Relative to...?
The previous 2 millions years of human existence. In the entirety of known human history, there was never a time when the human race as a whole was doing as well, living as well, thinking as much, knowing as much, learning as much, living as long, feeling as healthy, caring as much for one another, or growing as much in general as it is today.
Like the Chinese.
The Chinese are their own Civilization, which never really got a profound contact with western civilization. They have their own virtues and values, some of them magnificent, others rather lamentable.
Again, all told, if one of the two are going to be our future Overlords, I'd much rather it be India with its relatively profound western influence, than China with its relative shallow western influence.
Oh? Do tell how this sweeping Western civilization has eradicated poverty and enhanced every nation where its boot has trod. Why don't you start with South America, perhaps Uruguay specifically?
Sure. Uruguay in the 19th century was known as "the Purple Land" because its green fields were stained with blood until they turned purple. Travelogues of the time detail how its people massacred themselves in the internecine warfare known as the "Guerra Grande", the people lived in an abject and miserable poverty, and general backwardness.
Then along came the great reformers: Varela and Rodo, who transformed the education system, making it "free, secular and obligatory" for everyone, modeling it in the continental european model. Battle did the same with government, modeling the Uruguayan state after the French welfare state. Within 50 years of it having been known as the "Purple Lands" and being one of the most violent, insecure and unstable parts of South America, Uruguay came to be known as the "Switzerland of South America", one of the wealthiest, most prosperous, most stable, and most peaceful countries in South America.
THAT, sir, is what Civilization does for people.
Only from the 'technology = civilized' perspective. Regardless of your obstinate refusal to acknowledge it, there are other perspectives that don't place quite the emphasis on technology for its own sake as a requisite for civilization.
And you like to lecture me on reading comprehension. I was NEVER arguing that it was technology that equals civilization. That is just your plan of attack. Ok, so its not lack of reading comprehension as it is outright dishonesty.
It isn't about technology, its about a framework of civil ethics, that leads to progress, that leads to an improvement in quality of life.
The Romans had very little technology compared to us but they had a spectacular sense of civil ethics, and had a correspondingly high quality of life.
confidence and a quick response do not a valid answer make.
How does one really validly "answer" someone suggesting something as atrocious as that the modern middle class have it
as bad as the Serfs? It is a class-based blindness combined with historical ignorance to form the Perfect Storm of offensiveness.
I'm sorry you don't like your job at Wal-mart, or wherever. But seriously, even in this economy, even with declining job prospects, if you were to change places for one fucking day with a peasant from medieval europe, assuming you survived to see the next sunrise, you'd be fucking begging to return to this society. And the fact that you seriously try to assert otherwise just makes you look like such an utterly small-minded, utterly self-absorb pig-idiot who really believes "no one has it as bad as we do" when he's getting to live better than fucking monarchs did, with far more freedoms of both the abstract and the downright pragmatic than almost any other human being who ever lived has gotten to have, and you're fucking COMPLAINING. How blindingly willfully ignorant you are is only believable compared to how incredibly fucking
spoiled you are.
There is no society in the history of man which has been better for the general commonwealth of its people than our own.
RPGPundit