11-04-2019, 11:02 AM
OK. Rich-and-powerful people are not getting away with what they used to. Bill Cosby has gone from being a media darling to one of the most despised people in America. Date-rape is rape. America is becoming less tolerant of abusive sexuality and spouse abuse, a clear sign of a 4T well underway/
The purge will be about behavior alleged to have precipitated the worst of the Crisis -- economic collapse that has its cause in incompetence and criminality. wars that go badly, and criminal deeds on a mass scale done under the cover of administrative secrecy. It is amazing in that context that LGBT rights have gotten legal recognition while America becomes more sexually repressive, of against behavior that I cannot accept (sex with minors, for which people got slaps on the wrist almost all the time; and sexual trafficking).
As for the rest -- many possibilities remain for this 4T in America and elsewhere. Most of the scenarios are horrible -- from a military coup that establishes a soul-crushing regime such as that of Agosto Pinochet in Chile, apocalyptic war foreign or even civil, economic collapse with a depression as severe and protracted as that of the 1930's. The worst vices and the greatest virtues can be enshrined in a Crisis, and the struggle can be a contrast between those.
Our best hope for America and elsewhere is Abraham Lincoln's metaphor of a New Birth of Freedom. We and the British Commonwealth brought that to countries that had gone under the occupation of Germany, Italy, and Japan and to Italy and Japan themselves and to about half of Germany. We did purge the Bad Guys after the fact, treating them as the gangsters that they were.
The purge will be about behavior alleged to have precipitated the worst of the Crisis -- economic collapse that has its cause in incompetence and criminality. wars that go badly, and criminal deeds on a mass scale done under the cover of administrative secrecy. It is amazing in that context that LGBT rights have gotten legal recognition while America becomes more sexually repressive, of against behavior that I cannot accept (sex with minors, for which people got slaps on the wrist almost all the time; and sexual trafficking).
As for the rest -- many possibilities remain for this 4T in America and elsewhere. Most of the scenarios are horrible -- from a military coup that establishes a soul-crushing regime such as that of Agosto Pinochet in Chile, apocalyptic war foreign or even civil, economic collapse with a depression as severe and protracted as that of the 1930's. The worst vices and the greatest virtues can be enshrined in a Crisis, and the struggle can be a contrast between those.
Our best hope for America and elsewhere is Abraham Lincoln's metaphor of a New Birth of Freedom. We and the British Commonwealth brought that to countries that had gone under the occupation of Germany, Italy, and Japan and to Italy and Japan themselves and to about half of Germany. We did purge the Bad Guys after the fact, treating them as the gangsters that they were.
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.