06-29-2020, 09:36 AM
(06-28-2020, 10:54 AM)Isoko Wrote: Pbrower,
I have read Toynbee and his analysis does seem to fit in with Spengler and his theory. Overall I think that what we are seeing is the return of Caesarism and Donald Trump is in essence the first step, as is Brexit. If I'm honest, I think after Trump and when Brexit is finished will be more demands from the general public to take a strong hand on policy making, particularly as the economy continues its slow spiral downward.
I already know that in Britain, the main opposition is now the right wing in terms of what I call 'dissident thinking'. Its something in between civic nationalism and basic alt right ideas, without the ethno-nationalist jargon thrown in. I see non-white right wingers siding with the white right wingers basically asking the same thing: End mass immigration, stop political correctness, bring back family values, stop aiding the third world, banish Islam, etc, etc.
Looking at the UKIP phenomenon where that party was able to heavily influence the mainstream Conservative Party into running the Brexit referendum in the first place, I fully expect under the FPTP system, new right wing parties start to win seats, pressure the mainstream to act and the society goes even further right wing as a result.
Just think of Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil, except that those are comparatively racist within their own countries. Both are disasters due to COVID-19.
Right-wingers normally have the objective of ensuring an abundant supply of cheap, unorganized, expendable labor to which the owners and executives owe nothing. To be sure, Trump did not give the American Hard Right what it wished for in eviscerating unions, destroying welfare, and privatizing the public sector to monopolistic gougers. That will take someone else.
Quote:I think the vandalising of Churchill's statue and the Cenotaph just went too far for the Brits to stomach.
Churchill had his faults; he was a racial bigot and he was very wrong on Indian independence. On the other hand, the UK was one of the few European countries to come out of WWII with its Jewish population intact. Churchill did read Hitler right.
Quote:The end result though is more Caesarism for the UK. Europe is pretty easy, they'll just vote for the Identitarian parties that I predict will actually start to get mainstream powers this decade. The continent tends to do 'revolution' more than the Brits.
Probably not. The generational cycle is in operation in the UK, and as in the USA it tends to force the country to be what it needs to be at the time and keeps it from going too far in one direction. A society that gets stuck in a Crisis Era that it can never shake off is the real-life Soviet Union, the high-tech feudalism of Flash Gordon serials, the fictional Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the monstrous First Galactic Empire of the Star Wars saga,the vile aftermath of an Axis victory in The Man in the High Castle. Get stranded in a 3T (Degeneracy/Unraveling), and you have a society going increasingly corrupt, inequitable, and depraved so that when a Crisis comes the political order is ill-prepared for it and collapses (Roman Empire?) An extended Awakening allows a society to descend into mysticism and intellectual speculation while neglecting what makes prosperity possible. An over-extended 1T? One gets a technological marvel devoid of humanistic values with numbing conformity.
To spoof the "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" sketch -- nobody expects the cycle to turn, but it does. People are ill prepared for it, but that makes the responses genuine.
Quote:My overall thoughts on the end result tend to be a belief that easily tapped resources are going to start running out or hitting major peak extraction this century, bringing an end to the industrial age we have lived under. Less resources means less global travel, less production of consumer goods and more focus on local communities in order to survive.
We also have recycling. Our technology requires lesser material to do the same things. Mass is a good surrogate for the cost of raw materials and labor, and most obviously transportation costs; let's put it this way. You can actually carry a 25" flat-screen TV easily and could put it in the trunk of your car... but you could not carry a 25" console TV that needed a case to protect the vulnerable cathode-ray tube. Around 1980 one could get a 25", bare-bones console TV for about $600... and you can get a 25" flat-screen TV for about $100. The contemporary 25" TV is a far better machine than the expensive one from 1980. I have seen people praise vintage audio, but not vintage TV's.
We are doing more with less material. That is practically the definition of technological progress.
Quote:I wouldn't be surprised if the global village experiment starts to die out later on this century with most people living lives similar to their ancestors. I predict a huge boom in farming as the main economy sometime down the road.
One of the trends suggesting economic progress anywhere is that fewer people are farmers and farm laborers. To be sure, corporate entities have been squeezing out family farmers by making farm families offers that they can't refuse: that in return for land from which one gets a sub-par return one gets the funds with which to move to the Big City or its suburbs and send the kids (who do not want to be farmers anyway) to college so that they can be accountants, veterinarians, nurses, engineers, etc. ... Back-to-the-farm movements have typically had disappointing results.
Quote:Either way, Caesarism is going to be there to make sure the people adapt to these changes as suddenly not being able to buy a car or fill your shopping basket with lots of items like before is going to drive alot of people mad.
A Caesar comes into play when the system is already in irrevocable failure. I infer from Toynbee that the Roman Empire was always a society always rotting, perhaps with some semblance of rousing itself from built-in rottenness that had appeared during the latter two centuries of the Republic. Toynbee sharply dismisses the idea that the Roman Era was a time of lost greatness; it at most offered an Indian Summer of sort-of-OK times such as the near-century era of the Antonine emperors. Then along comes Commodus to start the inevitable decay.
Quote:As for AGW, if I'm honest I think the changes won't be as fast as predicted. I'll doubt we'll see the Netherlands under water in 100 years if I'm honest. But what I think is going to happen is the climate is going to get warmer and this could lead to ecological implications for many countries, particularly in agriculture. Europe will get greener and be good for farming but winter will die out as we know it. Russia though will still have colder winters but better temperature for farming.
It is up to Humanity to slow the questionable advance of global warming. We are doing a poor job at that as a species. Motor vehicle use many be flat-lining in the US, Canada, western Europe, and Japan, but it is growing in Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, China, and Russia...
If you are to say "turn up the air conditioner", then waste heat pumped out of buildings as well as the energy used in pumping out the heat together intensify AGW. Air-conditioning a house in Dallas in July costs more than heating a house in Minneapolis in the winter. Minneapolis is just north of the zone in which people can get away without air conditioning, but about a 3 C (roughly 5 F) increase in the July mean St. Louis, which has oppressive summer heat.
Quote:As for mass migration, if it continues, you end up with a Eurabised/Africanised Western Europe with the remaining natives fleeing into Eastern Europe and Russia. What happens then is basically a new version of the Middle East drama played out in Europe with Russia and EE as Israel and the once West as Palestine.
The biggest contributors to any mass migration will be from South Asia and China.
Quote:Basically a new century of war in Europe. So let's hope for the sake of the environment, world leaders can come up with concrete solutions on how to tackle this crisis in the long term.
Again, I see the harshest effects of AGW happening just in time for the Crisis of 2100.
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.