To Hell With you 2016!!!

[drawkcabi]

There are years I think that are more messed up than others and go down in history as bad years. It's all subjective to a degree and debatable I suppose but I think some years more people will agree suck than others.

1812, 1861, 1914, 1929, 1939, 1941, 1963, 1968, 2001, 2005 seem to be stand out fucked up years. I won't deny that those years are partial to my U.S. centric POV and maybe some of those years should be part of a string of bad years that are just as bad as the others around them or maybe they are the worst of the bunch. I enjoy history very much but I am far from an expert.

I just feel 2016 will go down in history as one of those years most people will agree were not the best of times.

So debate it in this thread what years you think were bad or just chime in and say a big FUCK YOU! to 2016 and let off some steam.

And  to anyone having an especially difficult 2016 even more than the rest of us.

 

[JGP]

I thought saying fuck you was a board no-no, but yah-- fuck you.

So much artistic talent lost, fascism rearing so baldly and being embraced by way more than I'd ever have credited, amongst so many other low points... And this is me complaining from the otherwise comfortable privilege of my armchair. No doubt, many and many more have legitimate reason to despise 2016.

Oh yeah, and FUCK YOU.

This year couldn't end soon enough.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Agreed 2016 has not been a good year.  

[Jo498]

2005 was mainly unavoidable natural disasters, or what am I missing? Hard to compare to 1914 or 1929. And being in Europe I do not see anything even close to such disastrous years for 2016.

[drawkcabi]

14 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

2005 was mainly unavoidable natural disasters, or what am I missing? Hard to compare to 1914 or 1929. And being in Europe I do not see anything even close to such disastrous years for 2016.

It's all subjective as I said, those were just years I thought of off the to of my head and maybe I'm misremembering some things. But also I'm not limiting bad years to years we make bad by our actions but by shit just raining down by natural happenings, choices people make, responses to these choices, responses to natural disasters, etc.

 

[ThinkerX]

3 hours ago, Jo498 said:

2005 was mainly unavoidable natural disasters, or what am I missing? Hard to compare to 1914 or 1929. And being in Europe I do not see anything even close to such disastrous years for 2016.

Brexit?

[Lordsteve666]

3 hours ago, Jo498 said:

2005 was mainly unavoidable natural disasters, or what am I missing? Hard to compare to 1914 or 1929. And being in Europe I do not see anything even close to such disastrous years for 2016.

From a UK point of view 2005 was the year we first got hit by Islamic terrorism on our own soil, and that changed things pretty strongly over here.

But I graduated from uni in that year too, so not all bad!

[James Arryn]

41 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Brexit?

If I had to guess, Jo is from Chatham, (though I don't think it had an oppidum I'm assuming artistic license) and Kent voted overwhelmingly Leave, so Jo might not (yet) be among the Brexgret brigade.

 

[The Marquis de Leech]

6 hours ago, James Arryn said:

If I had to guess, Jo is from Chatham, (though I don't think it had an oppidum I'm assuming artistic license) and Kent voted overwhelmingly Leave, so Jo might not (yet) be among the Brexgret brigade.

Jo's German.

Can we all agree that it's not been a good start to the twenty-first century?

(2011 was my own personal nadir. But if we're talking internationally: 2009, 2003, 1979, 1973, 1939, 1931, 1929, and 1914 strike me as notably shitty). 

[Jo498]

The Chatti were a Germanic tribe around the region where I currently live which is a few kilometres north of where the Roman limes used to be so "we" (no clue where my ancestors beyond great-grandparents or so came from) were almost but not quite subdued by the Romans (Ite domum!)

I do not think Brexit is a disaster on the catastrophic scale of the Tsunami in 2004 (not 05, I forgot that). The woman that was murdered would have been even if "Remain" had won. Neither comparable to a war or a major economic crisis. Except for some economic downturn (the scale and range of which are unclear) Brexit might have fairly mild consequences for most people.

I first thought that 2016 is clearly better than the early 2000s because there is no war with substantial Western involvement going on, Bu we all tend to be rather parochial in such views. Even with ISIS losing ground there are hundreds of deaths every week all over the middle East. Also in South Sudan. Almost all the countries where wars or (de facto) civil wars are going on have mayhem on the scale of the Orlando shooting every week or every day.

[Jo498]

1 hour ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Can we all agree that it's not been a good start to the twenty-first century?

You are right. But this is probably "return to normalcy" after the somewhat naive exultation of the 1990s (End of History etc.) And while Europe was starting into a future beyond the Iron Curtain and cold war there was a genocide in Africa in 1994. And wars in former Yugoslavia, so the End of History b.s. was proven wrong almost as soon as Fukuyama's book was published.

[drawkcabi]

I'm not saying that 2016 is the worst of the worst, but what I'm saying is that even if it's the least of the worst, when looking back on 2016 people will remark, "yeah that was some fucked up shit there". It's what I think, anyway. I'm fed up with this year and I'm also superstitiously scared to say let's get it over with because the cruel hand of fate may rain much much more shit down just for me thinking it's been too much all ready.

[PetyrPunkinhead]

Yeah, 2016 has been pretty much a shit show thus far.However, I'm from New Orleans, so it's hard to beat 2005 as worst year of my life though. Besides Katrina, as if that wasn't enough to win '05 as the prize, we had some terrible family stuff go down. Now that 2016 is more than half way over, I'm hoping shit improves in the next five months.

[The Marquis de Leech]

1 hour ago, Jo498 said:

You are right. But this is probably "return to normalcy" after the somewhat naive exultation of the 1990s (End of History etc.) And while Europe was starting into a future beyond the Iron Curtain and cold war there was a genocide in Africa in 1994. And wars in former Yugoslavia, so the End of History b.s. was proven wrong almost as soon as Fukuyama's book was published.

Fukuyama's work always was a liberal* masturbatory fantasy.

*Meant in the European sense, not the US sense.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Fukuyama's work always was a liberal* masturbatory fantasy.

*Meant in the European sense, not the US sense.

Absolutely.  I remember seeing the title when the book was first released and think it was patently absurd.  Humanity will never reach an "end of history".  As long as people exist there will be problems.

[sologdin]

scot, it's an interesting discussion, in fukuyama, whom i regard as a popularizer of kojeve, and something of an ideologue of the present moment on behalf of think tanks in the united states.  i furthermore regard his argument as thoroughly solicited to the foundation by derrida in spectres of marx.

 

dunno about the anthropocentrism, kids.  66M BCE was a bad year for the dinosaurs and i'm not really seeing any lamentations herein.

[Ordos]

I don't like to claim to be the representative of all humanity so i prefer to always keep it at the personal level. 2015 was a miserable year for me with 3 high points. 2016 is so far boring with little hope of a better tomorrow.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Absolutely.  I remember seeing the title when the book was first released and think it was patently absurd.  Humanity will never reach an "end of history".  As long as people exist there will be problems.

Suffice it to say, if all you've read is the title of the book, you really have no idea what it's about and lack the capacity to intelligently criticize it. Fukuyama never claimed that problems were going to somehow disappear. The central thesis of the book is that "western" liberal democracy is the "final" form of human government, and that, from here on out, notwithstanding temporary setbacks in the form of government in any particular country, we were going to see liberal, western-style democracy proliferate inevitably around the globe.

It's a thesis that has its problems for sure, but one of those problems is not that Fukuyama predicted that stuff was just going to stop happening. 

 

Edited to add: Not sure what all the fuss is about - 2016 is a pretty good year so far and is likely to end as an okay year unless Trump gets elected. If that somehow happens, I will re-evaluate my position. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

But positing any form of government as an "endpoint" or "culmination" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution which only posits change.  There is no "direction" to it.

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But positing any form of government as an "endpoint" or "culmination" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution which only posits change.  There is no "direction" to it.

Scott,

If you want to read the book and have a discussion about it, I'm happy to do that. I'll go dig out my old copy and give it a re-read. But if all you're going to do is engage in tangential inanities that don't make sense in the context of what we're discussing, there's nothing for me to actually say, because you haven't offered anything that bears responding to.