Asymmetrical Information

Remember how logically obvious nuclear holocaust seemed at the time? In fact, it still seems obvious that it was bound to happen (right up until the fall of the USSR, of course). Why didn't it?

Maybe doomsaying is actually a sort of protective response to help ensure that we muddle through. Maybe we need those folks to wring their hands and wail "The end is near!" so we know which things need the most muddling. ;-)

Bjorn Lomborg called. He wants his talking points back.

I kid. Seriously though, excellent-i-ly sensible piece.

Since I live in predominantly leftist communities, I get a regular dose of Chicken Little rhetoric.

This is especially true in relation to the presidential race. "Bush is killing us all!" is a common statement. I try to calm such folks down. I suggest that I might still be persuaded to vote for either candidate, but I am most likely to vote for the one that promises marginal improvement. If I want salvation, I'll go to church. Nothing changes. The left's religion is politics, since the left long ago abandoned God.

The population explosion mania of the 1960s was one of the great Chicken Little outbursts. Who was it, Paul Erlich, who predicted that the world would disintegrate into food riots by the mid 1980s?

I wrote about the same thing somewhat more succinctly http://ctl.idealog.info/random_thoughts/00210.html">on my blog. The super-short version: Society is always dying, and I don't mean that it just always appears to be dying. It actually is always dying, and always has been.

Chesterton put it much better, though only about the holiday of Christmas, in his short story The Shop Of Ghosts. Still, what he says is pretty generalizeable with a little imagination.

Correct in general, still you should not give up all pessimism.
Think about the people living around 1910. After almost 100 years of peace and continuous progress they were very optimistic and sure that nothing wrong will happen. And then came the most awful century in history, two World wars, Nazism, Communism, the Bomb, hundreds of millions dead. It can happen again. I'm not saying it will; I don't know. Nobody knows.

Is the world a safer place than it was in the decade or two after WWII? I think so, but that doesn't mean that we FEEL safer. For many, 9/11 made terrorism a threat that was felt on a more personal level than nuclear war was ever felt to be. That may not be rational -- a nuclear war would have killed tens of millions, even with WMDs, terrorists could not match that. But, we took comfort, perhaps too much comfort, in knowing the question of whether to drop the bomb was in the hands of rational men. The terrorists do not appear to be rational (nor do they want to appear rational, that would reduce their ability to incite terror). The fact someone might blow up your plane for no good reason makes it far harder to avoid the planes that might be blown up, and it makes the threat feel greater than it really is.

Very perceptive post, Jane. But I still don't think you should throw your household trash in a public wastebasket.

I guess everyone has their form of the apocalypse and it's right around the corner. It's my firm belief that there are those who take pleasure in believing in some odd thing (that is unknown to everyone) that's going to become the next apocalypse, too.

I think the latest popular form of "We're all gonna die!!!" is the "Peak Oil"/"Hubbert's Peak" oil crisis talk that's going around.

Good post, but what Jacob said.

Also, not that it undercuts the point of the post, but speaking as someone who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I never really thought nuclear war was inevitable or even very likely. I don't think that I was that out of sync with my contemporaries - we pretty much believed that MAD would work. And it did. I certainly wouldn't have put the risk of nuclear war anywhere near 50%.

Though I suppose that if I had been old enough to have been aware of events during the Cuban missle crisis (I was only three at the time) I might have felt differently.

Proof that widespread death is truly imminent? A blog post that mocks death! Ah, we're all gonna diiiiiieeeeee!

"Right now I'm reading Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters."

I heard Hitch on a book tour give a lecture on Orwell. Very entertaining it was, but he couldn't answer the question afterwards on why read the book instead of just going straight to the source and reading Orwell directly.

Could we summarize you post as: "Apres moi, ne pas de deluge", BTW?

"As flawed as the human race is, we seem to be a lot better than the doomsayers think at muddling through."

But, not as good as one might have thought at the start of the twentieth century. There's a sense of optimism & potential when reading political thinkers from then that doesn't exist now.

"I mean, that Day After Tomorrow movie Al Gore is pushing seems as looks about as scientifically sound as one of those ads for pills that make you lose weight while you sleep WITHOUT DIET OR EXCERCISE."

You mean the one of which he said:
'"There are two sets of fiction to deal with," Mr. Gore said. "One is the movie, the other is the Bush administration's presentation of global warming." He accused the White House of "trying to convince people there's no real problem, no degree of certainty from scientists about the issue."'

Doesn't sound like he's endorsing the catastrophic "science" in the movie, does it? So, any more canards you want to throw up. Oh, yeah, he "said" he "invented the internet". Let's hear that one again.

"But not being an astrophysicist, geologist, meteorologist, or other scientific type, I do not consider myself qualified to comment on whether we are, or are not, emitting our way to hothouse hell."

Well, being an astrophysicist isn't necessarily a qualification; Sallie Baliunas is an astrophysicist, and she still buggered up proxy data in her paper with Soon, and her recent article on the Ordovician glaciation on the lobbying firm site Techcentralstation somehow failed to mention that although CO2 levels were higher than present, solar output was ~5% lower. (strange omission for a solar physicist).

(A different Tom to the one posting above)

My father was a soldier. We lived with him in Germany during the 1950's. During the Hungarian Uprising, he suddenly started sleeping with a fully auto machine pistol and a bag full of loaded clips under the bed. I was frightened for quite a period after that.

But I never worried about the bomb. Somehow I always believed that Mutually Assured Destruction would work. Once the genie was out of the bottle, there was no way to put her back in as we are now discovering with the poliferation of nuclear technology and raw ingrediants.

We should worry more about chemical or biological weapons. They are harder to defend against and small quantities can do enormous damage. As we saw in Jordan recently, the terrorists certainly seem to have access to these items.

Where does this all leave us? Frankly the odds on WMDs affecting any one of us directly are low and as acceptable as those of driving on an interstate.

After the next incident of terrorism occurs in America, the American people will rise up with one voice and demand that the radical Jihadists be crushed convincingly.

Sweet Jeebus, Jane. I see the generally drunken boyfriend of last October has been in the liquor cabinet again.

I don’t particularly disagree with the tenor of your post, but how, in the name of all that is reasonable and just (or at least secretly center-liberal), can you ignore the war in Iraq into which the country was fear-mongered (“WMD, Al Qaeda= Iraq, Fear Another 9/11”). All of that can be fairly laid at the feet of this Administration and its supporters. The Dems (except Dean, really) were faithless, useless eunuchs who fell all over themselves in trying to kiss the Now-King’s ring, but it was this Administration and its minions that took us to war. Citing to Ms. Albright’s graduation bullsh*t (just because she told your sister’s class that they are destined to be “the future leaders of America” doesn’t mean sis should buy the big Beemer just yet) without mentioning Iraq seems unfair.

Also, I don’t know if calling Krugman “liberal” is accurate. It depends on what the meaning of “liberal” is (yes, we are all but shades of Bubba, long may he rut). If you mean that he doesn’t believe in supply-side economics, wouldn’t it be easier to just call him a “real economist”? If you mean that he, like Rubin and (once upon a time in a Congress long, long ago) the Republican Party, doesn’t like large structural deficits, he’s probably guilty as charged. If you mean that he thinks the Der Leader is die moron, then that’s probably right (and does anyone really disagree at this point?). There are probably more ranting marginalia to make, but you get the point. Also, where did the 1966 cite come from?

Finally, many of the complaints about the Patriot Act are based, implicitly, on the fact that the curtailment of freedoms will not fall equally on the country as a whole. Instead, to the extent that the burden of a loss of freedom falls on a minority, the majority will be able to blithely ignore the curtailment in the sure knowledge that if it affects them they can vote it out of existence. Think of how many people support the intrusive searches at the airport (I’d love to see the capture rates on that), but complain that they are not restricted to Arabs or Arab-looking people. More generally, when worrying about rights, don’t look to Posner, but instead look at Footnote 4 or Democracy and Distrust. Posner hates America (no, of course he doesn't, but that's probably the only time that sentence will ever be written).

"But perhaps the strangest thing of all is to realize that these children, unlike my generation, did not grow up with the ever-present fear that they might at any moment evaporate, suddenly and without warning, into a fine cloud of radioactive dust."

Whaa? You're not that much older than I am, and I don't recall being especially concerned about my impending nuclear incineration at the time. "By Dawn's Early Light" was about as likely to become reality as "Deep Impact". On the other hand, the Berlin Wall came down when I was 12, so perhaps by the time I was old enough to care about such things it wasn't a concern anymore?

On numerous occcasions Since Bush took office (quite a coincidence, huh?) many people have tried to make the case to me that the median wage earner of 30 or 40 years ago had it better than the median wage earner of today. After I point out that this assertion is really quite silly, that if the median wage earner of today were told he was going to live like the median wage earners of 1974 or 1964, he would promptly riot, and explain all the reasons why, the doomsayer almost inevitably falls back on the old chestnut; "At least health care was affordable then!". Then I ask whether the median wage earner of today would like to treat his child's leukemia with what was available in '74 or '64, or what the children of median wage earner's receive now; that is, would the median wage earner of today would prefer to have a dead child with lower insurance premiums, or a dead child with health insurance? At this point, angry, sullen, silence is the norm. It is so emotionally satisfying for some to be pessimistic or angry, that they really are even more offended when deprived of the sensations.

I distinctly remeber the feeling that everything might end in a global thermonuclear war. When I was in college at the University of Chicago, I would sometimes think that if it finally came to that war, then I was not in a good place, as Chicago would be one of the first areas to be hit. That said, there was never any point at which the possibility of destruction felt immediate. The presence of America's nuclear weapons and the tiny amount of sanity, really just survival instinct, of the Soviet leadership kept things from getting too dangerous.

The situation is somewhat different today. Our enemies have far less capacity for destruction than the old USSR, but they are also lack that tiny bit of sanity. The probability of a global catastrophe has almost disappeared, but the probability of a horrible, local catastrophic event, such as detonating a small nuclear weapon in lower Manhattan or the Chicago loop, is higher.

I also must say that I find the comments of SomeCallMeTim to be rather bizzare. For example, in the last comment SomeCallMeTim writes,"I don’t know if calling Krugman 'liberal' is accurate." This quote is just weird. The blog "Lying in Ponds" does quantitative analysis of partisanship in opinion columns. In this analysis Paul Krugman usually is in close competition with Ann Coulter for the title of "most partisan columnist". So, SomeCallMeTim, I don't know if calling Ann Coulter a conservative is accurate! The rest of his (her?) comments seem equally strange.

This month I will turn 50. So, I definitely experienced the fear of nuclear annihilation. The drills at school gave me nightmares. I can remember being so afraid I wouldn't be able to find my family if "the Russians" bombed us. Funny, but I also had this fear about being invaded by Martians. Go figure.

A summer vacation to White Sands was a fun romp, but I can recall my mom worrying about the possibility of exposure to some leftover radiation. When we got back to the motel, she made us all take showers and she put all the clothes we wore that day in a separate sack. I wonder now, if she was that concerned about it, why did she let us visit there?

As I grew to adulthood, I realized my mom was the proverbial "Chicken Little" and my dad the sensible Dickie Smothers to her Tommy. Thank goodness I had someone to balance her irrationalities.

And, Jane has performed a great balancing act with this post! Thanks!

We can either fence them out or fence them in.

Could the question be: who is generating these feelings of doom, and who is benefiting from them?

Doomsayers use fear because it is the best motivator. They use it whether they actually believe what they say has a realistic chance of happening.

Bush used it pretty well.

When I was in college at the University of Chicago, I would sometimes think that if it finally came to that war, then I was not in a good place, as Chicago would be one of the first areas to be hit.

Hmmm. Every American city of any size had some local feature -- a military base, a defense plant -- that gave its residence cause to believe that they were high on the Soviets' hit list. At least, that's what you always heard from those residents (those inclined to worry about this sort of thing, at any rate): "Oh, if there's a war, we'd be one of the first to go, because of the ___"

In the '80s I lived in St. Louis near the McDonnell Douglas plant, and unlike Average Joe, I was comforted to know that I would likely die quickly in the initial blast. Better that than be one of those poor bastards in rural Illinois, downwind of the fallout.

So, yes, children, these things were often in the backs of our minds (at least some of us). Some people were convinced that the destruction of civilization was inevitable. I need a better word than "convinced" -- they were invested in it, they looked forward to it. They had a sort of nonreligious belief in the inherent corruption of mankind. A nuclear war would've destroyed them, but given them the satisfaction of knowing, in those milliseconds before death, that they were right all along. They must be very bitter about our survival into the present. Ha ha ha.

As a tyke of 52, I remember going through "the population bomb" in highschool and it was the most depressing thing imaginable, we've been starving to death in a frozen hell-hole for the last 5-10 years according to him, IIRC. Doomsday theorists like conspiracy theorists always prosper since nobody holds them to account. History and a good memory dooms them in the long run.

Another thought, I am really pissed at the debasing of the term "liberal" As an old Humphrey liberal who's values stayed the same, I'm now a Bush conservative. Liberal used to mean something, now it's just a label for leftist sociopaths.

Average Joe:

1. FWIW, I know that it’s sadly telling that I'm answering a post in the comments section of a blog on beautiful Saturday afternoon. I really do secretly despise myself for posting a response that is too-lengthy for the minor scope of the disagreement (“This quote is just weird….The rest of his (her?) comments seem equally strange”). I will be achieving the iso-motion and getting a life directly after posting this.

2. To clear up your confusion, I’m a guy. The “SomeCallMeTim” moniker comes from the Python move The Holy Grail. I’m not sure that the second sentence relates to the first, but the only reason I can come up with for your doubt about my gender is the username.

3. I tried to take a look at Lying in Ponds to respond to the Krugman bit, but the site seems to have disappeared for the moment. So I had to depend upon the google cache.

LIP determined that Paul Krugman is a partisan liberal based on Krugman’s statements and columns since Bush became president and Congress became Republican. LIP acknowledges that, “Paul Krugman was a non-partisan economist as recently as a few years ago.” (Statement on blog on 3/26/04). Since Republicans have entirely controlled the federal agenda since the time LIP started measuring Krugman, and therefore Republican’s are primarily responsible all of the stupid policy mistakes made over the last three years, Krugman’s partisan score could indicate either that (a) he is a liberal partisan, or (b) Bush’s policy decisions have been either obvious or moronic (my suggestion in the original post). Over time, a consensus will develop over the Bush presidency, and we will be able to better judge between the theses; my suspicion is that Krugman will seem less “partisan” and more “right.”

As for Anne Coulter, you shouldn’t mistake our concern for her with our anger about the situation. We don’t mind her partisanship (it can be fun), but we worry that her vitriol might be the result of syphilitic meningitis (wasn’t King George full of spleen?). Because she is self-employed and may not be insured, the disease may be undiagnosed and untreated. Our anger is at a system that makes getting proper healthcare such a burden, and leaves the blameless (like possibly poor Ms. Coulter) to their cruel fate. Indeed, I suspect that if you set up a Save Anne from Syphilis fund, you would be surprised at how many Democrats contributed.

4. While claiming that Bush fear-mongered us into the Iraqi invasion might be controversial (because some still think the fear was justified), I don’t know that it’s bizarre. I suspect it seems less bizarre all the time.

5. The reference to the “protect the electoral minority” method of constitutional interpretation, again, doesn’t seem that bizarre. Not favored by conservatives, maybe, but not bizarre.

Off to achieve the iso-motion.

"Every American city of any size had some local feature -- a military base, a defense plant -- that gave its residence cause to believe that they were high on the Soviets' hit list." There were thousands of bombs available to each side, so while believing that you were high on the hit list was often unreasonable, believing that there was one bomb earmarked for your city wasn't.

OTOH, Chicago actually had to be in the top twenty. It's one of America's biggest cities (especially considered as a metropolis stretching from Milwaukee to Gary). I'm not sure about military installations other than a Navy boot camp, but the steel plants in Chicago and Gary are more important than most military bases in the long run. It's also a critical transportation hub. Make it radioactive and you've blocked both I80 and I90 and put a big hole in the railroad network, requiring all east-west traffic from the northeast, midwest, and northwest states to divert far to the south or go through Canada.

Megan-- Your sister graduated from Duke? Congratulations!

The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others.

Let's see, it is 2004, in 1904 one could:

buy the drugs (of any kind) they wanted without getting permission from someone (as are now all the Hollywood "A" list and powerful politicians);

get an entry level job and apply nearly all their earnings to creating a business instead of some to social welfare and some to their future retirement;

go to any doctor I liked, instead of someone wllowed to practice after consideration of the supply and demand and income level of approved doctors;

get my haircut by anone I liked instead of licensed person;

get a ride for hire from anyone instead of a licensed and approved taxi in most cities;

buy stock in an enterprise without a few hundred grand going to lawyers for SEC stuff (as if that protects us);

awe, you know - I could write forever, if your basic view is people need to be protected/directed by their betters, all these limits on freedom are good. If you believe all these rules are ways to give other people jobs and slim sliversof power ..

in 1904 one could: buy the drugs (of any kind) they wanted without getting permission from someone

Well yes, but I can still get the drugs I want without the need for permission impacting me overtly as long as I am discreet about some of them, and most of the drugs I take, from Ibuprofin to Lipitor to 4-HO-DiPT could not even have been created back then.

Jane's quite right, at least about the "nuclear devastation is coming any minute now" atmosphere that a lot of us grew up in. And about how quickly it's evaporated. I think the average child here in the Bay Area is probably more concerned about global warming than nuclear war. (And the average child in a public school in certain parts of the Bay Area is probably more worried about drive-bys than either one, but that's a whole 'nother can o'worms.)

And on the nit-picky side, to Jacob,

Think about the people living around 1910. After almost 100 years of peace and continuous progress they were very optimistic and sure that nothing wrong will happen.

Seriously? After the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War? I know they all look like small potatoes by Great War standards, but they were serious enough at the time. And the American Civil War was not small potatoes by any reasonable standard.

What little I've read of English editorial writing suggests to me that a lot of people were anticipating war with Germany a decade or more before it broke out. No one seems to have imagined the carnage on that scale, but it's simply not true that everyone was confidently expecting perpetual peace. How could they?

You seldom hear "Better Red than Dead" any more.
Very little reference also the Clinton's "Peace Dividend."
I still wait for someone to demonstrate where Coulter has been substantially incorrect. When they get as low as the "Syphlis on the brain" canard you know they have run out of gas.
And I stopped Analog for 10 years or so because of the predominance of disasted crap.

I noticed your reference to "On the Beach", by Nevil Shute, which is possibly the most depressing book ever written. What I have always found odd is that his other books, even the somewhat popular "Town Like Alice" never found the same fame as it. His other books are sort of chipper-libertarian-stiff upper-lip, as if Ayn Rand were a solid mildmannered british man. One should read most everything Shute wrote, start with "A Town Like Alice", my favorite "Round the Bend", and then every other single one of his books. None are at all like "On the Beach".

re: Our FEELINGS about threats - - today versus those innumerable yesterdays.

The media's role needs consideration. While we can rationally assess that the risk of nuclear exchange by the dual majorpowers(NOT superpowers) probably peaked in the mid-50's to late-60's ... there is probably more PERCEPTION of risk today.

Risk perception is not rational based upon the cerebral cortex, it is emotional based upon the limbic system. The media plays a role in maintaining our week-to-week priority list of "what issues are worth pondering."

Here's another question, to accompany "Where were you September 11th when you saw or heard about the WTC?" - - - The matching question is, "At what hour of the day, on Sept 11th, did you realize that you were going to hear much less about Gary Condit?"

"...Every American city of any size had some local feature -- a military base, a defense plant -- that gave its residence cause to believe that they were high on the Soviets' hit list."

All that was required to be on the "first strike" hit list was for a town to have an airfield nearby that was large enough to accomodate bombers. Bomber bases and missile silo's were considered prime threats by both sides. Industrial centers, while important in the long term, took time to mobilize and therefore could safely be relegated to second or third strike status. What that meant for Chicago is that someone living right next to O'Hare had a much higher chance of being at ground zero than someone who happened to be living on the Great Lakes Naval station.

All of the things at the top of the hit list were things that could kill you right now. Missile silo's and SSBN submarines in port (...and at sea if their location were known); Bomber bases or fields where bombers could be staged from; Command and control centers; and troop formations that were close enough to be an immediate threat.

Everything else was secondary. ...not that it would really matter in the long run, of course.

Roy

Every generation that ever was has preached that they will be the last generation on earth. I blame ego but a good argument could be made for P.T. Barnum shills.

A good post. It reminds us that while things are dangerous, they may not be quite as bad as some fear, or perhaps more accurately, they may be that bad, if good people don't intervene to fix things.

Like nowadays, the technological potential for rogue states to provide to terrorists simple WMD's is there (see poisen gases) and it is growing (see Abdul Khan of Pakistan). If we don't intervene, then things could get very bad indeed. We could find ourselves forced into dhimmitude slavery or into genocidal annihilation, but I think we can steer between Scylla and Charbydis (see the problem has been around for thousands of years).

And I remember one night going to a youth activity out of town (but nearby), and that night seeing some strange glowing light in the sky back in the direction of town. Nowadays I'm not sure what it was; probably it was the sunset reflecting off high clouds or something since this was a bit after sunset for us, but then, I thought it possible, as did others, that my hometown (we were told it was on the top ten list) had been nuked.

Of course, I thought that Red Dawn was a more likely scenario than all-out nuclear war. And I grew up in the Seventies and Eighties.

The system would not have gone on this long if there were not self-correcting forces in the system. We need libertarians and social conservatives both. I'm not so sure about leftists.

Tadeusz

I love the 1939 World's Fair. I always wonder about the millions who visited. 1939. The world was on the brink of war. Parts of it were well over the brink. Ten years of a crushing Depression.

And they went to see TV's, robots, the City of Lights - Futurama!

That show of optimism. So ultimately American.

Even during the height of Vietnam - we went to the Moon, because it was hard.

I think President Bush is possessed of that same optimism. Fighting a medieval foe determined to bring us into the 8th Century, Bush proposes to go to Mars.

It falls mostly on deaf ears. But at the same time, the X Prize will be won shortly.

We're not all ready to roll over and die.

I do not understand that people today talk as if we are not at WAR. I was 15 when WWII ended, and I remember the gloriest expectations of the United Nations. What a sad let down. I also remember the period of 1962 (Cuban Crisis) when in reality life as we know it was held in the balance of junior officers of the Soviet Union. What would our response be if a tactical nuclear weapon had been used in defense of the establishment of a missile base 90 miles off our shores. (A Castro recommendation) Remember we had over 60 nuclear bombers in the air that needed only the "go" CODE to complete their assigned missions. There were hundreds of others on the ground, loaded and ready to go.

People today do not address 9/11/91 in terms of what would have been the results of an attack one or more hours later. If the buildings had been full of their normal occupancy and normal retail comerence going on in the retail portions I suspect deaths in the Tens of Thousands. Also with limited time to communicate with the fourth plane what would have been the casuality cost at it's intended target.

These are times when we need national unity. I feel that human history goes through cycles repeating and repeating the same issues. With this Easter Season I suggest that the journalists of today are the scribes and the obstructionists of the U.S. Senate are the Pharisses of our time.

Somebody once said that when people stop believing in God they don't start believing in nothing, instead they start believing absolutely anything. It may even have been Orwell himself, I'm sure he would recognized the phenomenon,

A lifelong atheist myself, I'm temperamentally a contrarian individualist so I haven't succumbed to any of my lifetime's 'politically correct' (what seem to me to be better described as tribal) enthusiasms, but the ability to resist them for long has seemed to be beyond most people.

This it seems to me is the key - most people profess to believe the crap they sign up to for social reasons rather than anything else - they fear they would be lonely if they didn't (and often, e.g. on campus among faculty, lonely or worse is what they most certainly would be).

Excuse unseemly overuse of 'seems'...

I had a similar, if not as intellectual, reaction when listening to the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album on Friday. The song "Wooden Ships" made me think what prats the anti-war spokespeople were in 1970. "If you smile at me/I will understand/Because that is something everybody everwhere does in the same language!" David Crosby never met al Qaeda, and he never confronted the Japanese troops in WWII.

The song is set in a post-nuclear-war world (that was real big during the fifties through the sixties) and was supposed to evoke the "We are the world" warmth. As I listened I felt a mixture of the same disdain I had back when I first heard it, but also a kind of cold lump of fear that American's haven't learned anything, even after 9/11. Mass culture still seems to think that we have all this because it just happens by itself, not because prior generations fought much harder and bloodier wars than any during my life on earth, which began in 1948. They still think that all we have to do is show our good will to the terrorists and they will realize that they really like us. They don't realize that there are aliens in our own race whose only demand is that we die or convert to Wahhabism. Then we can have peace.

Larry H.:"At what hour of the day, on Sept 11th, did you realize that you were going to hear much less about Gary Condit?"

That's a good one! Before the second tower fell, sitting on the swing by the lake at my brother-in-law's house in Wisconcin, the black humor broke out: "What's the one good thing about all of this? That no one gives a damn where Chandra Levy is anymore!"

Me:

And in 1904
I couldn't marry who I wanted (I'm asian, my wife is white)...but I guess that's a small price to pay to be able to get an unlicensed haircut.

Just to make myself clear - I'm not arguing that the regulation of haircuts is a good thing...but I bet that Me couldn't get those services - doctor, haircut, or taxi - from anyone in a lot of places in 1904 if s/he was black.

Don't put on those rose-colored glasses to pine for the liberty we had in those eras in US history when the power of the state was used to enforce discrimination.

Were women freer before the 19th amendment (ratified in 1920)
Were we all freer from the police state before or after Miranda v. Arizona (1966)? Gideon v. Wainwright(1963)?

Can we do better - especially in areas of economic freedom? Of course. Were we better off with the rights available in 1904? I don't think so.

michelle dulak: if you're curious about the european state of mind before wwi, take a look at david fromkin's fascinating new book, 'europe's last summer: who started the great war in 1914?' (fromkin fingers helmuth von moltke, the chief of the german general staff, who he says even lied to his kaiser to get the war going.) but back to the topic:
'according to the most recent and convincing scholarship, it was not the case ... that the european world of june 1914 was a sort of eden in which the outbreak of hostilities among major powers came as a surprise. on the contrary, as its political and military elites recognized, europe was in the grip of an unprecedented arms race; internally the powers were victims of violent social, industrial, and political strife; and general staffs chattered constantly, not about whether there would be war, but where and when."
nick carter: since orwell and neville shute are coming up in the same thread, you might take a look at orwell's collected essays, journalism and letters: he gave a good review to shute's 'landfall' early in wwii; kind of made me want to read it.

Jane,
One of these days, the world really will come to an end, and you will look very foolish.

How, Danny, if the world comes to an end, she'd be too dead to look foolish!

Sic transit gloria mundi Trebuchet

I turned 61 a few weeks ago and I definitely remember the doomsday fears. Some posters say they don't remember that (but one of them says he was three when the Berlin Wall fell!). I remember air raid drills in school, crouching under our desks. I was in college during the Cuban Missile Crisis (going to school on Long Island, wondering how we could escape once New York City became a radioactive pit). Assasinations. War. MAD. Maybe some people felt protected by the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction but I sure as hell didn't. It wasn't a question of IF nuclear war would come, it was just a question of WHEN. I still look around in amazement at the world, amazed that spring has come again and the nuclear nightmare did not happen.

The world is a pretty good place to live, and getting steadily better for almost everyone. As flawed as the human race is, we seem to be a lot better than the doomsayers think at muddling through.

If we lose this war -- and we might -- the future is bleak. Bleaker than any of us imagine.

The only reason liberals say it's bleak now is because to them we've already lost. And given the defeatism currently sweeping this country, I'm not sure they're wrong.

Danny Taggart --

The world came an end a few (I no longer remember exactly) years ago. Nobody noticed.

Defeatism is sweeping the elites and the Democrats, the rest of the country is just fine. I worried a little about dying in a nuclear war, especially since when Reagan got elected the old doomsday clock got set to 11 seconds to midnight. But I also thought it was a lot of hooey, Communists might have been evil but they were not stupid, can't build a workers "paradise" on a radioactive slag heep. Now the Islamic Fascist nut jobs aren't operating under that same playbook, 72 virgins and all that.

Of course listen to any of that Crosby STills and Nash crapola and you understand why people did massive amts of drugs -

The world is an OK place, muddling through seems to work quite well, Americans are great muddlers, which is why we'll do ok in Iraq, in the end we will muddle thru - perfection is over rated

I don't remember who uttered this (paraphrased) quote but I find it more accurate as time goes on:

It must kill the left that someone, somewhere may be enjoying themselves.

I remember those long ago living with nuclear threat days. I was in the UK at the time and my father-in-law who was a public health guru was always going off to conferences about how to survive a nuclear attack (wearlight coloured clothing and get behind a light-coloured brick wall was what I remember from his prescriptions). I worked in the stats department of a stockbroker in the City of London where one of my colleagues who had a Norton 500 cc motorbike which mighlty impressed my engineering student husband - heh we were only twenty-two - used to say real good-byes to us every Friday (there was always an international crisis brewing) because the nuking was going to happen over the weekend. He also used to spend his weekly wages on the basis of there being no tomorrow and by Monday was touching all of us up to tide him over till the next pay day. Well as Jane says we're still here.

Jacob:

Think about the people living around 1910. After almost 100 years of peace and continuous progress they were very optimistic and sure that nothing wrong will happen.

What people? Living where?

The USA? A mere fifty years after the start of the Civil War, the bloodiest war in its history, and less than ten years after the Spanish-American War?

Europe? Napoleon, the Crimea, and the Franco-Prussian conflict were all cake walks?

Asia? Yeah, right. Commodore Perry and the Meiji Restoration, the Opium Wars, and colonization were just peachy for them.

And surely you're not referring to Africa.

Jeff, beat you to it ;-) Though you put it better.

Here's something I wrote on a Usenet newsgroup about 5 years ago.

We've reached a new golden age.
The future is no longer fixed in a sere white glow.
We've been released to find our own way.
We've reached the age of muddling through.

Richard Cook,

It was H.L. Mencken referring to Puritans but the analogy with the Left is apt.

I liked reading Jane's thoughts on this. I recall Jonah Goldberg writing a similar piece several years ago debunking 'slippery slope' arguments.

I love reading about Chicken Little scenarios of the past. I read once where some doctors and scientists of the early 19th century were convinced that railroad passengers traveling over 25 mph would all die. The body couldn't withstand it.

For all the folks who are sitting around poo-pooing the notion of nuclear war during the Cold War, take a look at Operation RYAN, in which teh USSR under Andropov got really, desperately, massively spooked about the possibility of a nuclear war in 1983.

Then there was the notion that cabinet officials who were present at the time estimated the chances of nuclear war over the Cuban Missile Crisis at anywhere between 33% and 50%.

And far as it goes, in 1980 some 40% of adult Britons thought that they would die in a nuclear war (as opposed to death due to some other cause).

A lot of blase confidence in not having a nuclear war, if merited at all, certainly didn't come across in all groups, namely the Kremlin, the White House, and the Public.

I vividly remember the Cuban Missle Crisis and lived through the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. My parents lived through the depression and World War II and often spoke about them as did their contemporaries.

I think the greatest threat to our civilization at this point in time is a generation who have never experienced adversity. It's not just about surviving but surviving as free human beings.

But even if everything gets blown up, something will survive, evolution will continue.

I also remember Pollyanna, Haley Mills and The Glad Game.

Orwell did receive an antibiotic for his tuberculosis but turned out to be allergic to it.
The guy just couldn't catch a break.

"What little I've read of English editorial writing suggests to me that a lot of people were anticipating war with Germany a decade or more before it broke out."
Given all the justified doom and gloom feeling (I remember school in the 70's, and nuclear war seemed quite plausible), let me mention some almost guilty fun instead. The book _The Great War of 189-_ (published in the late 19th Century). It has an opening chapters that read link an amazing prediction of the start of WWI. On the other hand, some of the other predictions (e.g., giant banks of lights, think night football today, being used to illuminate the battlefield) just didn't quite work out.

A similar book is _The Red Napoleon_ (published IIRC in 1936). The aggressor is Russia rather than Germany, and much closer operationally than strategically to WWII, but still seems prescient. If you get offended by the racism, here's a hint--he's satirizing it, not promoting it. (Written in 1936, its sometimes hard to tell the difference.)

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