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Pastimes : Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (802)	6/24/2008 12:34:52 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3816

Not all changes are positive, OTOH reduced racial discrimination is not the only improvement from when Prager was a boy. We have a lot more wealth, better technology, and much more opportunities for travel and trade, we have more advanced scientific knowledge, fewer people in desperate poverty (in an absolute sense, not relative to the overall rising standard). We have more moviews, books, tv shows, etc. Sure a lot of them are crap, but a lot of them where crap back then as well, we just remember the better ones because the worst aren't kept available. We also have whole new forms of communicating and presenting ideas, stories, and information most notably the web and other internet applications. Even in terms of social changes dropping out from consideration anything directly from trade, technology, and wealth, there are some benefits. Prager points out reduced racism, and there is more opportunity for people to live their life in very different ways, that's not always good, certainly people make bad choices with the new opportunities, but on the whole its good. When Prager was a boy we where in the cold war, and many figured we might face nuclear annihilation at any point. When he was a young boy we where in the Korean war, a far bloodier conflict than Iraq, not long before he was born we where fighting WWII, which killed around a hundred times as many Americans as have died in Iraq, and which killed close to three quarters of a million people world wide. Also in that general era you had the depression, the Holocaust, and other Nazi atrocities, and Stalin's atrocities, of course they where not "Prager "was a boy" (he was born in '48 Stalin was still around, but only for a few more years, and Hitler was gone), but even if you ignore events before he was a boy you had Mao's atrocities, and many other negative things that happened after he was no longer a boy. Would I like to have some things today be more like the world he describes in his article? Yes. He does point out some clearly negative changes, as well as some arguably negative changes. But would I rather live in 1948 than today? I don't think so. Am I worried about some of the negative trends of our time? Yes. But I'm also exited about the great possibilities of the future, and there where plenty of negative trends going on in 1948 (such as a strong movement towards socialism that had been going on for some time, and was continuing).