The Decade With No Name | Hacker News Reader

The Decade With No Name

newyorker.com

11 pointsdwynings19 comments

I didn't see much insight here. It was the typical liberal "00 was the decade of Bush and Bush is bad" with a little social media admiration mixed in.

The truth, I think, is that the last decade was simply a hard one and George Bush was just a product of his times. It was a decade where the U.S. chose security over freedom and grew into a nation it didn't want to be. While Bush was just a President who was not wise enough to turn the country around while being appeasing enough to give the nation what it thought it wanted.

I know some here love Barack Obama but I think he represents the same one-sided mentality of the last decade. He is the knee jerk reaction to Bush, opposite in every way and just as extreme to the other side.

My hope is that the next decade finds a balance this one has lacked.

I have a hard time thinking that Obama is different than Bush. All he seem to be doing is getting stuck into wars, and endorsing the Bush administration's policy of interventionism into the economy.

Plus, I still remember the anger and betrayal I felt when Obama signed the act that immunize telecoms for their spying activities. They don't even pretend to be subtle about it!

I think you're projecting on the politics.

Though the author lamented Bush's 2004 win, "(In the alternate decade of fantasy, President Gore, forever slim and with hairline intact, not only reads those intelligence memos in the summer of 2001 but acts upon them; he also ratifies the Kyoto Protocol and invents something even better than the Internet.)" sounds like a direct condemnation of that "00 as the decade of Bush and Bush is bad" attitude. Also, I didn't catch the glowing reviews of Obama in there, except that she referred to him as an intellectual.

I agree with you, though, that the article was basically content free.

We only seemed to the naming issue near the start of the decade here in the UK. Now, all of the mass media I've seen call it the "naughties" - even the staid old Times.

I like the question of semiology here, even though it's not really addressed in the article. I’ve been calling it the début de siècle — French for ‘start of the century’. The French term has so much more connotation than the literal English translation, though.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_de_siècle

It's the naughties, as far as I know.

Music from the eighties, nineties, naughties and today!

You get some amount of automatic street-cred with your kids if you tell them you grew up in the naughties.

I have only heard that term used in the UK, not in the US.

I think that usage of naught/nought for zero in British English is pretty standard. In the US, it can be used to mean "nothing" (e.g. "all for naught") but not zero.

This is why, I believe, that not much is being made out of the end of the decade. That, and perhaps so much emphasis was placed on the start of the century and/or millennium.

I'm not sure either what sort of name will be used for the next decade.

The Teens?

In that case this decade was the "pre-teens"?

The downfall.

killer appellation

Some puns are too useful to groan about.

Considering the number of software entrepreneurs on this site, I'm surprised I haven't seen it used here before.

I think it should be called the naughts: http://www.nobody-knows-anything.com/Jan00/000103.html

The AUGHTS. I see none of the issues the article bring up actually being BAD things about this term for this time period, which it has been used to describe it before.

"The first decade of the twenty-first century" sounds good to me. TFDOTTFC ("Tee-Eff dot Tee-Eff-See", TF.TFC) for short :)

Mentions Bump for the iPhone (YC S09).

2001-2010

How about we all just agree to call it "Steve"?

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