ITT: folks try to find an edge case to invalidate the graph of their greatest dislike/concern.
There are some good topics of progress on earth. There are many bad. There are many injustices and side cases that these graphs don’t display. Folks online sometimes cannot ever see anything but doom.
Legal slavery is up again because we uncovered The US prison system being basically slavery and china committing a holocaust knockoff, and Russia sending people to work camps and in Africa Noone actually takes care of it.
Deaths from Disasters is also up, waaaaay up if we count covid.
Nuclear Arms are rising again as we basically slipped into Cold War Reheated with expectations of a WW3 in the next 20 years.
I think we all know why battle Deaths are up, but they are up significantly.
Smallpox is also rising again thanks to antivax idiots… (clarification, similar diseases that have been officially eradicated in many places are making comebacks, chickenpox to name one, and it’s only a matter of time until smallpox itself comes back)
Smoke particles… Well emitted per person is probably down, but we had and have repeated massive wildfires, so i guess that graph also goes up.
Hunger goes up again as well thanks to climate change. And if we would use numbers not influenced by the extreme population growth in India and China it would never have been falling.
Im all for optimism, but not Naivety and those numbers are old as well.
Legal slavery… Hey, I wonder if we’re including America in this list? What with the whole “except as a punishment for crime” clause that was conspicuously not covered in my high school education. Shame we don’t have access to the information they used to structure the graph.
Oil spills… Hey, wasn’t there an enormous oil spill in 2010 that dumped about as much crude as all the rest of the sources on this graph combined? Strange that isn’t listed- Oh, I see. We’re only talking about boats, and the front doesn’t fall off of those anymore. But wait, it lists a 636kt spill in 1979- the ixtoc spill which before bp was the largest spill in history. Strange. Very strange.
Plane crash deaths… Hey, wasn’t there no civilian aviation regulations in 1929? No strict standards for training and construction? It’s pretty good we started regulating that, yep. Kinda seems strange to compare a time when any drunk cowboy could hop in a wooden-and-paper biplane to a time when even when the door blows out and the cabin loses pressure at altitude nobody dies.
Child labor… I guess I can’t fault the author for not predicting the future from 2018. Does seem kinda strange conditions for the graph though. both full time and “bad conditions?” I would personally have considered a child between 5-14 working full-time instead of going to school to be in bad conditions, but hey maybe thats just me.
Solar prices… Yep, you got me on this one. Like most other commercial technologies, solar panels have tended to get cheaper since their inception. You got me, this is unironically good.
HIV infections… They should never have been as high as this in the first place, fuck-you-very-much reagan, you evil bastard, I’m disappointed there’s no hell for you to burn in, but yeah its nice that we have better understanding as a community, and better medical treatments.
Disasters… yeah it turns out that actively planning for disasters is a way better idea than the mostly just “god wills it because sin” thing we did in the past. Whoda thunkit.
nuclear… 15,000 nuclear arms are still an apocalyptic lot. This is the older, smaller ones, that we know about.
I think I’ve had enough nauseatingly false optimism for one day.
Edit: Deepity, noun: (1) A statement that appears profound but only because it is actually logically ill-formed. (2) A statement that, to the extent which it is true is trivial, and to the extent which it is not trivial is not true.
Actually if you’re not being cynical you’re literally a bad person who wants people to die. How can you possibly celebrate progress when there are unsolved problems and the world still isn’t perfect?
Your criticism of the plane crash statistics are dumb. You’re basically complaining that falling numbers because of actual actions on problems don’t count because… Reasons? You can be cynical while recognising that progress is indeed happening
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