The Age of Entitlement
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
114 points (93.2% liked)
Comic Strips
19684 readers
1416 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I may be a dumbass, but not in a "ruining society" kind of way ...
I used to read this strip in the papers ages ago, I forgot what it's called
It’s called Pearls Before Swine. It’s actually a pretty smart and sometimes adult themed comic strip.
The Entire Rest of the World: "We're eliminating poverty and famine, expunging entire categories of disease, uniting the world with telecommunication, ending authoritarian governance and radically expanding the idea of civil rights. More people are literate than ever before. More people are technically savvy. More people are professionally skilled. We have never progressed as quickly or universally as we have in this instance."
Americans: "This is the Stupidest Era in human history."
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. I'm in the developing world, and there are a few improvements in some areas, but still, some bad trends are more generalized and also happen around here. Even some good things, like more accessible communications, come with their bad sides. To make things even more complicated, some of the progress we're having comes at the expense of some aspects of our culture that have been giving us resilience, and it makes me fear for our future.
I know I was too vague, but to be specific, it would require to write a really, really long text.
You can apply all the nuance you want, but what kind of job do you think you'd have a century ago?
Most of these careers didn't exist even fifty years ago.
entire rest of the world? This is certainly not what is currently happening in Europe. We did many of those things, in most parts of the continent, but we're currently in the process of dismantling many of those achievements and many countries are in the process of fucking up in the same way the US is fucking up, or in some cases already have fucked up (e.g. Hungary).
Unless you define "current era" as "everything post WW2 until now", which increasingly isn't a useful definition, especially for the US.
This is certainly not what is currently happening in Europe.
Defusion of the Cold War with minimal armed conflicts. German reunification and the pioneering of the EU as a continent-wide collective project. The cementing of NATO as a hemisphere-wide security force, functionally ending the cross-border conflicts that had plagued the continent for centuries. Multiple national health care services with commensurate campaigns to eradicate horrifying diseases, culminating in perhaps the fastest and most successful response to an epidemic in history with the roll out of COVID vaccinations. Virtually no instances of famine across the continent in a century, despite this being commonplace in earlier eras. Near universal literacy. Each decade gives us a higher rate of college attendance.
You want to stack that up against any given decade in the 17th or 18th century?
Unless you define “current era” as “everything post WW2 until now”
You could start at the end of the Cold War, if thats your jam. But "The Age of Enlightment" spanned roughly from the publishing of Descartes' 1637 philosophy of Cogito, ergo sum until the Napoleonic Wars began in 1804.
We're quite literally living in The Space Age. I can't image any other civilization that might have sent probes into interstellar territory would be classified as dumb-dumbs.
Defusion of the Cold War with minimal armed conflicts. German reunification and the pioneering of the EU as a continent-wide collective project.
These happened 30 to 40 years ago. Meanwhile, the US is repeating Germany's 1930s. Surely, the German Nazi regime counts as its own era, or at least would have if it lasted longer than 12 years?
Meanwhile, the US is repeating Germany’s 1930s.
The US is repeating the US in the 1890s. We've been a nation saddled with congenital fascism for centuries. We've run out of free real estate to give away to settler colonialists. Our finance sector is a fat little tick sucking our nation dry. And our flagging imperialist military is fumbling around for a fight its not guaranteed to lose.
But unlike our glorious rush into the Spanish-American War and all the indignities that ensued, we're not a country full of illiterate bumpkins with no sense of our history or understanding of our own plight. This country is thick with opposition. It's bristling from coast to coast. And its going to go off like a powder keg in the next big economic downturn.
Surely, the German Nazi regime counts as its own era
Fascism wasn't confined to one country on one continent over the course of two decades. It's been a plague on the planet going back nearly a century. Trumpism isn't demonstrating a glorious Triumph of the Will, but a humiliating impotent failure of mismanagement serving as a capstone to the project of American hegemony Bush Jr tried to kick off in 2001.
It's a death knell for the American Petro-state. The rest of the world is already better off as we turn inward and collapse on ourselves.
Hungary is an outlier not the norm.
EU is doing fine in general, out of 27 countries obviously there will be problems in some of them.
Hungary may very well be on the way to a better path by next election. Orban thought he was clever playing both sides, but I think that game is over.
"Entire rest of the world" is of course an exaggeration, just look at Russia. But overall if it wasn't for Russia and USA we would be doing pretty well in the world right now.
The far right is on the rise in nearly every European country that it hasn't already conquered, and even the establishment parties in many countries are dismantling rights, increasing inequality and decreasing the quality of public services as if they can't wait for a coalition with a far right party.
Even on other continents, many countries have seen a rise of the far right in recent years, e.g. Japan, India, Afghanistan, Argentina.
I’m not saying the US is an example to be followed, but have you seen the rest of the world?
It's vastly improved over the last 40 years