Definitely. See what happened when Brianna Wu tried to "send in detectives, send in police, send in everything in his power" to stop goobergrape.
Most people in this thread seem to be essentially expressing childhood nostalgia for a certain period, and that's the 2000s for a lot of people because many (most?) KFers are 20-30. Some are older, so they instead miss the 1990s or even earlier. This doesn't really have much to do with what the period was actually like compared to today; the unemployment and murder rates in the USA were much worse in the 1970s-1990s than today (for a very extreme example, NYC had 2,245 murders in 1990 but only 287 in 201
, but there's still plenty of nostalgia for those periods. Similarly, in Britain, actually wanting to live through the Winter of Discontent and the 1980s industrial unrest instead of today is total madness from a detached perspective, but people often become wistful for a time before they had so many adult responsibilities. Chris and his obsession with Manchester High is an exaggerated example.Since I don't really have much childhood nostalgia, I don't miss the 2000s. From a detached perspective, it was the peak of the war on terrorism and the resulting erosion of civil liberties; the feelings of national unity many people here are remembering fondly had the effect of suppressing criticism of the Patriot act, the Iraq War, and the construction of the surveillance state that culminated in laws like Obama's 2012 NDAA, which allowed indefinite detention of citizens. Much as we saw in New Zealand earlier this year, the aftermath of terrorist atrocities is a fantastic time to shove through whatever power-grabbing laws you have lined up, because you are with us, or you are with the terrorists... From a uniquely British perspective, it was also when the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 passed, which is the premise of the current laws against saying nasty things about Islam on Twitter. It seems quite likely that that, too, was prompted by the religious tensions resulting from the war on terror, along with the 2005 London bombings. Getting out of the EU also seemed very unlikely back then; it was only because Cameron decided to settle the issue with a referendum that we got the chance. The rise of nationalism in the 2010s, while marred by neo-Nazis and other exceptional individuals like the "skeptic community", at least gives a chance for a brand of politics that could reverse the drive towards more and more encroaching government power that progressivism (in the sense of the Progressive Era, not troonery) and fearmongering over terrorism created. Most people on the right wing of the culture war these days are strongly opposed to censorship, gun control, and other government power grabs, though sadly all too many of them fall into the trap of thinking fascists will save them from the communists rather than just making their own tyranny. It's also possible that the EU will end up disintegrating now given rising nationalism in Europe, or at least not forming a giant superstate, which will be satisfying.
As for the pop-culture stuff, I'm so out of touch that I can't comment, so I'll leave that to the rest of you.
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as time goes on and I for one welcome our new clown era.
