not to overexaggerate all of the powers of the planet’s single superpower, but the unchallenged influence that it now exerts certainly plays a role in how other actors behave & push the envelope in their own domains. we saw this in the crackdowns on opposition groups, minorities & other abuses immediately after the GWOT meme was tossed out there. unlawful detentions, security state on steriods, secrecy, etc etc.
if you look at what is now openly permissable, according to the actions of the leaders of the usa — overt unilateral aggression for one’s own self-interest w/ complete disregard for international laws, opinions & norms; the tolerance toward & encouragement of wide-scale corruption; the active promotion of a fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, reactionary, simplistic, dualist political worldview; reckless financial irresponsibility; hyper-militarism; state-sanctioned torture; the destruction of the state welfare apparatus; etc — and recognize that it sets the bar for how other aspiring tyrants determine their own policies & course of action, which many already have, then i’d say that in this category alone, the state of the world is well & truly more f’d up than it’s been for a long, long time.
on a separate measure, and one that has been briefly touched on in the past days here in other threads, according to those who track this sort of thing, like kevin bales, “Slaves are cheap these days. Their price is the lowest it’s been in about 4,000 years. And right now the world has a glut of human slaves – 27 million by conservative estimates and more than at any time in human history. [link]”
and then there’s the state of the world from non-human perspectives — the alarming rise in species extinctions, soil depletion, habitat & ecosystem destruction, toxic land & waters, and so on.
the state of the planet is definitely worse off than before

Posted by: b real | Oct 6 2007 19:12 utc | 4

Yunno, I came to live in Germany the year before the Berlin Wall fell and spent some time in Russia just after the fall of Communism, and there was a budding hope throughout all the turmoil that things were going to get better, the world was going to open up, people would find more freedoms and even more prosperity as the old hindrances to trade, travel and commerce fell.
It even continued in the bucolic years of the Clinton administration; I remember when even convenience-store clerks in America were being offer health benefits and pension plans, but that went with the crash of ’97 (which saw the end of any residual optimism in Russia as well), and then it all came to an end of September 11, 2001. The general view that things are getting better has been replaced by a fear that the worst is yet to come.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Oct 6 2007 20:19 utc | 6

i would say both, given fairly recent events of dubious veracity resulting in what appears to be endless war
my new neighbour lived under communism and says the politics here is worse
at least the medieval idea of separate publicly funded school boards for anglicans, buddhists, catholics,…, zoroastrians, etc. went over like a lead balloon
LCD screens are better fer the orbs I think, at least that has been my experience. Smaller text is now easily read and far less strain and tiredness result.
Breaks are still a good idea. Not only from staring at a screen, but also all the crapola out there.

Posted by: jcairo | Oct 6 2007 20:52 utc | 8

Cloned poster, it wont stay that way for long if the powers that be have anything to do with it…Richard Clarke calls for “closed Internet”
I had a chance to watch linktv for free recently, at a friends, you know one of them you can watch it for a week for free marketing deals, and I’m not sure if it is because I haven’t watched television in so long or a combination of that and good programing, but seeing and hearing about places that Western and American news hardly ever talks about –except in a negative light–, brought it home for me, the humanness of it all. In other words seeing foreign people in their own cultures and habitats made it really real. I couldn’t help but think, how deprived most Americans are by not seeing other cultures in a different light. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if we had a just and real media, it wouldn’t be so easy to dehumanize non Western cultures.
I’m going to have to check out their site again. It’s been about a year or two since it came to may attention. I wasn’t able to download anything even though they had things available for download…I guess they discovered the Youtoobz phenomenas.
But yes, I agree with others here, the answer is both yes and no. I think the powers that be want us to think things are bad, really bad, so as to overwhelm us so as to have power over us.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 6 2007 22:25 utc | 10

that we made it this far without nuclear war is a plus. However, even if we have a hundred year window as of today to act to reverse the impact of global climate change, its not likely we are capablle of doing so. Imperialism, at least the current flavor of it, is playing itself out. HIV/AIDS has been exposed for what it always was — a political disease. Awareness is increasing world-wide in leaps & bounds. Its becoming a more level playing field for poorer nations, though theres still quite a ways to go. Moral superiority by the Eurocentric world (Black, White & Brown) is increasingly being challenged. And for me, every new wisdom is absolutely priceless.
so I think we are better off. But we may still self-destruct from global climate-change if it turns out to be as damaging as it can be.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 6 2007 22:58 utc | 12

also, despite everything Big Pharma has done to prevent it, people are beginning to better understand and appreciate the immense value of herbal/natural health medicines/supplements and products in general.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 6 2007 23:47 utc | 14

This is appalling. Something about watching the last shreds of humanity in a person, here Dana Perino, tortured by her own disgusting dedication to being and remaining an insider…
As Badtux implies above, if she were of sn earlier era of insiders, she might have simply smirked through it, the way George does.
Have you ever watched American comedies from the 1920s? The aesthetic of funny always seemed bizarrely cruel to me. But yes, we seem to be slouching toward that model again.
a cycle?…

Posted by: ‘citizen’ | Oct 7 2007 4:42 utc | 16

@16
here Dana Perino, tortured by her own disgusting dedication to being and remaining an insider…
and she is also yet another victim of moral superiority, possibly & unbeknowingly messing with sociopathy.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 7 2007 6:00 utc | 18

The fact that it is so out in the open and people aren’t bothered by it is what gets me. When a US Senator can stand up in the House and proclaim that he is more outraged at the outrage over Abu Graib than the actual murder, torture and indignation then the world is worse no question about it.

Posted by: Sam | Oct 7 2007 10:43 utc | 20

@15 – that’s a very narrow filter to make an observation about the state of the world though. consider the effects & implications of the increasing genetically-altered food sources, synthetic foodstuffs, and chemicals & pharmaceuticals added to such. look at the rise in coronary heart disease, cancers, obesity, diabetes, neurological disorders, the decreasing sperm count worldwide & shrinking penis/testicle sizes (an evolutionary correction in the works?), the levels of toxins/chemicals/pesticides now commonly found in the blood, body organs, and mother’s milk, all of this directly related to the food we eat, the water we drink, and the environments we exist in. and what about the loss of diversity — in foods, in terrestrial ecosystems, in all realms cultural, social, and political — as the planet’s most lethal invasive species continues to trend toward monocultural systems?
the world state is far from returning to “normal”, whatever that description implies.

Posted by: b real | Oct 7 2007 17:34 utc | 22

it is time to reread dante to find out which circle of hell we are living through

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 8 2007 1:02 utc | 24

The top .000000001% are in an endgame and know it, so their minions grab more openly and greedily than ever. Soon the board will be upset, ala Albert the Alligator in Pogo, drowning/crushing many minions, following which the tools left and the few surviving rest of us will suffer the new rules of the old rulers without fail.
So, are things worse? Not for the shepherds.

Posted by: plushtown | Oct 8 2007 13:45 utc | 26

I wonder this all the time.
Hard to say. The 30 Years’ War was no picnic, nor the rampage across Eastern Europe of Attila and his Boyz. The Triangle Trade was the end of the world for those caught up in it as human merchandise; the Conquista (which we’re supposed to be “honouring” this week) was the end of a world in an orgy of blood, slavery, looting and sadism. China has been wracked by famine and war many times in history, India likewise. The Old Testament recalls to us tales of war, sacking and enslaving, the fall of cities, the wickedness of kings; the architectural and textual remains of MesoAmerican empires tell us of slavery, corvee labour, warfare. The Imperial Model of culture seems to behave consistently wherever it sprouts. The world is well provided with anthropogenic deserts and the ruins of civilisations built on blood and doomed by their own aggression and greed. “The world” has ended many times, or to put it slightly differently there have been many End Times and many people have looked up from their little lives to see Doom bearing down on them and everything they loved and cared about… which is how I feel a lot of the time today.
The difference today is that there are so many of us now — and our technology has extended the destructive reach of our psychopaths, greedheads, Men Who Would Be Kings, so that we now have civilisations whose implosion takes down a larger and larger surrounding area. And we seem to be producing damaged, desocialised Men With Guns at an alarming rate: the latest heartbreaking news from the Congo being just one example of the ragged armies of “superpredators” being deliberately created by state actors and then let loose in the world — the 30 Years’ war on a global scale, psychotic bands of reivers and raiders wandering the scorched earth… charming prospect.
What’s also new is the overdraw of biotic systems worldwide and the ungoverned engine of industrial capitalism accelerating that overdraw daily. Plus the X factor of climate destabilisation.
If we go in dystopian directions it is hard to see any future but a die-off, whether orchestrated or random. I still think the door to a better future is not closed, there is still a space big enough to wiggle through. But it’s narrowing all the time as bad choices are made, one after the other, by individuals, by governments…

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 8 2007 21:07 utc | 28

A recent poll shows that (in the USA) that in the last 5 years the number of people thinking that the roll of government is important in solving social problems has reversed, from under 40% then, to over 60% today. Thats a little progress I guess.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 10 2007 8:42 utc | 30