the decade from hell

[Irvine511]

it really kind of was.

The decade in news photographs - The Big Picture - Boston.com

 

[Jive Turkey]

I'm sure someone could compile of list of pleasant photos from this decade.....cant they??

I love looking at year/decade end photography. Thanks for posting

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

I'm sure it's even worse if you click on the graphic ones. I couldn't do it.

 

[phillyfan26]

People are generally influenced most by the decade of their teen years, correct? Being days away from 19, the 2000s pretty much were my entire teens. I do wonder how the impact of this decade "from hell" impacts me compared to the older posters on this board.

 

[JanuaryStar]

I'm sure it's even worse if you click on the graphic ones. I couldn't do it.

Me neither. I've stopped viewing them after I saw only a few very quickly. If you'd only judge from these pics, you'd say the world has gone flipping mad. It's so hard to believe what people do to each other. Luckily, also a lot of positive things happened. So right now I'm rather thinking about that

 

[ntalwar]

Interesting photos. I think those 50 were taken from these 115:
The top news headlines on current events from Yahoo! News

 

[U2Girl1978]

I looked at all the photos. Very very sad.

 

[Earl-Of-IMDb]

I stopped looking at the pictures right after the twin towers picture...but like Januarystar mentioned, I focus on the positive.

 

[coolian2]

Top 100 Reuters photos - Part I - photos - world | Stuff.co.nz
Top 100 Reuters photos - Part II - photos - world | Stuff.co.nz

 

[Jive Turkey]

I stopped looking at the pictures right after the twin towers picture...but like Januarystar mentioned, I focus on the positive.

Ya, it would be nice for someone to put together some pleasant ones. That being said, I think its important for people to see even the most disturbing photos. The 9/11 shots got be thinking a lot about how drastically the world has changed since that day. Seems like everything was rainbows and buttercups before then

 

[Jive Turkey]

Top 100 Reuters photos - Part I - photos - world | Stuff.co.nz
Top 100 Reuters photos - Part II - photos - world | Stuff.co.nz

Thanks for posting those.

Whats with the MJ/World Cup diptych on page 14

 

[Jive Turkey]

Another thought. The image of the Saddam Hussein statue being pulled down. I remember watching that live on CNN and somehow thinking, as did Wolf Blitzer, that it would hold similar significance as the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima. How wrong we were

 

[Earl-Of-IMDb]

Seems like everything was rainbows and buttercups before then

I agree. I think its worth remembering the pleasant times as well. well, good and bad, so we can reflect on how far we have come and to see how we can be more constructive and better ourselves as society.

 

[jacobus]

hugo chavez on one of the worst persons of the fading decade at UN:
"The devil came here yesterday, it still smells of sulphur today"
...so this topic really fits...

 

[coolian2]

Whats with the MJ/World Cup diptych on page 14

haha, i know! i have no idea what's going on there.

 

[Irvine511]

hugo chavez on one of the worst persons of the fading decade at UN:
"The devil came here yesterday, it still smells of sulphur today"
...so this topic really fits...

chavez is no angel himself.

 

[UberBeaver]

I would say the 1940's were probably far worse.

 

[maycocksean]

Perhaps it's insensitive of me to say so, but to be honest this past decade has been fantastic,for me personally. I spent virtually all of it on a tropical island paradise for starters. . .

(though, actually the decade for that paradise was infinitely worse, especially economically, than it was the mainland U.S.)

 

[melon]

The last decade, for me, has been a reminder that the end of the Cold War has not been "the end of history" after all. If we want a better world, the solution is not to throw our hands up in resignation, but to work to achieve it.

 

[kramwest1]

Looking through those pics really hit me how much the 00s were like the 80s (in a bad way): Terrorism, natural disasters, Space Shuttle disaster, nuclear threats, etc.

But, I have to say that despite all of that, the 00s were quite good for me (with apologies to the rest of the world).

 

[ntalwar]

"The iDecade" is the best nickname I've seen for the decade.

 

[Earl-Of-IMDb]

I have to say that despite all of that, the 00s were quite good for me (with apologies to the rest of the world).

with all honesty I could say the same.

 

[redhotswami]

People are generally influenced most by the decade of their teen years, correct? Being days away from 19, the 2000s pretty much were my entire teens. I do wonder how the impact of this decade "from hell" impacts me compared to the older posters on this board.

this decade was my 20s. i have to say, this one was far more influential to me than the 90s. it also sucked way worse, i think. anyway, it's probably kind of silly for me to compare and respond to your comment, since i've only been alive for nearly 3 decades, but, there it is.

 

[Irvine511]

for me, it was becoming a real adult. it has been enormously challenging.

 

[A_Wanderer]

As the media keep reminding us, the world seems as violent as ever. Armed conflicts rack more than a dozen nations, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, Burundi, Somalia, and Colombia. We are awash in weapons, from AK-47s to nuclear-tipped missiles. The eight declared nuclear states possess more than 23,000 warheads among them, and efforts to persuade Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear ambitions have failed. The U.S. still spends almost as much on defense as all other countries combined, while growth in global military spending has surged 44 percent since 1999, led by Russia (173 percent) and China (194 percent). "The past year saw increasing threats to security, stability, and peace in nearly every corner of the globe," the Stockholm International Peace Re-search Institute recently warned.

The economic crisis was supposed to increase violence around the world. The truth is that we are now living in one of the most peaceful periods since war first arose 10 or 12 millennia ago. The relative calm of our era, say scientists who study warfare in history and even prehistory, belies the popular, pessimistic notion that war is so deeply rooted in our nature that we can never abolish it. In fact, war seems to be a largely cultural phenomenon, which culture is now helping us eradicate. Some scholars now even cautiously speculate that the era of traditional war—fought by two uniformed, state-sponsored armies—might be drawing to a close. "War could be on the verge of ceasing to exist as a substantial phenomenon," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University.

That might sound crazy, but consider: if war is defined as a conflict between two or more nations resulting in at least 1,000 deaths in a year, there have been no wars since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and no wars between major industrialized powers since World War II. Civil wars have also declined from their peak in the early 1990s, when fighting tore apart Rwanda, the Balkans, and other regions. Most armed conflicts now consist of low-level guerrilla campaigns, insurgencies, and terrorism—what Mueller calls the "remnants of war."

These facts would provide little comfort if war's remnants were nonetheless killing millions of people—but they're not. Recent studies reveal a clear downward trend. In 2008, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the University of Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600), and Iraq (4,000).

Uppsala's figures exclude deaths from "one-sided conflict," in which combatants deliberately kill unarmed civilians, and "indirect" deaths from war-related disease and famine, but even when these casualties are included, annual war-related deaths from 2004 to 2007 are still low by historical standards. Acts of terrorism, like the 9/11 attacks or the 2004 bombing of Spanish trains, account for less than 1 percent of fatalities. In contrast, car accidents kill more than 1 million people a year.

The contrast between our century and the previous one is striking. In the second half of the 20th century, war killed as many as 40 million people, both directly and indirectly, or 800,000 people a year, according to Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland. He estimates that 190 million people, or 3.8 million a year, died as a result of wars and state--sponsored genocides during the cataclysmic first half of the century. Considered as a percentage of population, the body count of the 20th century is comparable to that of blood-soaked earlier cultures, such as the Aztecs, the Romans, and the Greeks.

By far the most warlike societies are those that preceded civilization. War killed as many as 25 percent of all pre-state people, a rate 10 times higher than that of the 20th century, estimates anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois. Our ancestors were not always so bellicose, however: there is virtually no clear-cut evidence of lethal group aggression by humans prior to 12,000 years ago. Then, "warfare appeared in the evolutionary trajectory of an increasing number of societies around the world," says anthropologist Jonathan Haas of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. He attributes the emergence of warfare to several factors: growing population density, environmental stresses that diminished food sources, and the separation of people into culturally distinct groups. "It is only after the cultural foundations have been laid for distinguishing 'us' from 'them,' " he says, "that raiding, killing, and burning appear as a complex response to the external stress of environmental problems."

World May Be Entering a New Age of Peace - Newsweek.com

 

[An Cat Gav]

hugo chavez on one of the worst persons of the fading decade at UN:
"The devil came here yesterday, it still smells of sulphur today"
...so this topic really fits...

Great quote.

It was a terrible decade in many ways, but not in the same league as the 1930's or 40's in terms of human suffering.

 

[WCF]

We might be over-emphasizing the negatives of this decade. As other people have mentioned, other decades have been far worse.

As insensitive as it sounds, most people are very much disconnected from these events. It's not like WWII, where most Americans were impacted by the war; it's not like the decades of the Cold War, where we all lived in fear of nuclear warfare. I won't even get into the suffering during the Great Depression. This past decade, if you ignored the rest of the world, our own worlds kept on spinning just fine, which is exactly what a lot of people did.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, despite the atrocity of some of these events, they were pretty small scale. I honestly think the media is just overblowing it all for their own sake. The decade from hell? I'd say hardly.

[edit]: The Newsweek article posted a couple posts earlier is very good at pointing this out. We live in one of the most peaceful eras in human history and that's a fact. To say anything else would just be exaggeration.

 

[VintagePunk]

We might be over-emphasizing the negatives of this decade. As other people have mentioned, other decades have been far worse.

You can find both horror and great beauty and joyfulness in any decade. Just depends where you choose to look.

 

[redhotswami]

As insensitive as it sounds, most people are very much disconnected from these events.

Perhaps. However, personal involvement in a national tragedy can pretty much ruin the entire decade. It's more than just one particular event, because even though it was a moment in time, it continues to effect the lives of those involved, and the lives of those involved with those involved for years to come.

 

[AliEnvy]

Pictures of Quotes of the decade - Photos - NME.COM