You know what pisses me off?
I mean, besides Microsoft, zealots, germs, St. Valentine's Day, and people who don't visit my site?
It's those people who rant and rave saying how crappy the world is today. Newsflash, knuckleheads, we are the best off we've even been in HISTORY. I can prove it, too. Infant mortality (as I mentioned last time) is MUCH lower. Scurvey, ricketts, and other nutritional diseases, epidemic throughout most of our history, are virtually unknown anymore. Hell, only in the 20th century are we as healthy as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, since agricultural peoples are rather notoriously restricted in their diets. We have antibiotics, hospitals, TV, cars, high literacy, and comparably little violence.
While I'm thinking about it, you know what else pisses me off? Those morons who claim that TV, guns, rock music, or whatever cause violence. Earth to planet Moronica. There was violence before TV, there will be violence with TV, there will be violence if we got rid of TV and whatever else they blame these days. Hell, they had a not more violence before the days of these so-called subversive elements. At least people don't go around killing every living thing in any given city, like in the good old days. Countries where they don't have TV are a lot more violent than the worst parts of our country (can we say Rwanda?) Hitler didn't have a TV. Maybe if he did he'd spend all of his time watching the Three Stooges instead of killing tens of millions of people. Also, in England their television is FAR more permissive than ours in terms of sex and violence and they have far less crime, and I speak from experience. In Switzerland everyone is a member of the defence force and when they're done with their training, the bring their military weaponry home with them. You know what their murder rate is? NEAR ZERO.
That's all for my mandatory digression.
A few weeks ago I bought a book called Plague, Pox, and Pestilence: Disease in History, and boy, is it a depressing book. It also reaffirmed my belief that we have it DAMN good these days. Tuberculosis, small pox, cholera, ergotism, bubonic plague, typhoid, all of these were plagues that killed millions of people with alarming regularity, but are virtually unheard of today. People (particularly in Europe) lived on subsistance farms, were malnourished, and were constantly being slaughtered by disease and each other. Not a fun life. They were ridden with fleas, lice, and other parasites, lived in total squalor, and they knew no better.
And that, I believe, is why things turned out like they did, with Europeans conquering the world. You gotta figure that Europe was probably THE worst place to live in the entire world (China was probably a pretty close second). I reckon that all of the diseases constantly sweeping over Europe combined with Islamic expansion and frequent invasions by nomads form the Steppes they developed a continental seige mentality and inferiority complex that lasted centuries. Ironically, this eventually spilled over to Islamic nations which up until then had been some of the most tolerant and enlightened people of the world at that time: the constant crusades sent to Islamic lands gave hard-liners a chance to takeover and they're still there.
So anyway, for centuries Europeans were struggling just to survive, as their kings jostled amongst each other for power and acrid tides of disease swept over the continent again and again. When borders solidified and nautical technology improved, what to they do? The turn their attention outward, hell bent on proving themselves by subjugating everybody else. People raised in such horrible conditions become indifferent to their own suffering as well as everybody else's. Now that our lives have vastly improved, we can afford to be tolerant. Good thing, too. Can you imagine medieval rulers with nukes?
Therefore, we are damn well off these days, and I'm sick of those damn doomsayers preaching destruction caused by everything from global warming to Saturday morning cartoons. Remember a couple fo years ago when know-it-all pundits were predicting that the Internet would collapse because of all of the strain put on it?
Guess what?
THEY WERE WRONG! They always are. People have been predicting the end of the world since they could think. Up until know they've just been insane cultists, but now insane scientists with stock in certain companies that stand to gain from the panic are joining the melee. Remeber a couple of years ago when everyone was afraid we were running out of landfill space and people were predicting a crisis?
Guess what?
THEY WERE WRONG! And landfill companies actually ENCOURAGED the hysteria so they could charge higher rates. Now we've got more landfill space than ever and everything's just ducky. Doomsayers can kiss my big, hairy...uh...muscular, sexy ass.
Now normally I'd let these morons and their fad disasters come and go ("Gee, it's Tuesday, so today is Killer Comet Day!"), but they pose a real danger to us. If something really big DID come along, the message would get lost in the static of all of the frivolous panics created by any loser with an agenda and too much free time. Remember when people were warning that in the very near future Social Security would become bankrupt?
Guess what?