Why do most people hold a progressive/whiggish/linear view of history...

BLACK LIVES MATTER

No they don't idiot

most times ive seen it was with shit that dosent make sense with

>i dont believe marriage is defined with two of the same sex
>oh come on its the current year

>i appointed a muslim to the parliment
>why
>oh come on its the current year

It's 2016. Why haven't all the jews been gassed yet?

The fact that they use the current year in their statement implies that they think 2016 is more advanced than say, 2003. It is a very linear way of thinking and very much based in the belief that things naturally get better as time passes. Which is why they also say stuff like "don't be on the wrong side of history" as though history is some independent force for change and not made up of the contingent decisions of individuals based on a variety of factors.

Well just because technology progresses linearly, Whiggos and Marxtards believe ideology and knowledge progresses the same way.

they mean "your memes are old"

it's a reply you might give to someone linking to NGGYU. /pol/ just doesn't have the awareness to consider that someone might find a serious appeal against "degeneracy" funny.

I wish people would say monotonic instead of linear since no one argues that the rate of societal/cultural progress is constant.

t. math sperg

Linear views of history became dominant with the rise of Christianity.

Yes most people just assume it's a linear progression, except the medieval period which is obviously a backwards period both technologically and culturally due to Christianity right?

What's truly sad is "it's X year, you're on the wrong side of history, you've got dated thinking" is seriously being used as an argument in of itself now. People were trying to pull that bullshit with trying to justify socialism being the right choice in a thread on here yesterday.

The irony is they are stuck in a nearly 200 year old ideology, which was thoroughly ripped to pieces by academics nearly 100 years ago.

Those same people are the same ones on here that say "le /pol/ needs to leave XD." Honestly they're just as bad as /pol/, you can't agree with any far-right ideology or leader without being called a stormfag.

>societal/cultural progress

Holy shit you insane motherfucker, it's about time someone pointed out that you're straight up retarded. Cultural progress has advanced light years in tandem with technological progress - just because you're ostracized for calling people nigger doesn't mean the world is a worse place to live.

Meanwhile, "alienation, overstimulation, and mental stress" are symptoms of modern Western society, but they are not synonymous with it. It's just what was pointed out earlier in this thread: "society has had the capacity to fix this problem for some time and yet has neglected to do so." The minute you agitate for changes in capitalism and your respective state apparatus is the minute you will be helping to fix the problem. "Muh Whig strawmen" is not about solutions, you just want to bitch about people just as politically, socially, and intellectually inactive as you.

It's just the extension of the absurd notion of "progress" essentially all mainstream folks fall into, not just left-liberals.

Remember kids, if you believe African societies are "less progressed" than the West, you are behaving identically to politicians who choose the makeup of their cabinet based on the year.

>Cultural progress has advanced light years in tandem with technological progress

Is that why Islam is dominating the West and will be in charge within the next century?

t. retard

Tumblr needs to leave

>Remember kids, if you believe African societies are "less progressed" than the West, you are behaving identically to politicians who choose the makeup of their cabinet based on the year.

Kind of true 2bh. Stormfags also fall into the trap of thinking technology and economic development = progress and civilization.

Blame Petrarch and his cycles of rebirth desu senpai

I don't see how it can mean anything but the progressive/Whig view. If people think something is a social problem, and they say, "It's 20XX", that implies that they think society should naturally have addressed this problem by now in the move towards a more perfect society. It doesn't really imply, "This is my view of the zeitgeist", because who says something like "It's 2016, we should have gay marriage by now", but would then beokay with gay marriage ending in the event that the zeitgeist changes, as though it were a fashion? No one, which is why the "It's [current year]" arguments imply that history is building to a specific point.

Correct. The only major difference is that right-liberals tend to be conservative. They like the way things are going or the way things recently were. Their perfect world is usually somewhere between 1860 and 1960.

Left-liberals desire a world like ours, but more equal in ways that have not yet been achieved. They believe a perfect world is right on the horizon, at least until a new cause comes around.

What a waste of post. What a waste of a life.

(checked)
i have nothing to contribute to this threads, just wanted to check your quads

sorry

Today's left-liberal is tomorrow's right-liberal

The linear progressive historical model is used less as a practical view of history and more as a ideal to strive for. At least that's what I've observed.

Oh absolutely. I'd argue that Trump's Republican Party is driven by revanchism for the recent past. Their platform is just a cry of return to the mores, demographics, and legal-institutional conditions of the Nixon years.

Does anyone else go through phases where they are depressed, intelligent, and see what is coming, and then emerge from the phase, become slightly more dull, and never think about it?

I really think that my depressed self is more insightful about the global future. But my body can't handle it and I snap back.

I wonder if this is what it is like before a World War. The truth is quite clear, but nobody can hold it in their heads because it's such a void of horror.

Why the fuck do people keep saying the WW3 is coming when we don't even know against whom?

not saying its coming but its pretty clear the tensions are higher between russia and us more so then the fall of ussr

There's a higher chance of the US being in an armed conflict with the PRC than with the USSR desu

I'm not sure if it's a "World War". What I'm saying is, many different factors are currently steadily moving towards "horror", and there is absolutely nothing stopping them.

I have no idea why people think this, if anything shit seems to be improving. The only worrying thing are the constant sandnigger attacks but those goatfucker can't and won't trigger WW3, they are not that important.

we have monuments dedicated everywhere to 'The Great War', demarcated in name from all other wars before based on how stupendous it was. Not only that, we had a sequel that was to be bigger and better.

We saw the coalescing of all these various historical timelines of independent nations (used loosely as nationalism itself means fuck all) where it took the unfettered expression of mans wanton desires to just be cunts before we started the general agreement that perhaps our interests are best served through mitigated peace.

There are still millions of people that were alive during this period, where for them 1950 was "the current year", and if they were to look into the past with a 100 years lens, they could pull historical examples to make salient points about current climates and the effect of those upon the human psyche/well being.

How long do we have to measure the effect of direct history, where we can look and say "oh because of x event, y conditions result."? At what point do we look back at World War Two, and see it is another European skirmish? the figurehead of the "enemy" has transcended popular culture, somewhat at odds with the prerogative of history to recall empirically, as "Hitler" is becoming less associated with the man behind the ghastly horrors of a war, as it is becoming a self-perpetuating notion of what is "bad" or "evil". When the generation dies out, and with it, the cultural and social attitudes that were fostered by both the time preceding World War Two and following it, do we shift to a new epoch determined by the post World War Two period and that period of history that forms from now, until 2045, or do we subsist in the mindset determined by our present milieu with minor instances of progressive attitudes prevailing and causing a general change?

>The only worrying thing are the constant sandnigger attacks but those goatfucker can't and won't trigger WW3, they are not that important.

No you dummy. Nobody cares about countries anymore. Countries are just run by bland bureaucrats who don't believe anything except "let's not go overboard".

The danger is the people. Millions of savvy people with free time to construct an obsessive worldview and discuss it online. Every event in the news is taken as evidence for one side or the other. Total polarisation, every country split in half.

It's all memes until it isn't.

>the biggest threat is shitposting

lol okay

It literally is.

Do you remember when /pol/ posting was a thing for a containment board? Checked Youtube comments lately? Checked Reddit? Do you think all of those people are paper tigers?

Why would youtube comments of all things signal the apocalypse? And no I don't read youtube comments as a rule because I'm not a retard (unlike you).

Also, your comment on technology is garbage. Technology is everything - every expressive act that involves some
Tangible manipulation of nature constitutes a technological enterprise. Technology cannot progress as it must necessarily already exist, it is the humans attempt to understand technology that progresses.

Humans can advance correlative to technology, and measure their success based upon their manipulation of the environment and the results it produces. technology is both stagnant, being all that presently discovered, and fluid, being all that yet to be discovered.

I don't really have a point actually...

>And no I don't read youtube comments as a rule because I'm not a retard (unlike you).
That's exactly how this functions. You know many people think only a retard would go on Veeky Forums. Coupled with social isolation, we have the perfect recipe for people to not know anything about each other, and assume that they all have the "right" opinions.

Do ad hominems count as proper arguments yet? I wish so.

Tensions are rising between European states. Russia really wants to posit itself as the second-place power, and its continued aggression could cause the US to retaliate.

China is also a sleeping dragon.

Lmao what a fucking mistake the destruction of the USSR was

Nationalist regimes are always more likely to cause destabilizing wars

>i want to be a plebiserf in technotheofuedalism

>between European states

Which ones?

>I like living in a stable country that isn't actively oppressing anyone.

Kill yourself white male.

Work on your prose.

Terrorism is a fucking distraction. It's scary when a Muslim kills ten people in some train station, but not actually threatening to state security.

Even in 2001, the number of Americans killed by terrorism was lower than the number of Americans killed in robberies. And both these together are dwarfed by automotive death.

Demographic shift in Europe is more worrisome from the perspective of Western governments, and I say this as a leftist.

The German-led order and detractors from the right and the left. Britain, Greece, Spain. We'll see how things change as non-liberal parties emerge in these stares and others.

tips - I am poor at expressing thought.

>A is a problem and B is a bigger problem, therefore A is not a problem

>but has quality of life and relationships improved for the average person
looking at crime rates, I'd immediately say yes

Given our political climate, you'd think A was a global crisis and B a minor disturbance

The most valuable resource for the improvement of mankind is knowledge, which is something we can never lose and will always accumulate more of.

For that reason, looking at the long-term, mankind as a whole will always improve their lot, and the linear view must necessarily be correct.

Me stubbing my fucking toe is a problem but you don't see it taking up 50% of the headlines in the states.

There are literally no islamist political leaders in teh West, at all. You are clearly a retard.

you probably would if ISIS took credit for it.

>which is something we can never lose and will always accumulate more of.

explain how a clearly conspired terrorist attack isn't news worthy

Rise of functional illiteracy

It's the current year why are you still able to read I mean come on

It may be, but in broadcasting it to the world you are also giving the terrorist what he desires more than anything; attention.

Compare it to school shootings in the US; the number and brutality of those also increased remarkably after the media went in a frenzy over Columbine.

> rise of

Paedagogy and teaching is also an example of the sort of things that we, in the long term, improve.

There may be blibs along the way when politicians decide to gut the school system to win easy votes, but in the long run, even that should be corrected.

Meanwhile books collect dust, newspapers disappear, and social media are becoming all that people read

well no shit media is always gunna milk the shit out of stories for ratings. it does not mean the average person dosent get the right to see that people are attacking in the name of alien ideals that are incompatible with his way of life

Human life is in average the best it's ever been. There is no other time in history that it was better.

are they really, though?

I'm not sure the population en bloc is less informed than they were 50 or 100 years ago.

But I would be worried that the media as a whole is focusing too much on the wrong thing, giving people a skewered view of the world, reality isn't 95% terrorism, Donald Trump and Pokemon Go

I fully believe that people have a right to know these things, but seriously, terrorism takes up what, 40% of the newsstream these days?

How can such a high number possibly be justified, especially considering how unlikely a terrorist attack actually is.

And I must repeat, the media coverage is precisely what the terrorist wants, why give it to him? To inform people? How exactly is your average man on the street possibly supposed to operationalize the knowledge that in a world of 8 billion people, a few hundred are conspiring to kill im in a brutal and sudden fashion for abstract reasons?

>reality isn't 95% terrorism, Donald Trump and Pokemon Go
How dare you question what Big Brother gives you, you disobedient regressive antirevolutionary, can't you see it's the current year?

The terrorists are practically in bed with the media. They have the common goal of dividing people. it Nurtures more views and ratings for media and serves theological purposes for the jihadist attention whores. either way i believe that it should get more attention proportionally. saying that fucking air conditioning is more dangerous than isis makes you look like a faggot. And jihadists poring into the country and scaring people into converting while they breed like rabbits can certainly threaten way of life more then an air conditioner or car can.

Except for all of those times when we did lose knowledge, you dumbass.

Unlikely to happen unless the world gets completely nuked.

You're delusional. Is NATO going to break up because you don't have any friends?

You mean like the library at Alexandria?

> jihadists poring into this country, converting people and breeding like rabbits

This sort of paranoia is another reason I think we have talked a little too much about terrorism.

Name one

that sort of event couldn't really be replicated, since information tends to be stored on multiple on-and-off-premise servers these days, as well as shared among countless people.

For one there are tons of historical records and documents that that got burned in buildings, intentionally destroyed, or just straight up lost.

Yes but many of them have been relocated, and at the same time, our methods of storage have evolved considerably since then, see

>mfw Whig retards on Veeky Forums have to explain to chronically malnourished children who get beaten and raped by their parents that life is totally awesome now and there's nothing to worry about

I'm sure even the biggest most whiggest retard would be able to tell you that the bad things going on in the world today aren't isolated to today and in most cases were a lot worse before.

Concrete
Linear perspective
unaltered literature that the church destroyed outright or made it fit their narrative
Numerous historical records

see

I guess some years are more current than others

In the western world at least, people are actually nice, like the average person is pleasant and nice and you'll get along amicably with them.

That might seem like nothing, so what right? But it's actually very different to the past.

If you read any sort of biography or account of life in the past, hell even 50 years ago, pretty much everyone was a straight up asshole to your face. Abuse in childhood was extremely common, abuse and shitty treatment by other people was extremely common. It was common to be a customer in a shop and be abused and insulted by the owner, how the tables have turned on that. It probably goes a long way to explain why everybody was so fucked up and did such fucked up things in the past that are much less common today, but i stress, in the west. The reason is probably our coddled upbringings and huge focus on being a good person who does the right thing, it's especially prominent in children cartoons.

I say in the west, because i have lived in some developing countries, among the local people, and they are still living, in a cultural sense, metaphorically speaking, in the past. Everyone is an asshole, shopkeepers are assholes, bullying continues well into adulthood past school, pretty much every child faced childhood abuse, and like 75% of the women had sexual abuse. Families are dominating but uncaring, cold and controlling. This just fucks people up, completely, people from developing countries have way more mental problems than westerners, westerners might seem like they're fucked up with the therapy and depression, sure, but it's rare for us to be abused now, or bullied in adulthood, or so fucked up we repeat it and end up doing fucked up shit.

Westerners do not know how good we have life. The reason we have stupid radical feminism and other bullshit whiny complainers is because it's human nature to continually try to improve the situation, but the situation is so fucking good there's nothing to fix so we make shit up.

there might be something to this. I'm always amazed when I'm watching tv shows, cartoons or reading books about the old days and seeing how rough people, especially children, are to one another.

>scaring people into converting
Sure thing, user

not jihadists but muslims

>Hurr people should not look at history via technological progress,
>Socio-Cultural progress = Important.
You're part of the cancer yourself. Any talk of "progress" is inimical to the study of history itself.

"Progress" implies some nebulous, predicted, future that multiple beliefs/political narratives push as an agenda. Christians have the Apocalypse while Marxists have eventual Communism.

The historian does not/should not care about this future since *it hasn't happened yet.* Ergo any talk of progress is not proper to history. Progress leads to guestimation, waving narratives over others and stressing that shit is important, and outright revisionism.

Reminder that not even technology progresses linearly.

>"Progress" implies some nebulous, predicted, future that multiple beliefs/political narratives push as an agenda. Christians have the Apocalypse while Marxists have eventual Communism.
>The historian does not/should not care about this future since *it hasn't happened yet.* Ergo any talk of progress is not proper to history. Progress leads to guestimation, waving narratives over others and stressing that shit is important, and outright revisionism.
Thank you.

Fuck progress and the idolaters named after her.

The tension between the European states have always been there, it's just becoming more pronounced as the veneer of civility they've maintained erodes in the face of economic crisis and external political pressure; old rivalries and animosities created by two world wars will tear Europe apart.

>The historian does not/should not care about this future since *it hasn't happened yet.*
Wat. History is our lesson on how do plan the future.

Also why is everyone so against progress? Would you fucks still rather be in the stone age getting felt up by your uncle?