What about "there is war in the middle east, still/again" is remotely unique enough in the last century to be a defining moment of the half-century?
If an event has the potential to be that, it's the near-peer land war in Europe.
The current Israel/Gaza conflict is a blip that is mildly different in degree than the same thing that has happened every decade or so since Israel was created.
Not to this degree in the last few decades. But I feel you are overall correct, it's just that the Internet allows for much bigger coverage of the details of the horrors committed, and it's interesting how governments around the world now fail so completely to shape the narrative.
The October 7th attacks were way worse than Hamas attacks that came before in recent history. The response was way worse than what has happened before in recent history.
And so both sides feel fully justified with their courses of action, because of what the other side did to them. That is the part that is so much not unique.
Governments are still shaping the narrative, it's just that the ones that are most skilled and successful in manipulating social media happen to be the non-Western ones (Think about China controlling Tiktok, or the various Russia election influence theories).
Ukraine War started 3 years ago in 2022, not two years ago. Or 11 years ago in 2014, if we count from the illegal annexation of Crimea.
The Gaza war will be a footnote to the actual war happening in Europe. When the terrorist attack of October 7 happened, my first sentiment was that Putin will be ecstatic that half of the world's attention will be shifted away from his crimes. A conspiracy minded person might think this was not an accident.
Who do you mean with "many people"? Developers who do not care or middle management that oversold features and overcommitted w.r.t. deadlines? Or both? Someone else?
>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history.
Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years.
So while I feel we are living in the stupidest era in history (the SEIH), I must conclude that we don't.
I think what's more important, is that you have a device that will broadcast you a personalized feed of whatever the most engaging stupidity in the world is, at that very moment, 24/7. The magnitude of this passive exposure is far greater than even the rate of spread.
I generally agree, but if we assume that the amount of history scales proportional to the number of humans, then it's not so clear cut, as there's never been more humans alive than now. In other words, there's just more history to be dumb in, nowadays, than before.
This is not enforcement, it is a spree of extrajudicial kidnappings without orders from the court. This puts us back so far even the Magna Carta is futuristic.
I think it's an understandable overshoot to confront what some might see as a long-standing, festering problem. This isn't an endorsement, but the frantic attitude makes sense: rush and get the job done, there's only one 4-year-term in which to do it.
IIRC, Biden's administration claimed 10-11 million undocumented migrants. Given where they are belived to be working, in food supply, removing them within a term of office (irregardless of questions about accuracy or due process) is likely to cause food shortage within the USA.
I'm on a different continent, so this metaphorical frag grenade exploding in the USA's metaphorical tent isn't my problem. But it should slow down the people desperate to make it a fix-in-one-term thing.
Agree completely. The parties here really couldn't be farther from consensus, so the sloppy, frantic policy decisions will probably continue. My knowledge of political history doesn't go far back, but it feels like a new thing for every presidential term to start off with a wave of retractions of the last guy's decisions.
Sure, first you hallucinate a problem that doesn't exist, then you shred the Constitution "solving" the imaginary problem. Literally the Hitler gambit.
Illegal immigration is far from an imaginary problem. Any immigration at all will affect the availability of homes, of jobs, of healthcare... So, it ought to be monitored and controlled. This is becoming more relevant as home prices rise and the job market stays sucking.
I don't even think ripping the Constitution up would render the problem "solved." It would really help relieve the panic if the parties could at least agree that the issue does exist; until then, any government plan can expect to be overturned in four years time.
To clarify: not defending literally A.H., I think that's a mischaracterization.
Every reasonable politician agree illegal immigration is illegal. But you're conflating immigration with illegal immigration in your comment, for some reason.
> Any immigration at all will affect the availability of homes, of jobs, of healthcare... So, it ought to be monitored and controlled. This is becoming more relevant as home prices rise and the job market stays sucking.
So does having babies. I don't see your point here. Immigrants come and they provide labor, the same labor we use to build homes and staff hospitals. Most immigrants that come to the U.S. are young and utilize less healthcare services than non-immigrants.
Well, no, almost everything you said simply isn't true. Immigrants create jobs. They create homes. They make healthcare more available. Why? Because they work productively, they earn money, and they spend it in the US. "Illegals" do all this while paying taxes without being eligible for benefits, so arguably they help America more than an average citizen.
There are good reasons to limit immigration, but "they're taking our jobs" isn't one of them.
Secret court proceedings have been a thing since 9/11. People seem to have forgotten that we built a concentration camp in Cuba explicitly to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial, deprive them of their civil liberties and torture (sorry, "enhanced interrogate") them, and how eagerly the American public got behind all of it.
We had the chance to nip it in the bud over 20 years ago and we couldn't. It doesn't look like we're going to this time, either.
On top of the FISA thing, you're already late to this party...?
The current administration believes that non-citizens have no right to due process. If there's no due process, there's no way to prove or disprove citizenship and no court proceeding at all. And SCOTUS ruled that you can ship a non-citizen just... Anywhere you want? Doesn't have to even be on the same continent as their home.
So the Gestapo - sorry, ICE - can kidnap anyone they want, put them in a camp of arbitrarily bad conditions without any form of disclosure or contact to lawyers or family, then send them to a random war-torn country with no belongings.
If you're extra unlucky, they may just send you to a death prison or work camp in a third world dictatorship.
So we are already passed the rubicon of "no court hearing at all". Today we're normalizing deploying the military against US citizens.
That's interesting with the Zillow anecdote. I wonder if the nuance in the title is actually correlated with a difference in behavior/culture/best practices/approach?
[Ex Post Facto Clause, US Constitution](https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11293). Oops, I thought it was so obviously going to be done away with in the courts, but in 1912 the Supreme Court ruled that it applies only to criminal punishments.
