Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Alt-Right?

[Bob Butler 54]

(08-29-2016, 06:57 AM)Anthony Wrote: Once the warrior age begins, the all-volunteer military is obviously toast.

And the Karl Marx vs. Ayn Rand dichotomy will be toast too - possibly to be replaced by this?

http://www.ru.org/index.php/economics/39...eory-prout

You are beginning to remind me of Cynic Hero, advocating and promoting a return to militaristic Agricultural Age values.  A caste system?  Really?  It might possibly work in India where they have a tradition of such things, but as a world wide approach I am dubious.

But some of the directions Sardar is heading in aren't totally off.   Prout "seeks to guarantee what it recognizes as the five minimum requirements of life for human beings: food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care."  If you add a retirement system, you're getting close to FDR's "Freedom from Want."  Eleanor got most of that inserted into the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The theory is that if a population doesn't have these things, along with the other three Freedoms, Religion, Fear and Speech, the population will have perpetual unrest.  Freedom from Want is a good goal, an old goal, one that was set at the last 4T/1T cusp, and promptly forgotten.

Well, not totally forgotten.  The Democrats are working towards health care and education, for example.

I can agree that capitalist systems strongly tend towards putting far too much money and political power in the hands of too few.  I'm not seeing enough checks on the power of the elites in the PROUT stuff.  They are proposing a caste based new elite, with the castes in theory checking each other's power.  Perhaps I haven't dug enough to find how exactly that works.  Creating new groups of elites doesn't necessarily check the power of said elites, preventing them from creating government of, for and by the elites.

And I don't see a return to Agricultural Age style perpetual war will be helpful.  Recent history shows major powers highly reluctant to take each other on directly in an era of weapons of mass destruction.  I think this a worthy beneficial trend, and it's about time.  Bush 43's attempt at neo colonialism got really ugly.  In the early Industrial Age the imperialists had a big advantage in weapon technology.  Today, proxy war and insurgent tactics guarantees the enemies of the imperialists will be well supplied with arms and ammunition.  Thus, the normal expected result of colonial wars and foreign interventions ought to be insurgent conflict, quagmire, failed states, and misery.  See Syria.  Attached is a CNN attempt to 'clarify' the situation there.

It may be that different cultures will want to push towards the Four Freedoms in different way.  A caste system might possibly make sense in India, while single payer fits the US better.  PROUT favors a world army?  Well, perhaps if it comes with a mandate to suppress failed states and massive crimes against humanity, this might be a desirable thing.  I don't know that you can get there from here.  After Bush 43, few seem ready to commit forces to ugly areas of the world.  The established powers are far more willing to prevent their friends from losing than commit to achieving a win.  Thus, quagmire.

PROUT attempts to address real problems.  They shouldn't be dismissed lightly, but I don't know that their approach will fit all over the world.