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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone else have other examples?

Elected president who is so crass and generally offensive he wouldn't have gotten close to being elected 50 years ago.

Elected president who is showing clear signs of age related cognitive decline (so they say) but continues to occupy the office.

Elected presidents with criminal behaviour that is far worse than what previous presidents were impeached or resigned for.

Mental illness, drug abuse, homelessness appears to be worsening in many cities while we're seeing record setting net worth individuals and corporations.

Environmental catastrophe lurking just around the corner, scientists pleading for action to the point of civil disobedience, same international apathy from governments.

Increased government surveillance and control, military equipment flowing into police forces, laws passed to allow government kidnapping of citizens without formal charges.

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Yeah the stock trading in congress is another one for your list. I sometimes feel like America is the most corrupt country I've ever encountered. it's not overt like "Pay me $50 and you can avoid a ticket" but it's pernicious and wide spread.

- Law makers trade on what they're going to vote prior to voting it

- charging people a different price for the exact same procedure, at the same location, under the same market conditions simply for the reason of their income/insurance/whims

- nepotism and politicking in executive class (boards, Csuite etc), their lobbyists, and the ruling class ("elected" officials) etc. as an example Stock Buy backs are being decided by these groups and benefiting those groups' stock based income despite the duty to maximize shareholder value.

Yeah America has largely avoided the little corruptions like the cops shaking you down for money, but we've got massive amounts of large corruption instead. Although the way that corporations are looking for any kind of new parasitic revenue stream they can find (flip around displays with tip amounts growing everywhere) are sort of a kinder, gentler style of little corruptions.

That one popular Greek economist pointed this out in the way Northern Europe critiques Southern Europe as 'corrupt', the economist points out that while Southern Europe is rife with highly localized corruption, it is Northern Europe that is the breeding ground for systemic corruption by elites (pointing out various banking scandals, etc)

We've just got the cops that will murder you in cold blood for looking at them wrong. I think I'd take the $50 get out of jail free card, if I could.

If you think corruption is actually worse now than it has ever been, as opposed to better but more visible to the general public… I have a nice bridge to sell you.

Only problem is that most politicians will tell you that their money is in a blind "trust". The real issue is deregulation of banking and the incentivization of how debt was repackaged into new "investment" vehicles along with the reality that credit/financial risk assessment never became institutionalized.

Remember, all the sub-prime mortgages were given high marks in being safe risks once they were packaged vehicles of debt because banks could bully their way into giving them assessments that were less than factual due to business pressures put upon them from the competition.

The real current crime is that all the debt from 2008 never was written off in any way. This in turn has had a cascading effect on the economy globally.

everything on this thread relies on ignorance about what was occurring in some prior time

so transparency is improving huh

Thank. You. I’m shocked by how little historical context people here have.

It almost makes me wonder if the average age on here is extremely young? I remember at a young age I felt like the world was falling apart because I had 0 historical context, but a little bit of learning goes a long way to seeing how much the world has improved. Even in recent years.

A European nation casually invading another European nation, something we thought was now unthinkable not too long ago.

Um, Serbia invading Kosovo ring a bell ?

Before that you had decades of Cold War fear mongering, preceded by WW2.

Scary thought but yes this was 24 years ago!

Naivity perhaps, but after that crisis was resolved many political observers thought that Europe was on a path to a forever peace.

Technically Kosovo was part of Serbia back then. And it was a wee worse than „invading“.

Only if you haven't been paying attention or have the "war to end all wars" delusion that people sometimes seem to get. There have been all kinds of wars going on in Europe all the time basically forever[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe

Are you joking? Europe's history is full of this

Europe's history is full of this, but yes no joke there were many, many political observers who, not too long after the conflicts in the Balkan countries in the late 90s, and as countries formerly under Soviet influence became liberal democracies felt that this era of European history was in the past, that liberal democracies wouldn't invade one another yada yada and that there would never be any more wars in Europe.

Obviously they were wrong, or perhaps there just needed to be an asterisk next to Russia as they quickly regressed away from becoming a liberal democracy and all the conflicts recently have involved Russian aggression against its neighbours.

Are you talking about the 2022 invasion? The 2014 invasion? The Yugoslav wars in 1990? The cold war? The world war? The other world war? And that's just living memory.

How unthinkable is something that last happened between the same two countries eight years prior ._.

Maybe what is declining is a knowledge of history? Like, compare Andrew Jackson to Trump, or Reagan or FDR to Biden; it’s no contest. Public mental illness, drug abuse, homelessness were all worse during the 1980s and that’s just in my lifetime. Go farther back in U.S. history and there were entire cities of homeless, destitute, starving, and sick people. The idea that “homelessness” is even a problem that society should collectively address is barely 100 years old. Prior to that people died in the streets all the time and the only public funding was to pick up the bodies and bury them.

I think a lot of problems I see is caused by a general lack of curiosity of any sort of historical norms. I think this leads people to extrapolate what is normal (The Trump presidency was not normal in most respects, and many people treated it as if it was) and what isn't (current living standards actually are extremely high compared to even 40 years ago, but people think standards are declining).

Yeah the mid-'80s sucked in the US, but do you have any modern examples of decline? :-)

> Elected president who is showing clear signs of age related cognitive decline (so they say) but continues to occupy the office.

Donald Trump is many things, but I really don't think he's seeing more cognitive decline than an average 76 year old.

This is in surely reference to Biden. See things like https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=455169079910588

I'm reasonably sure that one doesn't refer to Trump

Reagan, Nixon?

True - one could say that removal of the dollar no longer being pinned to the value of gold could be a factor. But in reality all it's done is shift it to another asset like real estate.

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