is 2016 the worst year in human history?

http://i.imgur.com/IAm9Tgn.png

on the plus side, my second cousin is pregnant with twins, first ones in my family in my lifetime

feel like everything is fine and has always been fine and always will be fine tbh

― forgive me fader for I have sinned (wins), Thursday, December 29, 2016 12:52 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we've all felt the "pang" of "loss" in 2016 amirite

― forgive me fader for I have sinned (wins), Thursday, December 29, 2016 12:52 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

superb work

took me way too long to get that

I was minutes away from saying so myself xp

elaborate pls

anything pre internet ... was so demonstrably worse that anybody claiming otherwise is suffering delusions

lol

before the internet, it was difficult to expose ourselves to alarmed dumbasses in sufficient quantity to induce the reassuring feeling that alarm is for dumbasses

back then you were ostracized for being a little shit, now you can just join subreddits full of people who think just like you and convince yourself that nah, it's everyone else who's deluded

but yeah just thinking about stuff like dental care pre-1940 (or whatever) makes me feel queasy, I never want to travel back in time

just access to information via the internet makes recent years worthwhile than stuck in some pre or colonial times

like woman putting urine and egg in their hair and consuming arsenic because it supposedly cured acne or put all sorts of shit on their faces and bodies is not nor ever will be cool henceforth

TS: you must find a man, crack this egg on your head VS you must find a man, shoot this paralytic neurotoxin directly into yr face

(women's experience in general not exactly the hardest lens thru which to argue for our own time but that particular example surprised me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS74e-4dQLU

waiting for a 538 article on whether or not 2016 really had more celebrity deaths than one could expect

been shared around a fair bit

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08504ln

unable to play that, what's it say?

no iirc

up from last year but well within expectations (haha listening again their "method" is complete bollocks though, based entirely on the number of pre-written BBC obituaries deployed)

it was just the huge glut at the beginning of the year. "2016 omg wtf bbq" already under way by the end of january. Prince died in April and even at that point it was like "when is this going to end"

2016 baconed, but when will Bacon 2016?

Post-truth is the Oxford word of this year - 2016 definitely a prime year for insulting ones intelligence.

Some perspectives

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/29/stop-saying-that-2016-was-the-worst-year/?utm_term=.a16cb4d355f7

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/12/29/_2016_was_the_year_white_liberals_learned_about_disillusionment.html

As a group, white liberals seem particularly prone to declaring 2016's worstness (as opposed to the many many horrible years that preceded it). I will readily admit that I am a white liberal with gobs of privilege. Further, like many people, I know I'm in a bubbly echo chamber of like-minded people. This functions as an amplifier.

I also want to note that white liberals tend to love us some vicarious traumatization ("I'm just SO SAD about what's happening in East Timor!"). So bad things happening to other people can often be counted up as yet more bad things that are happening to us.

Okay so the Venn diagram of mega-grieving populations is not strictly white and liberal, but there will be a lot of overlap. White liberals aged 35-50 are culturally well positioned to have enjoyed the music of Bowie, Prince, and Cohen. We're very well positioned to have been into Star Wars. Add the election and particularly its gut-punching surprise and the recipe is complete. Almost everybody thought it was in the bag, and that the country was more woke than it really is. (This mostly only surprised white people.)

If the American election already had you primed to think everything is going to shit, it's easier to see every celebrity death as yet another ingredient for your Sorrow Soup. And if you had a couple bad things happen in your life (personally, my mom died, my cat died, and my son was diagnosed with a rare genetic intellectual disability).

I don't think the "fuck 2016" sentiment is a white thing.

We get a leap second this year, it would be great if a mass extinction happened in that final second. Then there should be no more debate.

We're very well positioned to have been into Star Wars.

Also it wasn't just white people shocked by the election, despite what the Dave Chappelle skit depicted. The problem with this website and many other spaces in American life is that it is too white and people end up hand wringing over whether certain opinions are "white opinions." Even more problematic, people end up imagining what the "other" believes, as if nonwhite people were a homogenous bloc. In reality "they" think all kinds of things. Nonwhites are not the other of whites. We're all just people. Xp

Identity politics is good when it's anout fighting inequality but it's bad when it's about generalizing the perspective of enormous, diverse groups.

That wasnt intended as an attack on you ye mad puffin

Treesh otm

It's cool Treesh - honestly this isn't meant to be blankety but.

Can one say it's not exclusively white, while also saying that it's been noticed among yr white liberal types pretty prominently of late (acknowledging that if you're in a white liberal bubble you're going to see a lot more of it than otherwise)?

I'm as dismayed and worried by trump, brexit and the CONTINUED inroads of extreme right-wing ideology into mainstream political discourse as anyone and if you've had a bad year of course I sympathise, but that isn't quite what's happening in a terrible internet meme that needs to fold in things like mass killings in the United States (as dependable as hangovers) and a slight statistical blip in celebrity deaths (maybe correspondent with an increase in celebrities over the course of the 20th century? I wonder) in order to make its case

Almost everybody thought it was in the bag, and that the country was more woke than it really is

don't forget "America is Already Great". the people that did think the above were also convinced "almost everybody" thought the same.

im watching platoon what year is that set in that seems pretty shit nb theres some black guys and some lads i think maybe vietnamese they would appear to concur so thats a strong suite for the current argument

Platoon is set in 1986

maybe correspondent with an increase in celebrities over the course of the 20th century?

Absolutely; if you trace the commoditization of celebrity qua celebrity along with the mid-20th c. nexus of technology e.g. television with specific cultural figures e.g. beatles, elvis, you get a lot more people who were famous 25-50 years ago than people who were famous 125-150 years ago. And people 25 or 50 years past the peak of their fame are both more likely to be beloved and more likely to die soon, ergo more beloved dead celebrities.

true but it still is a shock that nearly all the mega-selling blockbuster artists of the 80's are dead (besides Janet?) while the Townshends, McCartneys, and Rolling Stones are all still alive

famous 60s band The Townshends and The McCartneys

the idea of multiple Townsends is quite frightening, although he'd probably like it - he could say twasn't me, it were him!

true but it still is a shock that nearly all the mega-selling blockbuster artists of the 80's are dead (besides Janet?)

Except the vast majority of them are still alive and kicking, if this page is to be believed: http://tsort.info/music/ds1980.htm.

well yeah, he was basically marvelling at how ~6 people can have died while a different ~6 people are still alive, which nngh everybody get a fucking grip already

I entirely sympathise with treeship's "I feel like I'm going insane" except he and I have apparently woken up in different twilight zones because from where I'm sitting mine is the minority viewpoint that actually makes any kind of sense according to the rules of the reality I went to sleep in

All I'm saying is, someone is killing celebrities and wins is involved.

sorry for your losses

yeah I know it's all arbitrary and it doesn't mean anything, point is as someone born in the mid-80's its weird to lose people who you can remember having hits and being a big cultural figure, over those who have been dinosaurs your whole life. it just affects you in a different way. maybe the first time my generation has started to feel, I dunno...kinda old? if it was all about whose music I was most attached to I'd say losing 2/3rds of ELP was the worst (lol) but they've always been "in the past" in my mind...hell the fact that they released two albums in my lifetime is still very strange to me.

still seems better than 1346, where if anyone in your village was famous it was probably cos their rotting corpse was hung on display at the town entrance as a public example

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

OK

can we move on now

Chicxulub impact fans hardest hit

lol at results
Maybe if more Star Wars cast members had killed themselves in sympathy