05-07-2020, 02:41 PM
(05-07-2020, 11:14 AM)David Horn Wrote:(05-07-2020, 03:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(05-06-2020, 10:32 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Incidentally, this going on for several years might actually make Covid-19 the climax of the Crisis, which I doubt it can otherwise be.
You are expecting another trigger? The boomers are going to age out of power soon, ending the window for the prophet - nomad - civic constellation of generations. With crisis war triggers rare to impossible given nukes, that leaves the chance of something else blowing up to a trigger low. After COVUS 19 is suppressed, the materialist selfish faction is going to want to shift rapidly into a high.
I’m not seeing another trigger coming along as likely. I was already working out what happens if a crisis configuration goes by without a trigger, which was looking likely until COVUS 19. What do you anticipate?
It may be that having Trump bollox this up as badly as he has will be the need impetus for real change. That never happened last time, and there's a tiny window where it may this time. The only real limitation: the US Constitution. It's nearly impossible to amend and many of the problems we have a nation are due directly to the imbalance in power between urban and rural. We won't have the option of secession amendments this time.
Trump has practically made impossible that a Boomer will be the political hero of this Crisis.
He has discredited the descent into an increasingly-elitist economic paradigm that has failed badly despite making the promise that if we go along things will eventually get better. It's been forty years, and when failure comes, the Hard Right shouts "YOU HAVEN'T SUFFERED ENOUGH!"
Not since at least Hoover have we had a President so reviled for dubious achievements. But Hoover was tied to an orthodox view of economic practice; Donald Trump is moral malignancy as well as incompetence. All in all his incompetence at playing the role of the despot (he hasn't shut down opposing media as Duterte is doing to the network ABS-CBN -- no relation to Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network in the Philippines, and he hasn't offed or even regulated the opposition Party). Maybe we are not out of the woods yet, and a few years from now the Hard Right will get someone as ruthless and corrupt -- more effective in stifling opposition. On the other hand, maybe the political climate of America will change so that such is impossible.
We have gone as far as we can with plutocracy before we end up with people starving on the street as government represents wealth instead of the People. That is the economic basis of feudalism and fascism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.