I found this to be an interesting, and enlightening, piece about the history of 4chan and an analysis of the motives behind the young "deplorables'" embrace (from their mothers' basements) of Donald Trump.  

Quote:1. Born from Something Awful

Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs. This new site I didn’t understand. It was a bulletin board, but its system of navigation was opaque. Counter intuitively, you had to hit “reply” to read a thread. Moreover, the content was bizarre nonsense.

The site, if you hadn’t guessed, was 4chan.org. It was an offshoot of a different message board which I also knew from my referral logs, “Something Awful”, at the time, an online community of a few hundred nerds who liked comics, video games, and well, nerds things. But unlike boards with similar content, Something Awful skewed toward dark jokes. I had an account at Something Awful, which I used sometimes to post in threads about my comic.

4chan had been created by a 15 year old Something Awful user named Christopher Poole (whose 4chan mod name was “m00t”). Poole had adapted a type of Japanese bulletin board software which was difficult to understand at first, but once learned, was far more fun to post in than the traditional American format used by S.A., as a result the site became popular very quickly.

These days, 4chan appears in the news almost weekly. This past week, there were riots at Berkeley in the wake of the scheduled lecture by their most prominent supporter, Milo Yiannopoulos. The week before that neo-Nazi Richard Spencer pointed to his 4chan inspired Pepe the Frog pin, about to explain the significance when an anti-fascist protester punched him in the face. The week before that, 4chan claimed (falsely) it had fabricated the so called Trump “Kompromat”. And the week before that, in the wake of the fire at Ghost Ship, 4chan decided to make war on “liberal safe spaces” and DIY venues across the country.

How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

At the very beginning, 4chan met once a year in only one place in the world: Baltimore, Maryland at the anime convention, Otakon. As a nerdy teen growing up in Baltimore in the 90s, I had wandered into Otakon much like I had later wandered into 4chan, just when it was starting. I also attended Otakon in the mid-aughts when 4chan met there, likewise to promote my webcomic.

As someone who has witnessed 4chan grow from a group of adolescent boys who could fit into a single room at my local anime convention to a worldwide coalition of right wing extremists (which is still somehow also a message board about anime), I feel I have some obligation to explain.

This essay is an attempt to untangle the threads of 4chan and the far right...

http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/int...societies/

Quote:Intra-elite competition is one of the most important factors explaining massive waves of social and political instability, which periodically afflict complex, state-level societies. This idea was proposed by Jack Goldstone nearly 30 years ago. Goldstone tested it empirically by analyzing the structural precursors of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and seventeenth century’s crises in Turkey and China. Other researchers (including Sergey Nefedov, Andrey Korotayev, and myself) extended Goldstone’s theory and tested it in such different societies as Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia; medieval England, France, and China; the European revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; and the Arab Spring uprisings. Closer to home, recent research indicates that the stability of modern democratic societies is also undermined by excessive competition among the elites (see Ages of Discord for a structural-demographic analysis of American history). Why is intra-elite competition such an important driver of instability?

Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands (see my previous post and especially its discussion in the comments that reveal the complex dimensions of this concept). In the United States, for example, they include (but are not limited to) elected politicians, top civil service bureaucrats, and the owners and managers of Fortune 500 companies (see Who Rules America?). As individual elites retire, they are replaced from the pool of elite aspirants. There are always more elite aspirants than positions for them to occupy.  Intra-elite competition is the process that sorts aspirants into successful elites and aspirants whose ambition to enter the elite ranks is frustrated. Competition among the elites occurs on multiple levels. Thus, lower-ranked elites (for example, state representatives) may also be aspirants for the next level (e.g., U.S. Congress), and so on, all the way up to POTUS...




http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/int...societies/

Quote:A week after 9/11 Bush went to a mosque and said that Muslims were not the enemy and that Islam was a religion of peace. Now compare that with now, where the Republicans have gone full Islamophobic bigot, inciting people to hatred with hysterical fears. That is the difference between a 3T and a 4T.

Quote:All you people who still think that 9/11 was the start of the 4T are just simply wrong, period.

Quote:Also, I hope "Neo-Cohen" is a typo, and not an antisemitic slur...

eaths of despair’ are cutting life short for some white 
Deaths of despair are cutting life short for some white Americans

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/deaths-de...americans/





In spite of decades of advancements in health care, diet and safety, white Americans are now living shorter lives, a trend that has surprised experts. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports out of Maysville, Kentucky, an area struggling with an increase in addiction, overdoses and suicide.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now a look at a demographic trend that is surprising the experts.
Despite decades of advancements in health care, diet and safety, middle-aged white Americans are now living shorter, not longer, lives.

Our economics correspondent reports in the latest installment of Making Sense.

PAUL SOLMAN: Maysville, Kentucky, in the northeast corner of the state, just a short bridge away from Ohio, despite some merchants’ best efforts at cosmopolitan outreach, the downtown is struggling. But at one local establishment, business is brisk and growing.

DAVID LAWRENCE, Mason County Coroner: This is the Batesville 20-gauge steel protector.

PAUL SOLMAN: This one is Churchill blue. (speaking about available coffins)

DAVID LAWRENCE: Churchill blue. We can get this in a misty rose for the ladies.

PAUL SOLMAN: David Lawrence manages the Knox & Brothers Funeral Home, is also the county coroner. He’s been seeing a lot of dead white males of late, especially ages 45 to 54.

DAVID LAWRENCE: A lot of it due to alcohol or drug abuse.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM, Family Physician: There has been a Denham practicing medicine.

PAUL SOLMAN: Craig Denham wears multiple hats too.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: This small bag is my grandfather’s medical kit.

PAUL SOLMAN: A fifth-generation Kentucky family physician.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: My great-great-grandfather’s.

PAUL SOLMAN: He’s also medical director for the fire department’s emergency service.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: In the past two, two-and-a-half years, we have had about a 300 percent increase in the drug-related overdose ambulance runs. And the prevalence of opiate addiction in this area continues to increase.

BECKY MANNING, Widow: He’s like, mom, it’s nothing that you did. It’s me.

PAUL SOLMAN: Becky Manning’s son got hooked on drugs. Fortunately, he’s still alive.

BECKY MANNING: Almost 40 now.

PAUL SOLMAN: But she blames the drugs in part for her husband’s suicide.

BECKY MANNING: He just carried this tremendous guilt for everything, for our son doing drugs. Then he started getting depressed, and then my husband took his own life.

PAUL SOLMAN: How did he do it?

BECKY MANNING: He blew his head off. I came home to that.

PAUL SOLMAN: Best friend Marcy Conner’s husband also killed himself.

MARCY CONNER, Widow: He developed alcoholism very young in life.

PAUL SOLMAN: An addiction he shared with lifelong friends.

MARCY CONNER: One died with a heart attack, but drug use and alcohol use played all the way through his life. Another one died of cancer, drank up to the very end. And my husband actually had a G-tube in, a feeding tube in, and poured alcohol down his feeding tube until he died.

BECKY MANNING: Alcohol poisoning.

PAUL SOLMAN: These cases fit a disturbing national pattern. Though U.S. life expectancy has been going up steadily over the last century, there’s now been a sudden and dramatic reversal, for just one demographic.

ANNE CASE, Economist: White non-Hispanics in America, middle-age, are dying in large numbers.

ANGUS DEATON, Economist: It was certainly a huge surprise to me.

PAUL SOLMAN: Economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who are married, published their finding just after Deaton won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics.
The paper showed that, starting in 1999, the death rate of middle-aged white Americans has been going up, instead of down.

ANGUS DEATON: We thought we must have made an error. I mean, the whole world is getting better. This middle-aged group is the one that’s benefited most, at least since 1970, from advances in the treatment of heart disease, from people quitting smoking, all of those things. And then suddenly for this trend that’s going down just to reverse out seemed like it had to be wrong. But it wasn’t wrong.

PAUL SOLMAN: The big increase was in what Case calls deaths of despair, alcohol-related liver disease, suicide, drug overdose.

ANNE CASE: People kill themselves slowly with alcohol or drugs, or quickly with a gun. For people aged 50-55, for example, those rates went from 40 per 100,000 to 80 per 100,000 since the turn of the century.
And it’s people with a high school degree or less who are killing themselves in these ways in large numbers. That’s the group that’s getting hammered.

DR. ELLEN KUMLER, Mason County Health Department: And now the CDC is paying more attention to that age group and demographic.

PAUL SOLMAN: Ellen Kumler, a public health doctor for Mason County, Kentucky, says the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control pick up where the Case-Deaton study leaves off.

DR. ELLEN KUMLER: When we look at the suicide rate, when we look at unintentional injuries, a lot possibly related to substance abuse, as well as liver disease, the rates of those issues have actually increased.

PAUL SOLMAN: Marcy Conner is a nurse specializing in substance abuse who has experienced deaths of despair time and again in her own family.

MARCY CONNER: I had a brother that committed suicide, also.

PAUL SOLMAN: And two cousins, one of them a nurse.

MARCY CONNER: And he started telling me that his depression medication wasn’t working as well, and pain medication wasn’t working as well. And he lost his temper at work one night and got fired.

PAUL SOLMAN: Got fired.

MARCY CONNER: They found him hanging in his garage.

PAUL SOLMAN: And the other cousin?

MARCY CONNER: She overdosed.

PAUL SOLMAN: And why so much drug use and abuse? Anne Case and Angus Deaton found something else in their study.

ANNE CASE: Since at least the mid-1990s, people’s reports of pain, of sciatic pain, of neck pain, of lower back pain year on year have increased.

MAN: Our best, strongest pain medicines are the opioids.

PAUL SOLMAN: The mid-’90s was also when the opioid painkiller OxyContin was approved by the FDA, and began to be marketed aggressively to doctors.

MAN: They do not have serious medical side effects, and so these drugs, which I repeat, are our best, strongest pain medications, should be used much more than they are for patients in pain.

PAUL SOLMAN: Within five years, the drug’s maker, Purdue Pharma, was earning a billion-dollars-a-year profit on OxyContin, which soon rose to $3 billion. As for the lack of serious side effects? Well, it did have one.

ANGUS DEATON: It’s basically heroin in a pill with an FDA label on the front. So, people get addicted to this.

ELIZABETH EASTON, Recovering Painkiller Addict: I started on oxycodone, or OxyContin, in high school.

PAUL SOLMAN: Elizabeth Easton is now in recovery.

ELIZABETH EASTON: I unleashed something horrid in me many years ago from doing one — one pill. I went from taking them to snorting them to, yes, injecting, which is really, really horrid.

PAUL SOLMAN: Because you have got to have it.

ELIZABETH EASTON: You have to. It’s the only thing that makes you feel normal. And it’s the farthest thing from normal.

BECKY MANNING: It controls your life. You’re a different person.

PAUL SOLMAN: That’s what Becky Manning saw in her son.

BECKY MANNING: Seeking and finding the next high was his priority, no matter who he took down with him.

MARCY CONNER: The brain is telling you, I have got to have it again. I need more. So that’s where you end up with that craving. The craving ends up with, you know, seeking supply.

PAUL SOLMAN: And though lawsuits and a government crackdown have helped curb the supply of OxyContin, cheap heroin is more than filling the void.

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: If you can’t get your pain pills that you’re abusing, you’re going to find the source somewhere. And so people are turning to the street drug heroin, which is more dangerous, in the sense that you’re taking something made in somebody’s garage vs. something made in a factory.

CHRISTOPHER RUHM, Economist: In many areas, it’s cheaper to get high on heroin than it would be to get drunk.

PAUL SOLMAN: Economist Chris Ruhm.

CHRISTOPHER RUHM: This is a major health crisis. I mean, drug poisonings have become the biggest source of preventable premature death. So, for example, there are more drug poisoning deaths than car crash deaths. And that’s quite recent.

PAUL SOLMAN: And says Dr. Denham:

DR. WILLIAM CRAIG DENHAM: I’m seeing just as many middle-aged women as I am middle-aged men.

PAUL SOLMAN: Bucking a century-long improvement in white longevity.

DAVID LAWRENCE: People without jobs and people kind of just keeping themselves secluded from others.

PAUL SOLMAN: For the PBS NewsHour, economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting grimly from Maysville, Kentucky.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, next week, Paul returns to Maysville to ask the obvious question: Why the startling increase in deaths in white America?

So, we really are Russia, now.

I miss that guy who went to Russia, and got The Russian Smile.

I miss Glick, and Rani, and Hopeful Cynic, and the Republican Shill, and the Auteur Paratrooper.

I would love for them to come on the board, and defend the ongoing train-wreck. 

This weekend CN takes on the sorry state if our educational system........

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/left-behind/

Discuss!

I recently spent a stomach-churning 90 minutes watching Steve Bannon's 2009 documentary Generation Zero.  An abstract describes his film thusly:

"The current economic crisis is not a failure of capitalism, but a failure of culture. Generation Zero explores the cultural roots of the global financial meltdown--beginning with the narcissism of the 1960's, spreading like a virus through the self-indulgent 1990's and exploding across the world in the present economic cataclysm."

 As patently ideological as it is, and as specious as some of its conclusions are, especially with respect to federal deficits and the printing of money, I intend to watch it again.  If anyone else cares to do so, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3SLtP10NQ8

The documentary does get a few things right, and there exist a number of film reviews, some quite critical (and deservedly so.)  I thought I would post a link to the brief review by The Christian Science Monitor, as it is a newspaper that tends to be more centrist than others:

"Generation Zero Documentary Looks at Another Inconvenient Truth: US Debt"
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/new-ec...th-US-debt

As a follow-up to this documentary, I would suggest Hedgeye's recent video interview with Neil Howe, posted only a few days ago:

Replay | Inside Bannon's Brain with "The Fourth Turning" Author Neil Howe
https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/57111-i...uthor-neil

I have some strong views about both videos, but I'm most interested to hear from other members of the forum about your takeaways.

Witnessing how Duginists and Bannon have latched onto turning theory, most especially the notion of a 4T Total War, I am now deeming it the weaponization of Generational Theory / Turning Theory.

Similarly, the various totalitarians which Paul R. Johnson labeled "The Monsters" - during the last 4T, latched onto things like Spengler's writings, and proceeded to massively twist and abuse them to their own nefarious ends.

It's only a model  - not a play book.

The sad thing is that we will all end up being smeared due to the abuse of these models by crazy people.

Generational Theory could have been so powerful and done so much good.

It's probably too late now to prevent an unfortunate outcome.

We face a polarization and conflict in our country. Though essentially beyond the partisan labels, it does cluster around Republicans and Democrats, which we now call red and blue.

What is this contest, or conflict?

I like to see it on many levels. I prefer most of the time to frame it as a contest between ideas, not people. The people on the other side are not my enemies, I like to think. It's the ideas, the delusions and deceptions they hold that must be dispelled.

Bob Butler likes to frame it as a contest between values; we can't hold the values of those we oppose, so we must accept this and accept that people have different values.

I think there's some truth in that, but on the other hand, framing it this way makes it harder to resolve; it says things can't be changed, because values are too hard to change. Whereas if one has a delusion or has been deceived, all one has to do is wake up from it.

Of course, framing the conflict in terms of deceptive ideas, also has its problems. Reading me saying to dispell the deceptions, sounds like I'm saying that I am right and the other person is wrong. Once in a while, a person can be in what's called a contemplative mode, and is willing to listen. In our society today, it appears that less than 10% of the people are capable or willing to listen to the other side. The rest have their minds made up.

When I speak of deceptive ideas, it is not just my ego speaking, because it is not only myself who "knows the truth" and others who don't. It is myself and many others, opposing another and many others. And I like to say that, if I know the truth, it is because I have been open and willing to listen. But the divide remains. If another person is not in contemplative mode, there is little chance I can convince them that I know the truth, and that they are deluded. And they may take is as an insult if I tell them that they have been deceived, and that I know the truth and they don't.

Let's see in my next post if I can frame the contest we are in a little differently.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monk...1e140df66e

Quote:In 2017, the Supreme Court will take up the issue of partisan gerrymandering. Depending on how the court rules, its decisions could have far-reaching implications for the partisan balance in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures — and for the future of redistricting across the country.