We've probably seen this before, but I don't remember. Here they are, Strauss and Howe explaining their theory, their books, and us: the forum; with some of the participants in The Fourth Turning Forum gatherings that we were invited to, but I didn't make it. Strauss mentions David Kaiser at the beginning. And Howe mentions "cusps" too! Posted by the former webmaster of the former forum.





"Boomers, look out, some of your worst tendencies are about to come to the fore." Well, Mr. Trump seems to have fulfilled THAT prediction by Mr. Howe.

"ha ha very ideological people shy away from the forum" well, not so much now! Maybe why Howe doesn't like us too much anymore.

Neil Howe: "most of what the internet is used for is pretty trashy. Here's an example of something where you can bring out the best in people, and get people to communicate things that are really important to them." That last phrase is still true, and this forum is still better than any I have found.

Go blue-boomer Steve!

Strauss was a political comic, and it strikes me it would have been interesting if he was around today, at a time when Seth Myers, John Oliver, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert are the voices of truth and wisdom today; about the only alternative to the breitbart/limbaugh crowd.

"History always bends" says William Strauss. "If you believe the Tofflers of the world, everything today is just going to be multiplied into the future. History is never that way."

"The next bend will be a very decisive one"

Which means also that S&H probably would have predicted that our forum would get more ideological. After all, in a time of decision, people take sides.

Quote:WASHINGTON ― The Republican-led Congress is jamming through a measure to overturn the Obama administration’s rules that would have banned telecom and cable companies from sharing customers’ personal information, including web browsing history, without their consent. 

The House is expected to vote on the bill on Tuesday. Its companion passed the Senate last week on a 50-48 vote, largely on party lines. If the House passes the bill and President Donald Trump signs it into law, internet service providers will win a regulatory victory. But advocates say consumers can kiss network privacy goodbye.

“ISPs will be able to sell your personal information to the highest bidder...and they won’t have any real obligation to keep your personal information secure, either,” said Gigi Sohn, who served as counselor to former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler from November 2013 to December 2016.

The FCC adopted rules last October that required companies like Comcast and Verizon to get their customers’ explicit permission before they could share “sensitive” data like Social Security numbers, information pertaining to children, or health information. Under the rules — which are not yet in effect — companies also had to tell customers and law enforcement if a potentially harmful data breach occurred. (Verizon is the parent company of The Huffington Post.)

The bill uses the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to undo any regulation within 60 days of its finalization, while also barring agencies from writing a “substantially” similar rule after the original one has been overturned. That means there’s a chance the FCC might be banned from regulating ISP privacy issues in the future, said David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, a grassroots group.

Trump ran a populist campaign, but his vision for the FCC, a government agency that is supposed to protect consumers from predatory telecom and cable companies, is shaping up to be the opposite, consumer advocates say. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has also opposed the Obama administration’s privacy rules as commissioner.

Back in 1979 then President Jimmy Carter gave a talk to the nation saying that America was experiencing a Crisis of Confidence. In that speech he mentioned the need for energy conservation, which, as we all know now, most of the public seemed to want no part of. The speech went on to be labeled the "Malaise speech", even though that word was never used in it.

Now, nearly four decades later, America once again appears to be experience what might be called Crisis of Confidence II, and may actually be more worthy of the malaise title because during the first one people were at least going out to dance nights away in discos. Today it seems no one, or at least very few, are in the mood for too many good times. This even though many fairly pricey restaurant are pack a great deal of the time. The recent defeat of healthcare reform, rather sarcastically referred to as Trumpcare, went down to defeat last week. Who was reinforcing the need to see its defeat? I guess it was the general public, as they did not wish to see our new President assume dictator mode, as many had been fearing since he first announced his candidacy. Now more than ever it is important to be wise in our convictions. There is much that should be done that I still don't believe the public has the will to really take up.

While much has been said about the need to rein in the power of Wall Street and large multinational corporations, up until now most fledgling protest movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, were noble failures at best--with the exception that it did bring on a dialogue about the subject of immense inequality brought on by the fact that the interests of Wall Street have consistently superseded those of Main Street for at least three decades with no end appearing in sight. To many folks the election of Trump only added fuel to the already blazing fire. Out of the ashes of discontent appeared Bernie Sanders, who for all intents and purposes was probably the only candidate who proposed the sensible change yet was largely ignored by the corporate controlled media. Had he been given adequate coverage, he possible could be our President today. But would he have to face the same level of obstruction in Congress that President Obama did? Probably so, as the men and women composing said Congress have their bread buttered on the corporate side.

Meanwhile, many substandard urban neighborhoods are even worse off today than they were at the heights of the civil rights struggles half a century ago. There are many areas with not a decent grocery store, leading to them being labeled as food deserts. At the same time relentless gentrification has forced many modest income yet decent folks out of the neighborhoods their families had occupied for generations. If Chicago is a prime example, and I believe that it is, nearly all the housing being built in the past 35 years has been pricey upscale condos and townhouses that the average Joe and Jane couldn't even begin to afford. The poverty in our cities is probably just the same as it was many years ago; the main difference being that it is much less visible. This may be good in some ways, but certainly not so good in others. The primary movers and shakers within our cities are without a doubt doing everything in their power to make sure that little if any so called "affordable" housing is being built. And the real estate moguls and developers have tremendous clout over what gets built and what doesn't. For a great on this, I heard a talk over the weekend about a book titled "How to Kill a City" by Peter Moskovitz.

Stories of folks trying to get by on minimum wage or even less have become legendary, as many are forced to work multiple jobs and at times even that isn't enough. The fear people have for others of the species have also become pervasive, leading to loss of social interaction despite the ascendance of so-called "social" networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet the social stigma against those on the lower rungs of the income scale is as pervasive as ever. This implies a general attitude such as "I have, and if you will just go get a job you can have as well". It really isn't all that simple, and there are many destitute folks who actually are working. They just don't earn enough to get by, let alone live the good life.

Do we have the belief that with positive application will come positive rewards? Probably not by too many. There are a significant number who are now waking up to the idea that they have been had for the past few decades, and what is likely to happen when that number becomes the majority?

Some of us old farts may remember the film 27 years ago and the book back in the 80s.

Well, I just saw an ad on YouTube. Hulu has updated it for the 21st Century and will air it as a TV series.

When I saw the trailer I did a double take. Some parts appear to be exactly like the movie.

Good timing and good job Canucks!

Poking the Trumpettes a bit, no?

I put together a three part video presenting my in depth critique of the theory.  This was essentially an embellishment of a blog post I made 2 years ago which was, in itself, based on a number of posts I had made on the old forum over the past decade or so.  Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

https://youtu.be/9gdA31UPGzc?list=PLFNzc...iWgRBDsIrJ

(03-24-2017, 07:39 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I'm not particularly fond of Pope Francis.  Seriously the man is a Communist in a Cassock.  He is also calling for the islamification of Europe.  Good thing he's celibate, he doesn't have to worry about the world his children will inherit.

Thousands of Russians gathered on Sunday to demonstrate against government corruption in what may be the biggest anti-Kremlin protest in years.

Unsanctioned rallies in several cities ― including Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Vladivostok ― sprung up after Alexei Navalny, who plans to run against President Vladimir Putin in the 2018 election, published allegations that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev had accumulated a massive fortune surpassing his official salary.

The rallies attracted an “[u]nprecedented number of young Russians,” reported Max Seddon, a Moscow correspondent for The Financial Times. They grew to massive numbers in cities where Putin once commanded strong support.

The protests appear to be the largest since 2012, Reuters reported. Authorities arrested hundreds of demonstrators, including Navalny and Guardian reporter Alec Luhn, who was covering the protests.

The U.S. State Department condemned the arrests of protesters.

“We call on the government of Russia to immediately release all peaceful protesters,” department spokesman Mark Toner said Sunday in a statement.

Photos show demonstrators waving signs with rubber ducks, a reference to Navalny’s allegation that Medvedev has a house for one of his ducks, the BBC reported. Others donned green face paint ― a callback to Navalny being attacked with green liquid last week ― and blocked the car transporting him after he was detained in Moscow.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russ...yiizfr&

Millennials are a supposed Civic generation who is supposed to support the narrowing of the gender roles. If Generational theory is right, why are a lot of Millennials actively fighting against it and fighting against their own generation's ideals? Wouldn't generational theory say everything has to accept the same consensus? This group is unfortunately hated by many Millennials but they fight far harder than any supposed civic generation did for their own rights.

Many Millennials studied history and I've heard a lot of them say 'Not This Time' and are actively fighting against repeating history. Many of them are militantly fighting not to repeat different aspects of history. I think we will end up with two different groups.

Long before millennials were dubbed the “Me Generation,” journalist Tom Wolfe used the label to describe the young baby boomers coming of age in the mid-1970s, a time of heightened focus on the self and personal development.

“The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality — remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self ... and observing, studying, and doting on it,” Wolfe wrote in a 1976 New York magazine cover story.

To the extent that millennials really are self-absorbed and narcissistic, it may be because they learned from the masters: their parents. Baby boomers ― the unusually large generation born during a wave after World War II ― grew up in a time of historic prosperity. In many ways, the world they’ll leave for their children couldn’t be more different from the one they knew as children. 

Boomers blew through resources, racked up debt, and brought an end to economic growth, using their enormous voting power to elect politicians who enacted policies that typically benefitted boomers’ interests, rather than future generations. Now, millennials face more debt, fewer resources and higher levels of unemployment than their parents, and are likely to see the fallout of runaway environmental destruction within their lifetimes.

In his new book, A Generation of Sociopaths, writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney puts forth the controversial hypothesis that baby boomers ― specifically the large subset of white, middle-class boomers ― are, both individually and as a group, unusually sociopathic. Gibney cites mental health data showing boomers have significantly higher levels of antisocial traits and behaviors ― including lack of empathy, disregard for others, egotism and impulsivity ― than other generations.


As a result, boomers have used their substantial voting power to create a society and government that don’t work very well. Or, as Gibney puts it, boomers’ “private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism.”

The factual basis for Gibney’s case isn’t perfect. Data on generations prior to boomers is thin, because widespread psychological testing wasn’t as common, and younger generations haven’t been around long enough for long-term data. It’s possible that other generations have major issues as well, but we simply don’t have enough information to assess them properly. Gibney, however, insists that there’s something unique with boomers.

We sat down with Gibney, a Gen-Xer, to learn more about why he says boomers are a generation of sociopaths, and how the boomer agenda has gotten us into the precarious political and economic situation we’re in today.

I imagine that a lot of people have taken issue with the title of your book. Is it really possible to apply a psychological label to an entire generation?  
Well, I think you can match the behaviors and the policies to certain diagnostic criteria. For the boomers ― the youngest are in their 50s and the oldest are in their 70s ― we have a coherent body of data, collected over decades, that map onto this diagnostic criteria of sociopathy.

So we can see sociopathy-associated traits like improvidence ― there is no greater improvidence than failing to save for your retirement. We can postulate the checklist that way. We have an enormous amount of data about the boomer mainstream, and it matches up surprisingly well with the description of antisocial personality disorder.

It’s a good diagnostic label, because what we’re really dealing with is an anti-social society. And that highlights the inherent paradox: Can you have an anti-social society? I don’t actually think you can.

You argue that boomers aren’t genetically predispositioned to be dysfunctional, but instead were conditioned to be that way. What do you mean by that?
I focus mainly on the white, middle-class boomers who constitute the substantial majority of the boom ― it’s a pretty homogenous group, and they were raised in a fairly homogenous way. They were the first generation in the U.S. to be raised permissively. And the evidence strongly suggests that highly permissive parenting leads to some problems later on in life. These people have higher self-esteem, but they tend to be more rebellious and messy, both in the literal sense and in their approach to their own affairs. 
They were also the first generation to be raised with television, and there really weren’t parental reservations about screen time. The literature on TV and cognitive and behavioral development is almost universally negative.

Quote:They came of age in a time of fairly effortless prosperity ... They really just assume that things are going to work out, no matter what. That’s unhelpful conditioning.” Bruce Gibney

This is a very long video.  I suggest following it to the youtube page.