Has the regeneracy arrived?

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-16-2016, 07:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I would argue that it (objective psycho-history) is beyond any human.  At best we can use mass psychology to understand, and perhaps manipulate the course of history.  Beyond that, anything even close to Asimov's Psychohistory is a pipe dream.  But a good dream never hurt anyone.

Well...  Idealist dreams have been known to fail disastrously, but in general I'll not argue against dreams.

(05-16-2016, 07:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: And a doctrinaire Whig would be right, in so far as that list would conform to their ideology.  The question is, however, does that happen in history.  Does the transfer of one old elite automatically confer social/economic/political "progress"?  I would say largely no.  After all to a serf does it matter if the king is a Saxon or is a Norman?

An argument over land between Saxon and Norman has nothing to do with progress.  That's just humans being humans, the bloody Agricultural Age status quo.  If Robber Barons are trying to take power away from agricultural land owners, or if advocates of democracy are taking power away from kings, then you can talk about progress from the perspective of a Whig.  I see many crises in the Anglo-American series being about a transition from the basic Agricultural Age pattern to the Industrial Age pattern.  If you go back before the Black Plague and printing press, the Whig march of progress hasn't really started.

Arguably, with the suppression of the last fascist and communist major powers, the Robber Barons have essentially won the contest with the autocratic tyrants.  It is time and past time when the arrow of progress involves taking power away from the Robber Barons.  How to go about that successfully is the question.

But within the time where the democracies were suppressing the tyrants, yes, there was an arrow of progress.

(05-16-2016, 07:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I don't bash boomers, I merely tell the truth about them.

Do you ever go back and re-read your own posts?

(05-16-2016, 07:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: You mean there is conceivably something good to be said about Bush 43?

There are rumors that he once loved his mother?

(05-16-2016, 07:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I think you're over estimating the good will of the Europeans, Japanese and Koreans.  For the most part prior to the 1970s they couldn't do anything about US imperialism because they were not economically strong enough to.  Imperialism is expensive. By the time they had the economic means to the so-called communist threat was pretty much over.  The USSR's economic means to build empires were exhausted, China was moving capitalist, which left the only countries attempting to actually construct socialism to be Tiny Albania, Isolated DPRK (though Juche should not be confused with M-L), and maybe Cuba (which was heavily revisionist to start with as Castro really isn't a commie).  Vietnam and Laos are not now and never have been socialist of any type.  The communist parties of both exist because Russia not the US helped them in ending colonialism--they are vestigial organs.

I don't see it as good will.  I see it as self interest.  During the bipolar Cold War era, it was in the interests of the Europeans, Japanese and Koreans to support the US.  After the Berlin Wall came down, not so much.  This is one of those things that ought to be obvious with 20 20 hindsight but might be impossible to see in real time when one is a veteran politician who has seen the world work in a particular way for his entire career.  This is the blindness of a long established world view in action.

Or at least that's the closest I can come to an excuse for the Bush 43 administration.  They had a lot of experienced and well educated people setting their policies, yet they blew it and their leader is commonly perceived of as an idiot.  I tried at the time to find a plausible reason for the mistake.  The best I could come up with is a Cold War world view setting up an expectation of how the world would react, when in fact the world had changed...  big time.

(05-16-2016, 07:37 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: I think we largely agree that we are not disagreeing.  I've started to think that when dealing with all the big issues, the really important issues (you know the ones that you're not supposed to talk about in mixed company but are really the only issues worth talking about--seriously you have no idea how much I hate "chit-chat" and "small talk") the result always reminds me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Good parable.  We are still emphasizing different things, but seem to be listening to each other better.