irrelevant what a subsequent Supreme Court interpretation was to that point.

The Supreme court formally declared that the amendment authors wrote the amendment with the first clause of the second amendment as meaningless flavor text. It is obviously revisionist and I hope it doesn't hold for more than a few generations or so (assuming the USA survives).

I think that’s pretty much the only way you can make that work? I’m against gun ownership, but I feel like you really need to stretch things to read that any other way than ‘people shall be allowed to own their own guns’

I almost don’t want to respond since this is well trodden ground, but I would say that “a well regulated militia” casts doubt on the individual gun ownership interpretation. You have to decide who the militia exists to fight and therefore who should regulate them. It’s obviously not obvious though.

“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I dunno, this one is a whole lot less open to interpretation than the first sentence

It's not. "The people" is a collective term, so this unambiguously says that collectively the people have the right to keep and bear arms, i.e. as a group. For example, maybe this guarantees that a well regulated militia of the people has the right keep and bear arms. An example of a less ambiguous statement would be: "the right of all individual people to keep and bear arms".

We know who the militia existed to fight.

The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.

On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.

Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.

It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history

My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.

Why do we think we’re passed an Arch Duke Ferdinand moment? Trump is more than ready to use his secret police.

RIP Charlie Kirk, no human deserves that. The rest of us left are still not necessarily better people after that exact moment, hopefully everyone takes a pause.

Constantly fear-mongering that every event that occurs is a prelude to a repeat of history's worst atrocities is exactly the type of rhetoric we should avoid.

I agree with you.

Do you think we have a Presidency with the same sensibility? They sent the national guard with zero pretense all over the country. This is about to get serious.

I don’t think you two agree.

One thing that history shows again and again is people being killed for their beliefs. Charlie always spoke from his heart, from his deeply held intellectual and spiritual beliefs. He died, literally on a stage defending those beliefs.

> He had the courage of his convictions and refused to change his beliefs or be deterred from acting on them.

That's only a good thing to the degree that those beliefs are good. Charlie's beliefs were evil.

71 day old, account, but these are your only comments on the site. I guess trolling is alive and well even on a community like HN.

Yep, he died doing what he loved, arguing for the oppression of trans people

You're using subjective language so you can't really be wrong but it doesn't mean anything either. You're just perpetuating a general sense of hate. I'd say this kind of thinking and talking is why he was so hated - people enjoy being part of a mob expressing righteous judgement of whoever the popular target is.

I think he's just stating a fact. And pointing out bigotry is not in itself hateful. Unless you think the civil rights movement was motivated by hate?

I can't see his post now but it wasn't a fact. It was a subjective generalization of the type that some people would feel is correct and others would feel isn't, but can't be tested objectively.

Hackernews really hates it when you tell them the truth. The post simply stated what Charlie Kirk was saying moments before his untimely demise

At the time he was shot he was talking about the problem of trans people being much more violent than average. If his shooter gets caught and is trans, well, that would be "died for his beliefs" in a very extreme way.

If they are trans or not he still "died for his beliefs", as he had said:

"I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our God-given rights."

Is "trans people shouldn't own guns" a "deeply intellectual" thought? Or even one that supports 2A?

Supposed problem. He was being questioned about the data showing otherwise.

> If his shooter gets caught and is trans

True—but that's the thing about preaching hate, it turns out, there's lots of people who might want you dead.

Did he preach hate? I've seen some of his videos and never saw anything like that. Perhaps you've confused something else for hate?

Here’s a brief summary, if you’re asking in good faith and actually want to know: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/11/2342963/-The-whit... but there’s plenty of others as well.

Which part of that is preaching hate? I couldn't identify any from a quick look. Is it the “a lack-of-father problem in the Black community.”?

Okay, so not in good faith. I’m sorry I responded to you. Ya got me, +1 for the trolls.

Yes good faith. That article is full of examples and I don't understand which ones you count as preaching hate. Was that one or not?

How about stoning gay people? Or pushing the Great Replacement theory? Or claiming that the Texan flooding deaths were due to DEI initiatives? Like did you read it?

I looked at the stoning gay people one through the link there and it isn't clear if he's advocating for it, against it, or just stating a fact about what the bible says. He used it to respond to a pro-gay Christian (Ms. Rachel from kids videos) who favored a law from Leviticus (love thy neighbor) and he pointed out that the same book also says to stone gays. He said that if you love God, you should love his laws, including that one (implying that Ms. Rachel should want to stone gays to be consistent with her stated belief). He described it as God's perfect law... but it's not clear if he actually condones or believes that or is just making a claim about what's true within the canon of the bible or what Ms. Rachel would believe to be consistent with herself.

Do you know if he ever clarified his position on killing gays anywhere else? If that's the only time he ever publicly mentioned it, on it's own, it's too ambiguous to call preaching hate.

So far, I can't find any hate preaching. I don't want to sift through everything just in case there's some hidden gem. You could just tell me which one is pretty clear if you knew about it. So I assume you're just repeating some popular opinion that isn't even true.

> He described it as God's perfect law... but it's not clear if he actually condones or believes that

How do you imagine that working? Do you call many things you don’t support “God’s perfect law?”

> just making a claim about what's true within the canon of the bible

I wonder why he chose that specific example, then.

> what Ms. Rachel would believe to be consistent with herself.

What do you mean here?

> Do you know if he ever clarified his position on killing gays anywhere else?

This is an amazing sentence.

> How do you imagine that working? Do you call many things you don’t support “God’s perfect law?”

Imagine instead of the Bible, it's The Lord Of The Rings. Somebody examining it might describe the special master ring as being Sauron's perfect creation, or whatever. That doesn't mean they believe it is in real life. They're talking within the context of the story.

You're saying he preaches hate by promoting killing gays. If that's what he was doing, wouldn't he have been clearer about it instead of just using it as part of a smug retort showing somebody else's hypocrisy?

> What do you mean here?

She used Leviticus to justify her beliefs, but apparently cherry-picked the parts she wanted and neglected the stoning gays part. He's pointing out that the actual text says the opposite of what she believes based on that same book of the bible.

Since every example you've shown and I've looked at has been weak or nothing, I conclude that you're wrong about him preaching hate and instead you've just been fooled by media telling you that and you never bothered to look at the evidence. Really, it's that media that's been preaching hate - hence why he was so widely hated.

> That doesn't mean they believe it is in real life. They're talking within the context of the story.

So you read a bunch of his writings, or watched his videos, and didn’t pick up on the fact that he was a devout Christian?

> I conclude that you're wrong about him preaching hate and instead you've just been fooled by media telling you that and you never bothered to look at the evidence. Really, it's that media that's been preaching hate - hence why he was so widely hated.

It’s clear you started with your conclusion—very efficient, but a waste of my time. I’m done feeling the trolls, goodbye.

Yes I knew he was a Christian. So? Ms. Rachel is too and she somehow doesn't want to kill gays, despite quoting Leviticus.

At the end of the day, you have no evidence that he was preaching hate. So you must have come to that conclusion by believing what someone told you without checking it yourself. If you were being skeptical, you could go and ask those people who told you that to explain their reasons and maybe they do have something, or maybe they don't.

That right here is why leftism is such a violent ideology and why all good people should abandon it:

1. Pick some ideas.

2. Define any disagreement with those ideas as "hate".

3. Kill anyone who disagrees on the grounds that "haters" deserve it.

This is circular mirror-world logic. The left is full of hate-based ideas. If leftists were being systematically mown down and Trump led celebrations each time, justifying himself by this logic, you would find it appalling.

I’m not justifying anything, just pointing out he made a lot of different groups of people angry, and so it’s hard to tell which group the shooter may have belonged to.

It's not hard at all. He said things that upset the left, a violent leftist killed him, leftists are now celebrating. And he was without a doubt killed by a leftist. According to investigators they found his ammo, which was engraved with "transgender and anti-fascist ideology".

> a violent leftist killed him [...] And he was without a doubt killed by a leftist

I think, there's actually a considerable amount of doubt.

> He said things that upset the left, leftists are now celebrating.

Maybe, but was he killed for denigrating black people? Gay people? Jews? Transgender people? Immigrants? Professors? Doctors? The list goes on.

He also pissed off the right, too—Laura Loomer recently calling him a traitor. So, I guess we’ll find out.

> According to investigators they found his ammo, which was engraved with "transgender and anti-fascist ideology"

You might want to look into that again.

How are you feeling today about that “without a doubt killed by a leftist”? Has that given rise to any introspection?

Are you claiming he wasn't?? His own friends and family said he is and his bullets were indeed engraved with far left slogans.

Yes, I’m claiming he wasn’t—he was a far right groyper.

Delusional. It's just come out that he was living with a trans roommate, as if it wasn't enough that he killed a conservative pundit, his bullets were engraved with far left Antifa slogans, sybols and songs, and the investigation has revealed a man "deeply indoctrinated into far left ideology". There is zero evidence for your viewpoint.

None of this is surprising. There's a long history of far-left Antifa and trans activist types trying to kill people. Look at the armed far-left militia that attacked an ICE office, or the "trans rationalist cults" that killed their landlord and others.

Tell that to Melissa Hortman, or her next of kin.

I'm just shocked people like you are blaming the victim instead of the shooter. I didn't follow that guy and don't really care which topics he covered, he didn't deserve to be killed. If anything, this just makes the trans issue (or whatever the supposed issues are) more polarized. Unfortunately this mentality is in line with what I've been seeing on Reddit over the past year (ie., speech is actual violence and should dealt with with actual physical violence, punch a [loosely defined] Nazi, etc). Scary times ahead.

And the fact that you were getting downvoted for this rational take concerns me even more. Scary times ahead indeed.

I never blamed the victim, I only quoted him.

He died doing what he loved: preaching hate and fabricating lies about minorities. He was literally spreading lies about trans people all being mass shooters when he was killed, a minority that is already four times as likely to be targeted by physical violence. He did not deserve to die for his beliefs, no one does. But his beliefs themseveles are morally abhorrent and certainly contributed to this climate of hatred and violence we find ourselves in. Let's not celebrate his life.

This take isn’t very hinged. Kirk was correct in identifying the issues with trans rights views on the left via anti-(insert euphemism for woman) wokeism. He also preached the views that offend the stonks go up brainwashing of the youth happening in academia.

> He also preached the views that offend the stonks go up brainwashing of the youth happening in academia.

Speaking of unhinged takes... I literally can't parse that sentence. Touch grass sometime soon?

Sure, I’ll unpack, sorry for the over-compression:

Academia and broader cultural messaging teach students to see career success, productivity, and corporate loyalty as higher priorities than caring for or investing in family.

People are encouraged to define themselves by their job titles, income, or the prestige of their employer rather than by family roles or community contributions. (Proven in polls)

Students may be groomed to see working for large companies as the “default path” to security, respectability, and self-worth. This is relevant with in the context of how few gen Z folks on the left view family as important (<10%) - this was major news this week.

Universities often emphasize employability, corporate partnerships, and internships with major firms, implicitly signaling that this is the “right” way to succeed.

If corporate work is framed as more important, family responsibilities can be treated as distractions rather than central parts of life.

Societies that reward corporate loyalty over family care risk weakening intergenerational bonds and making people feel alienated outside of work.

The critique is that academia is not only instilling blind faith in perpetual economic growth but also shaping values so that young people see serving corporations as more worthwhile than serving their families. Kirk’s main message was pushing back against that hierarchy—saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.

> The critique is that academia is not only instilling blind faith in perpetual economic growth but also shaping values so that young people see serving corporations as more worthwhile than serving their families. Kirk’s main message was pushing back against that hierarchy—saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.

I mean, I suspect it's the cost of university education in the US that's driving much of the observed behaviours, that seems like a more parsimonous explanation than what you've given above. And speaking as a former university lecturer, the notion that academia tells students what to think does not match my experience at all.

> saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.

Wow, to be fair this is the first statement of Charlie Kirk that I've wholeheartedly agreed with.

Thank you for taking the time to develop your viewpoint in spite of my mildly aggressive reply. I'll try to reciprocate:

I completely agree on the issues you bring up but I disagree on their causes and what should be done to address them.

I don't believe Academia is to blame for all of this. Not any more than the rest of our shifting culture. Hyper-individualism is a symptom/goal of neoliberalism, the dominant ideology in the west for the past 50 years.

What you describe has a name in leftist theory: worker alienation. Workers are alienated from the purpose of their work, from their community and even from themselves. In these conditions, it becomes very hard to find meaning in one's life and even harder to get the will to do anything for the community.

The right has sold Americans on the idea of the self-made man, on self-reliance. They have basically destroyed syndicalism in the country and told workers they should simply perform better if they want a better life.

Everyone has internalized these precepts: that one's success and happiness in life are pure results of one's grit and dedication. You see it everywhere, in gym culture, in dating culture, in eutrepreneurship... "No empathy should be spared for the unemployed, they are all lazy and deserve nothing", or "Your coworker got fired? Good, one less to compete with".

And so, years after years, Republicans (mainly them, Democrats also helped) unwove the threads of our society one by one. Cutting into social security, healthcare, infrastructures... Slowly the country is crumbling under a severe lack of care.

All of this makes me grin when I hear Charlie Kirk speak of rebuilding the family and our communities. Why is he siding with the party that sold our country for tax cuts to the wealthy, then? Even now, huge tax cuts to the rich and defunding of important government programs are the centerpieces of Trump's economic policy. (See his so-called "Big Beautiful Bill.)

Trump and Kirk both support massive businesses extracting money from local communities. They both support this atomization of workers, this weakening of regulations in favor of employers. They both drank the Kool aid on exponential growth, which is why they reject the very real fact of climate change.

Now, what's the actual solution? Rebuild society's safety nets: stop people from being afraid of the future. Shame this culture of "grindsets" and "mogging": bring back kindness and empathy. Redistribute wealth, even if just symbolically: show this country's values actually mean something, and meritocracy is not just a lie invented to justify massive wealth inequalities.

We in the USA find it totally acceptable (as in doing the exact opposite of other nations where it happens once) to have a mass shooting at a school two times a week. We have already passed absurdity.

IMHO, you're correct on many counts.

What's the Pindar quote again? "War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach"

> You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.

Do you know what Harding's famous "Return to Normalcy" stump speech in the 1920 campaign was about? I bet you don't; few do. My U.S. history textbook in high school mentioned it, but did not explain what it was about.

We may be smarter, but we certainly are not wiser.

There are facts, skills, smarts and then there is wisdom. The latter is in short supply and is orthogonal to the other three.

Yeah, COVID showed me more than anything that our core need of belonging and need for conformity (the one that can drive cultist behavior) is not something that everyone can overcome with knowledge and experts and awareness. You truly can't make a horse drink, even if they are dehydrated.

History books don't tell you what happened but a particular interpretation/opinion of it.

I’ve come to realize how sad it is nobody alive today will be alive to see how what’s occurring fits with a multi-century arch of history. The way we examine the Middle Ages or Byzantine Empire.

It would be fascinating to see how 2001-2025 fits into that.

I think we will be remembered for our chemistry, physics, engineering and materials science. There is going to be a lot that is forgotten because:

1) There is an eternal power struggle among people that is only obliquely acknowledged and seems willfully forgotten.

2) There is a lot of useless crap based on predatory psychological cues that will be weeded out through natural evolution.

I'd suggest a 3rd reason -

In the arc of history, it's not that different from any other time. We just have a recency bias.

every dynasty and empire after the last was the “smartest” compared to the one before, yet they all still collapsed.

This is where poetry comes in: WH Auden's "September 1, 1939" (https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939) comes to mind.