How different is Western Europe's saecular timeline?

[Ragnarök_62]

Tuss Wrote:It's just like you can picture the hippies dancing around the Native American campfire, right.

I know that Eric posts lots of stuff by Mahar, but wow! Here's blind squirrel finding a nut.

Quote:One way to explain this weird phenomenon of mislabeling the Turnings might perhaps be that the late 70's/early 80's actually was a very bewildering time for the generation pushing the cultural spooks. The Boom couldn't recognize themselves in this new era - characterized as it was by the tastes and sensibilities of the Jonesers/Xers more than themselves, what seemed a worrying alliance of reaction between the old and the young, if not actual counter revolution.

Yeah, there has been a thing about PC crap which is annoying , to say the least.   And yes, I've been hammering this in hopes the Democrats finally getting a clue.  That hound don't hunt no more. 

Quote:So they were unable to orient themselves within it, couldn't understand it and they didn't like it. It took some time for them to figure out how to exploit the new Zeitgeist for their own purposes, and get back into operation, so to speak. So when we arrive in the mid 80's they finally have come up with a plan to summon the former Maoist village meeting in complete consensus: the full embrace of a lassez faire/privatization dogma as a way of rescuing some cherished aspects of their ideals into the future. In other words, their disgust with order and authority (to be replaced by "values") and the celebration of the "authentic" free wheeling individual. (Maybe someone could express this better?)

And so....   It was easy to accept the fact that given the facts on the ground, say in 2016.   I was not surprised by Brexit [which I've always supported, btw] and the rise of Trump as a penultimate symbolic "Fuck You" to the establishment. That is the difference in say Eric, and myself.  Now of course, things can be interpreted as one set of "Boomers" / "Jonesers", is perhaps the target of what is in need of "creative destruction". It was the "square" GI constructs.  Jonesers/Xer's may see in turn that PC for example is in dire need of self same "creative destruction". The technique is the same, but the targets are different.  I'm not sure this is the sort of answer you seek. It's out there.  Now wrt foreign policy.  My view is such things as emotionally triggered "wars of choice" is as such.
"Wars of choice" = any war conducted for ideological reasons/feel good reasons. I think the Powell Doctrine is the valid one.  As such.

Wiki Wrote:The Doctrine
The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
   
2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
   
3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
   
4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
   
5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
   
6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
   
7. Is the action supported by the American people?
   
8. Do we have genuine broad international support?[2]
   

As Powell said in an April 1, 2009 interview on The Rachel Maddow Show, the Doctrine denotes the exhausting of all "political, economic, and diplomatic means", which, only if those means prove to be futile, should a nation resort to military force. Powell has expanded upon the Doctrine, asserting that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing U.S. casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.[3]
[/url]


I'd add some more to the above.
9. Public must sign off of a income war tax to pay for the proposed war.
10.  A draft where those in the higher levels of the Federal Government go first.  That is to say the current draft age would take either those in higher positions themselves or their kinfolk first.  Next comes the rules for everyone else.
11. An understanding that wars kill. No sugar coating or using specific policies to "spare civilians" in a war zone, since such undermines assorted items above this one.

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Doctrine#cite_note-3]

Quote:And being the prime Narcissistic generation that they are, who want to be in control and credited for coming up with everything and every cultural agenda, they simply set about to eradicate the early 80's, its mentality and aesthetics, as just too troublesome to fit into a preferred world view. Thus we suddenly have this weird idea that the early 80's belonged to some kind of "Counter-Awakening", yet part and parcel of (their) Grand Awakening, still.

Yes, it seems self referential doesn't it? The Counter-Awakening is basically as it acts out now. It's a binary meme.  PC/defiantly not PC.  

Quote:And they, of course, inaugurated this new Turning as having begun in 1984. (A year which was absolutely the same as 1983 and 1985, and not distinguished by anything in particular.)

While every objective criterium points in the opposite direction...

I guess it depends on when the  anti PC meme took hold as the opposition. X'ers stylistically challenging the product of the prior awakening does work , more or less.  In the US, 1984 is special because that's a Presidential election year. But yeah, it's only important in the US.

Quote:By the way, the early 80's in the eyes of an Xer wasn't necessarily commited to Neoliberalism. If Xers had been older and mature enough to commit themselves to an elaborate system of thought, chances are it would have gone in a more "realistic", anti-utopian and actual conservative direction.

I think that's happening now, IMHO of course. Sometimes it takes epic fails of misguided ideology, in say a shitpot of wars of choice leading to chaos and failure suffices. The current wars of choice are I'd say 0-5 in the win loss stats. 
1. Afghanistan :  still the graveyard for empires as it's always been.
2. Iraq:  Once a stable country, now a failed state featuring 3 faction fighting between Kurds/Sunnis/Shias.
3. Syria:  Ongoing. Has evolved into a proxy war.
4. Libya: Failed state after the ouster of Qaddafi.  Currently the focus of lots of refugees going to the EuroZone.
5. The War on Drugs. Failed states in Latin America due to well armed drug cartels. Also militarized police in certain areas in the US, and stuffed to the gills jails. 

I'm of course amazed how much emotion has uh, "trumped" common sense here....   I think 2008 woke many up to the evil of Neoliberalism as well. Neoliberalism essentially treats every noun as some sort of product or gizmo that performs some market function.  In the world scheme of things, Americans are the product, "consumers", who obtains goods and services usually through a debt bind, facilitated by financial institutions. An example is the expectation that nobody ever pays off their house, but uses it as an ATM to buy shit that's for the most part not needed, but "wanted". The "want" is facilitated by ads or course. Here is an example of how "big data" also drives the "wants".


http://www.acxiom.com/about-acxiom/priva...formation/

If you want, you can do some hard work to make yourself disappear to some extent. One can also shut down known data mining.  First you have to give up Facefuck and second, you have to do some fancy firewall rules to make Alphabet/Google go away.
00.194.58.216.in-addr.arpa    name = dfw06s48-in-f4.1e100.net.
100.194.58.216.in-addr.arpa    name = dfw06s48-in-f100.1e100.net.

Here is a firewall log entry which caught these boxen knocking on port 443 on my puter.

[13591.073681] [UFW BLOCK] IN=enp3s0 OUT= SRC=216.58.218.138 DST=192.168.1.74 LEN=40 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=56 ID=47671 PROTO=TCP SPT=443 DPT=53260 WINDOW=0 RES=0x00 RST URGP=0

So, what is this saying actually.  OK, first is my private IP address of 192.168.1.74.  Yes, that's a private IP address. How do we know that's the case. Well, here is a good bit of random web info right here:
https://www.lifewire.com/private-ip-addr...nge-818387

Next is this interesting source address of 216.58.218.138 which is attempting to connect to my puter from port number to some random port, 53260.  This is messed up because this is a private puter, not a public one, but this stupid puter from 216.58.218.138 is trying to get something, but I don't know what from my puter and is thus treating my puter as a source/server.

Now... here's the interesting thing. It's Google that's knocking on my ports!

https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/174717?hl=en

The problem for most folks is they are not using a firewall policy of "deny all" , except what is explicitly allowed.
That means that I can go to Google stuff on *THEIR* port 443, but of course Google shouldn't be able to go look at whatever my puter has on random port. So there you have it.  This need for Americans to be the product, consumers for the Neoliberal world is now out there for all to see. The PTB don't give a rat's ass of course that debt diving is a stressful stimulus to the product, consumers.