I feel we're riding a knife's edge and there's a hurricane brewing in the gulf of absurdity.
====
Incidentally, I feel like this is why it is so hard to actually learn from history. You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
Great quote. I feel the same way about 9/11 - the feeling of confusion, like "wtf is going on?!" IMHO, only those who lived it can really relate.
You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.
There's the story about the guy who says he was the hardest working man in Vietnam, and then when pressed about what he did, he states he was a trucker to the great surprise of anyone listening.
When asked why he thought that, he says "well I was the only one."
RIP Charlie Kirk, no human deserves that. The rest of us left are still not necessarily better people after that exact moment, hopefully everyone takes a pause.
Here, I get to read all about the latest insanity in the last 24 hrs from…. 4 major countries in Crisis?
Tchau, from central Brazil (today).
https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/947180/female-drivers...
The joke is that everyone else he went to war with was claiming to be something else, so he must have delivered all the supplies himself.
The response is interesting to me, because having fought in a war, though I am not a US veteran -- I instantly got it. And the place I heard it from was more veteran dominated, and everyone instantly understood/appreciated the joke.
Do you think we have a Presidency with the same sensibility? They sent the national guard with zero pretense all over the country. This is about to get serious.
What went poorly is our society's collective response. From the medical and governmental establishment, there was much hemming and hawing over what measures to take for way too long (masking, distancing, closing of public spaces, etc). Taking _any_ countermeasures against the spread of the virus also somehow became a culture war issue. I'm assuming GP meant "left or right" by "either side" so make of that what you will.
-- James Callender, The Prospect Before Us, 1800
Nevertheless, I realize that it's usually a zeitgeist more than any particular thing that really flows through history.
I am definitely worried what Trump and republicans will do as a response.
More posts debating the justification for killing 11 people in a boat in the Caribbean who did not pose an imminent threat.
HN rules do not prevent any of these discussions.
But here we have a individual who advocated those killings.
Here we have an individual who publicly justified school massacres by saying those senseless deaths are a worthwhile price to pay for gun rights in the US.
On HN it's perfectly fine to justify all this violence, to argue that the violence is regrettable but necessary, but any equivalent discussion about this one individual is somehow beyond the pale.
This is the sort of violence that begets more violence.
A school shooter isn’t trying to say “shut down all schools”.
But a terrorist flying a plane into one of the most important symbols of your most important city is certainly trying to send your society a message.
Same with this killing
Think about how you would feel if some guys beat you and your friends up in a bar fight, vs someone individually stalking you and beating you up outside your own house. You got beaten up in both cases, but the bar fight beating will unlikely make you feel as vulnerable and scared to leave the house as being stalked and targeted individually
I'm an outside observer, but isn't that the point of the right to bear arms in your constitution? I don't think the people who wrote it were naive enough to not understand guns could be used for evil purposes, so inherently they supported the price of the deaths of innocents as a trade off for the benefits of guns, right?
Looks like a storm is coming.
I remember being grateful about how that doesn't really happen in the US (Trump being the most recent, but he survived). I guess I was wrong... and, in that case, Garcia Marquez might agree with you.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
There’s endless legal debate how this should be interpreted, but it’s not obvious that there was an assumption that there would be mass individual gun ownership.
1. The goal of the second amendment was never "everyone should be able to have as many guns as they have, and if people use a gun to kill a dozen children then so be it", it was "it should be illegal for the government to take away people's weapons because the first step a tyrant would take is to disarm the populace so they couldn't fight back." That goal doesn't hold water anymore in a world where a computer geek working for the US military in a basement in Virginia can drone strike a wedding on the other side of the world. Instead, the NRA has made "guns good" into something that too many people make their whole personality, and the people who are actually trying to destroy society use that as a weapon to prevent any positive change when someone murders a dozen kids by making people feel like the only choice is between "anyone can have guns and children are murdered every day" or "the government takes your weapons and forces any dissidents into siberian-esque gulags".
2. Firearms were far less common, far less accessible, and far less deadly than they are now. Compared to what was available at the time, modern-day weapons like the AR15 are effectively weapons of mass destruction. If you went into a school with a civil war-era rifle and tried to kill as many people as you could, you'd maybe get one shot off which might not even kill someone if you hit them, and then you'd get tackled while you were trying to reload.
However I was speaking in the context of the tradeoffs of danger and the awareness of what blood you get on your hands for agreeing. Although the writers of this bill couldn't forsee AR15s and drone strikes, I'm sure they could forsee that there was a cost to freedom to bear arms.
What they couldn't have predicted is that the Bill of Rights would also apply to the individual state and local governments since that wasn't true until the 14th amendment almost 100 years later and didn't really kick off until the 1900s. This is obviously important to understand what the original amendments mean.
It's bizarre that there should be "sides" for how to deal with a public health issue. I can understand differing approaches, but it's the extreme polarisation that flabbergasts me.
Not sure what the comparison with COVID is supposed to be. Spanish flu was not created in a lab. There was no vaccine for the Spanish flu. The only real similarity is social distancing, quarantines, and masks -- we did that back then too.
It was essentially not done because it would be too effective.
It's like when a conservative person is canceled they throw an absolute fit, then turn around and cancel someone on the left, without making any connection.
I would go so far as to say going to meetings physically was also a counterbalance.
When you're around other people, even ones who share your beliefs, and say 'I think we should murder that guy!' then in most crowds someone is going to say 'Hey fellow, are you okay?'
It's when you exclusively socially exist in online spaces that the most extreme actions suddenly become encouraged.
Or as Josh Johnson recently quipped, "The internet is all gas no brakes."
We might be thinking of different types of gatherings/meetings. Specifically, I was thinking of someone with a particular set of extremist ideals that get together for a monthly meeting with others with those same extremist ideals. Someone in that group would likely not say "are you okay" rather they'd say "hellzya brother!" or whatever they'd actually phrase it. These types of meetings are also known to have someone speak intentionally seeking to get a member to act as a lone wolf to actually carry out the comment you're hoping someone would tamper. Now, one doesn't need to go to meetings for that encouragement. They just open up whatever app/forum.
A personal salute to all those who fought to preserve it.
There is a great video on the Poles who worked to preserve it. A lot of it is ... Unspeakable.
Where are these people going that they just see encouragement without resistance?
This seems vague. Can you elaborate on the claim you’re making?
It reveals something deep about the human condition. Auchwitz was a perfectly lovely place for many of the employees as long as they disassociated themselves from all the suffering and evil around them.
You could be forgiven for not knowing, since the collective coverage and attention to it since has probably been less, total, than what this received in the last couple hours.
Over the last week or so we've had: serious riots in France, catastrophic riots in Nepal, a scandal in the UK featuring the ambassador to the US, hostile drone incursions into Poland, the murder of Charlie Kirk, the ICE raid on visiting South Korean workers, soldiers on the streets of DC and a threatened incursion into Chicago, a school shooting, revelations about the biggest paedophile scandal of the century and its links to the rich and famous, including the current president, and Israel attacking most of the countries around it.
In the background is the continuing war in Ukraine, China's increasing militarisation and threatened technological lead over the US, the situation in Gaza, the disassembly of the established US federal system of government, existential and economic dread over the impact of AI, and climate change.
If everyone's feeling a little edgy, there may be good reasons for that.
The logic behind the 2nd amendment doesn't hold once Uncle Sam has nuclear tipped icbms and I'm not allowed to have them. I'm also not allowed to have tanks or rocket launchers or even high rate of fire Gatling style guns.
To paraphrase, "if you think the 2nd amendment is what's keeping the government off your back, you don't understand how tanks work"
The response to 9/11 was one of the most foolhardy possible, and it's astounding that any other nature would attempt the same with it still in living memory.
That being the case, I would say their opinions and beliefs are pretty important to the current national climate.
The relative lethality of a particular style of rifle doesn't seem to matter. Better guns than muskets were available at the time, and they didn't seem to think it necessary to limit that amendment.
I don't think your opinions about the history and purpose of the second amendment holds water.
As someone whose parents, grandparents, and entire family lived in Italy through WWII (and one grandfather who lost an eye in WWI), nobody liked talking about it.
If they did talk about it, it was usually brief and imbued with a feeling of "thank God it's over. what a tragedy that we were all used as pawns by the political class for nothing more than selfish ambitions."
Neither was covid-19: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
The rest of the world haven't been shy lately about expressing their opinion of the war, something that Israel recognises and care about, but they have provided no way out for israel to take any other course of action.
Our ideas and opinions should be as harmonious as possible with reality. If Israel was understood better and her concerns and fears engaged seriously it would go a long way to ending the war.
In the context of this assassination i feel the path forward is not empty platitudes of "deescalation" rather greater empathy and understanding of people you disagree with. This is mainly an internal process, but also one that should have outward expressions too.
What's the Pindar quote again? "War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach"
The modern context is we have gone from a benevolent nation to a blidgerent nation. Not really progress. But the context is decisive.
There's a lot of criticism of places that kept schools closed for longer than was necessary, in retrospect. But we really didn't know whether it would always be the case that the risks to children were low. The virus could have mutated in a way that brought more risk. Or there could have been chronic effects that could only be seen after the passage of time. Given the infectiousness of the virus, it could have been so much worse.
I get the vaccine hesitancy. But I think a lot of people were not willing to accept that vaccination is not just about their own safety, but a collective safety issue.
And the next time this happens (which it probably will given the statistics), the US will probably handle it much better and the lock down will be less severe. I'm Korean American, and something like 10 years before covid, Korea had gone through an earlier pandemic (swine flu?), so when covid hit, it wasn't that big a deal. They already all knew what to do and the lock down wasn't as severe.
Yeah, our lockdown was overkill in many instances, but it was all so new to us. There's a good chance it'll be a lot better managed the next time.
How do you think Palestinians have felt living in an open air prison next to genocidal maniacs with zero ability to control themselves for the past 50 years. USS Liberty should’ve been the end of things, but it wasn’t.
I walked all the way back from the famous entrance gate, along the train tracks, to the monument at the back. The place was huge and imagining people suffering there during that type of weather was especially heartbreaking. I was luckily able to convince the taxi driver to wait for me. I have some black and white photos I took of it somewhere on my shelves. That visit sticks with me more powerfully than almost anywhere else I've been.
So public policy should have reflected that, instead of going into counterproductive authoritarian clampdown mode. In my country the authorities literally switched overnight from threatening to jail parents who took their kids out of school to announcing mandatory school closures.
Do you know what Harding's famous "Return to Normalcy" stump speech in the 1920 campaign was about? I bet you don't; few do. My U.S. history textbook in high school mentioned it, but did not explain what it was about.
https://liberalarts.vt.edu/news/articles/2020/08/virginia-te...
It's a political issue no matter how you look at it, and it was a very political issue at that, considering what the state (throughout the Western world and elsewhere too) proposed doing.
To paint it as merely a "public health issue" is doing people who don't agree a tremendous disservice, and it is very much part of the othering that has led us here. Please stop it.
Interesting phrase. "Engineer the pathogen".
There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.
> By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/charlie-...
If your family lived in a village in middle east and the military of another country came and seemingly killed your parents, you would think that the person would grow to have certain opinions on the things and certain enemies.
A lot of the policies being enacted have the potential to create a lot of enemies. Just to name a few, there have been thousands of people fired from federal government. Those people and their families have had their lives changed. You have people from other countries who have lived here their entire lives who are now being separated and sent to other countries. You have people playing politics with Ukraine where many people are dying due to something that the rest of the world has the power to solve. Or people in Palestine being murdered while some talk of building a wealthy paradise on the land where they were raised.
I'm not taking a side on these things. But you have to agree that these tactics have the habit of making very determined and malicious enemies. Many political policies, and the people who have strong opinions on them, have to realize that their opinions and the policies they support, do impact the lives of real people. Potentially causing devastating repercussions, death and suffering. If said people are determined to enact revenge, it is no surprise that feel justified in doing so.
I'm not justifying their thoughts or actions. But you can understand that people who have felt these impacts aren't acting particularly rationally or are stable.
A phrase like "the war" glosses over a lot. If the IDF were not deliberately shooting children¹, would the Israeli public be clamouring, "shoot more children"? If food shipments were not being blockaded², would the public be demanding that Gazans be starved?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-... [2]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-malnutrition-children-blo...
I'm sure some form of military action was necessary in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. Genocide³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ was not.
[3]: https://www.fidh.org/en/region/north-africa-middle-east/isra... [4]: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/un-special-committee-pre... [5]: https://amnesty.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Amnesty-Intern... [6]: https://msf.org.uk/issues/gaza-genocide [7]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/28/middleeast/israeli-human-righ...
And there's no doubt about it - it was a myth. Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944. Ivan and Uncle Sam were kicking down the door, extermination camps were working overtime, yet most people were still fully behind him.
The hardest thing for people to admit is that they've been duped.
The older ladies busy making handmade perogies was such a delicious treat.
But I also got to meet Stefan Petelycky. He wrote the book: Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine
He ended up there and was one of the lucky ones who made it out. When he pulled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo, the number he was given there, a chill crossed my entire body and an overwhelming sense of sadness hit me.
I of course had heard about the concentration camps but seeing a tattoo in person made the event much more real where I could connect to the tragedy in a way I never did.
Another way this observation is manifested is how out of nowhere you have countries voting in extremist parties and politicians.
Why do you believe a pandemic has sides?
There are crowds where that guy is not there, is not heard, or doesn't speak up at all.
In those crowds, people reach out for their pitchforks and outright murder people.
If you take a frank look at history, you will notice those are all too frequent. Even in this century.
You are clearly not paying attention.
Public health is not a technocratic field where there's always clearly one right answer. It presents itself as deciding on things that may hurt individuals but help the collective, and so it naturally attracts collectivists. In other words it's a political field, not a medical one. That then takes them into the realm of sides.
On the charges of genocide... Again what you say should be in harmony with reality. In truth all those sources have an anti israel bias. One can't help but think they started with a conclusion and found the evidence to fit in with it, which is the wrong way round. In any event other bodies like the UK government don't agree. Genocide requires intent and there is simply no intent for genocide from the Israeli government. One can also argue that if indeed genocide was the goal the war would have been much faster. anyway i hope that gives you a better perspective of Israels point of view and interpretation of events. Their stated goals in gaza are destroying hamas and ensuring gaza is no longer a security threat. Hamas is very large and quite well embedded in the civilian population and has a lot of infrastructure which means that even waging a war will lead to a lot of civilian casualties. Something that hamas exploits and people who claim genocide ignore.
I'm telling this story because I think it's how things usually go, and I think you are quite mistaken.
Most of Germany had seen the defeat of 1918. Once a war is started the only way is forward.
And that's just the big events in Europe, if you looked at newspapers you'd see hundreds of horrible things happening every single day.
Even terrorists attacks are way lower than not so long ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Terroris...
My parents had the cold war, petrol crisis, September 11, dotcom, 2008, my grandpa fought in wars in the 60s, my grandma was born right before ww2 and talked to German soldiers when she was 6 and her village was occupied, &c.
Young westerners get scared because they're used to people dying far away, now that it's getting a bit closer they think it's the end of the world, the truth is that it's always been fucked up, we just got locally lucky for a bit
Get out of the news cycle, it really isn't that terrible out there
That's what people did for 99.99% of humanity btw
I dunno, this one is a whole lot less open to interpretation than the first sentence
Funny way to put it. You do not feed the enemy, rest of the world feeds the enemy. You make all effort to prevent the enemy being fed, to starve the enemy to death. Starving the enemy is generally accepted as a war crime, but Israel disagrees. Oh yeah, and enemy in this case includes infants.
Certain methods of dealing with public health issues have historically been shown to be incredibly effective (e.g. vaccination, milk pasteurisation etc), so it's disconcerning when there's a political movement that pushes an agenda that is clearly based on fear and not rational evaluation of the issues. It seems to me that there's a push to make the poorest sections of society become less healthy and more vulnerable.
Anyone picking up the paper could tell that the war wasn't going to be won by them in 1944. It was two years after Stalingrad, a year after Kursk and Italy's surrender, France was being liberated, Finland was collapsing, and Germany was fighting a three-front war.
Compared to all that, 1918 at the time of the armistice looked down-right optimistic.
I mean a lot of people are saying that. Big if true etc.
There are facts, skills, smarts and then there is wisdom. The latter is in short supply and is orthogonal to the other three.
Wilder, in the sense of less Organization, less infrastructure, slower transportation and communication. People had to protect themselves, because there was nobody around who could do it. But today, the majority of people can be reached in a matter of minutes.
> When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere,
You don't understand that guns are the major reason for this?
If you walk slow the earth looks like a plane
If you go faster the earth looks like a sphere
If you travel really fast the earth looks like a dot. A tiny blue one.
Excuse me? Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman were less than 3 months ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...
Ruby Ridge was 1992, Waco was 1993.
1993 was the bombing of the world trade center.
It would be fascinating to see how 2001-2025 fits into that.
The term "well-regulated milita" predates the constitution and traces back to the days when white people were often a substantial minority compared to the populations of enslaved black people they lived among.
On St Croix where a young man named Alexander Hamilton grew up, the ratio was 1 free person to 8 slaves, so the well-regulated militia was to assemble at the fortress if they heard a blast of the cannon: they were required to come with their weapons in order to put down a slave revolt.
Source: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow.
It's also probably worth mentioning that "people" in "the right of the people" certainly excluded slaves from the right to own weapons, making the text even more burdened by its own history
My point is: what the founders understood was that some gun violence was the unavoidable cost of maintaining the system of slavery, itself a system of formalized/normalized political violence.
What’s sad today is how much of “sides” today is based on emotion not fact.
Very few facts in life are absolute.
Hitler was appointed to the chancellorship by senior political leaders (the president and the former chancellor) who thought they could control him. Unfortunately Germany at the time embraced the "unitary executive" theory of government.
We all know how that worked out.
In general, law enforcement is used to prevent harmful behaviour that disrupts society, so preventing theft is typically high up on the list. I think the people decrying shop lifters being targetted are highlighting the hypocrisy of societies that celebrate people who can steal huge amounts of money (e.g. not paying for work/services provided due to them being a large organisation) and yet demonise people who are struggling to survive and end up stealing food.
I was somewhat on the fence about mask mandates (I'm in the UK by the way) as I didn't think the evidence for masks being effective was particularly strong, but I had no issue with wearing a mask in public as it seemed like a sensible precaution that wouldn't cause me any harm. Then, we had social distancing laws introduced which were fairly draconian, but most people tried to observe them. The real kicker was when Boris Johnson and his cronies were caught not following the laws that he himself had introduced.
You’re completely correct about the conservatives and others thinking they could control Hitler
This is worse, but we have always lived in "interesting times" depending on where you were in the globe.
The article literally says there is no consensus.
It objectively isn't and that's what's so tragic. Israel doesn't need to be understood, it needs to work harder to understand. And, per 9/11, it specifically needed to understand that taking Hamas' bait was a straight shot to dashing international goodwill and benefit-of-the-doubt.
There's some far-off timeline where Israel negotiated in good faith for the return of all of the hostages without dropping a single bomb. The anti-war movement that finds one of its most fervent centers in Israel itself is driven by the dawning horror that many of those hostages are never coming home precisely because Israel (again) chose blind fury over reason. And that's not a matter of perspective, it's a simple fact.
It was simple. People without ethical limits seen their opening to weaponize fear and discomfort ... and succeeded.
weaponize fear and discomfort = get close to others (masked) in public and breathe in front of them
I don't think that applies if one of the sides is using rational arguments and statistics
From further in the article: "But the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies - and the BND is the latest to entertain the theory. In January, the US CIA said the coronavirus was "more likely" to have leaked from a lab than to have come from animals."
Clearly world leaders were afraid of anti-Chinese sentiment, didn't want to be seen "siding" with Trump, or just didn't want to piss China off.
That's rich. People who want raw milk are sociopaths? Etc? Once again we have name-calling as a way to shut down debate. Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you, and I bet you have done just that. These false equivalences and exaggerations are in fact incitements to violence. You and all who do this should be ashamed of yourselves.
2. The lab leak hypothesis is geopolitically convenient for the US
3. They explicitly state "low confidence" in their affirmation of this hypothesis
https://record.umich.edu/articles/lockdowns-saved-lives-but-...
So yeah, I do see your point in the lockdowns were probably unnecessary, but as others have mentioned, pandemics were new to the US at the time, and we didn't have the knowledge and procedures on how to best deal with it. Yeah, we did probably go overboard, but what happened is understandable given how deadly Covid was.
We know now that social distancing and masks (for those that are willing) would probably have been enough, as other countries used to pandemics already know, like South Korea.
I can't tell you what my relatives were like leading up to the war (I certainly wasn't born at that point), but they were illiterate peasants from the south, far removed from the cities and politics.
My suspicion is that, if anything, they were like most southern Italians, who seem to have a profound distrust of the government and politicians.
If I'm honest, they didn't have any moral objections to the war--they just felt used.
The difference is the public nature of the execution. That is what makes it more similar to, say, Colombia or Venezuela _to me._ Within the context of 'magical realism', it is the perspective and mass dissemination of the violence that heightens that feeling.
Going back to the original topic, there is a reason that most of 100 Years of Solitude's pivotal moments happen around the staging of public executions (and not so much the off-screen violence, of which there is some but it's not focal).
2. Divided attitudes with regard to the locus of issues around Covid-19, and public policies, are far from exclusive to the USA.
I can understand people wanting raw milk and that's fair enough as it goes, but selling it or providing it to others is risking their health to some degree - this is shown by the relatively high level of people falling seriously ill from drinking raw milk - this is due to the high level of bacteria that is often found in it. If someone does care about the health of others, but believes that raw milk is safe to consume, then it's more a case of ignorance than sociopathy.
> Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you
You're out of order with that comment.
I agree - stats are a tool to try to figure out non-obvious links and trends to figure out what is actually happening. They can certainly be distorted (see mainstream media), but we shouldn't allow bad actors to prevent us making use of probably the best way to investigate population level effects.
Up until the last century, violence was seen as just another necessary part of living, and morality only came into play when it involved you're own community.
[0]: a more nuanced take that is illuminating can be read here: https://www.france24.com/fr/20140730-grande-guerre-poilus-vr...
2. Irrelevent because:
3. Low confidence, but probable merely implies plausibility, at least a somewhat higher likelihood than a wild previously unencountered zoonotic.
Based on all publicly available information it does seem more likely, the CIA will be better informed than the public, if they (and others) concur then I don't see why we need to dismiss it.
I've felt this myself a few times now. Both when Trump was attempted assasinated and now with Charlie Kirk. I am sad that public discourse and our democracies are kind of unraveling these days and that this is just a sad reality of that fact. As far as Trump or Charlie Kirk go, I have no sympathy what so ever.
I'm not sure I really want to blame anyone for things becoming like this, it all seems like par for the course in the world we've created for ourselves. I just wish we were able to stop before this.
1) There is an eternal power struggle among people that is only obliquely acknowledged and seems willfully forgotten.
2) There is a lot of useless crap based on predatory psychological cues that will be weeded out through natural evolution.
Fauci himself was known to say that vaccine development takes at least 5-10 years or something like that (and never mind the fact we had Event 201, that the virus contains code BY MODERNA) or else all hell breaks loose (he was also known to say masks aren't effective)
In the arc of history, it's not that different from any other time. We just have a recency bias.