IdleRich
IdleRich
But presumably you see some improvements as well as backwards steps? I'd say that a story about how everything has got worse is no more convincing than the myth of progress"Well, obviously I disagree, which is why I wrote all that stuff above it."
By judgment you just mean gut feeling though right? Which is fair enough, there is no metric for actually knowing that I can imagine. Not convinced though, if I'd been someone whose sexuality was criminalised and then it wasn't then it would take some pretty bad stuff happening elsewhere to make me think that society was moving in the wrong direction."The second thing that this rests on is taking marginal gains to some particular person or subgroup, but ignoring the whole effect. Sure, a “gaylord”, or a woman, or a poor person, might prefer to have the individual gains that they made in a straight offer, but would they take them in exchange for the total change in society over the last hundred years? I’m pretty sure that the answer for most people would be “no”. That’s simply a matter of judgement. And yes, a lot of this rests on the differences in morality and values between now and then. What else would it rest on?"
The second bit though, you misunderstand me. I'm saying that if you could transport a lot of people from 1911 to 2011 then probably a lot of the things they would list as detrimental changes would be "Woman are allowed to vote" "Hardly anyone goes to church on Sunday" "There are lots of black people and we're not allowed to treat them as sub-human". In other words, the things they might not like are often gonna be things I (and probably you) do like.
I mean, what you seem to be saying is "People from 1911 wouldn't like 2011 and so I'm right in talking about anti-progress" but the things that people from 1911 would hate aren't the same things as you are decrying now and so I'm not sure the argument is valid.