Generational Dynamics World View - Printable Version +- Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory (http://generational-theory.com/forum) +-- Forum: Fourth Turning Forums (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-1.html) +--- Forum: Theories Of History (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-7.html) +--- Thread: Generational Dynamics World View (/thread-51.html) Pages:
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-22-2019 ** 22-Oct-2019 Was Hillary a senile delusional old hag in 2016? (10-22-2019, 08:20 AM)Marypoza Wrote: > I'm not. Why are you believing a senile delusional old bag who is So, was Hillary a senile delusional old hag when she ran for president in 2016? Republicans thought so. If not, then at what point between then and now did she turn into a senile delusional old hag? (10-22-2019, 08:23 AM)Marypoza Wrote: > actually now that l think about it l don't think the hag is really Really?? Was Hillary not really female when she ran for president in 2016? If not, then at what point between then and now did she stop being female? Lol! Perhaps she had a gender change operation. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Marypoza - 10-22-2019 (10-22-2019, 09:41 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 Was Hillary a senile delusional old hag in 2016? -- yes yes & no RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-22-2019 ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness (08-28-2019, 07:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: > ** 28-Aug-2019 World View: World War III (08-30-2019, 08:20 AM)David Horn Wrote: > I know you have strongly held views, but it's impossible to Divisiveness isn't caused by the president. It's caused by the generational era. FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for implementing a bunch of programs that a lot of people hated. FDR seriously split the country because of his proposal to pack the Supreme Court, something Democrats are talking about again. Like Trump, FDR was divisive because many people loved him, and many people hated him. In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive. They hated Bush, and even got a movie made in 2006, Death of a President, that portrayed the assassination of Bush. Obama's presidency was supposed to heal racism, but instead he used every opportunity he could to stoke racial hatred. The left constantly threatened the Tea Partiers, calling them teabaggers, and close Obama advisor James Hoffa frequently threatened Tea Partiers with violence. The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment Trump took office. They've spent three years humiliating themselves trying to bring about a political lynching of Trump with one phony charge after another. Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star Chamber. The Star Chamber was abolished by the bloody English Civil War, but the Democrats are reviving it, to lynch Trump by any means possible. Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised that Democrats have shown such enormous contempt for blacks having the lowest unemployment rate in history. But actually, if you look at history, it makes a lot of sense. Democrats in the Civil War wanted blacks to remain in slavery, then they formed the KKK to lynch blacks for over a century, so now they're still contemptuous of blacks getting jobs, since unemployment keeps blacks in slavery, which is where the Democrats have wanted them for 150 years. It's pretty sickening. So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not particularly divisive. It's the Democrats who would say that even the most benign Trump policies are divisive, even something like lowering unemployment rate for blacks. But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes well beyond America. In this generational crisis era, xenophobia, nationalism, and tribalism have been growing all over the world, particularly as worldwide economic growth has been slowing. There are bitterly divisive battles going on in Britain, Israel, Italy, and Hungary in Europe. There are conflicts today in many places, including Syria-Idlib, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, Somalia, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Ukraine. There are riots in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Catalonia, and elsewhere. The Brexit debate is particularly hilarious. So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness. It's the generational Crisis era that causes economic stagnation, xenophobia, nationalism, and tribalism, and those things cause divisiveness. This is all part of "The Gathering Storm" that's leading to WW III, with or without Trump. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - Cynic Hero '86 - 10-22-2019 LOL, Xenakis to replying to posts made two months ago when there were over half a dozen posts made just yesterday and today. I know the subject matter of the Yesterday's posts made you uncomfortable because it refutes the notion of 330 million Americans all loving liberal democracy and hating all totalitarianism, but that just isn't true. A lot of us have come to like totalitarianism and want the creation of a nationalist military state. Hillary is a globalist who is hated by the majority of the citizenry. You boomers can't even run political primaries according to the normal processes because doing so would return a result contrary to globalism. Gabbard, Williamson, Yang and Bullock are far more representative of what average Joe six-pack Americans believe in than Hillary or warren. On the Right it is TRUMP, NOT Jeb Bush, Graham or the late Mccain; who is far more representative of what the average Joe six-pack wants. Boomers attempt to preserve the 1990s method and mindset regarding how America does things even after 9/11 is resulting in the government losing its legitimacy with the American People. Hillary is the Russian Agent, Not Bernie or Tulsi. The notion that the Clintons are patriotic is something only stupid dog eared boomers would believe in. Warren won't be accepted as the nominee, and I'm Not referring to republicans who will side with trump, I'm referring to large segments of the democrats themselves, who will knife the woketards in the back if the latter forces through warren as nominee. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-22-2019 ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Russia-Turkey deal in Syria
Guest Wrote:> The Russian media has been going wild saying how America abandoned Russia's president Vladimir Putin and Turkey's president Recep Tayip Erdogan, met in Sochi on Tuesday, and after six hours hammered out an agreement setting up a buffer zone in northern Syria, 120 km long and 32 km deep. Both Turkey and Russia will patrol the buffer zone, and require what Erdogan calls "YPG terrorists," referring to the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which is thought to be allied with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The PKK have conducted nurmerous bombings and terrorist acts within Turkey, and have conducted a 30-year insurgency. Turkey's incursion into Syria will not go any further. The remaining parts of the buffer zone will be patrolled by Russian military police and Syrian border patrols. One thing that isn't clear to me is what the Arabs in the Syrian National Army (SNA) that have been cooperating with Turkey are going to do. It's these Arabs who have been massacring the Kurds, and now they'll have to be brought under control by either Turkey or Russia or Syria or all of them. The ceasefire will be extended another 150 hours, to give the YPG time to evacuate the region. Erdogan has said that, in the future, 1-2 million Syrian refugees, among the 3.5 million that Turkey has been hosting, will be moved into the buffer zone. Some American politicians are expressing alarm over the rise in influence of Russia. This is fine with me, as I explained in my article a couple of days ago. China is our enemy, not Russia. And if Russia is taking over the job of protecting the Kurds from the Turks, then America has one less headache and Russia has one more. ** 18-Oct-19 World View -- Generational analysis of Turkey-Syria war and ceasefire agreement ** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/xct.gd.e191018.htm#e191018 ---- Sources: -- Russia, Turkey Decide On Joint Syria Patrols After Putin-Erdogan Meeting https://www.rferl.org/a/turkey-s-erdogan-visits-putin-for-syria-talks-as-u-s--brokered-cease-fire-is-set-to-expire/30229111.html (RFERL, 22-Oct-2019) -- Russia, Turkey seal power in northeast Syria with accord https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/world/10207814-181/russia-turkey-seal-power-in (AP, 22-Oct-2019) RE: Generational Dynamics World View - David Horn - 10-22-2019 (10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: Divisiveness isn't caused by the president. It's caused by the generational era. Answering in order:
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-22-2019 Wow! Our respective world views have absolutely nothing in common. By the way, the Martian InSight lander is suddenly back in service, after getting stuck 8 months ago. Don't forget to take some snapshots of it for your memory book. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - David Horn - 10-23-2019 (10-22-2019, 04:14 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: Wow! Our respective world views have absolutely nothing in common. I agree; that's a point we can share. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 10-23-2019 (10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness Some eras are inherently divisive, and some aren't. It is obvious that American life is least divided just after a Crisis war is over (young men are more likely to be accustomed to taking orders and enduring privation and are unwilling to let anything get in the way of peace, prosperity, and normality) and most divided as America starts to go from an Awakening Era to an Unraveling because the Idealist generation has stretched things as far as it can while the Reactive generation is more likely to put individual gain and comfort above a Voyage to the Interior that it can never understand. This said, some Presidents are more likely to enhance the divisiveness of a time and some are more likely to mollify the divisiveness of a time. Those who push a one-sided agenda and are unwilling to back down to get what they want piecemeal are more likely to divide America than are those who can make pragmatic compromise to get most of what they want more gradually. Thus I contrast Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and find Trump severely lacking. As far as that goes -- Barack Obama has much the same political skills as Ronald Reagan began with as a communicator... the difference was that the Hard Right was ready to stop Obama as the moderate Left was unable to stop Reagan. Quote:FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for He was blamed wrongly. The Great Depression reached its low point in stock-market valuations in the autumn of 1932 (stock-market valuations are a coincident indicator in economics), and the perception of danger ended after the Bank Holiday that FDR established, after which major reforms of banking made any further erosion of the economy from the low point . After the Bank Holiday, America started on a recovery that, within six years, would have most Americans living better than they did around the time of the Great Stock Market Crash. According to the arch-conservative economist Friederich Hayek, it is the speculative boom leading into the financial panic (as in 1857, 1929, and 2008) it is the speculative that does the real damage by devouring capital that might otherwise go into the gritty investment in plant and equipment that creates jobs and genuine investment. People perceive easy money from speculation in paper instead of investing in small businesses that create real prosperity for owner-operators and do far better at spreading economic opportunity through capital formation than does a welfare system, let alone a speculative bubble certain to burst. It is possible that the growth from the nadir of the Great Depression was mostly the result of people out of work starting small businesses such as one-location supermarkets. One may have a reality close to that which Doctor Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide) would offer: that the aftermath of an economic meltdown is the best time in which to start a small business. Opportunities to get jobs in bureaucratic organizations are few, so starting a small business in which one must work 70-80 hours a week building a business is better than anything else that anyone can do. Because so many people are out of work, labor is cheap for its overall competence and diligence. Inventories, and real estate and equipment that got devalued greatly are available cheaply. Employees recognize the need to seek out customers who make their jobs possible, so everyone who has a job is hustling to get a revenue stream if he cares about his private-sector job. The economy goes in short order from people looking for easy income from short-term, lavish returns from highly-liquid assets to the unpleasant default in survival through long-term, low yield means that require much effort that one cannot reasonably abandon. The 1930's were arguably the best time ever in which to start a small business. So what is the difference between the 1930's and the 2010's? The economic meltdowns from 2007 and 1929 were similarly severe after a year and a half. From the middle of 1931, bank runs and a deflationary policy in the money supply made things far worse. By 2009 the federal government was backing the banks, so businesses and investors did not find that their bank accounts were gone when payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes came due. By 1931, businesses that had done nothing wrong started going under, and things got steadily worse. Governments had to retrench because their tax revenues vanished. Early in 2009 the effects of the government backing the financial industry ensured that things would not get as bad as they did in the 1930's. The bank runs did not happen. Businesses could meet payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes. Governments did not need to shrink just to meet the fall in revenues; they could borrow. But note well: the economic elites got rescued, and they had the means for spending lavishly on politics. They backed exactly the sorts of people who shared the agenda of tycoons, rural magnates, and executives: the idea that no human suffering could ever be in excess so long as the Master Class gets whatever it wants -- which is its own indulgence while the rest of Humanity is reduced to peonage with survival as a dubious privilege easily lost. 95% of the people are to suffer for 1-2%, maybe 3% would do well in any economic system (like physicians, engineers, accountants, and senior military officers), and 1-2% would get to live like sultans in oil-rich kingdoms with small populations. What those elites wanted was ultra-cheap labor in a society in which the proles had responsibilities to the rich and the rich had none to the proles. You can blame the economic elites from the Boom Generation, many of them educated in MBA schools in which they learned finance but not human values -- and, impoverished in learning the liberal arts, gravitated to the more primitive drives of sex, drugs (OK, it became fine whiskey instead of cocaine fashionable for a short time), bureaucratic power, material gain and comfort, and mass culture. Donald Trump exemplifies such, and he shows how putrid such a philosophy can get. If you think that such is essential to capitalism, then think again. I know of one clearly-capitalist community in which men do not ditch a wife when they no longer looks like a Playmate of the Monty , who have no tendency to drugs stronger than alcohol, whose community has few white-collar jobs, in which the material standard of technological indulgence is about one hundred years in the past, and for that has largely been immune to the degrading effects of an amoral mass culture. Such people are the Old Order Amish... you might not want to live as they do, but their way of life is far more sustainable than the one that Trump stands for. Individual prosperity depends upon the size of the farm that an Amish farmer can operate (with his children's labor, of course), and the only way in which to get rich in their world is to be a capitalist. I could make the case that the health of a capitalist society is the extent to which this is true: that almost the only people who can get rich are the capitalists. The fault with Soviet communism was that the people who got rich were the bureaucratic administrators better at feathering their nests and ensuring that their own kids could succeed them than in creating prosperity through entrepreneurial innovation. Guess what is happening in America? Our bureaucratic elites are beginning to look much like a nomenklatura in "socialist" states. Quote:In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive. They Wrong. The Hard Right has been fostering division along ethnic and class lines since the 1980's. It has sought to exploit the class line between educated and under-educated people, between regions in states and between states, and between ethnic groups. Its efforts have degenerated into tribalism. The Tea Party exists as an effort to give populist support to a reactionary agenda that holds that multitudes must suffer for economic elites. The Hard Right believes that capitalism is essentially and incorrigibly corrupt, inequitable, cruel, hierarchical, and repressive -- just as doctrinaire Marxist say that capitalism is. The difference between the American Hard Right and doctrinaire Marxists is that the American Hard Right endorses what Marxists consider the horrible vices of capitalism. Capitalism saved itself by making avid consumers out of the proletariat, and contemporary plutocracy seeks to create an economy that fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. Some people have caught on. Blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have caught on. Maybe well-off blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have long recognized that the poor of their groups deserve attention from the well-off. Thus the black bourgeoisie sees responsibility toward blacks left behind. "Asians" is of course a category which includes peoples as diverse as Koreans and Pakistanis... but all of the Asian groups that I have met have shown respect for formal learning essential to smooth functioning in American life. The only Hispanics that I have known in large numbers are Mexican-Americans, and they seem to insist that their kids pay attention in school so that they do not become a permanent underclass in intractable poverty. The people not catching on are most white people. So what is wrong with White America? The white upper class and middle class generally has little contact with poor whites and really cares little for them. You do not see white people from Suburbia serving as mentors to poor whites in Appalachia. Therein lies much of the division in White America. Well-off blacks, Asians, and Hispanics vote like the poor people in their own groups. As for the movie Death of a President... it is largely forgotten. Maybe it wasn't good enough to remember -- or so awful (think of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Heaven's Gate, Inchon!, Howard the Duck, or Gigli) so awful that they leave lasting impressions upon those unfortunate enough to have seen them. Quote:The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment If you want an analogy, consider Richard Nixon. About everyone recognizes that Richard Nixon ran a largely-clean campaign and had no connections to gangland creeps before being elected. To be sure, Nixon had some spiders in his soul, but not enough to overpower his rationality until he got full of himself when the power of the Presidency went to his head. Nixon did not have a legacy of sleazy dealings in business. He had a keen legal mind. Donald Trump was a sleazy, hollow character before he became President -- and he saw his status as a celebrity as a rationale for his excesses as a leader. Corrupt dealings were already in place before Trump started his campaign for the Presidency. Trump has seen his business connections as things to enrich him and his progeny while President with the aid of his power as President. Three years into his Presidency, Nixon started his dirty-tricks campaign against opponents and dissidents; that was the start of his downfall. Sure, Nixon could win in a landslide while the full nastiness was only a rumor to most Americans, and when "Tricky Dick" was simply an echo of his start as a California politician. It took about two years from the start of the dirty-tricks campaign for the Nixon Presidency to unravel. It has taken a little more time with Trump -- with far-bigger offenses. So what is the difference? Trump has more people enabling him for partisan ends. His supporters are largely those politicians that the Tea Party elected or tolerated. Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the anti-human agenda of the backers of the Tea Party. Remember well that the financial backers of Tea Party pols wanted to divide America on class lines between a Master Class and its victims. Quote:Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star Which is exactly what gangsters and large-scale cheats say of the process that takes them down. This is exactly what I expect from drug traffickers, child pornographers, human traffickers, and large-scale financial cheats. For such people I shed no tears. Quote:Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised Uhhh -- blacks have been getting better formal education and starting small businesses, two of the surest means of escaping poverty. No single politician deserves credit for that, unless it is Obama for economic stewardship that allowed one of the longest periods of economic growth in history. Check an overlay of Eisenhower and Obama elections, and you will notice that the Democratic and Republican Parties have largely switched constituencies over about sixty years. The exceptions are in the High Plains and Mormon Country, and those could be at risk to Trump and the GOP in 2020. Donald Trump is an arrogant, obnoxious @$$hole irrespective of his political values. Quote:So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not Trump may not have intended to intensify divisions that already exist, but he has certainly aggravated them through his incompetence and personal nastiness. This is a man who mocks the handicapped -- something that I learned not do do when I was a small child. I learned early -- "See that disabled veteran? You might have to make that sacrifice for your country! See that blind person? There but for the Grace of God go you!" I am on the autistic spectrum, and my life is a mess for that. To be sure, I would rather have Asperger Syndrome than anything else in the DMS-IV classification (including the extreme narcissism or even sociopathy of Donald Trump)... I would rather be black than have Asperger syndrome, and I recognize that white privilege still persists. (I would not give up some points of IQ because my intellect is all that I am). Incompetence and malign intent have much the same effect in bringing about tragedy... and good organizations root them out of positions of responsibility so that incompetence or malign intent puts one in positions in which one can hurt only oneself. With Donald Trump I cannot make a ready distinction, but all in all it would have been better had he been brought up without privilege and had to make a living selling used cars. In view of his character I might expect odometer fraud from him. Quote:But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes Happy people do not rebel. Maybe if times were not so bad... Quote:So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness. It's the generational So what happens if Trump manages to avoid removal by Congress, but he and the Republican majority in the Senate also goes down with him in the 2020 general election? The world has a general problem. Much of it is prosperous enough that most people cannot improve their lives just by buying more stuff. So what happens to the proletariat who, as Marx put it, has nothing to sell but its labor, when making more stuff is no longer a means of creating more prosperity? I suggest Piketty, who is only a start but is as far as anyone goes. So how does a post-scarcity society solve the issue of workers becoming superfluous? Rejection of technology so that people must work harder for the basics again? I will pass on the mass culture that the Old Order Amish reject with their rejection of the technologies of mass media, but do not ask me to give up J S Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- or the cinematic wonders of about eighty years ago. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 10-23-2019 (10-22-2019, 11:46 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Oct-2019 World View: Divisiveness Some eras are inherently divisive, and some aren't. It is obvious that American life is least divided just after a Crisis war is over (young men are more likely to be accustomed to taking orders and enduring privation and are unwilling to let anything get in the way of peace, prosperity, and normality) and most divided as America starts to go from an Awakening Era to an Unraveling because the Idealist generation has stretched things as far as it can while the Reactive generation is more likely to put individual gain and comfort above a Voyage to the Interior that it can never understand. This said, some Presidents are more likely to enhance the divisiveness of a time and some are more likely to mollify the divisiveness of a time. Those who push a one-sided agenda and are unwilling to back down to get what they want piecemeal are more likely to divide America than are those who can make pragmatic compromise to get most of what they want more gradually. Thus I contrast Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump and find Trump severely lacking. Quote:FDR was blamed for perpetuating the Great Depression, and for He was blamed wrongly, and only by a tiny minority that has not gained respect over time. The Great Depression reached its low point in stock-market valuations in the autumn of 1932 (stock-market valuations are a coincident indicator in economics), and the perception of danger ended after the Bank Holiday that FDR established, after which major reforms of banking made any further erosion of the economy from the low point . After the Bank Holiday, America started on a recovery that, within six years, would have most Americans living better than they did around the time of the Great Stock Market Crash. According to the arch-conservative economist Friederich Hayek, it is the speculative boom leading into the financial panic (as in 1857, 1929, and 2008) it is the speculative that does the real damage by devouring capital that might otherwise go into the gritty investment in plant and equipment that creates jobs and genuine investment. People perceive easy money from speculation in paper instead of investing in small businesses that create real prosperity for owner-operators and do far better at spreading economic opportunity through capital formation than does a welfare system, let alone a speculative bubble certain to burst. It is possible that the growth from the nadir of the Great Depression was mostly the result of people out of work starting small businesses such as one-location supermarkets. One may have a reality close to that which Doctor Pangloss (from Voltaire's Candide) would offer: that the aftermath of an economic meltdown is the best time in which to start a small business. Opportunities to get jobs in bureaucratic organizations are few, so starting a small business in which one must work 70-80 hours a week building a business is better than anything else that anyone can do. Because so many people are out of work, labor is cheap for its overall competence and diligence. Inventories, and real estate and equipment that got devalued greatly are available cheaply. Employees recognize the need to seek out customers who make their jobs possible, so everyone who has a job is hustling to get a revenue stream if he cares about his private-sector job. The economy goes in short order from people looking for easy income from short-term, lavish returns from highly-liquid assets to the unpleasant default in survival through long-term, low yield means that require much effort that one cannot reasonably abandon. The 1930's were arguably the best time ever in which to start a small business. So what is the difference between the 1930's and the 2010's? The economic meltdowns from 2007 and 1929 were similarly severe after a year and a half. From the middle of 1931, bank runs and a deflationary policy in the money supply made things far worse. By 2009 the federal government was backing the banks, so businesses and investors did not find that their bank accounts were gone when payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes came due. By 1931, businesses that had done nothing wrong started going under, and things got steadily worse. Governments had to retrench because their tax revenues vanished. Early in 2009 the effects of the government backing the financial industry ensured that things would not get as bad as they did in the 1930's. The bank runs did not happen. Businesses could meet payrolls, accounts payable, loans, and taxes. Governments did not need to shrink just to meet the fall in revenues; they could borrow. But note well: the economic elites got rescued, and they had the means for spending lavishly on politics. They backed exactly the sorts of people who shared the agenda of tycoons, rural magnates, and executives: the idea that no human suffering could ever be in excess so long as the Master Class gets whatever it wants -- which is its own indulgence while the rest of Humanity is reduced to peonage with survival as a dubious privilege easily lost. 95% of the people are to suffer for 1-2%, maybe 3% would do well in any economic system (like physicians, engineers, accountants, and senior military officers), and 1-2% would get to live like sultans in oil-rich kingdoms with small populations. What those elites wanted was ultra-cheap labor in a society in which the proles had responsibilities to the rich and the rich had none to the proles. You can blame the economic elites from the Boom Generation, many of them educated in MBA schools in which they learned finance but not human values -- and, impoverished in learning the liberal arts, gravitated to the more primitive drives of sex, drugs (OK, it became fine whiskey instead of cocaine fashionable for a short time), bureaucratic power, material gain and comfort, and mass culture. Donald Trump exemplifies such, and he shows how putrid such a philosophy can get. If you think that such is essential to capitalism, then think again. I know of one clearly-capitalist community in which men do not ditch a wife when they no longer looks like a Playmate of the Monty , who have no tendency to drugs stronger than alcohol, whose community has few white-collar jobs, in which the material standard of technological indulgence is about one hundred years in the past, and for that has largely been immune to the degrading effects of an amoral mass culture. Such people are the Old Order Amish... you might not want to live as they do, but their way of life is far more sustainable than the one that Trump stands for. Individual prosperity depends upon the size of the farm that an Amish farmer can operate (with his children's labor, of course), and the only way in which to get rich in their world is to be a capitalist. I could make the case that the health of a capitalist society is the extent to which this is true: that almost the only people who can get rich are the capitalists. The fault with Soviet communism was that the people who got rich were the bureaucratic administrators better at feathering their nests and ensuring that their own kids could succeed them than in creating prosperity through entrepreneurial innovation. Guess what is happening in America? Our bureaucratic elites are beginning to look much like a nomenklatura in "socialist" states. Quote:In the current era, Democrats have been extremely divisive. They Wrong. The Hard Right has been fostering division along ethnic and class lines since the 1980's. It has sought to exploit the class line between educated and under-educated people, between regions in states and between states, and between ethnic groups. Its efforts have degenerated into tribalism. The Tea Party exists as an effort to give populist support to a reactionary agenda that holds that multitudes must suffer for economic elites. The Hard Right believes that capitalism is essentially and incorrigibly corrupt, inequitable, cruel, hierarchical, and repressive -- just as doctrinaire Marxist say that capitalism is. The difference between the American Hard Right and doctrinaire Marxists is that the American Hard Right endorses what Marxists consider the horrible vices of capitalism. Capitalism saved itself by making avid consumers out of the proletariat, and contemporary plutocracy seeks to create an economy that fits a Marxist stereotype of capitalism. Some people have caught on. Blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have caught on. Maybe well-off blacks, Asians, and non-Cuban Hispanics have long recognized that the poor of their groups deserve attention from the well-off. Thus the black bourgeoisie sees responsibility toward blacks left behind. "Asians" is of course a category which includes peoples as diverse as Koreans and Pakistanis... but all of the Asian groups that I have met have shown respect for formal learning essential to smooth functioning in American life. The only Hispanics that I have known in large numbers are Mexican-Americans, and they seem to insist that their kids pay attention in school so that they do not become a permanent underclass in intractable poverty. The people not catching on are most white people. So what is wrong with White America? The white upper class and middle class generally has little contact with poor whites and really cares little for them. You do not see white people from Suburbia serving as mentors to poor whites in Appalachia. Therein lies much of the division in White America. Well-off blacks, Asians, and Hispanics vote like the poor people in their own groups. (As for the movie Death of a President, it is largely forgotten. It may not have been as awful as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Howard the Duck, Gigli, Inchon!, Showgirls, Jaws 4, or Superman 4, movies that leave impressions in people who had the misfortune to watch them, which might be a backhanded compliment. So what is the relevance! Why bring it up?) We liberals do not see assassination as a way to deal with Donald Trump. We believe in lawful, constitutional means. I'd be more wary of the Armed Services, the intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement -- entities usually on the Right but who find Trump far more objectionable than Obama ever was. The current President has done something no prior president has done -- making a coup possible. This country is about as polarized as Chile was in 1973, with the President showing undue solidarity with totalitarian leaders at the expense of his country's usual allies. Sure, Allende was as far Left as Trump is far Right. Quote:The Democrats have been planning impeachment literally from the moment If you want an analogy, consider Richard Nixon. About everyone recognizes that Richard Nixon ran a largely-clean campaign and had no connections to gangland creeps before being elected. To be sure, Nixon had some spiders in his soul, but not enough to overpower his rationality until he got full of himself when the power of the Presidency went to his head. Nixon did not have a legacy of sleazy dealings in business. He had a keen legal mind. Donald Trump was a sleazy, hollow character before he became President -- and he saw his status as a celebrity as a rationale for his excesses as a leader. Corrupt dealings were already in place before Trump started his campaign for the Presidency. Trump has seen his business connections as things to enrich him and his progeny while President with the aid of his power as President. Three years into his Presidency, Nixon started his dirty-tricks campaign against opponents and dissidents; that was the start of his downfall. Sure, Nixon could win in a landslide while the full nastiness was only a rumor to most Americans, and when "Tricky Dick" was simply an echo of his start as a California politician. It took about two years from the start of the dirty-tricks campaign for the Nixon Presidency to unravel. It has taken a little more time with Trump -- with far-bigger offenses. So what is the difference? Trump has more people enabling him for partisan ends. His supporters are largely those politicians that the Tea Party elected or tolerated. Donald Trump is the apotheosis of the anti-human agenda of the backers of the Tea Party. Remember well that the financial backers of Tea Party pols wanted to divide America on class lines between a Master Class and its victims. Quote:Now Democrats are now using a King James/King Charles style Star Which is exactly what gangsters and large-scale cheats say of the process that takes them down. This is exactly what I expect from drug traffickers, child pornographers, human traffickers, and large-scale financial cheats. For such people I shed no tears. Quote:Speaking of divisiveness, as cynical as I am, I was still surprised Uhhh -- blacks have been getting better formal education and starting small businesses, two of the surest means of escaping poverty. No single politician deserves credit for that, unless it is Obama for economic stewardship that allowed one of the longest periods of economic growth in history. Check an overlay of Eisenhower and Obama elections, and you will notice that the Democratic and Republican Parties have largely switched constituencies over about sixty years. The exceptions are in the High Plains and Mormon Country, and those could be at risk to Trump and the GOP in 2020. Donald Trump is an arrogant, obnoxious @$$hole irrespective of his political values. Quote:So I know that you have strongly held views, but Trump is not Trump may not have intended to intensify divisions that already exist, but he has certainly aggravated them through his incompetence and personal nastiness. This is a man who mocks the handicapped -- something that I learned not do do when I was a small child. I learned early -- "See that disabled veteran? You might have to make that sacrifice for your country! See that blind person? There but for the Grace of God go you!" I am on the autistic spectrum, and my life is a mess for that. To be sure, I would rather have Asperger Syndrome than anything else in the DMS-IV classification (including the extreme narcissism or even sociopathy of Donald Trump)... I would rather be black than have Asperger syndrome, and I recognize that white privilege still persists. (I would not give up some points of IQ because my intellect is all that I am). Incompetence and malign intent have much the same effect in bringing about tragedy... and good organizations root them out of positions of responsibility so that incompetence or malign intent puts one in positions in which one can hurt only oneself. With Donald Trump I cannot make a ready distinction, but all in all it would have been better had he been brought up without privilege and had to make a living selling used cars. In view of his character I might expect odometer fraud from him. Quote:But the other thing to notice is that this kind of divisiveness goes Happy people do not rebel. Maybe if times were not so bad... Quote:So it isn't Trump that's causing divisiveness. It's the generational So what happens if Trump manages to avoid removal by Congress, but the Republican majority in the Senate also goes down with him in the 2020 general election as Trump goes down in a defeat? The world has a general problem. Much of it is prosperous enough that most people cannot improve their lives just by buying more stuff. So what happens to the proletariat who, as Marx put it, has nothing to sell but its labor, when making more stuff is no longer a means of creating more prosperity? I suggest Piketty, who is only a start but is as far as anyone goes. So how does a post-scarcity society solve the issue of workers becoming superfluous? Rejection of technology so that people must work harder for the basics again? I will pass on the mass culture that the Old Order Amish reject with their rejection of the technologies of mass media, but do not ask me to give up J S Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- or the cinematic wonders of about eighty years ago. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-23-2019 ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Trump's victory speech on Turkey and Syria I just watched Trump's victory speech on the Turkey-Syria-Kurd situation, and have a couple of quick thoughts. Trump said that the ceasefire would be "permanent." When I heard this, I wondered, as I often do, what comes over almost all politicians to think that they're so brilliant that they can make impossible things happen. (This is the discredited "Great Man Theory of History.") However, I share the view that this outcome was much better than if Trump had sent in thousands of American troops to stop Turkey's invasion, as many, many people said they wanted. "Countless Kurdish lives have been saved, without the spilling of any American blood." And: "Let someone else fight on this long bloodstained sand." Trump said that the Kurdish generals were very pleased by the outcome, since the alternative was a massacre by the Turks. He didn't mention the claim that the Kurds were betrayed. Trump said that the ISIS prisoners were under control of the Kurds, and that most of those few who had escaped had been recaptured. Trump did not say anything about the Syrian and Russian troops in the region. In fact, he never once uttered the word "Russia." This will continue to be a controversial issue. Trump looked very tired, much more tired than I can recall ever seeing him. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-23-2019 ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: The stupidest person in Congress - Chris Murphy
I've often said that the stupidest person on the scene today is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who makes one moronic, pathetic statement after another. Just to prove that I'm not sexist, I've now found someone who is even stupider than AOC. AOC is just a young girl, new in Congress, so has an excuse for being stupid. But Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy is 46 years old, was in the House from 2007-13, and has been in the Senate since 2013 and he's a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. So I was watching al-Jazeera, and they showed a brief video of Murphy speaking to the Center for American Progress, where he's apparently thought to be an expert. Here's what he said in his speech: Quote: "Elsewhere in the Middle East, things are falling I hear politicians say really stupid things all the time, but this is about the stupidest thing I've heard a politician say recently -- and that's saying a lot. He's referring to a major split in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that occurred on March 1, 2014, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors from Qatar, and then on June 5, 2017, when the same four Arab countries imposed a land, sea and air blockade on Qatar. I've written about this subject many times, and how it's based deep in the history of the countries involved, going back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. So we can infer the following from Chris Murphy's statement:
This goes beyond simple ignorance. Someone who has been in Congress since 2007 and is on the Foreign Relations Committee should at least know that he doesn't know what he's talking about, and should have the common sense to keep quiet. This goes we'll beyond ignorance into sheer stupidity. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera ran this video without comment. They must have run it to show the world how stupid the Americans are. And it isn't just Democrats. Lindsey Graham has been saying some really dump things about the Syria situation that I won't go into here. Of course, almost all other politicians could be said to be competing with one another to say the stupidest possible thing. In 2006, the Congressional Quarterly and the London Times conducted a survey of Mideast experts (Democrats and Republicans), and found that they couldn't answer simple questions like whether al-Qaeda was a Sunni or Shia organization. (As I recall, most thought they were Shia.) You know, I really do despair that the country is being run by total idiots. And the "experts" in China are also idiots. But this is why we're headed for World War III. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-23-2019 ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Another confused person: Bill Gates I used to think that Bill Gates was smart. Well, he's the second richest person in the world, so I guess he is pretty smart, a lot smarter than I am. But I just saw a half-hour interview with him, and he said some really dumb things. -- Climate change: He said that there will be a massive world wide effort to fix climate change. Is he really so dumb that he thinks that will actually happen? Oh, and he said that Trump will have to go first. He kept talking about what will happen in 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and the thought of a war apparently never entered his mind. Maybe he even believes the fantasy that the world will end if climate change isn't fixed in 11 years, as AOC says. -- Child mortality: He talked about how deaths from childhood diseases are being cut in half. Does he really not realize that cutting child mortality just creates a lot more cannon fodder for the next war? So I suppose if you're the second richest person in the world, you can live in whatever fantasy world you want. Hmmmm. I wonder if he takes jet planes? I wonder if his mansion has a bunker for surviving a war? Enquiring minds want to know. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - pbrower2a - 10-24-2019 (10-23-2019, 09:54 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Another confused person: Bill Gates Climate change is real enough that animal life is adjusting to it. I live in southern Michigan, and last Sunday while I was out for a walk I saw a snake. Ordinarily, snakes are in hibernation by now where I live, but not yet. Donald Trump is an extreme ignoramus on science, so he can accept corporate PR as gospel truth (which also indicates his hollowness as a person. Trump has said that he wants people driving more gas-guzzling vehicles because such is good for the fossil-fuel industry that he considers a cornerstone of prosperity. It is possible to see projections of climate change in the movement of climatic boundaries based on the levels of emissions of greenhouse gases. The Cfa/Dfa line between snowy winters and rainy winters (that of the freezing point of water for the coldest month of the year) used to be through Philadelphia and New York City, but it now seems to be going through Indianapolis and Boston about now. By 2100 that line is projected to pass through the Straits of Mackinac and into the Canadian Maritime Provinces. What is so bad about losing the real winters in southern Michigan? This is a grain-growing area, and the line between the corn belt and the wheat belt goes through about Battle Creek, Michigan -- home of the giant cereal plants of Kellogg's Corporation. It is no coincidence that Kellogg's has a huge cereal plant in a place in which the grain belt meets the corn belt, as do such competitors as Post and Ralston-Purina. The optimal situation for either wheat or corn involves a real winter whose blizzards protect the soil moisture that germinating crops need in the spring and supply melt-water that those crops need. Michigan's spring is basically April, with March as a winter month and May as a summer month, for all practical purposes. Without those real winters the crops would not be as plentiful, as demonstrated in the year (2012) in which Michigan had the mildest winter of all time. By summer, drought-like conditions had turned the grasses yellow as happens in the San Francisco Bay Area which has a severe and predictable summer drought. Crop yields fell that year. Quote:-- Child mortality: He talked about how deaths from childhood diseases What really cuts child birth rates is the education of girls so that they do not start having children in their teens. This reality crosses all ethnic, religious, and cultural lines. High rates child mortality contribute to high birth rates. When children are not born in as large numbers they tend to be treated with more lavish care and are less likely to be seen as sources of remittances as soldiers in wartime. Quote:So I suppose if you're the second richest person in the world, you can Much unlike Donald Trump, Bill Gates seems to have his head on straight. Gates is an innovator and not a gambler and crony capitalist like Trump. Quote:Hmmmm. I wonder if he takes jet planes? I wonder if his mansion has Uhhh... if you work for a living in Sao Paulo and want to visit relatives in Recife (Brazil is getting into the age of mass travel by air, and it is not a rich country), then you probably take the long trip by jetliner even if you took the bus to Sao Paulo to go from a shantytown in Recife where there are few jobs in a classic world of Third-World poverty to a shantytown near Sao Paulo which seemed like New York City, Paris, or Tokyo by contrast except for not having a language barrier. Intercity buses are largely for people too poor (unemployment) to have a car or prohibited from driving a car due to DUI convictions. As for mansions -- I would rather have the super-rich spending money on mansions, art, and horses than on buying the political process. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-24-2019 ** 24-Oct-2019 World View: Great Man Theory Higgenbotham Wrote:> Among other attributes, to be a wildly successful entrepreneur it I've been thinking a lot lately about the "Great Man Theory of History," which says that great historical events occur because they are brought about by great leaders, and further that these leaders are born with these leadership skills (as opposed to learning them through life experience). The theory was advanced by 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle, and has been adopted since then by many historians, who write histories as a series of stories told through great leaders. So, for example, this theory might claim that Adolf Hitler was born as a great leader who caused World War II and the Holocaust, and Winston Churchill was born as a great leader who save the world from Hitler. It's hard to overstate how thoroughly Generational Dynamics rejects this theory. WW II and something like the Holocaust would have occurred with or without Hitler, and the world would have been saved from Hitler with or without Churchill. However, there is a part of the Great Man Theory which is true -- that politicians who are born with great visionary and leadership skills self-select themselves to become the leaders to implement things that are going to happen anyway. So applying this, Hitler was a great visionary and born with great leadership skills foresaw that public opinion was turning towards genocide of Jews (a trend that Hannah Arendt documented in her 1950 book The Origins of Totalitarianism), and decided to implement the genocide through the Holocaust. It's easier to make the argument that Churchill was in the right place at the right time, and someone else would have defeated Hitler without Churchill. Many of Barack Obama's supporters believed that he was a Great Man who would "heal the world" and remake society through his policies from gun control to curing global warming. But in the end all his policies failed. He couldn't even get the "simplest" of his policies implemented -- closing Guantánamo prison. So what went wrong? Obama was clearly born with exceptional leadership skills and great vision, but he was stopped because his policies were opposed by huge masses of people and generations. Now look at Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. He was also born with exceptional leadership skills and great vision, and he used those skills to implement the Great Leap Forward which was the stupidest agricultural and economic policy of any nation in the history of the world, and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese through torture, executions and starvation. So what went "right" for Mao's policies that let them be implemented? Mao was clearly born with exceptional leadership skills and great vision, but he could not be stopped because he was dictator, in control of the army, and able to torture, jail and kill anyone who opposed him, a privilege that was never afforded to Obama. Donald Trump is often called a "dictator," but he's the same as Obama in that all his policies are constantly being challenged, whether by the courts or Congress or agencies. So Mao Zedong, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are similar in that they all had exceptional leadership skills and great vision, but the difference is that Obama and Trump could be stopped, while Mao could not be stopped. And now, of course, China has a new dictator, Xi Jinping, who also has exceptional leadership skills and great vision, and who is a dictator who cannot be stopped, and he's going to bring disaster not only to China but to the entire world. The interesting observation about dictators is that they're as stupid as you and me, but they have no one to challenge their stupidity, with disastrous results. In an interview in 2014, Obama admitted failure: "I just wanted to add one thing to that business about the Great Man Theory Of History. The President of the United States cannot remake our society, and that’s probably a good thing. Not probably. It’s definitely a good thing." And of course the reason that it's a good thing is that even Great Men make stupid mistakes. So now let's circle back around to your point about Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, and their being "overly optimistic." The "Great Man Theory" could apply equally well to government leadership and business leadership, and Great Men in this category self-select themselves to build successful businesses. So Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates both have exceptional leadership skills and great vision, and they built Amazon and Microsoft with those skills. In many ways, a business leader is like a government dictator, because a business leader often has dictatorial powers within his own company. Using those skills, he can push the company to disaster (as is happening with WeWork, and may be happening with Tesla), or he can push his business to major success. So business leaders and government leaders who are "overly optimistic" might be very successful, but they might be stopped by the people, one way or another. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-24-2019 ** 24-Oct-2019 World View: Ethnic massacres in Syria utahbob Wrote:> John, I called this a few years ago, when I was in uniform. I said There have been American troops in Syria for ten years. And yet, Bashar al-Assad has been continuously committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, using barrel bombs, chlorine gas, Sarin gas and all the rest of it, millions of Syrians have fled into neighboring countries, including over a million into Europe, and as you say there are ethnic massacres still going on. So what the hell was the point of sending troops in in the first place? Well, I suppose we had to fight al-Qaeda and ISIS. But is there any other purpose? Are we really supposed to keep thousands of troops in Syria because some Kurdish politicians are trying to gain leverage by referencing an imaginary American commitment to protect them forever? These groups have been killing each other for centuries, and will continue to do so. American troops are not relevant. Why not just let them kill each other? RE: Generational Dynamics World View - David Horn - 10-24-2019 (10-23-2019, 11:23 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 23-Oct-2019 World View: Trump's victory speech on Turkey and Syria I see you get your news from the Murdock News Empire, because large parts of what you wrote here have been thoroughly debunked. Whatever you may think of the Kurds, they are far from happy. As to Trump, I'm starting a "Trump for Prison 2021" effort. Like to join? RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-24-2019 (10-24-2019, 12:37 PM)David Horn Wrote: > I see you get your news from the Murdock News Empire, because I realize that reading comprehension is not exactly your strong suit, and may be almost completely nonexistent, but I wasn't quoting Fox. I was quoting Trump. It was a report on Trump's speech. Enjoy your erotic prison fantasy. RE: Generational Dynamics World View - John J. Xenakis - 10-24-2019 ** 24-Oct-2019 World View: Mike Pence on China calls out NBA and Nike
I watched Mike Pence's speech today on China. It was a very harsh speech, criticizing the entire list of CCP activities that the West considers to be criminal -- jailing Uighurs, jailing priests, destroying churches, IP theft, South China Sea crimes, and dozens more. The speech is sure to catch the CCP's attention and infuriate them, presumably because an American vassal dared to speak back to the leaders of the Master Race. Pence also called out American companies that are kowtowing to China: Quote: "Some of the NBA's biggest players and owners, who The image above is from days when Nike was laughably claiming that it wasn't just a cheap, pathetic sellout. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/24/vice-president-mike-pence-says-nba-acting-like-subsidiary-of-china.html RE: Generational Dynamics World View - David Horn - 10-24-2019 (10-24-2019, 01:49 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(10-24-2019, 12:37 PM)David Horn Wrote: > I see you get your news from the Murdock News Empire, because The reportage was fine; the spin, not so much. |