06-09-2020, 08:32 PM
(06-09-2020, 07:30 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-09-2020, 05:34 PM)Mickey123 Wrote: If we waved a magic wand and made all of the police officers in the U.S. into nice people who were utterly free of prejudice and who never treated anyone disrespectfully, this would get us approximately .01% of the way we need to go to reach the High.
The difference wouldn't even be noticeable, except by people who were suspected of crimes or who were being arrested. We would still be a million miles away from the High with no clear path to get there.
As I'm repeatedly asking this question and getting no answers, I'm suspecting that liberals (who make up much of this forum) haven't the slightest plan or idea how to move forwards towards concluding the Crisis and moving to the High.
That leaves either the radical right's plan to ship all the minorities off to other countries, or the far left's inevitable plan for a socialist revolution. In a crisis turning, people will eventually turn to the biggest and most extreme plans. Nobody has any real practical plan to "smash the patriarchy", or to make everyone stop being racist. But the anti-capitalists, they will indeed have a plan, the plan they always come back to. Socialist revolution!
So the far left wants a socialist revolution, the new far right wants ethnic cleansing, and there's always the possibility of looking without instead of within and having a big old war, where we could join with western europe and try to free the downtrodden people of China, Russia, and North Korea and abolish dictatorships worldwide.
Which of these alternatives should a liberal root for?
I don’t think the problem is that you are getting no answers, but you have made up your mind what the answer should be and you have not been getting it from anybody. No matter how I or others word their answers, it is not your answer, therefore you ignore it.
What are the problems we are facing this crisis? One political cartoon had a granddaughter listing them off. Combine the pandemic of 1917, the protests of the 1960s, the Civil War and the Great Depression, all together, all at once, and there you are.
What are the greatest problems facing the society? What are the problems the society absolutely must fix? I’m sorry, but saving the planet doesn’t make the cut. The right’s ability to ignore problems, to block spending to solve them while disregarding the science, doesn’t make it so far either, but it is a significant subtext.
But, no. This isn’t crisis enough for you. There was always a crisis war in the Industrial Age. Therefore, we have to have a crisis war.
You are not alone in being obsessed with war. Several posters are making the same mistake, assuming that patterns observed in the Industrial Age will hold in the Information Age. Different ages. Different patterns. Any pattern observed in the earlier age should not be assumed to hold over in the next, especially if the signature technologies of the new age are involved: computers, nukes or renewable energy.
Check reality. Verify the pattern before going wild predicting it will continue.
Sorry. Wrong age. Major powers don’t do crisis wars anymore. Even if nukes don’t make the big powers nervous, insurgency blocks the ability to do colonial imperialism. Playing defense in an insurgent conflict makes everyone reluctant to put boots on the ground. Starting something is just a bad idea these days.
The crisis ends and the country moves into a high when the major problems facing the country are solved. If we focus on racial inequality by the police, the virus, and fixing the economy from problems primarily caused by the virus, that seems to be the crisis so far. Everything else is lower tier. Some lower tier problems may be addressed assuming the Democrats get into power, which seems likely just now. But it is up to the next administration and congress to determine which if any problems to bring onto the front burner. As Biden doesn’t look like the most dynamic guy, I am not looking for many issues to move onto center stage. We will see about the VP choice and if the Democrats get firm control of both houses of Congress.
Exporting minorities? A socialist revolution? Ethnic cleansing? Aggression in the name of democracy as the superior culture? These supposed agendas of various groups seem to be figments of your imagination. If there is supposed to be a war, someone must be planning these things?
Does anyone advocate any of these things?
The thing is, you've given up on the actual Strauss-Howe theory and replaced it with your own ideas. The Crisis, according to the theory, is a time when society is threatened to its core, shaken to its foundations, and out of the ashes of this a new society is born. According to the theory, the climax of a crisis is unforseeable until you get close to it, total war is likely, and things that were unimaginable a few years before become possible.
But you don't believe any of this. You've replaced the theory with your own personal preference, which is a very mild crisis that doesn't threaten society in any way. These Black Lives Matter protests do not threaten anything, they are minor protests of a sort seen repeatedly throughout the last 55 years. The coronavirus pandemic is similar to the Hong Kong flu of the 60s and the Asian Flu of the 50s, each of which killed 1-4 million people. A disease which kills mostly old people, in addition to 0.1% of people under the age of 65, doesn't threaten the existence of society.
The economic fallout of our response to the coronavirus is still unknown. We have high unemployment currently, but where this takes us economically in the upcoming years, no one knows yet. It may be that we're at the beginning of the 2nd Great Depression, and if so, that would qualify as a Crisis event, but not likely the climax unless it becomes far worse than the first Great Depression, which still required World War II to let the Crisis be completed.
As to what I said about ethnic cleansing/forcibly removing minorities, that is indeed the goal of the alt-right. Read their forums some time and look at what they're discussing. They want to remove all Muslims from Western Europe and remove blacks and Mexicans and Muslims and Jews from the U.S.
As to socialist revolution, this is always the far left's goal.
Obviously these things aren't possible today. They only become possible at the end, when the culture wars reach their conclusion.
You want to throw out the Crisis part of the Strauss-Howe theory and still have it work, but it can't work without a crisis. You can do without a war, but this requires society to be shaken to its foundation in some other fashion.