Europe’s experiencing the longest hot war since World War II. The war in the Gulf seems to be escalating as we speak. Extremism has been on the rise for years now. Is it actually getting worse or is it simply the fact that we can access information from all four corners of the world so easily as never before?
There’s a big Economic Supercycle which lasts about 100 years, or around 3 generations.
We’re now at the most painfull point of that supercycle, when wealth has accumulated in too few hands as has real power, inequality has exploded, social mobility has crashed and growth has ground to a halt, so the elites have switched from capturing most of Economic Growth to pillaging existing wealth from the rest of the population - a handful of people are fine, most people are getting poorer and young people most definitelly don’t have the opportunity to “be anything you want”.
All this, of course, translates into social discontent, increased autoritarianism from those in power in order to keep said power (just notice the fast growing desire from widespread surveillance amongst mainstream politicians as well as the increase in anti-demostration legislation in supposedly Democratic nations) and political movements subsidized by the elites (i.e. the populist Far Right) that scapegoat foreigners (immigrants, “interference” from other nations) for the pain that most people are feeling so that they’re not punishing the local elites for their pillaging and the way they mismanage the country.
All this in turn translates into more wars: if you’re scapegoating foreigners for the pains in your country and/or there is not enough economic growth for the elites to grow more wealthy, then it’s only natural to go to war with other nations, either to “punish” them for their “fault” in the pain of the population or to take their shit to make the local elites richer.
Naturally, when people are discontent and have no real hope to change the way the place they live in is managed or they live somewhere that keeps getting attacked by foreign military because their elites want to steal your shit, a lot of them turn into “extremists”. Also a lot of things which are pretty natural and democratic things to do start getting painted as “extremism” by the mass media owned by the above mentioned elites and/or made illegal by said elites (when directly in power) or the politicians they bought.
And then most of this shit feeds around into reduced Economic growth, so less of it for the elites to capture, hence the elites pillaging even more, propagandize the “foreign enemy” even more, push even more for Far-Right parties and reduced democratic rights even more.
Social flows from Economic and Economic flows from Social.
The first school shooting in the US was in the late 1800s.
During an 18 month period between 1973 and 1975 there were an average of five terrorist bombings a day in the US.
There were more serial killers in the 1970s than any decade since.
Before 1974 a women could not open a bank account unless she had her father’s or husband’s prmission.
I think that it was just the last 30 years being an anomaly. In Europe you had lots of very interesting stuff happening pre WW2. Also pre WW1 was calm just briefly. After WW2 you had communist revolutions in the east which took a while, then in the west you had Basques, Northern Ireland, extremists in Italy and Germany doing interesting happenings. And decolonization struggle in the rest of the world. All very eventful. Real calm for Europe came after end of cold war up until 2014 Ukraine. And that is if you disregard the wars in ex Yugoslavia that was ongoing for 10 years! And included eventful things like a genocide and several ethnic expulsions. So maybe real calm was for all in all 14 years in the 21st century…not to say that Middle East was anything but calm in that period. And that Russia ended its civil war circa 2008 and invaded Georgia that same year. That leaves us with 6 whole consecutive years of calm on European continent.
The extremism thing is definitely real.
So in the 90s we had news over sensationalize crime and we thought our cities were all unsafe. Moms kept their kids inside. Now in the 10s and 20s we have the news sensationalizing politics and we think we are under fascists or communists when the real problem is the corpos nobody is talking about.
yep. my folks basically thought if you spend more than two hours in the city we were gonna get car jacked and murdered. they were terrified when i moved to the city and lived in it.
my older siblings never lived in the city, they lived in suburbs their entire life and still think cities are full of rapists and murderers. they also watch nothing but TV news. they only go to major sports games or like big events, and they drive straight there and back, and tell you how terrified they were the entire time something bad was gonna happen.
Europe’s experiencing the longest hot war since Wordl War II
I believe you that this is true by length of time, but there was a lot of war going on in central and eastern Europe in the 90s.
Which central european country had a war in its own territory in the 90s? I’m only aware of wars in the balkans, which aren’t generally considered central europe.
Abundance of news and remember the golden rule. Modern day journalism sacrifices the core principles for more clicks. Doomscrolling makes more money at the end of the day.
“If it bleeds, it leads” is as true as ever
It’s the information.
Before, what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you, so, when someone on the other side of the country did something, it would have to be REALLY important for people to talk about it here.
Tv gave us national news, but still, they were limited by broadcast time. Not every little bit of news can fit in a 24 hour day, and they’d have to repeat the important stuff just in case someone wasn’t watching at the exact time it was reported.
Now, there are no limits. Every local drama, every crime committed, every break up and make up, and every plate of food is recorded and immortalized on the Internet.
Statistically, crime is lower than ever, less crimes go unsolved, and more people have more rights than ever before. This world is literally the best it’s ever been, but we’ve also never been exposed to so much injustice before. It’s quite the Faustian Contradiction.
The shift from paper to digital has caused all news to pass through RAM and CPU registers, thus causing it to become
volatileIn recent memory, there was a brief gap of calm in most of the world between the fall of the USSR and 9/11 where it looked like we could go a different, more positive direction. For the rest, every generation thought they lived in the most volatile times. I’m not trying to say it’s delusional necessarily but we have a strong recency bias.
Most folks can’t take this perspective. Despite everything, we’re still in probably the most peaceful time in history. We have the best medicines ever, most caste systems have been done away with in the west. Fucking helicopters.
We’re clearly in the process of bringing caste systems back in the west, it’s getting increasingly hard to access health care or housing even in countries that used to have strong social welfare systems.
Climate crisis and capitalism refugees, water shortages, forest fires all are getting worse. I consider we are entering a new dark age. The US empire is collapsing, world order is re-shuffled, nobody really knows what’s coming next.
And also, it’s very easy to get stuck watching it happen live while one’s own actual situation might be okay. Good to switch it off sometimes and go walk under some trees and enjoy what is there to enjoy if you have the chance. All the more if it’s to end soon!
My understanding of the term “dark age” was the period of time after the collapse of the roman empire in europe where no written history existed. It was “dark” because we didn’t know what happened. Archaeology has pretty well filled in the gaps now so it’s no longer so unknown.
I think you’re using it to mean upheaval or unrest. IDK enough about history to rebut you, but I never really thought that’s what it meant.
No, I mean that I believe that we might be not far from some really interruptive event. We are very dependent on our modern tech for record keeping. Not much is needed to interrupt that and send us into survival mode.
I sometimes like to believe (and I know that’s just speculation) that the dark ages had less upheaval than we now think, at least in the far corners of the former empire. No empire to hassle you, maybe you can just plant your fields in peace, right?
Disclaimer: my musings around history are absolute amateur ramblings of someone with the memory of a potato.
Hol up, I think I’d have heard about a nuclear exchange in Europe
What are you even on about?
Things are getting worse.
Yes we can access information more easily but things are also getting much worse.
Despite what they may say out loud, wealthy oligarchs are well aware that climate change is going to cause widespread famine, and natural disasters like drought, fire, floods, and storms.
I’m gonna go with more volatile. Climate change is getting to the point where it’s harder and harder to ignore. The consequences are very scary and not at all pleasant to think about. As a result, people are angrier and more frightened. Personally, I expect bigger, crazier bullshit.
When major costal cities start getting flooded, people will lose their fucking minds.
