Has the regeneracy arrived?

[Kinser79]

(05-17-2016, 09:37 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Well...  Idealist dreams have been known to fail disastrously, but in general I'll not argue against dreams.

The best of idealists speculate on what one ought to want, the best of materialists speculate on how to get it.  Unfortunately there are many idealists who reject reality.  I'll leave those on the forum like that nameless.  I'm sure you already know which Obtuse person I'm referring to.

Quote: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.

But here is the rub, wherever there is an elite, and I think it arguable that excluding hunter-gatherer societies there will be an elite that elite is subject to corruption and abuse.  This existed in the Agriculutral age (which is perhaps three ages rather than one), the Industrial age, and whatever you'd call our current age.

As it stands, I really can't tell the difference between Normans and Saxons.  

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

All the time.  I still don't bash boomers, I merely tell the truth about them.  That truth isn't pretty.

Quote:

(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?

Perhaps.  Sounds unsubstantiated to me

Quote: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.

In the context of the Cold War and Korea it was/is self-interest.  In the absence of the Cold War American presence is viewed with suspicion, at best, outside the Anglosphere, and is present even there to a lesser degree.  As for why Bush 43 and his administration failed and are viewed as idiots there is probably a two fold reason.

1.  They expected the world to react in the context of the cold war, which it didn't due to the absence of the cold war.

2.  After the passing from political life the generations that lived through WW2, the newer younger generations were growing tired of continued US presence.