08-11-2019, 09:02 PM
(08-11-2019, 11:59 AM)Ghost Wrote:(08-11-2019, 11:34 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-11-2019, 10:54 AM)Ghost Wrote:(08-11-2019, 09:12 AM)Anthony Wrote: No way was 2008 the start of any Crisis. Unemployment only got up to 10.2% (in October 2019) - while in November and December of 1982 it reached 10.8%.
Yet 9/11 never really changed anything: Not only didn't the Culture Wars not diffuse, they actually intensified - Lawrence v. Texas, 2003, Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 2018.
So what I have chosen to do is to do something unique and declare 9/11 a "half-catalyst" that moved us into a place between a 3T and 4T - where we will remain until the 2020 election, when a Super Civil War Anomaly (and a Second Civil War itself) will break out.
What do you think are the "bridge zones" between the turnings? In my opinion, they go like this:
4T to 1T: 1942-1945 (starts with Stalingrad and ends with the end of WWII)
1T to 2T: 1960-1965 (starts with the introduction of the birth control pill and ends with the start of America's involvement in Vietnam)
2T to 3T: 1978-1984 (starts with Carter's popularity slightly slipping and ends with Reagan's 1984 landslide victory)
3T to 4T: 2001-2008 (starts with 9/11 and ends with the 2008 financial crisis)
One common trend I seem to notice is that over time, bridge zones between "turning periods" keep getting bigger.
Bridge between 4T and 1T is 3 years long.
Bridge between 1T and 2T is 5 years long.
Bridge between 2T and 3T is 6 years long.
Bridge between 3T and 4T is 7 years long.
I really do not know if 2T/3T bridge is correct and if it isn't, please let me know.
4T/1T-- I would use different years with 1944 as the death blows to Nazi Germany (D-Day, fall of central Italy to the Allies, July 20 plot, King Michael's coup in Romania, Soviet advances to Belgrade, Budapest, and Warsaw, collapse of the Bulge) to 1948 (Czechoslovak coup, Berlin Airlift) deciding what Europe would mostly be like from 1948 to 1989. I will have to recognize that the Republic of China went from viable to doomed in 1948 as the result of one battle. That year the major war criminals convicted in the Tokyo trials are executed. I am going to call the collapse of Communist rule in central and Balkan Europe and the USSR as the definitive event of the 3T.
What are your thoughts about the other years I used (1960, 1965, 1978, 1984, 2001, 2008)?
60-65 -- the cultural euphoria that marks the transition from 1T to 2T. The change in musical expression says it all.
78-84 -- cultural change with the Boomers leaving childhood (the pop culture is made for teens, and Boomers were leaving teenage years). Disco seems to be a bad compromise between Boomer and X tastes, and it probably drove Boomers out of the pop culture. Pop musicians quit pretending to any expression of noble ideals as the music became pure hedonism or expression of anger.
01-08 -- an awkward time that began with one economic downturn (Enrob and the dot.fraud bust) and ended with the most dangerous economic meltdown since the Great Stock Market Crash. 9/11 is a 3T event, as Americans went back to free spending and a speculative boom ensued. In 2008 nothing that seemed to work before then could work.
Economic meltdowns as bad as the Panic of 1857, the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the year-and-a-half meltdown beginning in 2007 late in a 3T suggest its end. The transition from 3T to 4T around 1930 begins with the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and has its first culmination in the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933 -- really in a little more than three years.
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.