2016: A Damnable Year

I lost a coach and a friend in 2016.

The further I get away from it the better...

GIVE ME YOUR FACE

Well I think we could lock this thread, I decided to give the debate a rest.

We can create a new one for 2017, which I feel is a lot worse already.

Just another day in the life of Jimmy Nutrin

Or we could leave this one open...you know, just in case someone had the need to rant about 2016 a little bit more...and nevertheless start a new one.

I suggest 2017: A Year of Protests.

More like 2017: The Lights Go Out ^note  The lights are going out all over [the west]. We will not see them again in our lifetime.

Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives

Before we get locked down, I'm gonna suggest 2017: The Chickens Are Coming To Roost

Fittingly, it's the Year of the Rooster.

edited 1st Feb '17 6:27:52 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised

Oh good, I'm not the only one who's been thinking about that quote, lately.

Could we just let this thread fade into the background until a few years from now when we can better judge it in context?

Now that this year ended five months ago, it's time to look back, and I say that the people who called this the worst year in decades or worst year *ever* have way exaggerated.

None of the issues of 2016 were new. Terrorism, shootings, police brutality, Middle East war, and political unrest are nothing new to this year, they have all been issues that have plauged past years this decade, and most of them were all bad before this year, none of them hit their worst point this year.

As well, the impacts of 2016 are currently shaping up to be not as bad as expected: I don't think this year is the "tipping point to collapse" that many people think it is. Donald Trump's election, probably the most significant on a global scale, has not been as bad as it looked so far, since many of his policies he said he would introduce in the first hundred days (the wall, elimination of gun-free zones, Muslim travel ban, repealing Obamacare, cancelling funding of sanctuary cities) have all either fallen through or not happened yet, and in the EU, the election results in recent elections like the German election being won by a social-democrat, the Dutch election giving big gains in progressive parties, and Le Pen currently losing in France seem to have defied fears of far-right power in Europe taking control.

edited 1st May '17 10:40:42 AM by WhatArtThee

Just another day in the life of Jimmy Nutrin

There is more to the world than the West.

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

We are currently working on softening the fall-out of 2016...thankfully those who predicted that 2017 would be even worse are apparently wrong...well, kind of. Turkey for example keeps getting worse. But all this doesn't change that 2016 was a terrible year overall.

Maybe 2016 was a pretty bad year, true, i'm not saying it wasn't, but all the "Worst year in decades" stuff I don't get. I judge really bad years based on events as well as impact, and i'd say 2001 (9/11, which led to major wars that have killed millions, as well as events like the Anthrax mailings), 2008 (Global economic meltdown that we still are feeling the effects of) and maybe even 2011 (Arab Spring leads to rise of groups like ISIS, as well as other really bad events like the major Japanese earthquake and tsunami and Fukishima nuclear plant disaster, as well as Anders Brevik killing 80 in Norway) all are worse years recently. The impacts of 2016 currently are shaping up to not be as bad as feared. And yes, there is more to the world than the west.

And plus, no year is perfect. Pretty much every year since the beginning of time has seen significant violence and political turmoil somewhere in the world. This year is hardly unique.

Finally, time is a continuous spectrum. It's not a clear jump between years. 2015 led directly into 2016, which led directly into 2017. Time isn't a vacuum, the effects of the past cause situations in the present. The turmoil of 2016 was merely a continuation of the growing dissatisfaction with government in past years, not a completely new threat.

edited 2nd May '17 4:47:16 AM by WhatArtThee

Just another day in the life of Jimmy Nutrin

EVERYTHING is merely a continuation of what came before. There is no point using that kind of logic because it then makes nothing worth talking about.

And again, you are focusing way too much on just Western Europe and the US. 2016 has become the kickoff year for a global meltdown. Erdogan went full retard in 2016. Assad and Russia turned around the Syrian Civil War to unknown ramifications. Rama IX has passed, leaving Thailand without someone to look up to in their tumult.

Does all that mean armageddon is upon us? Is the effect going to be immediate? No. But in terms of direct cause and effect, as opposed to indirect causes and effects, 2016 I believe will prove to be one of those years. In terms of what happens in the year before and the year after, they really pale by comparison (I for one do not think 2017 was destined to be worse, merely a continuation of the same).

Final Fantasy, Foreign Policy, and Bollywood. Helluva combo, that...

I still think "kickoff to a global meltdown" is exaggerating things a lot, and I highly doubt that it will be the kickoff year for one. It is true there is political turmoil, but when was there not somewhere in the world? It's nothing new. Since the beginning of civilization empires have risen and fallen, wars have been fought, we've faced unrest, protest, corrupt leaders, government meltdowns, consititutional crisises, economic problems, territorial disputes, power struggles... And this is no different, no "global meltdown" is coming anytime soon. Your treating it like all of a sudden political turmoil on a scale never seen before has begun, when the world has been in turmoil since the rise of civilization and will continue to be until the Sun dies. There has never been a year where the world was at peace. The Doomsday Clock has never been more than 17 minutes from midnight.

And no, I am not denying last year was kinda bad, but the "One of the worst years ever" people are exaggerating a lot. Again, in terms of direct impact I feel that years like 2001, 2008, 2011 (The catalyst for the whole Middle East mess) were a lot worse.

And yes, maybe I am a bit too western-centric, but I can't help it, i'm a teenager living in the USA and the news is always about the west/middle east.

edited 3rd May '17 5:15:26 AM by WhatArtThee

Just another day in the life of Jimmy Nutrin

There were a lot of much worse years, 2016 just represented a political shift and apart from that, it was not different than the years before.

In another note, I find the doomsday clock to be just silly. We are much further away from global collapse (and more peaceful than ever) than they claim: no world wars in sight due to all the nuclear weapons now possessed by all the great powers and the truly devastating events of global warming can still be prevented.

Life is unfair...

Ths high in the sky perspective works best when one is a god. As for the rest of us, we have to live through these things. Yeah, the bronze age collapse was a blip in the timeline of human history, but it sure wasn't fun for the thousands killed and the thousands more who lived knocked back a level in civilization for generations. The Romans during the 5th and 15th centuries probably considered those times watersheds even if things were peachy in say, Persia. There are people affected by these events, no matter what the world is like. The Doomsday Clock for example, may never read 12/24 hours to midnight, but its being going up and down in seconds since nuclear devices were fielded almost a century ago, and because, life now is relevant, people have made choices hoping to avoid being blown away along with millennia of human effort. The frequency of catastrophes doesn't make any one less of a problem, especially these that we should by all logic have seen coming and headed off, what with all the history we've accumulated.
Kinda bad? If we do restrict things to the west, just think of the implications of comparisons to the 1930s being made completely shamelessly now. Reductio ad Hitlerum no longer (automatically) applies, because real life has gotten that crazy.
People who won a fraction of their civil rights over a period of centuries stand waiting for them to be rolled back much more quickly than they were gained. Myriad people around the world (in, for example, Seoul, Tehran, Beijing) have been put at risk of renewed militarism. One state-historically known for the Straight Man of the continent went off its meds and is in the process of screwing over its younger generation to sate the pride of the older.
Another state, historically a crossroads between Europe and Asia, heir of three and more empires, and a regional heavyweight fell to its own demagogue, and suddenly finds Saudi Arabia to be its shining new example.
Then there's the backflow. Just read the European Declaration of Human Rights and youtube search for "German prisons," and google ^this The younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of its predecessors, only part of a response to the year's events. Those sacred cows are all at risk—or, in the case of the youth's letter already lost and virtually irredeemable, because society, unlike persons cannot just turn on a dime. If rights and opportunities and institutions that preserved them crumble away, they don't come back, not for generations. No one is simply recoiling a particularly nasty election/referendum/protest, they're recoiling from direct damage done to the soul of the Western World and a real chance of achievements clawed from the powerful over centuries are at an end.
Do I exaggerate? Perhaps, but beyond the people on these very forums wondering if they were watching the twilight of western civilization, no less than the staff of President Obama had to be talked off the ledge while he (probably fruitlessly) tried to convince them that democracy hadn't ended.

And though human rights and dignity extend to every person on Earth, every society is not equal. In 2001, the USA suffered a physical blow (in consequence of which the government began to curtail civil liberties and whipped up already inflamed fears and anger toward boogeymen that would have lingering consequences), in 2008, the world suffered a recession. In 2011, varying authoritarian governments finally lost the acquiescence of their peoples with varying triggers.
In 2016, the peoples of multiple states with long-established institutions, with disproportionate share of human trade and production, with the ability to send their kids to school five days a week, and with relatively accessible mechanisms for public debate and decision, decided to try destroying their states, emboldening similar madness elsewhere in their cultural relatives. 2017 may have proved that people within aren't going gentle, but in 2016, it looked like the peoples of those states had just proved that they had no desire to fight for democracy.^note Looking at US turnout, half the population didn't bother to try to stop what they had seen coming for over a year, a good chunk of that group and third party voters decided inflicting Trump on the world would be a good way to teach their parties a lesson for not doing exactly as they wished. And while, about every state on Earth claims to be a democracy or calls itself republic of x that means little. Similarly, the history of the western states mean little if their institutions fail. The Athenian Democracy popped up by pure chance and fell in the 4th century. The French First Republic arose in 1792, amidst war and persecution, and its intellectual descendants are still not the equal of Athens in public participation, 2400 years later.

edited 3rd May '17 7:58:07 AM by CenturyEye

Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives

Worst year ever? Nope. Worst year I can remember experiencing? YES! So much YES! I mean a financial crisis is never fun, and 9/11 was traumatic, as are floods, Tsunamis and earth quakes. But as long as I can remember, I was always optimistic about the future, and I had reason to be. The world was moving towards a positive direction, with less wars. We even had a vote to abolish the apartheid! A VOTE!!! Not a bloody civil war, just a lot of people realizing "yeah, this isn't fair, we have to change this". And then 2016 happens and we suddenly take a huge step back, not just in one country, but in multiple ones across the world, including some from which I simply didn't expect to get THAT far off the rails. I never thought that we would ever got a worse president than Bush. I never thought that the UK would manage to give itself the bullet, jeopardizing the peace in Ireland in the process. And then there is middle America, which seems to fall apart on top of everything else.

edited 3rd May '17 8:47:47 AM by Swanpride

About the posts above: Yes, I do agree the doomsday clock is kinda dumb, we're not that close from global collapse.

I mentioned all the past turmoil to say that none of this is new, not that that kind of thing is "good". It sucks to live through stuff like this, but it's been happening to countries over thousands of years.

Grafite has a good point, this year did show a political shift in some ways.

Century Eye's post, I feel, was way, way overexaggerated, BUT, I can see your fears. When Trump won, I was scared too. I feared the destruction of the US would ensue and things would all go to hell. But at the same time, things are going much better than I thought. No wall, no Muslim travel ban, no removal of Obamacare, no repeal of LGBT marriage, no elimination of gun-free zones, etc, and i'm starting to think my initial fears he'd be the next Hitler were poorly thought out. I do not feel that the collapse of Western civilization is at hand.

edited 3rd May '17 8:30:48 AM by WhatArtThee

Just another day in the life of Jimmy Nutrin

Oh, you're not wrong. I called back every gut fear that boiled up in 2016. (Fun place that). All the same, Swanpride's post assessed the year shorter and better than I did.
Still that stuff hasn't happened stateside; though due more to incompetence than moderation. But, again Swanpride's post. At best the next several years will be a long holding action.

Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives

Trump already has done a lot of damage even though people tried to stop him at every turn. He took away the privacy of every internet user in the US. He funnelled billions of taxpayer money into his own business. He ordered a raid which killed woman and children and cost a soldier his life. He alienated all of the US close allies while giving its enemies leverage. He is jeopardizing the national parks. He cut funding for clinics in the third world, even though informing the woman living there about their options for protection might be the most important thing you can do, considering the fast growing overpopulation. He cost the US tourism industry billions, because people have stopped travelling to the US.

The process had begun many years before. He merely concluded it.

This is not a new thing if you look at the entire history of US foreign policy, particularly in areas such as South America.

people have been murdered before. It is therefore totally okay if I commit a murder, too.....

I'll point out to WhatArtThee's statement:

And make it mine as well (if WhatArtThee is alright with it).

edited 3rd May '17 10:56:36 AM by Quag15

2016 was the year of populism.

edited 3rd May '17 10:58:02 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised

Honestly, the situation in Korea is my biggest worry for this year. If that goes bad, this year would wind up being worse than 2016, especially for East Asia.

edited 3rd May '17 11:13:06 AM by FireCrawler2002

Anything that involves a military conflict would be worse than the political conflicts of 2016. Still, I've heard many Korean people say that this situation is business as usual for them and they're more concerned with the elections than anything right now.

Also, any decision made last year (maybe apart from Brexit) can still have its effects being reversed, so I don't see what all the extreme agitation is about.

Life is unfair...

Also, i'm a bit unsure just HOW big of a political shift 2016 was. Far-right politics have been prominent in Europe for a few years now, with far-right political parties getting major results in 2014-2015 elections in countries like Poland, Hungary, Greece, and Italy.

edited 6th May '17 11:10:04 AM by WhatArtThee

Just another day in the life of Jimmy Nutrin