We had some years of kind-of stability in the world with no significant big wars. But with recent events the world is feeling like "it is burning". Just because we got accustomed to the more peacefull live.
So, I wouldn't say its like "we always thought that". Its more like we had a good short phase and now its back to normal. Or maybe the good phase is the normal and the pendulum swings back?
The world would be much better if people learnt that wars even in places far from them such as between the middle east and the US, would have a network affect and bring instability to other parts of the world and soon near them. The world started "burning" again with the war on Iraq / Afghanistan.
> The world started "burning" again with the war on Iraq / Afghanistan.
If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11, those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11 started it. Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide than ever during those two wars (although this does a terrible job of capturing deaths caused by war, but not directly from combat): https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
The 90s were relatively peaceful compared to the previous few decades, but we still had the Yugoslav Wars, Israeli-Palestine at times, the Gulf war, Rwanda.
You could also argue that without the US financing the Afghan side in the Soviet-Afghan war and the Iraq side in the Iraq-Iran war then the Taliban wouldn't have taken advantage of the Afghan power vacuum post civil war and that Iraq wouldn't have attacked Kuwait to avoid paying their debts, starting the Gulf War which was the prelude to the Iraq War
> If terrorists didn't kill thousands of Americans on 9/11, those wars don't happen, so you'd have to say 9/11 started it.
The narrative to push the war on Iraq largely also revolved around "WMDs" while the legality of the war still remains debatable.
> Ironically, the world had less combat deaths worldwide than ever during those two wars
I wouldn't measure peace just by number of deaths, but even if we were to do so, it is also worth taking into account the increased security measures and the less freedom we have to prevent deaths.
I mean I think at least a plurality of people on this website agree that the War on Iraq was a mistake. A lot of people at the time were very clear that it was a mistake.
Do you really think it's fair to say that I'm whitewashing it to call it a mistake? Do you really think I'm the person you need to persuade? This is a weirdly combative stance to take against someone that, in all likelihood, largely agrees with you. What's the benefit of it?
That does not support that they "_always_ thought this", it only means that this happened in the past. Another interpretation is that periods of hardship are followed by ones of stability and the generation that lived through the hardship notices differences in their young.
It's measurable, but not in an agreeable fashion. I'm sure if you tracked curse words, or simply looked at the number or reports an admin has managed, you can track a change.
But you then argue with the metric. Maybe curse words aren't a good measure of hostility. Maybe the admin was overzealous, or underzealous and then corrected. That's what makes it hard to come to a consensus.
Anectodally, on the internet, I would agree. I feel post 2016 saw an uptick in hostility, and then the pandemic years of 2021/2022 saw another uptick.
Yes; moaning about both the youth of today and old people goes back, at least, millennia (though there are sometimes cultural taboos against moaning about old people which dampens that down).
My pet half-serious theory is that we currently talk a lot about the dastardly millennials and boomers because senior media staff are largely genX; note that we don't hear much about genX these days. This will start to change in a few years as genX starts to age out, and suddenly everyone will be complaining about genX and genZ. Whole new stereotypes will have to be forged (the old genX stereotypes from the 80s are very youth-of-today oriented and won't work for moaning about old people), and no-one will ever mention avocados again.
The culture of any generation is defined by the generation before it, that's why Gen Xers are the most depressingly suburban and forgotten about generation, not the boomers, because while boomers love themselves more than anyone loves themselves, nobody glamorized boomerism more than Gen Xers, who grew up with more direct exposure than younger generations; they just didn't have the same numbers.
Likewise, most of our prominent entrepreneurs are all Gen X try-hards who found fortune because of the consumption patterns that millennials adopted and were in the right place at the right time to capitalize on it. Millennial consumption patterns of course having been heavily influenced by gen xers and boomers by proxy, the few that got that good job and kept it forever are quite happy to upgrade their iPhone every year, buy TVs and cars for no reason, and move to the boonies not realizing that Gen Xers mistakenly gave up their sense of community to follow in the boomers' footsteps; they'll borrow and pay anything possible for the privilege.
the whole generation-labelling thing is fabricated, likely because it gives the media something else to divide us with. the only officially labelled generation was the baby boomers.
Our mouthpiece to complain and share outrage is what changed. In Desert Storm or Bosnia, you'd get a 5 minute update on the war, tucked inside a 30m national news cast (not speaking for everyone but the majority of Americans). Now you get nonstop almost-live combat footage, citizen journalists (a good thing), along with disinformation from bad actors trying to manipulate the narrative.
Have people always thought this (e.g. "the youth of today are lazy") or is it measurably true?
I feel like it's obviously true.