is 2016 the worst year in human history?

lol

Well curated

For me, personally, terrible. Nothing to do with Donald Trump, nothing to do with rock stars dying.

voted 1864, awful year both in human history and for me personally

yeah good list. Voted Black Death, but 1492 is a pretty good answer.

dude you forgot the year that kurt died

Yeah but isn't his death part of the Rwandan genocide, when you think about it

1520 blew chunks.

The Black Death was pretty bad iirc

hmmm, black death, smallpox, genocides, nazis, crusades...or the year bowie and prince died

I'm assumuing no Christians would claim 30 was a bad year.

they didn't call it the "Great" Leap Forward for nothing

Making the Leap Forward Great Again

Two Sacks is one two many imo.

1968 I'm thinking is the most important to our modern sensibilities.

*serious face* anybody arguing against the Holocaust has got a tough case to make in terms of impact on human history i think

personally the destruction of the library at Alexandria has always felt like an enormous tragedy/crime tho, only mitigated by the possibility that what was lost was exaggerated

slave trade maybe the biggest crime of the lot but its ultimate outcomes are mixed in terms of history of humanity i think

gorta

Terrible stuff, good poll

Went with 1492, Spanish conquistadors are so nightmarish

gorta another horrible crime with eventually mixed results for humans as a whole

2016 is the year five years and purple rain officially became the reality we're living in, and bowie and prince checked out before we could ask them to write songs about what's next.

ie, it's over

lol weed

jameson, actually

That was me second guess ;-)

2016 is the year five years and purple rain officially became the reality we're living in

Not sure about that, Bowie's prediction of the start date of World War 3 was off by ~38 years at least:
Aladdin Sane (1913-1928-197?)

You say you want a leader
But you can't seem to make up your mind
I think you better close it
And let me guide you to the purple rain

seemed pretty relevant, in the "fuck this human ezperiment, let's call the whole thing off" sort of way

so true!

haha i was about to put 'but no one is actually saying this?' then i googled it & found i was v v wrong

well tbf google hits from 1954 are somewhat rare

personally the destruction of the library at Alexandria has always felt like an enormous tragedy/crime tho, only mitigated by the possibility that what was lost was exaggerated

yeah. things get lost, broken and burned all the time, and when we do find past knowledge or preserve it, we either turn it to our own ends or good bits of it end up preserving ignorance of past as received wisdom (hello galen).

was just reading about drunk soldiers shooting at the ankles of passers by in a cellar bar in 17th Germany, and people being forced to drink boiling shit as torture in 30 Years War, but it's hard not choose Holocaust.

Progressivists don't always seem to have the capacity to understand that things can become progressively bad. The 20th Century administrative and infrastructure frameworks helped expediate the programmatic slaughter of peoples.

On this "progressivist" basis however (and with all our new and wonderful globalising weapons and structures) the world as it is very much has the capacity to deliver the worst year ever very soon.

Rooting for 2017. I more see 2016 as the equivalent of the drag racing start line smoke, nitro and burning rubber, before the actual fun starts.

Nothing can touch the GLF for the sheer rapid death toll but the Cultural Revolution probably wasn't far off - albeit over a longer timescale of horror.

List could've done with the inclusion of the 2004 tsunami, that wiped out 230.000 people, for good measure. But it wouldn't be right if this poll threw up a winner that wasn't caused by humans themselves tbf. Hard to not vote for the holocaust indeed.

voted an lushan rebellion (reports of 36 million dead are not considered reliable due to the COMPLETE COLLAPSE OF SOCIETY in the rebellion's wake), but i would add:

1755: lisbon earthquake
1945: hiroshima, nagasaki
1975: start of cambodian genocide

i would also argue the negative perception of 2016 comes from the perception that absolutely _nothing good has happened_ this year. so 1943 is a terrible, terrible year in human history, but if you're russian you can point to the soviet victory at stalingrad as a source of hope and comfort. in 2016, by contrast, you have democracy completely and decisively crushed as a global political force by ethnocentric fascism, but, uh... the cubs win the world series?

I'd err more to the side of the argument that the 36m figure is probably erroneous and caused by the breakdown of the census system. But if if it was correct it would be staggering by 8th century standards, wouldn't it be approx the third of the world or something?

Read a book by Rui Tavares recently that suggested the Lisbon earthquake provoked a sea change in Portugal (and consequently Europe at large) away from viewing natural disasters as the wrath of God against sinners and towards urban planning/prevention strategies.

Voting on Monday, after Austria’s presidential election and Italy’s constitutional referendum.

very tempted to vote 1200 BC for the bronze age collapse but went with spanish conquest of americas/smallpox. not just death but close to a total civilizational extinction, enormous impact on world history. mongol conquests, black death, 1917, 1943 all heavy on doom but there's been more of a sense of recovery.

1864 is a bit of a dark horse, as it also has the end of the American Civil War, and the Paraguayan War didn't really get devastating until later. But it's the year where North America, South America, Europe (Second Dano/Prussian War) and China (Taiping Rebellion) are tearing themselves apart. Wordwide violence for some weird reason.

Personally speaking It's been the worst year of my life, hands down, so yeah 2016

no ilx comps this year, so deffo 2016

2003 - sufjan stevens begins his 50 states project

44 BC was great cos it finally gave stabbing victims a clever dying repartee

Pretty much the beginning of the end in 1440. All downhill from then.

Voted 30 Years War, mostly to remind myself to finish reading that book.

no ilx comps this year, so deffo 2016

― ^ 諷刺 (ken c), Saturday, December 3, 2016 1:25 PM (fifty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had the idea of an ilx comp of 'the worst songs we can think of'

"Sack" lol

Back, Sack, and Crack of Rome.

Some perspectives

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/29/stop-saying-that-2016-was-the-worst-year/?utm_term=.a16cb4d355f7

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/12/29/_2016_was_the_year_white_liberals_learned_about_disillusionment.html

As a group, white liberals seem particularly prone to declaring 2016's worstness (as opposed to the many many horrible years that preceded it). I will readily admit that I am a white liberal with gobs of privilege. Further, like many people, I know I'm in a bubbly echo chamber of like-minded people. This functions as an amplifier.

I also want to note that white liberals tend to love us some vicarious traumatization ("I'm just SO SAD about what's happening in East Timor!"). So bad things happening to other people can often be counted up as yet more bad things that are happening to us.

Okay so the Venn diagram of mega-grieving populations is not strictly white and liberal, but there will be a lot of overlap. White liberals aged 35-50 are culturally well positioned to have enjoyed the music of Bowie, Prince, and Cohen. We're very well positioned to have been into Star Wars. Add the election and particularly its gut-punching surprise and the recipe is complete. Almost everybody thought it was in the bag, and that the country was more woke than it really is. (This mostly only surprised white people.)

If the American election already had you primed to think everything is going to shit, it's easier to see every celebrity death as yet another ingredient for your Sorrow Soup. And if you had a couple bad things happen in your life (personally, my mom died, my cat died, and my son was diagnosed with a rare genetic intellectual disability).

I don't think the "fuck 2016" sentiment is a white thing.

We get a leap second this year, it would be great if a mass extinction happened in that final second. Then there should be no more debate.

We're very well positioned to have been into Star Wars.

Also it wasn't just white people shocked by the election, despite what the Dave Chappelle skit depicted. The problem with this website and many other spaces in American life is that it is too white and people end up hand wringing over whether certain opinions are "white opinions." Even more problematic, people end up imagining what the "other" believes, as if nonwhite people were a homogenous bloc. In reality "they" think all kinds of things. Nonwhites are not the other of whites. We're all just people. Xp

Identity politics is good when it's anout fighting inequality but it's bad when it's about generalizing the perspective of enormous, diverse groups.

That wasnt intended as an attack on you ye mad puffin

Treesh otm

It's cool Treesh - honestly this isn't meant to be blankety but.

Can one say it's not exclusively white, while also saying that it's been noticed among yr white liberal types pretty prominently of late (acknowledging that if you're in a white liberal bubble you're going to see a lot more of it than otherwise)?

I'm as dismayed and worried by trump, brexit and the CONTINUED inroads of extreme right-wing ideology into mainstream political discourse as anyone and if you've had a bad year of course I sympathise, but that isn't quite what's happening in a terrible internet meme that needs to fold in things like mass killings in the United States (as dependable as hangovers) and a slight statistical blip in celebrity deaths (maybe correspondent with an increase in celebrities over the course of the 20th century? I wonder) in order to make its case

Almost everybody thought it was in the bag, and that the country was more woke than it really is

don't forget "America is Already Great". the people that did think the above were also convinced "almost everybody" thought the same.

im watching platoon what year is that set in that seems pretty shit nb theres some black guys and some lads i think maybe vietnamese they would appear to concur so thats a strong suite for the current argument

Platoon is set in 1986

maybe correspondent with an increase in celebrities over the course of the 20th century?

Absolutely; if you trace the commoditization of celebrity qua celebrity along with the mid-20th c. nexus of technology e.g. television with specific cultural figures e.g. beatles, elvis, you get a lot more people who were famous 25-50 years ago than people who were famous 125-150 years ago. And people 25 or 50 years past the peak of their fame are both more likely to be beloved and more likely to die soon, ergo more beloved dead celebrities.

true but it still is a shock that nearly all the mega-selling blockbuster artists of the 80's are dead (besides Janet?) while the Townshends, McCartneys, and Rolling Stones are all still alive

famous 60s band The Townshends and The McCartneys

the idea of multiple Townsends is quite frightening, although he'd probably like it - he could say twasn't me, it were him!

true but it still is a shock that nearly all the mega-selling blockbuster artists of the 80's are dead (besides Janet?)

Except the vast majority of them are still alive and kicking, if this page is to be believed: http://tsort.info/music/ds1980.htm.

well yeah, he was basically marvelling at how ~6 people can have died while a different ~6 people are still alive, which nngh everybody get a fucking grip already

I entirely sympathise with treeship's "I feel like I'm going insane" except he and I have apparently woken up in different twilight zones because from where I'm sitting mine is the minority viewpoint that actually makes any kind of sense according to the rules of the reality I went to sleep in

All I'm saying is, someone is killing celebrities and wins is involved.

sorry for your losses

yeah I know it's all arbitrary and it doesn't mean anything, point is as someone born in the mid-80's its weird to lose people who you can remember having hits and being a big cultural figure, over those who have been dinosaurs your whole life. it just affects you in a different way. maybe the first time my generation has started to feel, I dunno...kinda old? if it was all about whose music I was most attached to I'd say losing 2/3rds of ELP was the worst (lol) but they've always been "in the past" in my mind...hell the fact that they released two albums in my lifetime is still very strange to me.

still seems better than 1346, where if anyone in your village was famous it was probably cos their rotting corpse was hung on display at the town entrance as a public example

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

OK

can we move on now

Chicxulub impact fans hardest hit

lol at results
Maybe if more Star Wars cast members had killed themselves in sympathy

at least no one voted for Roman Sack and Siege of Juersalem

Good thing no beloved musicians are going to die now that 2016 is over.

This rookie general (Zeng Guoquan) for the Qing dynasty captures 8000 Taiping soldiers in an unlikely rout. His battalion commander helpfully explains that they have to kill them all now. Zeng then reluctantly subordinates the task to him and goes off to hide in his tent. The Commander sets up a killing station where people get beheaded in batches of 10 at a time "finishing by the light of lanterns just after the sun went down that night"

His brother (Zeng Guofan) wrote several letters to Guoquan over the following days - first more sanguine, suggesting his brother find a way to bury the thousands of corpses or else pile them onto old boats and send them down the river so the stink wouldn't bring disease into his camp. But as he realized that the slaughter was weighing heavily on Gouquan's conscience, his letters became more reassuring by telling him if Confucius were alive, he too would say it was right to exterminate the rebels.

This General Beheaded 8000 Captive Soldiers...And That's Okay!

Probably for the "why am I such a dick" thread, but have felt a rage I don't quite understand every time I see facebook / twitter posts along the lines of "quit it with the fuck 2016 meme - there's no magical meaning to a year" or "whew, glad it's 2017 now and all of your heroes are safe" - I don't think these ideas / sentiments are wrong, exactly, it just seems like such a patronising attitude, like they think everyone else is an irrational idiot for indulging in some sort of semi-magical thinking when (a) everyone does and (b) the world isn't always a worse place for it. But I should get over it I guess.

yep

surprised there was no option for "every year is worse than the previous year"

ban years

ban years

mods?

they would but even the worst one only got 16 fps

read about the Great Leap Forward the other day. 55 million dead, wow that 20th century was evil

not if those 55 million were stood in the way of a beautiful future

I'm dying to get hold of that new Tan Hecheng Cultural Revolution book, but £18.20 for an epub download is more than I'll pay.

2017 thus far featuring less celebrity death but more dystopia

Alan Colmes rip
Fuck you 2017

no

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/why-536-was-worst-year-be-alive

That’s a woke kid’s dream come true

should i run this again with 2020

definitely

Smallpox very likely killed more than 50% of the population of the western hemisphere within a few decades of its arrival. The black death killed nearly half of Europe's population. As bad as this year is shaping up for those of us living through it, covid-19 isn't even close to the head of that class.

We're still in April!

rank the past five years in order of terribleness

i'll start

5. 2019 - came out
4. 2017 - moved, got new job, bought house
3. 2020 - ehhhh.
2. 2018 - severe depression (recurrent), treated with tms but overall unpleasant
1. 2016 - dad died, lost job, also it was 2016

or, like, just go on speculating what was really worse, the black death or the an lushan rebellion. not sure i have much of a horse in that race.

Smallpox very likely killed more than 50% of the population of the western hemisphere within a few decades of its arrival. The black death killed nearly half of Europe's population. As bad as this year is shaping up for those of us living through it, covid-19 isn't even close to the head of that class.

Governments around the world in those named single years didn’t respond to massive climate crisis events by relaxing or waiving checks on fossil fuel extraction.