• hmonkey@lemy.lol
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    9 days ago

    Hitler lost WW2, the south lost the American civil war, and we haven’t all nuked each other (yet)

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        9 days ago

        No, it is genuinely a good point. The fact that its use so far has been entirely limited to the two that ended WW2 was certainly not a given. Some US military leaders wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.

        The Korean War was so soon after WW2 that the strong taboo against the use of nuclear weapons hadn’t yet taken hold, and the USSR had a miniscule stockpile, so the US could genuinely have done it with limited risk to themselves. The fact that they didn’t use them is a really important turning point that helped build in the taboo against their use that has so far held to this day.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.

        Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.

        That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.

        Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.

        • theshatterstone54@feddit.ukOP
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          8 days ago

          Wait, when you say Republicans, do you mean the organisation that Americans currently call the Grand Old Party, the GOP, the modern Republican Party? If so, I find it ironic that the party standing for freedom has evolved into the party that shields and encourages racists and criminals.

    • Didros@beehaw.org
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      8 days ago

      Hitler learned about Eugenics from America. We were forcibly sterilizing people for being “inferior” which you can imagine who that meant. America built their own concentration camps for Japanese citizens and our forced labor in our current prison system is just tge more pletable version of labor camps.

      The American civil war was about slavery, but tge north was not full of abolitionist people like you might assume. Tge rich in the North and South were against ending slavery, but their hands were forced by the larger population. The only reason we have not had nukes go off is only because they are old and not maintained well. We’ve dropped a few nukes on accident that just didn’t go off. At least two of those were over America.

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      8 days ago

      Kinda terrible examples tho…

      Sure “Hitler lost”. Cause he killed himself and stuff. But the Nazis won. The US saved most officers and gave them jobs in NATO and the nascent west German government. Then used them to hunt and undermine communists all over the world. The Nazis themselves kinda won. The Cold War was basically a Nazi war, which they won.

      The south “lost”. But after they lost the US became the most racially segregated country in the world and became the chief inspiration to the Nazis.

      Then the US literally bombed Japan TWICE for no fucking reason other than spooking Stalin.

      You have 3 wrong examples, that actually show we are living in the timeline where the Empire won.

  • will_a113@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    I try to be a “silver lining” type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I’ve been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There’s even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

  • Doombot1@lemmy.one
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    9 days ago

    Near-infinite access to pretty much any information you can possibly dream of, content, questions, etc, on a little device in your pocket

          • Don_Dickle@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            It was all the time because couldn’t get my mind to connect to all the things I was thinking about. Now I can and it just comes out. For example I never wake up in the morning hungover or anything my eyes just go bing and I am wide awake. I then rune 3 miles then read about an hour of wiki for whatever my mind comes up with. Then I got to my job for 48 hours.

    • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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      9 days ago

      The problem with that is it has led to ignorant people believing they’re smart — all because they can find any random site that backs up any nonsense they assert. Critical thinking and credible research are endangered concepts now.

      • Doombot1@lemmy.one
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        9 days ago

        Oh, of course. There are negatives to everything for sure. But I think as a whole it’s made life better in a lot of different ways.

        • Didros@beehaw.org
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          8 days ago

          I miss tge bar room arguments over who did what. Like tge guy who ran out of a bar and stole a plane and flew it back to tge bar to prove he stole a plane before. Awesome. Now you just hoogle everything

  • SolidGrue@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    I mean, we’re communicating over the Internet right now, which is pretty cool. Right?

    On Lemmy. For now. Things will change. But for now it’s pretty cool. Um.

    Hi. :waves:

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Do you ever worry that somebody could just forcefully grab you, unzip your pants and forcefully stuff hundreds of angry snakes into your pants? Or that you’re going to pull back your shower curtain one day, and there’s going to be a bear in your shower? Or that one day all the countries will just nuke each other for funsies?

      I often worry about things that don’t makes sense. Like the one time my ex girlfriend was eating ice cream, and I wondered if one day she might give birth to a moose.

  • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    8 days ago

    Kids seem more aware of toxic behaviours and seem to clock their mental health better than I ever did. Even 10 years ago, talking about mental health was considered a taboo.

  • Sinuhe@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    The evolution of our living conditions. We tend to forget how much things have changed. My grandmother grew up during WW2, she not only struggled to get food but also couldn’t go to school because she had to work (yes kids had to work, even in first world countries). She was heavily traumatized during the war because she had to take care of the dead bodies the Germans left behind them, she was only 16 at that time. The years after that were tough, she married a man from another country and was seen as an outcast. They worked their ass off all their life for very little money, then my grandfather died in horrible conditions and the company behind the whole thing has never been held responsible. My parents didn’t have much food either when they grew up but ant least they weren’t raised in war times, and they had access to basic education. As for me, I have done things my family couldn’t even dream of: I went to the university, speak 4 languages, married a girl from a different continent and we live freely in another country, there’s food on the table everyday, never had to go to war and even have time to waste watching shows or typing things on the internet. I am not saying the world is perfect today, there’s definitely a lot of things going wrong as well, but it’s definitely better than it used to be and we tend to forget that

    • skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.

      There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.

  • Dae@pawb.social
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    8 days ago

    Statically speaking, globally, we are living in the freest, most prosperous age in recorded history. It was the most peaceful as well, but I am unsure if recent events have changed that.

    But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.

    It could very easily be way, way fucking worse. We are nowhere near the worst timeline yet.

    • P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br
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      8 days ago

      But by and large, we have more rights and are more prosperous than any other era of human history. And drspite the fact we could literally end the whole goddamn world right fucking now, it’s very, very clear that the powers that be really like living, and most conflicts are more focused and less destructive than ever before.

      Wall-E Buy-N-Large hehe

  • Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 days ago

    There are multiple cases where pure chance and human hesitation prevented all out nuclear bombardment in the Cold War.

    So for that alone we are extremely lucky.

  • Jordan117@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Too big. An alteration of the timeline where that’s not the case would basically be one that didn’t involve humanity at all. Not sure you fully understood the question, it’s not asking what’s great about living in this point in time, but rather, of the different paths humanity could have taken, what makes this one good.

      • Shanedino@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Did you ever stop and consider things could be different in other time zone completely unrelated to humanity. Consider our non is smaller or farther and we never get solar eclipses. Small detail, humanity still here (with smaller waves).

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Time LINE. You’re talking about going so far back that humanity wouldn’t exist. And if you go that far back and try to jumpstart evolution to have humans exist sooner; disregarding how that completely ignores how evolution works, any society that would arise would be indecipherable compared to our own. The resulting “humans” could be hairless and have purple skin. Think of the hot-dog fingers timeline from 'Everything, Everywhere, All At Once" except the world they live in wouldn’t look anything close to ours. They would instead communicate entirely by slapping and live in long tunnels made of beeswax or some shit like that. There are too many branching paths and variables to get anything even close to recognizable.

          For the purposes of the main question OP asked, it’s pointless to go back that far. We’re no longer talking about “how might modern society be different if we had made different choices, and what choices have we made that turned out to be good?” but instead saying “what if humanity never evolved and something else did instead?”

          A better example, let’s look at the Grand Canyon. Carved by the Colorado River over millions of years. But let’s say you went back far enough to deviate the river’s path so that it never ran through modern day Arizona. At that point, it’s pointless to ask how the Grand Canyon might look different because there wouldn’t BE a Grand Canyon!

  • MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works
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    8 days ago

    I regularly shop at a supermarket built on a site where people were burned as witches in the 17th century.

    A ship’s captain was away at sea and died after his ship was wrecked in a storm. Back home, his housemaid was accused of having created the storm and was burned at the stake. And there I am buying lemons and ice cream and toothpaste. It blows my mind.

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    8 days ago

    In terms of total war and death worldwide, this is the most peaceful time in known human history.

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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      8 days ago

      Is that still true? Like, as in, updated in the past year-to-the-last-few-months? War (even though they’re not calling it war) is rising in many places.

      • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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        7 days ago

        I don’t believe this is something easily tracked and updated annually. The point is in terms of amount of population as a percentage. People in the 21st century largely have more food, shelter, and general security worldwide than in all of known human history.

        Don’t let anecdotal news about wars worldwide override the fact that much larger scale (as percent of world population) have occurred and occurred consistently in past history. Wars, famines, plagues, and other things have wiped out far more of the population overall historically. While the wars you see today are horrible, and in specific regions they might be decimating, they still pale in comparison to the level of death in human history and the scope of death of past wars.

        The Black Death in the 1300s itself killed 30-50% of all of Europe. Ghengis Khan is estimated to have been responsible for killing 10% of the world population (10% today would be more than the entire population of Europe, for perspective). There’s a lot of less than documented Chinese history that also suggests massive deaths from famines and plagues and stuff that seem to have amounted to a large percentage of the world population at the time.

        Another thing I have seen a lot of in the last decade, mostly relating the the US, is that while large scale violent crime may be up (like mass killings) overall murder and crime is lower than it has been in past decades. Again, in a macro scope of things. You’ll always have pockets of geography and/or time that are bad.

        • trainsaresexy@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Ghengis Khan is estimated to have been responsible for killing 10% of the world population, which would be more than the entire population of Europe today.

          The population of europe today is more than 750 million so that can’t be right.

          • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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            7 days ago

            I altered my wording. Thank you. I meant it as perspective. 10% today would equate to more than all of Europe.

      • SlothMama@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        It’s no longer true as of about two years ago no, but the measurement was always a bit skewed for Western audiences and glosses over increases in specific types of crimes ( categorically ) such as homicide bombings and domestic terrorism.

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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      8 days ago

      We’re getting awfully close to another World War given ongoing affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East…

  • P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br
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    8 days ago

    GAY RIGHTS

    TRANS RIGHTS

    it’s not perfect, but we’re still getting there!

    LGBTQIAPN+ I stand with you!