No more Millennial children

[pbrower2a]

(01-21-2018, 10:20 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(01-21-2018, 06:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Howe and Strauss said that the GI/Silent boundary was not well defined until the end of World War II,

Which supports my view that generational boundary definition is a lagging indicator.  It does not however support the absurd theory that generations can last much longer than a quarter century, maximum.  At least no in the industrial saeculum.  Pre-industrial saecula are more murky.  (and less relevant)

Industrial era? We are in the post-industrial era in which the basic consumer goodies are cheap. Of course, real estate, medicine, public services, legal process, and especially real estate aren't cheap. Some of the cost reflects monopolization which will turn anything into a rip-off.

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Quote:I am guessing that 1924 cohorts were more likely to do enough combat to make rank (as from battlefield commissions)

As NCOs at most.  1923s regularly made 2nd Lieutenant by battlefield commission.

But even NCO's can develop some talent for command useful as blue-collar supervisors. Let us not forget that post-WWII veterans' organizations offered more to veterans of the GI Generation for participation in "the Big One -- "Double-ya, Double-ya Two", as the fictional Archie Bunker put it. Combat in Korea didn't count for as much, and occupation duty in Japan or western Germany after the war (a near-vacation) didn't count much either. Young Silent soldiers were in Europe in case the Soviet Union tried to push it's order into western Europe by military invasion.

Quote:This made a difference in political success: there have been two GI Presidents born in 1924, three Boomer Presidents born in the mid-1940s, but no Silent Presidents. As I see it the most likely Silent President will be Nancy Pelosi under the condition that the Democrats take over the House of Representatives in the next election, choose her as Speaker of the House, and she is present when a President leaves office while there is no Vice-President. Now that is a stretch.

It is quite a stretch because the Dims aren't taking back the house this year.  Second even if they did and somehow managed to remove Trump, Pence (a Boomer) would become president and they would then have to impeach him as well.  I would venture to guess that the reason that there was a lack of Silent presidents (though they maintained control over congress far longer than either the GIs or Boomers did) may have something to do with the fact that they were bookended by two large and dominate generations.

Should Donald Trump have to resign in disgrace, then most likely Mike Pence has dirty hands too. I doubt that Republicans and Democrats could concur on appointing a VP  should the Democrats have one or both Houses of Congress. Approval ratings of both the Presidency and Congress are now far worse than those for Obama and the Democratic-majority House and Senate in early 2010. If the Tea Party could wear down Obama and the Democratic-majority Congress, then the larger and more coherent opposition to this President can do even more damage to those in power.
 

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Quote:I have also noticed that the Silent include something unique: a large number of self-effacing comedians, either zany characters (Jerry Lewis, Carol Burnett, Christopher Lloyd), neurotic personalities (Woody Allen), or parodies of GI efficiency (Andy Griffith, Leslie Nielsen, Dick Van Dyke). Howe and Strauss did not notice that -- but I did.

Jerry Lewis, Carol Burnett, Christopher Lloyd, Andy Griffith, Leslie Nielsen and Dick Van Dyke quite simply did not have much impact on society except as entertainment.  Woody Allen serves more as a butt of a joke than as cultural phenominon.  S&H probably noticed but like myself did not consider them important enough to notice.  If one views generational formation as a tide chart one doesn't need to factor in how many fish are in the area to know within a quarter of an hour when high and low tide are.

Which is like saying that Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev are 'mere entertainment'.  Yes, composers did not have the effect upon political life that a Lincoln, Bismarck, Churchill, or Mandela could have. But one goes through the secondary channels of broadcast stations when the newer material is dull and one can find such a program as M*A*S*H. Actors are generally not scriptwriters who write something that can be reused, and we obviously have no recording of how Bach, Paganini, or Schubert played the instruments of their specialization. (There are player-piano rolls of Brahms, Rachmaninov, and even Mahler which have been recorded onto disc, and those deserve attention). Programs that television executives consider 'evergreen', not all of them comedies, are safe materials to broadcast because they are good and because they are written in conformity with the old broadcast code.

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Quote:Using the duration of the last three completed Crisis Eras, the Great Depression/WWII  Crisis (Crisis of 1940) lasted at most 16 years in America, if longer elsewhere in countries that endured great physical destruction in the war or had revolutionary changes soon afterward; Bloody Kansas and the American Civil War (Crisis of 1860) lasted six years; the Revolutionary and Constitutional Crisis (from the Boston Massacre to the ratification of the Constitution) lasted long enough for children born at its start to become fully adult.

Not quite.  I generally date the ACW 4T starting around 1850 and ending in 1865 (or 15 years), GD/WW2 from 1930 (for simplicity) to 1945 (or 15 years), the Revolutionary Crisis lasted from around 1763 to 1789 or 26 years but that was on a longer pre-industrial saeculum and thus irrelevant now.

So what does a post-industrial world in which people cannot buy happiness by simply buying more stuff do to the generational cycle? We cannot know, and of this we must remain mute.  I would guess that elites who have spend a Junior Year in Paris are less likely to want to destroy Paris.

Quote:... Which makes me confident should there be a war Trump would be a near perfect president during it.  If he wanted glory he could build yet an other tower and dip it in gold, or make an even better reality Tee-Vee show.  Believe what you want about (President Trump) but I know it isn't glory he was seeking in running for President.  Having been to the White House myself before the place is pretty much a dump (I mean it is a very very old house after all) in comparison to his three storey penthouse in Manhattan, and he certainly didn't run for office for the 400K.  He wipes his ass with 400K.  

He renovated the old Post Office Building in DC as one of his hotels, and those who want his favors are wise to show receipts from their stays there. I've seen images of the gaudiness of some Trump Towers... and I prefer the integrity of the minimal Motel 6 to that should I travel alone. I might want to catch up on some news and my favorite computer sites before I go to bed.  But I am an educated person of rural middle-class origin who does not fall for ostentatious display. Surely you remember my thread in which I compared Trump taste to that of some up-from-nowhere tyrants and eventually drug lords... although I can admire legitimate achievement as in old movie palaces I'm not much into expensive, wasteful display.

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Quote:It may take longer to resolve a Crisis without a war. War forces a national focus as diplomacy and social reforms do not.

Or perhaps there is no real solution to the crisis we now face--the break down of the old order and the rise of the new one.  I have often compared the current 4T to the Glorious Revolution for a reason.  Neither had a major war (yet), have been mostly internally focused, and based on moderate reforms that give rise to a 2T that will result in a later 4T that completely over turns the old order.  After all the last monarch of Britain to exercise Royal Veto was Queen Anne.

Possible. The Trump 'solution' could backfire badly. He lacks the political skills of Ronald Reagan, the last conservative President to effect lasting change in American political practice (and not all for the good). What happens if the Democrat elected in 2020 or 2024 is basically a "Reagan of the Left"?

A hint -- the Right wanted Obama to fail, and they did everything possible to ensure that he would fail.

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Quote:  I can think of some resolutions of this Crisis, one of which is that Donald Trump and the GOP successfully transform America into a pure plutocracy with no welfare, in which the rich are exempt from responsibilities, and all Americans learn that their fate is responsibility above all else to make the filthy rich even filthier rich.

The welfare state is doomed Trump or no-Trump.  Socialism stops working when you run out of other people's money.  Furthermore plutocrats really really love highly regulated economic orders so if you want a plutocracy then you should be voting for the Dimocrats.  After all they are the low wage, import cheap labor from foreign countries to screw the black man, and the slavery party.  They really haven't changed that much since the days of Jefferson Davis, never mind George Wallace.

Do not be fooled, Trump is at most a mild reformer.  As I said I see him as a Gorbachev like figure who will preside over a controlled dismantling of the American Empire.  Anything else begs for national annihilation.  I don't know about you, but I'm not into suicide.

First of all:

1. The gig economy with no job security makes a welfare state necessary. At the least we will need unemployment insurance so that people who have highly-honed talent can wait out a cyclical downturn and not take a job from some unskilled worker.

2. Big Business has itself adapted to the welfare state. Wal*Mart may be quite reactionary on labor-management relations, but it makes much profit off food aid. SNAP turns people who out of desperation might be shoplifters into paying customers. Government relies heavily upon the educational system for job training. 

3. Then why do Hispanics and Asians who have few cultural affinities to American blacks vote like blacks?

4. The Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party of the once-solid South found its way to the Republican Party as they found that without the Republican Party they would have to share power with blacks in the South. But what do the current southern Republicans have in common with the Dixiecrats of the 1960s and earlier? They could entrench themselves in power, but they often governed  badly.

 The former Confederate States except for Virginia and to some extent Florida and Texas are all worse than average in educational achievement, crime, public health, and worker pay. What the Dixiecrat pols did badly, contemporary Democrats do little better now.

Quote:Take your sci-fi talk elsewhere.

Who knows? I might write a novel some day.
 

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Quote:The trend toward political conservatism began among late-wave Boomers and  got really-well marked with cohorts born in 1961. Most of the liberals born in 1961 were from ethnic or religious minorities that largely voted Democratic or were from unionized households.

Not quite true.  Most of the so-called Red Boomers are actually "Big Government Liberals".  It is just they want their big government ensuring that little Johnnie isn't touching himself in his bed room, Tyrone isn't smoking a blunt and Adam and Steve can't get married.  That form of conservatism drew its last breath in 2004 in the last election of the late 3T.  It isn't going to come back, and it isn't relevant now except for perhaps clueless Blue Boomers who never understood that they were the opposite side of the same coin (and still don't).

Since the birth of the Tea Party and other such movements conservatism has been taking a more libertarian and conservatarian aspect of X, which respects Reagan in the sense that "at least the fucking 70s are over now".

Re-read Generations. America is becoming more repressive about sex except on same-sex rights.  I got on that side out of the conservative concern for law and order. There's nothing like the threat of gay-bashing (even if one is not gay) to take revenge upon people who see their bigotry as the right to beat and rob people. I still strongly disapprove of underage sex whether it is between naive underage people or whether it is between someone underage and an exploitative pervert. Marijuana? I don't like it, but a crackdown on it does more harm than good.

The corporatist right-wingers, the Bible-thumpers, and the (utopian) libertarians on the Right have begun to turn on each other. As a liberal I have no stake in either of them prevailing. I am reminded of what Henry Kissinger said of the opposing sides in the Iran-Iraq war -- he wished that they could both lose.

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Quote:Of course "Zed" chronicles already exist. But so far their journalism is high-school journalism. It will shortly be college journalism.

Not quite.  High School and college publications are still publications.  But that is a minority of the cultural output that they are already putting out.  Social media has had a leveling effect and reduced entry cost to zero (which is why CNN, MSNBC and the Alphabet Networks are losing their shit over it).

Quote:It will be a while before they are employed as journalists who get bylines, do investigative or battlefield reporting, etc

What century are you living in?  Most journalists who work for the legacy media don't do that now.  Ever notice that the news of the day usually consists of the President's tweets?  And when not that, it is unnamed sources on Capitol Hill or the White House (which means officals leaking).

The masters of most fields develop their passions in childhood, hone their craft in early adulthood, and go on autopilot as they approach midlife.

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Quote:Facebook and YouTube are mostly non-professional. They could be practice for the real thing.

Prior to the Radio Era most journalism was non-professional.  It is not practice for the real thing.  One either is reporting the relevant information of the day (even if it is for Bobby Lee High School) or they are not.  Reduction of entry costs to journalism will result in the de-professionalization of journalism.

But quality-control matters.  Branding matters. of course I expect a shake-out in the media. It could be that the New York Times is more useful in Lansing, Michigan as a news source than is the Lansing Journal-Gazette.  We will still need local media for local news, weather, sports, TV listings, death notices, and the like. Rags like the Detroit News and Free Press put much of their attention into the sports pages., which will be one means of survival.

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Quote:To be successful in any profession or art still takes about 10K hours of dedicated effort to polish one's craft, as says Malcolm Gladwell (who explains much well). That is the difference between the amateur ande either the success or failure in all but a few cases.

In that case your standard youtube vlogger will have that if they post three times a week in 2 years.  Video editing is somewhat labor intensive.

As a journalistic hobbyist, basically an editorial writer, I am well past the 10K hours.

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Quote:Other sports include tennis, gymnastics, and golf, all of which are excellent forums for asserting the personalities of the athletes down to their eccentricities.  

As usual, you miss the point.  Actors, Singers and Sports figures are not indicative of the generation at large.  The notion that they are is something Boomers seem to believe but has no basis in reality.  Much like the Boomer notion that these persons should serve as "role models" for children.  That isn't their job.  Children do need role models, they come with two unless death or family court deprives them of one.

But they (and I forgot to mention child film and TV stars) are the first to get recognition.  Thus in any time a sports star can be in the public eye for his athletic achievements before his generational peers get through law  or med school. In the old days, business executives were drawn heavily from traveling salesmen after about twenty years of dedicated, loyal, competent service. So if you establish a screen persona by age 20 the media will try to find out if there is more to you than your acting. if you win 20 games as a pitcher or hit 50 homer runs in a season the sports journalists will be interested in things other than your baseball play. Actors, pop musicians, and athletes are the first to give indications of the personality of a generation.  Detroit media paid much attention to Justin Verlander, one of the first  superstars to emerge from what Howe and Strauss call the Millennial Generation (he was born in 1982). He seems rather bland, but that is a commonplace rap on Civic young adults.

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Quote:A post-Crisis era can be an era of harsh repression and poverty if the leadership is pathological (as under Commie regimes in central and Balkan Europe or in China.  Communities that might have had easy connections before WWII (like Weimar and Bayreuth) could be separated by an internal border within a nation, with hostile political and economic systems on other sides.

This said, Germans (at least outside the Soviet zone and DDR), Italians, and Japanese had real Highs analogous in economics, politics, and mass culture to those in the USA, Britain, and France -- and far nicer 'Highs' than did such nominal winners as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, where Commies established stultified cultures, overpowering propaganda, and an economic order obsolete from its inception.

If Britain had a post WW2 "High" it didn't come until long after the war (if at all).  Britain, France and Western Germany were simply put exhausted.  Italy was destroyed and rationing there remained until the 1960s (and just about everyone was poor there).  In western Europe the one country that did have a "High" in the 1950s was Spain.  Franco being an avowed anti-communist got a lot of aid from the US during then which he plowed into industrialization, infrastructure and better housing for the population.  Oh and Franco was supposed to be a fascist or something.  (Really he was a Spanish Nationalist but according to the lefties these days anyone slightly to the Right of Mao is Hitler.)

Eastern Europe and the USSR especially did not have a high at all.  With perhaps the exception of the Poles and Czechs (they are Catholic and Westward looking to start with) the orthodox states, including Greece started in on their 3T (which is why communism fell there half a saeculum later in their 4T).

Just because the US, UK and Germany had a 4T war in the 1940s doesn't mean that the USSR did.  The Soviet "High" I usually date from 1922-1942.  Oh and that "high" featured repression in spades.  Stalin was a Nomad and had a background as a brigand he dealt with enemies  and persons assumed to be enemies harshly.

How good is the High?

1. Does a country emerge victorious but not exhausted, or if it is defeated or exhausted does it recover quickly? Much of Britain's problem was its costly and internally-divisive decolonization. See also France, the Netherlands, and at a later stage Portugal.

2. Does the country reject austerity? Britain preserved its wartime rationing a bit too long. Not until Thatcher dod the Brits open the spigots on consumerism as America did in the late 1980s.

3. Does the political and cultural order eschew cultural repression? Culturally-repressive societies like the Soviet Union typically fossilize despite their pretensions to continuing revolution just as Franco-era Spain and Salazar-era Portugal did with the support of reactionary leadership that rejected modernity. It is hard to imagine the Beatles emerging from the Soviet Union or some fascistic country. What many of us see as Spanish cultural achievement (Miro, Picasso, Casals) occurred in countries like France and the USA after Franco took over.

Fossilized cultures show evidence of decline. Fossilization preserves the facade over the rot, as in the Roman Empire.

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Quote:The highest offices of the land are usually staffed with people at or just past retirement age. Experience matters greatly in democratic politics, and very rarely do young adults rise so rapidly in the political system as did Grant, T. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton, or Obama. I still predict that Trump will be a failure as President and be one-and-out... and it is quite possible that his successor will be a late-wave Boomer who becomes the next analogue for Lincoln or FDR.

That isn't why politics is a lagging indicator.  Culture is changed before politics changes.  Grant was famous as a general and a mediocre president.  T. Roosevelt had the presidency thrust on him by an assassin's bullet (he was picked for VP to keep him out of NY politics, he was not well liked in Albany, not because he was the best the GOP could come up with).  Kennedy's father and his father's connections essentially bought him the presidency.  Clinton was a mediocre president, he's only remembered fondly because of his "Bubba Bill" persona but really the man is a crook.  Obama managed to win an election against an old man in he wrong party for the wrong year and win re-election against a man who couldn't make up his mind and in general acted too weird to be trusted with the Presidency.

I doubt that the Boomers have someone who lacks gray hair that can take on the GC role as Trump already fits the bill.  You just don't want that to be true so you're ignoring the evidence of your lying eyes.

Most of America disagrees with you about Donald Trump. There is time enough for another Lincoln or FDR. Donald Trump is an incompetent political leader, the 'my way or the highway' type that people try to find ways to avoid. He has no principle other than the enrichment, power, and indulgence of economic elites. He is intellectually and morally hollow, and the only way in which he reshapes America is if he and his political flunkies are able to crush liberalism and the welfare state once and for all.

Sure, this is a Crisis Era, and seemingly anything can happen except for a continuation of 3T patterns of life.

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Quote:The end of the Crisis, Howe and Strauss tell us, typically comes when the Idealist generation fades out of political life either cast out due to incompetence or retired due to mass aging, fading relevance, and debility.  (As far as I am concerned, the end of Boomer dominance in executive and bureaucratic elites cannot happen fast enough. They are simply awful!)

Well Boomers in Congress lost the majority during the Obama Administration and have been completely replaced on the state level except for a few lingering Governors.  Mass aging is taking its toll but it is slow.  After the ACW the compromisers were thrown out on their ears as they had been discredited.

The Idealist generation reaches the peak of its power when it takes over the highest offices. But even that is the end of the line.

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Quote:62 is either middle-aged or old  depending upon personal habits.

If average life expectancy is 80 years then 40 is middle aged.  The key feature of being middle aged is that it happens in the middle of the life cycle.  A 62 year old is old.  It doesn't matter if he smokes 3 packs a day and eats Wendy's triple baconators every day for lunch washed down with 3 gallons of coke or is a non-smoking vegetarian who runs marathons for fun.  The only difference between the two is that the smoker will waste less resources being old.

Some people reach chronological old age -- the people who stay physically active, avoid cancerweed products, eat healthy foods, and drink in moderation if at all. Some people get old before others, and that means people with sedentary lifestyles, bad eating habits, use of street drugs, cancerweed products, and alcoholism.

Quote:I may have to 'borrow' someone's kid so that I can make an intelligent purchase  of a smartphone soon.

No you don't.  You need to find an Xer who can tolerate you for more than five seconds.  Kids don't know shit about smartphones except how to play angry birds on them.  Xers on the other hand had to study computing from the ground up and know good value for money.  Otherwise you might as well buy an Ishit since that is what the kid will recommend.

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Quote:Teaching, even if it is as a substitute. I do real teaching. I can make some interesting contribution when the opportunity arises.
 

I had substitute teachers in school.  They rarely if ever taught anything except for one year when I was in 7th grade and the regular teacher had a nervous breakdown at the beginning of the year and his substitute really became the regular teacher.  She "subbed" for him for three years according to rumor.

I know my material, and I get to the school as early as possible to be prepared for the coming day. The district gets an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. I'm really good at math and science, but I can administer an English class if it involves reading or spelling. I am also a firm disciplinarian who starts rigid and can loosen up as a reward. I typically lecture for about five minutes  (which is about all that most K-12 students can tolerate, anyway), give an in-class assignment, and circulate around to see who is struggling.  But -- students will do classwork while I am the sub. I cannot work any other way.

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Quote:Materialism may be how the universe works down to the level of the subatomic particle, but attempting to explain natural phenomena an a gross scale is impossible (Uncertainty Principle and other limits -- too many variables for too few equations, and the practical impossibility of measuring the phenomena without altering them).

I think your understanding of quantum mechanics is on par with Eric's.  Meaning you don't know what you're talking about and would be better served by shutting up now.  

Materialism maintains that the real world exists independently of human perception.  IE a tree falling in the woods with no one around does make a sound (assuming of course this tree is in a place with some sort of atmosphere though I suppose water or similar liquid could work too).

I could never make sense of quantum mechanics, which indicates that I do not have a PhD in physics and nothing else. 

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Quote:Mencken was certainly right about democracy and demagogues.

He was right about idealism too.  I suggest checking out his brainy quote page.

It's usually pointless to suggest what someone deceased for sixty years would say of someone around today -- but Mencken would probably have ripped Donald Trump for his sexual depravity, moral relativism, and hollow intellect. Mencken was an iconoclast.