Comment on Anon thinks about human history
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 months agoprogress humanity has made
That word implies a positive growth. Technological advancement seems like a better fit. Although we did that, and many tinkering with productivity, our life standarts was not consistent with that.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I would like you to look at the relative populations of slaves to free people, the rate of death by starvation, the rate of death by malaria, the rate of death in childbirth (both parent and child), and tell me we haven’t made significant positive growth.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
It depends on if you watch one country or the world as the whole. I’m now in t-shirt, pants and throusers made somewhere in Asia or Africa. I don’t feel they have these rates just like ours. I’m a part of an elite to speak English language in my hole. These workers who produced everything in my house didn’t have that time to learn a foreign language, nor they have time to shitpost in it. I feel a little pity for when I despised to work with dangerous chemicals for a while in the past, and they did so for years, died from illneses caused by it, worked with bare hands and without respiratory protection, just to have a meal on the table. There are bad things happening we are isolated from, but it doesn’t mean theybdon’t happen.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I never said bad things don’t happen. Bad things happen all the time, constantly. The poorest people on earth have a lower quality of life relative to the wealthiest people on Earth than ever before in history, but that is largely because the wealthiest people on earth have never been as wealthy as they are now. I reckon there are few places where the quality of life right now is significantly worse than it was in that location 1,000 years ago.
The one exception, of course, is climate change. Hundreds of millions, potentially billions of people will be killed within the next couple of centuries due to anthropogenic climate change. I still hold that humanity as a whole is making progress, largely because I can’t think of a single empire in the past that wouldn’t exploit fossil fuels more than we do now, if they knew how to.