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(08-27-2017, 06:21 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Doublespeak requires doublethink (more commonly called cognitive dissonance). Since I as a materialist allow for reality to inform my ideas I do not require doublespeak. What you call "alternate history" is actually seeing history from a different perspective. One would think that those of prophet generations would be able to grasp this concept, but I find that the traits of a prophet make them uniquely incapable of grasping it. In general prophets make up their mind first, and then attempt to make reality reflect their ideology. They are also given over to all manner of idealistic philosophies as well. It is those who have an idealistic viewpoint to start with who require doublespeak and doublethink to address their cognitive dissonance that arises when reality does not reflect their ideology as is often the case.
As the philosopher C. S. Peirce put it,
Quote:If Materialism without Idealism is blind,
Idealism without Materialism is void.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/so.../dualisms/
Identifying oneself as a pure idealist or as a pure materialist is similarly absurd.
Quote:Quote:(Butler) As for the future, I see crises as addressing the most serious problems a culture is facing. You can clear up a number of items, but you can never get everything, and if you do changing technology will create new problems. Whig tendencies will not manifest and triumph until these new problems are clear and unavoidable. Until they do become critical, the elites and status quo will dominate. Part of the reason we have had no triumphant regeneracy is the lack of such problems. Bush 43 had a new foreign policy that failed. Obama was at best a decent caretaker, up to undoing the damage Bush 43 did to the economy, but he did not champion new values to the extent that justifies a high and awakening. Neither sorta almost crisis succeeded in creating the need and the mood for a high. Thus, we're still in see saw mode.
(insult redacted)
Bush II did have a new foreign policy that failed (NeoConservatism). The very essence of that foreign policy was first hashed out in the 1930s in Trotskite circles and eventually migrated into the GOP in the late 1960s. It was capable of doing so only because unlike European Parties the American Parties are not ideologically driven but rather are nothing more than loosely held together coalitions of persons attempting to be elected
OK, so Trotskyites are opportunists, and opportunists sell out such principles as they claim to have when the opportunity arises. Trotsky himself was as brutal and fanatical a b@stard as anyone ever was, which probably explains why Gorbachev never got around to rehabilitating him even if he rehabilitated most victims of Stalin's purges... and even Alexander Kerensky.
Quote:As to the Economy, I find that by and large Presidents aren't very effective at either addressing economic downturns nor promoting economic booms. Why is that? I would argue because they are by and large individuals and the economy itself is an amalgamation of a collective mass of some 300 Million individuals. At most I can say about Obama is that he didn't stand in the way of the oil booms in the Dakotas and didn't try to meddle with fracking. Otherwise like Bush II he was an economic disaster.
The Federal Reserve Bank has more power than Congress or the President in setting economic policy, which explains what i call the Central Bankers' Coup in 2008 when the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve bank, and the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission told Dubya and Congress how the economy was going to do things. For all I know those three might have seen the Joint Chiefs of Staff before issuing their findings.
Quote:The whole point of electing (Obama) was to excise the NeoConservatives from government, but in turn he was just as bad as they were. And for the record this is from someone who voted for him twice. 2008 I was hoping for something different, in 2012 it was "better the devil you know than the devil you don't".
Contrary to the opinion of President Donald Trump, most historians recognize Barack Obama as an above-average President. I would give him high marks for economic stewardship, undoing the damage of Dubya, avoiding scandal, whacking Osama bin Laden, and demonstrating rigid adherence to Constitutional principle. He may not have been innovative in foreign policy, but going back to the foreign policy of the elder Bush was the wisest course available.
Neoconservatism is effectively dead. For its faults, neoconservatism at least rejects teh demagoguery that President Trump exudes.
Quote:As to the regeneracy, you're (Butler) not seeing it because your Whig ideology is in the way. You expect this big huge unifying thing to happen. But regeneracies never happen like that all. If anything they should be expected to be messy and come late. In S&H's books they have pointed out previous regeneracies--I'll focus on the two most recent ones (not including the MAGA Regeneracy).
I have great doubt that any "MAGA" regeneracy is a genuine regeneracy. False regeneracies, most infamously the fraud of the Nazi Regeneracy in Germany, have huge flaws with the seeds of their own destruction. Because so ambiguous an expression as "Make America Great Again" is easy to interpret in any way one wishes many interpret it as they wish. Considering what so narcissistic and cruel a b@stard Donald Trump is, I assume the worst. It may be projection because the worst plutocrats are so bad that they make a Marxist analysis of their behavior the best -- but for whom and at what time do I see America better for people like Donald Trump?
When but in the 1920s, the last hurrah of the Gilded Age... and for whom? the monopolistic profiteers who got away with sweating the proletariat. I may not be a Marxist, but there are situations in which Marx offers an accurate description, and effective condemnation, of the capitalist order in certain times and places.
Was America better without qualification that it was at any point before 2016 for people other than economic elites? Maybe life was easier in some respects, especially in real estate costs and commute times. Of course there were far fewer people to bid up real estate costs and values... or bid down pay and working conditions. There was less suburban sprawl to accommodate about twice as many people as there were in the 1950s (325M estimated in 2017 as opposed to 175M in 1960). Much of America was more attractive sixty years ago than it is today, but I can see no humane or effective way to go back to the population levels of the late 1950s. Besides, population decline even without mass murder is ugly in its own right. Detroit and St. Louis are very distressing places.
Was America better for non-white minorities before 1965? Certainly not in "Kukluxistan" (the segregated South). Homosexuals? Certainly not. The roads? I think little of taking a certain Interstate highway 65 miles in one direction or 75 in another. I doubt that I would take the Blood Alley surface road that that Interstate supplanted so often.
OK, I will concede that small-town life was much more vibrant when people were less mobile because the roads were worse. Except for cheap real estate, there's not much reason for living in a hick town anymore. Towns of less than 5000 are losing their supermarkets and pharmacies to box stores like Wal*Mart and (in the Midwest) Meijer in towns of 10K or so.
Medicine? It's much better than it used to be -- if you aren't priced out of it.
There may be more sophisticated technology of entertainment and more 'entertainment'... but those are terribly over-rated. If I had to choose between listening to Bruckner's Eighth Symphony on a scratchy LP over a stereo with only 20 watts per channel or the latest pop hit on the finest sound system... you know my choice. I'll take the cinematic masterpieces of the late 1930s over shallow blockbusters any day. The real value of the more sophisticated technology of entertainment in our time is that it is higher in precision of audio and visual playback and more access to the gems of pre-modern times.
Quote:S&H pointed out that the Emancipation in the ACW saeculum was the regeneracy. I've posted numerous times that they got their 4T timing wrong. If we stop to consider that the 4T started sometime around 1855 (give or take) 1863 was a full 8 years after the start of the crisis.
S&H also point to the New Deal being the regeneracy in the GP Saeculum. I disagree with them there. I'll explain why. The New Deal itself was highly contentious and was only implemented from 1933-1937, specifically 73rd and 74th Congresses. By 1937 there as already push back on the deficit spending front and the New Dealers if they weren't replaced with Republicans were replaced with more conservative Democrats. Not to mention the fact that it is STILL living memory of people referring to FDR himself as "That Man".
Many still consider Howe and Strauss' theory fringe (I don't). I doubt we have a solid explanation of the mechanism of any era of the Saeculum, but I would guess that this order of events happens:
Late in the 3T is a Degeneracy (my term, something that I discussed in a thread on a now-defunct predecessor Forum) in which just about everything goes bad (bad politics, bad business practice, bad mass culture, bad public policy) because loosey-goosey attitudes bring out the worst in people. The 3T/4T cusp indicates the beginning of the Crisis, when about everything goes bad (elected officials lose their popularity, and a really nasty panic as in 1857, 1929, or 2008 takes place). People insist on change and get it as leadership going into the Crisis is discredited. George III... Buchanan... Hoover.... Dubya... people get structural changes that start some recovery. That is an early Regeneracy. There might or might not be another Regeneracy due to a second wave of Crisis... But there is typically some point after which everything is anticlimax. It could be Gettysburg -- or D-Day.
Just as there can be false prophets there can be false Regeneracies, like Bloody Kansas, the accession of Hitler in Germany, or the rise of the Tea Party (the dissimilarity of the three should be obvious enough). A False Regeneracy leads to big trouble, just as does a false prophet.
Quote:So if we're expecting for a universal acceptance of whatever happens to be the status quo as a regeneracy then you won't get one until after a 1T has already started. If we are expecting universal acceptance of a particular plan to address a 4T then the whole concept of a regeneracy must be thrown out.
However, if we accept a regeneracy is merely the near universal acceptance that something must be done to address the 4T issues then quibbling over X, Y, and Z in the political arena becomes nothing more than background noise. So considering that Bush II was an almost completely 3T president his views can be discarded, and considering that Obama brought no new views to the table (in your words at best a caretaker) then that means there is only one possible regeneracy in the current 4T. That is the MAGA Regeneracy as I've termed it which prominently features Donald Trump and his supporters at the helm.
...and I consider the resistance to Donald Trump for his incompetence a Regeneracy in its own right.
A President who has 60% disapproval for most of a week seven months after his inauguration is doing much wrong even without a foreign debacle, mass unrest, or an economic meltdown. I can see easily how this President gets an approval rating in the 20s/ That happened with Truman as his second term was ending, Nixon as he was about to resign, and Dubya in the summer and early autumn of 2008 -- again as his Presidency was approaching its end. America could simply wait out the end of what seemed troublesome Presidencies at the time. If Donald Trump should vacate the presidency we get no real change in politics. Mike Pence is as pure a reactionary as America has ever known to get as high in the political system as he is, perhaps one stroke or coronary away.
Quote:For some reason I suspect that you're (Butler) displeased about this truth and thus must use doublethink to completely reject the notion that we've had a regeneracy. And that's okay, you share that not only with whatever remnants of the Whigs that remain as well as the lunatic leftists that are out rioting.
Quote:(Butler) iS&H saw a valid pattern, but they misunderstood what caused the pattern and the forces that shape it.
I would say then what are you doing on a board specializing in their historical theories. I mean don't get me wrong, there are some issues S&H are dead wrong on. The idea that prophets lead the awakening for example. They are at most foot soldiers. But their pattern holds.
This time Donald Trump is a member of a Prophet generation, and he exemplifies the worst traits of a Prophet generation (arrogance, ruthlessness, and selfishness) and none of the best (no honorable principle, no scruples, and no visionary quality). I see him as the worst sort of Idealist, an exploiter and abuser who demands to be seen as a benefactor. We may have to stumble through this Crisis at its worth with a Reactive leader on the brink of elderhood, like a sixty-something Washington, J. Adams, Truman, Eisenhower, or (Obama played the role well) Obama. Such will be awkward.
Quote:Quote:(Butler) Technology is destroying good jobs.
Technology destroys and creates jobs all the time. If your goal is to have full employment I have a means that can facilitate that at the stroke of a pen. Ban all farm equipment. Everyone will have to farm to raise the food needed to live, thus everyone will have a job. Economic ignorance is not a solid foundation for your argument.
Butler is right. Your straw-man solution is wrong.
We are at the end of the stage of economic development in which the exploitation of scarcities in material goods is an easy way in which to get rich. Many people dreamed of such a time, but it could easily be as rough as any of the classic transitions that Marx saw in the past and predicted in the future. The easiest ways in which to get rich are now rent-grabbing, cronyism, and corruption. Software engineers may be creating the prosperity of Silicon Valley, but real-estate tycoons are grabbing most of the wealth so created there.
We no longer need to keep up with the latest technology to be satisfied with it. Those who go through hard times do not upgrade; they use what they already have. I can imagine a scenario when most households sho0w when the family was last doing well, because such will show what technology was then in place. That is not to say that hunger and homeless are not real problems; they can easily be such, especially if the Master Class wants them to serve as spurs to working longer and harder under worse conditions for less so that the Master Class can indulge itself more fully. Again, economic elites that behave as Marxist theory predicts that they behave are big trouble in any social order -- the ones who at the worst make a violent revolution possible.
Quote:Quote:(Burler) Energy and global warming together look to create a significant problem.
Energy is only a problem when one doesn't have it. Energy is the ablity to do work, economically speaking, thus, it seems prudent to expand energy production. At current technology the best way to do this is through nuclear fission, but the so-called greens have no interest in using this clean burning energy production method which is far safer than fossil fuels let alone their wind and solar pipe dreams.
Just as a surfeit of food can lead to medical problems that eventually kill one, an excess of solar radiation or an excessive retention of solar radiation can kill any potential for life on a planet. Venus is extreme. Excess exposure to sunlight can give a light-skinned person a nasty sunburn. But even at this, I have a severe doubt that more consumption of energy in the First World per capita implies better lives. Waste of energy is not a good thing. Energy consumption fell drastically in the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s as free enterprise began to recognize that energy is not a free good.
If we do more telecommuting we will drastically cut down the use of motor fuels.
Quote:As to global warming. It is fearmongering. Is the climate changing? Yes. It is always changing. In the time hominids have been on this planet there have been at least 5 different ice ages followed by warmer inter-glacial periods. But unlike the doomsayers around here, warmer global temperatures are always associated with greater prosperity, and larger populations. Medieval Warm Period was better than the Little Ice Age, which was better than the Late Roman Little Ice Age, which wasn't as good as the Classical Warm period and on and on.
Global warming implies that places already on the margin of human survival due to heat and humidity (the infamous heat index) will become increasingly stressful. That means the Persian Gulf region and much of Pakistan and India. Sure, those places have desert climates, but the absolute humidity is deadly.
Fear-mongering? Sure. One of my favorite scenic trips is to Tahquamenon Falls in the UP of Michigan. There are plenty of warnings to not go past a fence to get the photograph of a lifetime. Try getting that photo and you may have an end-of-life experience. A few years ago some fools taunted lions and tigers in a zoo and even threw things at the overgrown house-cats. A tiger scaled the fence and went after its tormenters, killing two and mauling another. But I wouldn't taunt dogs, either.
That's not to say that if we had global cooling we wouldn't be in worse trouble. With global warming, farmland gets inundated and food production collapses. With global cooling, food yields shrink far below the carrying capacity of the planet as we now have.
Quote:Quote:(Butler) This could create a post scarcity economy with a new awareness of ecology and sustainability. There are elites who profit from the status quo. I expect that they drag their feet, try to extend their profitable old pattern, but will they drag their feet enough for a true regeneracy and crisis pattern?
A post scarcity economy is possible if we rapidly develop and deploy thorium fission based on the Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) model. This can be scaled up and down as necessary. For example Chicago may require sever really big reactor plants but East Tumbleweed Village in Sierra Leone might only need one small one. What is more is that Thorium is quite common, and doesn't lend itself well to nuclear weapons proliferation.
If it is practical it goes into use. Only one thorium reactor is currently in use.
Quote:Quote:(Butler) For decades I've suggested that the next generation of prophets will be called the Green Generation, that the issues suggested above will be at the core of the next awakening or crisis. So far, no. Nothing has happened cycle wise. We're in the see saw. As badly as I want to break the see saw pattern, reality speaks. The see saw is still there.
Then you've only managed to be wrong for decades. I forsee the next prophets rebelling against social media and the policing of it far more readily than being influenced by eco-fearmongering.
As for the see-saw perhaps you're not seeing the regeneracy and the progress of the cycle because you're simply not looking for the right things, or you're values locked in that it must have A, B, and C when there is no evidence that A, B, or C are even issues. The back and forth in the White House however is far older than the 4T, its been happening the entire saeculum and I don't expect it to stop until after the saeculum ends.
We are going to see less of a commodity fetish. Status symbols of the crasser sort will lose their relevance. Beyond basic needs, experiences will matter more than will things.
Quote:Realistically I see a Trumpian GOP emerging, and the Democrats if they manage to survive will be composed of SJWs, Neo-Cons, NeoLiberals and all the others who are rejected out of the regeneracy.
This is as relevant as the talk of a New Era of politics in the late 1920s. Reality discredited it. hoover did not become the wave of the future.
Quote:Quote:(Butler) Oddly, I have always seen you siding with factions I perceive as the dominant elites, what Marx would call the owners of the means of production. You started with the Marxist ruling class, and shifted to Trump. In many ways it is a good bet to ally with the elites for three turnings out of four. You'll do well for a while with the attitudes you displayed above.
You must have a very different definition of what a dominant elite is. As a Marxist I sided with the proletariat, which is not now nor ever has been a ruling elite. As to Trump, is he a really rich person? Yes, Yes he is--he can afford to be a dollar a year president. But is he part of the Established GOP elite? No. Even if you only listened to the Lugenpresse, Legacy Media, etc it would be evident that the high mandarins in the GOP cannot stand him. That his nomination, and subsequent election was a hostile take over by popular forces of the Republican Party.
Donald Trump is a sick joke in much of America. The old-school Republicans are beginning to recognize what a monster he is. They dread the loss of their political and economic freedom.They are still a minority within their own Party. But when things get bad enough they will make an alliance with Democrats to ditch President Trump.
Quote:Quote:(Butler) We'll just see if said elites will see enough of the potential coming storm to manage a soft landing. I'm a bit dubious. They generally don't. If the brick and mortar stores collapse, if the restaurant industry follows, if the climate change deniers lose their propaganda war with reality... We may yet see a true crisis. That's a lot of ifs. When you go to the future, there is no choice but guess at alternate history. Sill, should problems come to a head, bet with the Whigs. Until then, ride with the elites if you must.
Well there are some issues here to address, too bad it is between so much fluff and nonsense.
1. Brick and mortar stores will never truly go away. I cannot imagine buying shoes online. Even though I know my size and have been wearing that size for years, I still need to try the shoes on. A size 12 Nike sneaker is vastly different from a size 12 Dr. Martin's boot. The same can be said of clothing, foodstuffs, and other sundry goods. Where B&M stores are having trouble is hardware, entertainment, tools, general consumer goods and the like. And even then often one orders online and then picks up these items at a store. As is the case with Wal-Mart. I often make an order and pay for it and go and pick up the items at the local store (because it saves me tremendously on shipping). So stores are going nowhere.
One source of merchandise will be used stuff. If I had to furnish a new living place I might have to resort to Goodwill or Salvation Army. There's much stuff that people have tired of, stuff that old people had that their kids don't want... the supply of old books and video is just simply incredible.
Quote:2. Restaurant dining is an experience. So unless you're talking about virtual reality which is in its infancy, and this assumes it isn't a dead end technology, dining out is going no where unless you are proposing mass extinction of the human species. Prostitute may be the oldest profession but Chef is the second oldest.
As I went through some rough times, I found that dining out was one of the easiest habits on which to cut back. Grocery stores have plenty of prepared meals suitable for cooking in a microwave. Cooking from scratch is pointless for one person, but going out to eat? I do so when traveling. Maybe I go to a fish fry on occasion.
OK, I am not eating as much, and I have lost 33 pounds over about a year. Ice cream, cake, and pie have disappeare4d from my eating habits.
Quote:3. Anyone who denies that the climate changes over time is a fool. Likewise anyone who claims that there will be no snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in 10 years in 2005 is also a fool. The claims of anthroprogenic global warming are wildly overblown just as was the immanent threat of a new ice age in the 1970s. What is true though is that the sun drives climate most strongly of all factors, and it is headed for a solar minimum in the next few years.
Check the recent climate records, Kinser.
Quote:4. As for who to bet on, I am betting on those who will likely be the victors. In the end whatever side is victorious will after the fact write up history to make it seem that their victory was inevitable and part of the unending arrow of progress. That is to say, they will be added to the long list of others that make up the Great Ones of Whig History.
Many people thought that the wave of the future was fascism. Then it was communism.
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.
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(08-28-2017, 08:38 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: (08-27-2017, 06:21 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Butler Wrote:Technology is destroying good jobs.
Technology destroys and creates jobs all the time. If your goal is to have full employment I have a means that can facilitate that at the stroke of a pen. Ban all farm equipment. Everyone will have to farm to raise the food needed to live, thus everyone will have a job. Economic ignorance is not a solid foundation for your argument.
Butler is right. Your straw-man solution is wrong.
We are at the end of the stage of economic development in which the exploitation of scarcities in material goods is an easy way in which to get rich. Many people dreamed of such a time, but it could easily be as rough as any of the classic transitions that Marx saw in the past and predicted in the future. The easiest ways in which to get rich are now rent-grabbing, cronyism, and corruption. Software engineers may be creating the prosperity of Silicon Valley, but real-estate tycoons are grabbing most of the wealth so created there.
We no longer need to keep up with the latest technology to be satisfied with it. Those who go through hard times do not upgrade; they use what they already have. I can imagine a scenario when most households sho0w when the family was last doing well, because such will show what technology was then in place. That is not to say that hunger and homeless are not real problems; they can easily be such, especially if the Master Class wants them to serve as spurs to working longer and harder under worse conditions for less so that the Master Class can indulge itself more fully. Again, economic elites that behave as Marxist theory predicts that they behave are big trouble in any social order -- the ones who at the worst make a violent revolution possible.
You do have to admit that bringing back the Luddite solution is kinda innovative. (Innovative Luddite???  ) If modern technology is creating the problem of a post scarcity world, get rid of the modern technology?
It would force the industry made primitive non competitive, though. All those jobs you create, all that labor, won't be cheap. There was a reason to adapt the technology, after all. I don't know that you want to make farming not competitive. I don't know what industry one wants to throw under the bus while the rest of the world laughs and profits. Ban robots? Force labor intensive assembly lines? Make everyone code in FORTRAN using punch cards? Make America great again by trying to force it back into the days of tax and spend?
Shoving parts of the technological genie back in the bottle hasn't been tried much to speak of. Lotsa luck.
At least to date, what Trump is doing from a historical perspective is personify extreme failure. That hopefully doesn't become the culture defining regeneracy idea that everyone follows. He might fit well as personifying the see saw, in showing how to hand power to the other party.
What happens if some important foreign figure dies, and the US has to send someone important to help invest gravitas and US appreciation? You can't send Bush 43. He has to stay in the US to avoid war crimes arrest. Trump? Talk about diplomatic insult. You'd never guess what he would say.
But of course partisans have strong blinders. They see a different world.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
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(08-28-2017, 05:49 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Kinser
I’ve generally found that people will make predictions that reflect their values. The one question is whether the predictions are really predictions or dogma. Do you change the theory to reflect reality, or try to alter one’s view of reality to confirm the theory. For example, the West with its capitalist leaning theories have tended to favor a free press, where the East with its Communist theory favored censorship and propaganda. That is one way to measure the worth of a system, whether it is close enough to scientific to embrace reality, or whether you need to deny reality.
I can't speak for you but I often change my theory to reflect the reality. Which is right and proper. That is why I find it troubling that what passes for a left these days is most ademate about instituting censorship online, they already control most of the legacy media. That tells me that their position is extremely weak.
Quote:The global warming alarmists have their science.
No they don't. If they did have the science to back their alarmism then they wouldn't be alarmist. It is a scientific fact that in recorded history there has been oscillation of warm periods and cold periods.
Quote:The Arctic ice is melting. Historically, when the Arctic goes, the Antarctic follows.
Then explain why sea ice is at record levels. And I mean record high levels.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-14/re...ce/5742668
If this ice is melting then it should be at record low levels, but it is not.
Quote: With less light being reflected off ice, there is a large temperature jump up with associated extinctions and the like. The denialists of course disagree. For me, the key is the Arctic. If what is happening continues to happen, there will be a political kickback at some point. Reality should hopefully play a large role in this.
Anyone with a brain already knows that white reflects heat (and light) while darker colors (say blue ocean water) absorb it. What is discounted is that in warmer periods there is much more oceanic evaporation causing a larger portion of cloud cover which also reflects solar radiation. And that is before we even get into solar minimum/maximum cycles. If the sun isn't generating the heat and light to start with then it doesn't matter if the colors on the surface is white/light or dark.
Quote:And, sure, there have been other climate shifts in the past, but none have opened the northwest passage in historical times. None have melted this much ice. None have begun to approach the current extinction rate. Partisanship will effect your blinders. This one is too big.
Given the record amount of sea ice I don't foresee the North West passage opening up either. As to extinctions, mass extinctions seem to happen on a regular interval. 99.9% of all species on this planet have eventually gone extinct. I fail to see your point.
Quote:A lot of predictions of revolutions and civil wars have been flying around. If you buy into fixed clockwork S&H and that Industrial Age patterns will still persist, another might be due.
http://generational-theory.com/forum/thr...l#pid23006
That is my general theory as to how the mega-saeculum, saeculum and micro-turnings work. Is it a hard and fast clockwork? No. It is more easily understood to be like a tide chart. One can easily use one but it can be off as much as a quarter hour based on other variables.
Quote: I’d recommend that instead of blindly predicting violence, one should watch the spirals of violence carefully. Is there a spiral building?
Yes. Do you not even watch the Tee-Vee "news"? As to the issues surrounding it, it is between American Patriots lead by Donald John Trump vs the Ultra-Leftist scum best represented by Antifa types. Don't be fooled by the deranged ramblings of Alphabet Soup, this is where the spiral is located, these are the factions that will end up fighting it out.
Quote: Around what issues? There are wars and rumors of wars, true enough. When has there not been? However, domestically we seem stuck in a mode where most to all of the violence is blamed on lone nuts. I’ve been watching for groups to organize violent actions such that they are ready to strike again, and which attract popular support. With infiltration doctrine and a well organized police, popular repeated up scale violence won’t be easy. I’m watching for it to become real. Thus far the major factions don’t seem to be making it real.
I don't think you've been watching. Antifa had another riot yesterday (27 August 2017) in California.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/27/berkel...ark-video/
Quote:One problem may be division of wealth. No doubt is exists. The question is… so what?
Indeed so what. There have always been the rich and the poor since the begining of history. There will be a rich and a poor until a post-scarcity society can be created. I have no hopes that that will happen in my lifetime.
Quote:A more pertinent question is how many are being pushed below the poverty level. How many will convince themselves that something must change. Domestically, economically, this rather obvious reason for civil war or revolution has not gone critical. It seems one of the things that ought to be watched, though. However, with the see saw running as it has, why go violent if one just has to wait a few years for a very likely paradigm swap?
There are two problems with this theory.
1. Humans can endure extended periods of extreme poverty.
2. Revolutions never happen when expectations are on the down swing but rather on the upswing.
But there will be a civil war between the right and the left. And the right will win because we control the productive portions of the country. Where the corn is grown, where the ore and coal is mined. What do the cities have? Welfare recipients and the financial bourgeoisie. Add to that most cities are three days away from anarchy and the blue areas don't look too hot right now.
Quote:It is one thing to make predictions according to one’s extreme partisan values. We all can. Pretty much all of us here do. It is another to watch the trends, to accurately judge where we are, and what happens soon.
I agree. Which is why I'm pointing out that your expectations don't match the reality and you are attempting to doublethink your way out of it rather than consider that your ideology may be completely wrong. Maybe you can't do that and I'm wasting my time. There are plenty here who only have sporadic contact with reality. But from your posts it seems to me that you do have contact with reality at least as much as I do, your problem is a matter of what you've termed values-lock.
Quote:It may well be that we’ll have the technology for a soft landing into a post scarcity world. I’m just saying I’m seeing more fracking than thorium reactors in the real world. I’m sympathetic that we might in time go nuclear. The question is whether the elites currently profiting off fossil fuel will be greedy enough to prevent any soft landing. Will the current fear of nuclear be overcome? How strong will the need get before the want to arrives?
Fracking is at best a bridge, and it has a major flaw, fracking wells are quickly depleted. At most I would say that current fossil fuels will give us 10-20 years for nuclear reactors to be set up. And while I prefer to use thorium, uranium would work just as well. What is standing in the way at present is an elderly generation who is convinced that nuclear power is unsafe despite its record of safety.
After all there is a reason people can remember Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima but don't remember the millions who've choked to death on smog created from burning coal.
Quote:One scenario involves global warming confirmed while the push for green technology isn’t being deployed. At minimum, there will be people angry with associated political turmoil. This has me watching rates of deployment, climate changes, spirals of violence, etc… So far, no. Everybody is too upset with tweets which hurt their feelings. Pardon if I roll my eyes and think the tweets are neither the problem or the answer.
Most so-called "green" technology isn't all that green. PV arrays produce mountains of waste after their lifespan of just a few decades, and that is before we deal with wind turbines which kill thousands of migratory species.
http://theconversation.com/the-green-tec...lity-46681
I don't much about tweets or tweeting. Like facebook I never got involved on Twitter. That being said, I roll my eyes at the speshul snowflakes too. Myself, I think over a decade of Millenials running around showing their ass has resulted in Generation Zed rejecting their ideology and turning off the social media.
Quote:There is a retail space crash coming, akin to the housing crash of a while ago.
There could. But I wouldn't liken it to the housing market crash unless the banks are giving businesses NIJA Loans. NIJA standing for No Income, Job or Assets.
Rather, I would liken it more closely to the constriction of whip manufacturing when the mass produced automobile was introduced a century ago.
Quote: We’ll see how bad it is, and whether enough people go out of work to impact the restaurant industry.
In an economic down turn there is always fewer restaurants visited, and fewer started. However, in your previous post you indicated that the food service industry would be completely plowed under. This is unlikely since eating out is an exerience rather than a commodity. Would a major recession negatively impact such things like fast food, most certainly. And honestly I consider that a good thing, people shouldn't be eating that shit anyway.
Quote: Will delivery services and internet massaging create enough jobs to mitigate those jobs lost? As far as I know, I’m the only one who has tried to make the link into restaurants. I am just cruising too many strip malls, and noting how the restaurants depend in great part on retail. The urges will be much the same, but economics changes as much as climate does. We’ll see. The point is you watch things rather than try for absolute predictions.
Over all, we should see a reduction in the total number of jobs. Ultimately the goal is to replace expensive trucks and expensive delivery drivers with far cheaper flying drones, or at least that is the direction in which Bezos wants to head, and Amazon is by far the largest general merchandise retailer.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-am...story.html
Quote:Anyway, can you appreciate the distinction I’m trying to make? Would you care to say what you are watching and why?
I have many times. But if it helps I strongly suggest checking out Infowars pretty frequently. Alex Jones isn't crazy, he's just six months ahead of everyone else.
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08-28-2017, 09:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-28-2017, 10:05 PM by Bob Butler 54.)
Hmm… The solar cycles… you ought not to bet your planet on that. They have about a dozen year cycle, which means a lot of the heat records are broken when the cycles hit their warmest. Thus, you get alarmists and denialists taking turns blowing trumpets. At the low, everything returns to the same baseline. You do get some variation, but if you look at the overall curves there is a much longer term and larger magnitude trend. CO2 and temperature have been going up since serious fossil fuel use took off after the US Civil War. The last solar cycle peak was indeed lower than most, but the high temperature records came anyway.
The Northwest Passage isn’t a daydream. I remember bumping into a article about a commercial cargo ship that made it though without an icebreaker escort. I’m a bit dubious. Her navigator flew drones to help pick a course and the ship had a reinforced ice breaking bow herself. I went to find that article again, but got swamped in Google by too many pieces pushing northwest passage tourist trips to the far north. I also hear how Alaska, one of the more active states in preventing over fishing, has put a ban on fishing new areas opened up by retreating ice.
You can find individual articles saying odd things. If your perspective is partisan enough, you can convince yourself that the outlier article is representative. For that reason I generally don’t put too much weight on individual articles. Too many sponsors in the commercial press. Too many agendas. Does it make RealClimate and other places where the pros get together?
I think you want to review extinctions. Species don’t vanish slowly and steadily. Large clumps of them go together at the end of an epoch. Sometimes the reason is absurdly obvious. When a large enough asteroid hits the planet, you get an end of epoch with mass extinctions. Currently, the Earth is trying to respond to human dominance and often fails if extinction is counted as a failure. We’ve had a jump in extinctions already, and not all of them are directly climate related.
Scientific American covers one area in Amphibians in U.S. Declining at "Alarming and Rapid Rate"
Too much isn’t about science, but competing political memes. Reagan suggested government is the problem, that one should cut back on domestic spending. In FDR’s time, it was assumed big government solved big problems with big projects. Thus, partisans to varying degrees who have bought into these memes will pick and choose what they want to believe to confirm them. It is still possible to find enough denialist leaning articles to maintain the conservative belief. I suspect that won’t be the case indefinitely.
You predict a rural victory in a pending civil war. I referenced history in the Whig talk that has the urban - progressive - new technology faction generally coming out on top. Part of this is the adaptation of new ideas. The cities are generally the place where the new ideas impact most. The rural faction often attempts to hold onto yesterday. Generally, it doesn’t happen. There is a long slow struggle, yes, but in many suspect a full scale S&H crisis is about adapting the culture to new ideas and technology. Often, a conservative's cold dead body is involved. We're just learning different things from history, I guess.
I can sympathize with fracking being at best a bridge, but still wonder how much it would take, how close to disaster we get, waiting for a wide spread acceptance of nuclear. That’s one I want to watch. So far, fracking is being pushed, while reactor building is still mostly on hold. Should it be that way? Another question entirely.
Internet censorship? I know governments are playing that game. China has it’s great firewall. The US is pursuing jihadists on line. I don’t see the main stream media playing that game. There is no lack of partisans yelling at each other.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
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(08-28-2017, 09:54 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Hmm… The solar cycles… you ought not to bet your planet on that. They have about a dozen year cycle, which means a lot of the heat records are broken when the cycles hit their warmest. Thus, you get alarmists and denialists taking turns blowing trumpets. At the low, everything returns to the same baseline. You do get some variation, but if you look at the overall curves there is a much longer term and larger magnitude trend. CO2 and temperature have been going up since serious fossil fuel use took off after the US Civil War. The last solar cycle peak was indeed lower than most, but the high temperature records came anyway.
I wouldn't bet the economy on dubious projections as to the climate either. The local meteorologist has difficulty predicting the weather three days out, let alone three decades out. After all it wasn't that long ago that there were claims we were headed into a new ice age, or do you not remember the 1970s? I mean I was a little young to remember them, but for that I have duckduckgo. Google has had a fatwa issued against it so I changed engines.
Quote:The Northwest Passage isn’t a daydream. I remember bumping into a article about a commercial cargo ship that made it though without an icebreaker escort. I’m a bit dubious. Her navigator flew drones to help pick a course and the ship had a reinforced ice breaking bow herself. I went to find that article again, but got swamped in Google by too many pieces pushing northwest passage tourist trips to the far north. I also hear how Alaska, one of the more active states in preventing over fishing, has put a ban on fishing new areas opened up by retreating ice.
It seems to me that what you have there is skillful navigation of dangerous icy waters with a icebreaker escort and a reinforced bow. That being said Nuclear subs have been using the Northwest Passage for decades. I was fortunate enough for us to surface up there..lets just say that as late as 04 the Arctic was plenty cold.
Quote:You can find individual articles saying odd things. If your perspective is partisan enough, you can convince yourself that the outlier article is representative. For that reason I generally don’t put too much weight on individual articles. Too many sponsors in the commercial press. Too many agendas. Does it make RealClimate and other places where the pros get together?
Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a mainstream legacy media news source. I would imagine that they got their information from these "climate scientists". That being said, there is a reason I cited the article about the abundance of sea ice in the Antarctic. I don't know about you but if there is ice in the ocean it is a safe bet that the temperature from where it came from is at or below (and more likely below since this is Sea Ice and salt lowers the freezing point, which is why one salts icy patches on pavement) 273 Kelvin.
Quote:I think you want to review extinctions. Species don’t vanish slowly and steadily. Large clumps of them go together at the end of an epoch. Sometimes the reason is absurdly obvious. When a large enough asteroid hits the planet, you get an end of epoch with mass extinctions. Currently, the Earth is trying to respond to human dominance and often fails if extinction is counted as a failure. We’ve had a jump in extinctions already, and not all of them are directly climate related.
Scientific American covers one area in Amphibians in U.S. Declining at "Alarming and Rapid Rate"
Mass extinctions usually happen at the end of epochs but new species develop and old ones go extinct all the time. Indeed in Japan they have discovered a bacteria which consumes nylon as a food source. Nylon has only been around since the 1930s (and probably later for Japan).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria
Quote:Too much isn’t about science, but competing political memes. Reagan suggested government is the problem, that one should cut back on domestic spending. In FDR’s time, it was assumed big government solved big problems with big projects. Thus, partisans to varying degrees who have bought into these memes will pick and choose what they want to believe to confirm them. It is still possible to find enough denialist leaning articles to maintain the conservative belief. I suspect that won’t be the case indefinitely.
I think you underestimate the internet. It never forgets. If an article is published everyone in the world has access to it permanently. Attempts at censorship by certain corporations aside.
Quote:You predict a rural victory in a pending civil war.
Not quite. I predict that if the Cities get too upity they get cut off. Tell me what is the corn acarage in Manhattan or the amount of rice grown in San Francisco.
Quote: I referenced history in the Whig talk that has the urban - progressive - new technology faction generally coming out on top. Part of this is the adaptation of new ideas. The cities are generally the place where the new ideas impact most. The rural faction often attempts to hold onto yesterday. Generally, it doesn’t happen. There is a long slow struggle, yes, but in many suspect a full scale S&H crisis is about adapting the culture to new ideas and technology. Often, a conservative's cold dead body is involved. We're just learning different things from history, I guess.
I see you're holding onto the idea that in order to be counter-culture one has to be something other than conservative. Which is amusing since the entire establishment is now distinctly liberal. But then again I already knew you were values locked into your "Whig" perspective.
Quote:I can sympathize with fracking being at best a bridge, but still wonder how much it would take, how close to disaster we get, waiting for a wide spread acceptance of nuclear. That’s one I want to watch. So far, fracking is being pushed, while reactor building is still mostly on hold. Should it be that way? Another question entirely.
Nuclear isn't being pushed right now because a huge, unnecessary, and wasteful government bureaucracy is standing in the way. It was created under the old paradigm (IE the New Dealer "Government solves problems" model). I'm speaking of course about the EPA and the Department of Energy. One the creation of a GI Republican and the other of a GI/Silent Cusp Democrat.
Both need to be gutted to permit nuclear power to be less expensive than the artificially inflated price it has now. Indeed, both have actively and effectively blocked the US from pursuing the French path to nuclear, which is distinctly rooted in the Mid-20th century. Nevermind newer technologies. Instead, the powers that be wish to sell us on a green renewable pipe dream even though Germany has conducted that experiment already and has only resulted in essentially being forced to import electricity and higher energy bills.
http://americanenergyalliance.org/2015/0...y-failure/
Quote:Internet censorship? I know governments are playing that game. China has it’s great firewall. The US is pursuing jihadists on line. I don’t see the main stream media playing that game. There is no lack of partisans yelling at each other.
You've never heard the term "fake news"? You've not heard of Google manipulating its algorithms to direct searches into partisan directions? You've not heard of YouTube taking down videos for saying such things as "Transgenderism is a mental illness" (It is, psychologists call it Gender Dysphoria Disorder), that races do exist and have evolved differently, and other politically incorrect things. Indeed there has been a running joke in some circles that in 2014 "edgy content" on YouTube was from the likes of Pewdeepie and TheAmazingAtheist (who is known for his long winded controversial rants and sticking bananas up his ass, and other assorted drama) but in 2017 "edgy content" is cat videos. And that is even before I get into censoring attempts by Twatter and Fuckbook.
It makes me wonder if the reason you're not seeing this happen in real time is because you are not adequately connected to what is happening or are willfully blind and deaf. Chances are the former based on your age. As I've pointed out before my mother is at most only a few months younger than you, and she's convinced that me, my boyfriend and our son are all insane with our complaints of online censorship. Of course she also is convinced that the only thing online is fitbit and mahjong connect and I have to update her fitbit for her half the time.
Inb4 Bob has no idea what fitbit is.
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08-29-2017, 10:32 AM
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
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(08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
WTF is "Generation Z?"
Also known as Homelanders. I say their cohorts begin in 2005; some say earlier. The new artist or adaptive generation. Generation X started a letter per generation succession. The next prophets will begin a new letter cycle with Generation A!
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(08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
WTF is "Generation Z?"
Some call them "Homelanders" or "New Adaptives", I've even heard "digital natives" thrown around. Gen Zee or Zed (depending on country, though I prefer Zed, I think it sounds cooler) would be the adaptive generation that follos the Millies. I disagree with Dave Cullen as to their birth dates though. Someone born in 1996 should have vague memories of 9-11. I generally place them around 1998-Present. The oldest are just now becoming adults.
My adoptive son (and really he adopted us than the other way round--kinda like a cat), a 1999 cohort, fairly accurately represents at least the early wave of them. That Early Wave typically has Xer parents, and some of the very oldest may have Millie siblings.
I also posted an other video on this generation by Styxhexenhammer666 in the Generations forum too.
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(08-29-2017, 02:48 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 12:42 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
WTF is "Generation Z?"
Some call them "Homelanders" or "New Adaptives", I've even heard "digital natives" thrown around. Gen Zee or Zed (depending on country, though I prefer Zed, I think it sounds cooler) would be the adaptive generation that follos the Millies. I disagree with Dave Cullen as to their birth dates though. Someone born in 1996 should have vague memories of 9-11. I generally place them around 1998-Present. The oldest are just now becoming adults.
My adoptive son (and really he adopted us than the other way round--kinda like a cat), a 1999 cohort, fairly accurately represents at least the early wave of them. That Early Wave typically has Xer parents, and some of the very oldest may have Millie siblings.
I also posted an other video on this generation by Styxhexenhammer666 in the Generations forum too.
You are completely outwith S&H here. You have incorrect generational operational definitions.
Right. 9-11 was a 3T event.
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(08-29-2017, 02:47 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 11:20 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: (08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
WTF is "Generation Z?"
Also known as Homelanders. I say their cohorts begin in 2005; some say earlier. The new artist or adaptive generation. Generation X started a letter per generation succession. The next prophets will begin a new letter cycle with Generation A!
Well those folks ain't no 2005 cohort unless they've been taking steroids since they were infants.
Some people date Gen Z as starting earlier, like kinser does (but i never agree with kinser). Some people may use Gen Z to indicate the millie/adaptive cusp, like some people use Gen.Y.
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08-29-2017, 06:37 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-30-2017, 12:37 AM by pbrower2a.)
(08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
WTF is "Generation Z?"
"X" -- what Howe and Strauss call the Thirteenth Generation for being the thirteenth generation to know the United States of America. "Thirteenth" never took off, and "X" has entered commercial use for describing the generation as a demographic.
"Y" or Millennial -- "Millennial" has been in far more common use in commerce, mass culture, and academia.
"Z" -- sometimes called the Homeland Generation. The generation to know a Department of Homeland Security. "Department of Homeland Security" sounds like a great name -- for a secret police. One distinction is that it has always known having had to use a passport, or at least an 'enhanced driver's license', to get through American borders. At this I put its first years of birth in the twenty-first century and not in 1996 or so.
So far as I can tell, nobody has ever called Boomers "Generation W".
It is difficult to discern the politics of this generation. If the Silent are any indicator, I expect it to begin very conformist as a "me too" generation, ratifying what its next-elders say once it reaches adulthood. We don't have any voting record. With Generation X we saw a voting pattern that made the difference in the 1980 election by going more sharply toward Reagan than most expected, turning what might have been a somewhat-close Presidential election, at least in electoral votes (maybe like 2012 for Obama) into an electoral rout. Generation X became less conservative with time as Republicans doubled down on such social issues as abortion, gay rights, anti-feminism, and the Fundamentalist agenda, but it was more attuned to free-market ideas and less hostile to corporate power than any generation since the Lost Generation. Few conservatives predicted that X secularism and libertarian values on sexuality would be an open door for liberalism within Generation X.
....The hack that Kinser shows in this video seems to express wishful thinking more than anything else about politics. "X" and "Millennial" will be the strongest influences upon this generation, with Boomers likely to appear either as having grandparent-like influence as relics of a time when black-and-white television was the norm and before the Interstate Highway System was largely built or as old political figures (like Donald Trump this time or FDR in the last Crisis Era) to be recognized for greatness or to be rejected for awfulness.
Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth are yet to enter adulthood. Unlike Generation X, which was clearly much less pretentious about its culture having any educational or moral content and was much more reactionary on economics than its elders, the current child generation (Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth) have yet to graduate from high school. For most whom we can expect to become leaders they have yet to enter college, and there they get to encounter adult ideas generally unavailable to those who go no further than High School or take a strictly-vocational course. They have yet to recognize the superficiality of the digital world. They will get some hard knocks in the workplace and in economic life.
That hack does suggest a positive in recognizing thrift as a merit in a world of debt. But the solution to personal debt is not self-denial. We need remember that government debt allows personal saving. That's not to justify waste as in show projects, patronage, and sweetheart deals -- or wars for profit. It is difficult to save if rents and taxes are both high. I can see the next adult generation finding ways to cut corners in the cost of living, and the most effective way that I can see is to move away from high-cost areas. If they must move from California to Ohio to take Grandma with senile dementia or Grandpa with Parkinsonism and find that they can do better economically working as a retail clerk in Dreariness, Ohio than as a technician in Silicon Valley because the rent is a third as much in Ohio, then maybe they will stay in Ohio. If you can live better in Dreariness, Ohio because the rent is as third as much and your wages are cut by a half, you might tolerate the ugly urban scene, the monotonous expanses of farmland, and having to shovel snow.
Yes, I understand that Kinser now sees Donald Trump as the most wonderful thing to have ever happened to American political life and to be the wave of a glorious future of national pride and of economic growth predicated upon extreme inequality.
Donald Trump is not a free-enterprise advocate. He is an advocate of an order in which the expression of economic virtue is that the Right people (like he who has been a spoiled, privileged, irresponsible brat all his life) get whatever they want and everyone else yields to them -- even in rejecting reason and learning. Even if he gets away with it, his successors might not. In the latter part of the 18th century, people who rejected faith and class privilege over reason had a quick and dramatic cure for people who believed that peons existed to indulge and enrich them.
![[Image: 300px-Ex%C3%A9cution_de_Marie_Antoinette...e_1793.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Ex%C3%A9cution_de_Marie_Antoinette_le_16_octobre_1793.jpg/300px-Ex%C3%A9cution_de_Marie_Antoinette_le_16_octobre_1793.jpg)
Marie Antoinette, object of this scene, was the definitive snowflake. She was not the most culpable person of the Ancien Régime, but she was one of its more obnoxious exponents, and thus particularly vulnerable when the political climate became hostile to her type. Of course we would be more technologically sophisticated -- maybe we would use nitrogen asphyxiation. Maybe it will lack the drama of a beheading...
Just a reminder. Trump is doing far more harm than good, and if history doesn't do something bad to him it will do so to some of his successors. I can't say whether Kinser is a true convert to American reaction or has found it a marvelous destroyer of a capitalist order that he recently disparaged -- sort of like some Vietcong who seemed to sell out Communism on behalf of a corrupt régime as a fanatical supporter who discredited the order and made as Commie takeover possible, selling out again to the Commies. Or maybe that was the 'game'. Sort of like Victor Ippolitovich (why am I tempted to call him 'Ipokritovich') Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago?
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.
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(08-29-2017, 02:48 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 12:42 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 11:14 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: (08-29-2017, 10:32 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:
A discussion on how the counter-culture is now conservative. I'm actually surprised this is still on YouTube but this forum doesn't host for vid (dot) me.
WTF is "Generation Z?"
Some call them "Homelanders" or "New Adaptives", I've even heard "digital natives" thrown around. Gen Zee or Zed (depending on country, though I prefer Zed, I think it sounds cooler) would be the adaptive generation that follos the Millies. I disagree with Dave Cullen as to their birth dates though. Someone born in 1996 should have vague memories of 9-11. I generally place them around 1998-Present. The oldest are just now becoming adults.
My adoptive son (and really he adopted us than the other way round--kinda like a cat), a 1999 cohort, fairly accurately represents at least the early wave of them. That Early Wave typically has Xer parents, and some of the very oldest may have Millie siblings.
I also posted an other video on this generation by Styxhexenhammer666 in the Generations forum too.
You are completely outwith S&H here. You have incorrect generational operational definitions.
I disagree. A new generation starts being born a few years before the turning change over. It is entirely possibly what is being called Generation Z is in fact a late wave of the Millies, but they are substantially different from the older wave if they are. The problem I think we're encountering is that it is difficult to define exactly when the 4T started. I start it in 2005, which means that the oldest of Z would be 7 or 8.
There could also be a Millie/Z cusp dating from 1998-2002 with the core born from 2002-20??.
It has been noted on this forum and the old one that fuzzyness between the generations happens.
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(08-29-2017, 06:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: So far as I can tell, nobody has ever called Boomers "Generation W".
Actually I believe that Eric has on his attrocious website that looks like it hasn't been updated since 1994. And I did once or twice during the Bush II administration. Holding him up as a prime example of Boomer incompotence. But Boomers call themselves Boomers so that's the name everyone is stuck with even if we could assign a letter to every generation which seems impractical. The reason that X, Y, and Z have been used is because these letters often represent an unknown quantity in Algebra. I suppose N could also be used similarly.
Now it is time for Occam's razor.
Quote:It is difficult to discern the politics of this generation. If the Silent are any indicator, I expect it to begin very conformist as a "me too" generation,
This assumes that Generation Zed will express themselves exactly like the Silents did. We have no reason to expect them too. After all Millenials have not expressed them exactly like the GIs did or Xers the Lost, or for that matter Boomers the Missionaries. That being said even if they adopt a "me too" methodology at least for the foreseeable future that means conservative. The mood is shifting right after decades of being left as is to be expected.
Quote: With Generation X we saw a voting pattern that made the difference in the 1980 election by going more sharply toward Reagan
I don't think that Xers made the difference in the Reagan Revolution. I'll tell you why. In 1980 the youngest voters were born in 1962. Arguably the first year of the X cohorts, maybe the second depending on where one draws the Boomer/Xer line. So we're talking about a fraction of a fraction. The Youth vote in 1980 was Boomer dominated. Now if we're talking 1984 that is a different story as the entire 18-22 demographic would be Xers, and include the 23-in-1984 if you insist on the cut off being 1961.
What does this tell us about Xers in 1984? That they preferred the incumbent over a return to the 1970s which Mondale represented.
Quote:Generation X became less conservative with time as Republicans doubled down on such social issues as abortion, gay rights, anti-feminism, and the Fundamentalist agenda, but it was more attuned to free-market ideas and less hostile to corporate power than any generation since the Lost Generation. Few conservatives predicted that X secularism and libertarian values on sexuality would be an open door for liberalism within Generation X.
I would argue that X hasn't become more liberal, but rather that the things that they are liberal about are issues that the liberals have used to gain their votes. The GOP's pandering to conservatism on sexual and cultural issues was pandering to Silents and older Boomers mainly. Groups more likely to oppose them than X on economic issues.
As I've told Eric in the past, people don't become more liberal or conservative as they age, what happens instead is that which is considered liberal or conservative changes.
Quote:....The hack that Kinser shows in this video
I will admit that David Cullen is perhaps a novice amateur when it comes to generational theory, his main bailiwick is discussion of technology. I'm not even sure if he's read S&H unlike say Styxhexenhammer666, who I would be surprised if he hadn't considering that he edits and republishes herbology books from the 17th century. That being said if we give credence to polls and actual votes of people between 18-24 now (whether they are Millie Civics or Zed Adaptives is irrelevant at this point) then we must conclude that the youth is trending right.
Bear in mind in 2016 an 18 year old was born in 1998 and a 24 year old was born in 1992.
If the X/Millie line is around 1982 like S&H wrote, this means that even if these people are not an actual generation in and of themselves, they are definitely the later wave of Millies. Assuming a 20 year generation of humans 1982-1992 would be Millie^1 and 1992-2002 would be Millie^2.
It could be possible that what is happening is that Millie^2 is taking up the name of Generation Z because they are alienated from the older half of the generation. Indeed, there is evidence that this is relatively common at least in the current saeculum what with Aquarian Boomers and Disco Boomers, Atari Xers and Nintendo Xers, why should Millies be different?
Quote: seems to express wishful thinking more than anything else about politics. "X" and "Millennial" will be the strongest influences upon this generation, with Boomers likely to appear either as having grandparent-like influence as relics of a time when black-and-white television was the norm and before the Interstate Highway System was largely built or as old political figures (like Donald Trump this time or FDR in the last Crisis Era) to be recognized for greatness or to be rejected for awfulness.
Well I know of one Boomer politician that some of this set of cohorts revile, she lost the youth vote to Trump. As my son said of HRC "She represents everything wrong with society why would anyone vote for her?" Obviously he wasn't old enough to vote in the last election but he would have likely voted for Trump and I haven't checked but I suspect when he registered to vote he registered Republican, though he really has no use for partisan politics--but FL is a closed primary state.
Quote:Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth are yet to enter adulthood. Unlike Generation X, which was clearly much less pretentious about its culture having any educational or moral content and was much more reactionary on economics than its elders, the current child generation (Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth) have yet to graduate from high school. For most whom we can expect to become leaders they have yet to enter college, and there they get to encounter adult ideas generally unavailable to those who go no further than High School or take a strictly-vocational course. They have yet to recognize the superficiality of the digital world. They will get some hard knocks in the workplace and in economic life.
College doesn't mean the same thing as it did when you went. These days going to college means that you were dumb enough to pay money to be indoctrinated with leftist nonsense. Maybe it made sense to pay money for an "education" before the internet existed but these kids have spent their entire lives exposed to adult ideas online. In fact they have never not been exposed to them which makes them different from previous generations, and even waves of generations if in fact what we are dealing with is just the second half of the Millenial Generation.
Quote:That hack does suggest a positive in recognizing thrift as a merit in a world of debt. But the solution to personal debt is not self-denial.
I know that this is probably an alien concept to a Boomer but saving to buy something rather than going into debt for immediate gratification is not the same thing as self-denial. Rather it is merely having a lower time preference. Furthermore given the way technology and prices of manufactured goods go it is actually better to wait. That Ishit you want will be half-off in six months for example.
It is to be expected that persons who have live all or most of their lives in times of economic distress should be more strongly K selected.
Quote: We need remember that government debt allows personal saving.
No it doesn't. Government debt is differed taxation. The reason that people buy treasury bonds or bills (depending on the maturity date) is because they know that the government has the power to tax the population. Even if the debt is merely recycled the population has to be taxed to service that debt even if it does nothing else.
Quote:It is difficult to save if rents and taxes are both high
That sounds like an argument for the government to not spend tons of money on a bunch of nonsense. I really don't care if it is food stamps or invading Turdworldistan.
Quote: I can see the next adult generation finding ways to cut corners in the cost of living, and the most effective way that I can see is to move away from high-cost areas. If they must move from California to Ohio to take Grandma with senile dementia or Grandpa with Parkinsonism and find that they can do better economically working as a retail clerk in Dreariness, Ohio than as a technician in Silicon Valley because the rent is a third as much in Ohio, then maybe they will stay in Ohio. If you can live better in Dreariness, Ohio because the rent is as third as much and your wages are cut by a half, you might tolerate the ugly urban scene, the monotonous expanses of farmland, and having to shovel snow.
We delve into the world of subjectives now. But there are objective counters here.
1. Moving in with Grandma/Grandpa reguardless their health is probably a good idea. Grandma/Grandpa likely own their own home, in some cases it is completely paid off (so the only "rent" necessary would be covering the property taxes and necessary maintenance).
2. If one's cost of living is lower it doesn't really matter if one's salary is lower. No matter how much you make you can only buy so good a set of cloths, so nice a car, so big a house and on and on. Seriously Bill Gates is a multiGorillianaire, and he buys his cloths from Wal Mart.
As to the subjective. I've been to California. The most I can say about it is the weather is nice. Otherwise it is crowded and filled with people who are largely lunatics. I can say the same about New York City. You couldn't pay me to live in either now, and I've lived in both. NYC as a Civilian, California when I was in the USN. So given the choice between living in Commiefornia surrounded by people who would be convinced that my boyfriend is a Nazi because he is bald while white or living in Dreariness Ohio I'd pick Ohio every time. But I'm fortunate that my family is all located in Florida. Yeah it is god's waiting room but most people down here are not insane (I'm far enough north that it is still the South)
Quote:Yes, I understand that Kinser now sees Donald Trump as the most wonderful thing to have ever happened to American political life and to be the wave of a glorious future of national pride and of economic growth predicated upon extreme inequality.
Not quite. Inequality of outcome is a result of liberty. One can either be equal or they can be free. Given that choice I pick freedom.
Here's a nice book about some of my ideas. Its original price was 1 Shilling in 1899.
https://books.google.com/books?id=lQdDAQ...e&q&f=true
I'm going to leave the rest of your post PBR because it is just more of your pipe dreams about guillotines. Those are neither insightful nor interesting.
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I'm coming to see wealth inequality as indication of the the country still has a reserve. If we ever really decide to do anything, a means exists to do it. I care far more about there being a minimum floor for things like food, shelter and medical care than the few wanting to build uber yachts. However, with the economy frequently being optimized for Wall Street and Easy Street, you have to hope you can release Main Street when the time comes.
In the same way, much of the alt right just wants to be uncivil to certain minority groups. I personally have no sympathy with that. There has been since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's time a legal concept that negative rights to not protect the ability to harm others. Thus, you don't have a right to cry 'fire' in a crowded theory, and your right to swing you fist around ends where my nose begins. Old old principles. This very simple concept seems to be missed by many on the alt right. If they are systematically denying members of a certain subculture access, if they thank being cruel is harmless fun protected by the Constitution, they just aren't aware of where negative rights end.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
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(08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I'm coming to see wealth inequality as indication of the the country still has a reserve. If we ever really decide to do anything, a means exists to do it. I care far more about there being a minimum floor for things like food, shelter and medical care than the few wanting to build uber yachts. However, with the economy frequently being optimized for Wall Street and Easy Street, you have to hope you can release Main Street when the time comes.
If we assume that by Main Street, what you mean is your average work-a-day American person of the proletariat then the best way to insure that they have a minimum standard of living is to ensure that they have jobs to provide that for them. Welfare has never lifted anyone out of poverty, it maintains them there. As such we have to use two different large policy direction.
First is to structure international trade to promote Americans making things and buying things made in America. Bringing money in and keeping the money here circulating, in other words.
Second to limit the import of new labor. Importing low wage unskilled labor depresses wages for the lower income/skill groups, blacks in particular. Importing lower wage skilled labor depresses domestically educated citizens. As I've said on the old forum before there isn't a shortage of STEM field graduates in this country, rather there is a shortage of them willing to accept 30K/year (cause they have student loans to pay off among other things).
Adopting the second policy position will cause a gradual rise in pay through labor constriction, it also helps developing countries as they won't suffer brain drain as badly.
Quote:In the same way, much of the alt right just wants to be uncivil to certain minority groups.
There is no evidence that this is the case.
Quote: I personally have no sympathy with that. There has been since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's time a legal concept that negative rights to not protect the ability to harm others. Thus, you don't have a right to cry 'fire' in a crowded theory, and your right to swing you fist around ends where my nose begins. Old old principles. This very simple concept seems to be missed by many on the alt right. If they are systematically denying members of a certain subculture access, if they thank being cruel is harmless fun protected by the Constitution, they just aren't aware of where negative rights end.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. If the Left wins there won't be any free speech at all. I like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. am convinced the only limitations on free speech should be slander, libel and incitement (to riot or to violence or panic). Apart from that free speech is sacrosanct. Any attempt to restrict it past those common sense limitations is distinctly anti-American.
I will go further, if there are in fact positive rights in the Bill of Rights as it seems the ACA has opened the door for then I would say that it applies to the First and Second amendments just as much as any dubious right to health care. As such I demand that YouTube and etc provide me with a channel to spout off my nonsense, and that the federal government buy me an AR-15 (cause you can't have too many). I think the laundry room is still lacking a gun
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(08-30-2017, 08:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I'm coming to see wealth inequality as indication of the the country still has a reserve. If we ever really decide to do anything, a means exists to do it. I care far more about there being a minimum floor for things like food, shelter and medical care than the few wanting to build uber yachts. However, with the economy frequently being optimized for Wall Street and Easy Street, you have to hope you can release Main Street when the time comes.
If we assume that by Main Street, what you mean is your average work-a-day American person of the proletariat then the best way to insure that they have a minimum standard of living is to ensure that they have jobs to provide that for them. Welfare has never lifted anyone out of poverty, it maintains them there. As such we have to use two different large policy direction.
First is to structure international trade to promote Americans making things and buying things made in America. Bringing money in and keeping the money here circulating, in other words.
Second to limit the import of new labor. Importing low wage unskilled labor depresses wages for the lower income/skill groups, blacks in particular. Importing lower wage skilled labor depresses domestically educated citizens. As I've said on the old forum before there isn't a shortage of STEM field graduates in this country, rather there is a shortage of them willing to accept 30K/year (cause they have student loans to pay off among other things).
Adopting the second policy position will cause a gradual rise in pay through labor constriction, it also helps developing countries as they won't suffer brain drain as badly.
I can sympathize with much of that. For example, ideally, unless the recipient is permanently disabled, welfare should be viewed as a last chance to dial in and not a permanent way of life. I agree there are too many colleges, too many degrees, but good luck getting rid of hope. People at least pretend to want to be dealt in.
But a few good ideas won't change the need for a basic change in balance. The uneven wealth distribution and who is creating it is obvious.
(08-30-2017, 08:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: In the same way, much of the alt right just wants to be uncivil to certain minority groups.
There is no evidence that this is the case.
Wearing a swatstica and waving a battle flag doesn't count? If you look you can find alt-right folk who almost plausibly hide their prejudice, but it's far easier to find prejudiced haters if you care to look. They want attention. I suspect you like that side of the alt right as little as I like what's recently become the alt left. That doesn't mean one should close one's eyes and pretend not to see.
(08-30-2017, 08:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I personally have no sympathy with that. There has been since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's time a legal concept that negative rights to not protect the ability to harm others. Thus, you don't have a right to cry 'fire' in a crowded theory, and your right to swing you fist around ends where my nose begins. Old old principles. This very simple concept seems to be missed by many on the alt right. If they are systematically denying members of a certain subculture access, if they thank being cruel is harmless fun protected by the Constitution, they just aren't aware of where negative rights end.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. If the Left wins there won't be any free speech at all. I like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. am convinced the only limitations on free speech should be slander, libel and incitement (to riot or to violence or panic). Apart from that free speech is sacrosanct. Any attempt to restrict it past those common sense limitations is distinctly anti-American.
I will go further, if there are in fact positive rights in the Bill of Rights as it seems the ACA has opened the door for then I would say that it applies to the First and Second amendments just as much as any dubious right to health care. As such I demand that YouTube and etc provide me with a channel to spout off my nonsense, and that the federal government buy me an AR-15 (cause you can't have too many). I think the laundry room is still lacking a gun
I personally don't see hidden positive rights in the old Constitution. Freedom from Want was a justification to make war. The UDHR was a UN treaty we signed. It is binding perhaps, but who is running around enforcing it? The ACA may strive for similar principles, but it isn't structured as a bill of rights. If we are to share risks and costs, it will be because the modern people wish to do so.
But as long as there are areas of US culture that are reserved to a specific culture, gender or race, I don't see affirmative action going away. That counts as harm under law, as much as you dislike it. And while modern Nazi and Confederates aren't actively lynching and putting folks in gas chambers, the hatred is still there, and a few folk hate as much as they can get away with. I'll throw a few on the alt left in with the traditional folk. I see hateful violent behavior as worth getting rid of.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
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(08-30-2017, 01:40 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: Now it is time for Occam's razor.
(my material to which you respond in dark green)
Quote:Quote:It is difficult to discern the politics of (the current child-to-adolescent) generation. If the Silent are any indicator, I expect it to begin very conformist as a "me too" generation,
This assumes that Generation Zed will express themselves exactly like the Silents did. We have no reason to expect them too. After all Millenials have not expressed them exactly like the GIs did or Xers the Lost, or for that matter Boomers the Missionaries. That being said even if they adopt a "me too" methodology at least for the foreseeable future that means conservative. The mood is shifting right after decades of being left as is to be expected.
They aren't voting yet. They are not yet creating mass culture. So far they are getting the same mass culture as Millennial young adults. In the 1970s the (then stupefied) mass culture produced for Generation X was clearly different from what Boomers bought. But for the time Generation X had no problem with it. Boomers to a great extent abandoned mass low culture not made for themselves and went in other directions unless the material was 'nostalgia'. I am reminded of what the GI journalist Herb Caen had to say of the 'bubble-gum' rock that early-wave Generation X listened to with apparent relish: that this stuff was incredibly bad.
As the disco fad (and that dreadful, contrived music was intended to blend Boomers and X in a mindless hedonism) failed to redefine American mass culture as a lucrative conduit of record sales to its creators, performers, and hucksters, Boomers and X split.
The GI's and the Silent did not have such a cultural split until about 1960.
Quote:Quote:With Generation X we saw a voting pattern that made the difference in the 1980 election by going more sharply toward Reagan
I don't think that Xers made the difference in the Reagan Revolution. I'll tell you why. In 1980 the youngest voters were born in 1962. Arguably the first year of the X cohorts, maybe the second depending on where one draws the Boomer/Xer line. So we're talking about a fraction of a fraction. The Youth vote in 1980 was Boomer dominated. Now if we're talking 1984 that is a different story as the entire 18-22 demographic would be Xers, and include the 23-in-1984 if you insist on the cut off being 1961.
What does this tell us about Xers in 1984? That they preferred the incumbent over a return to the 1970s which Mondale represented.
It was marginal. Reagan was going to win over a President widely seen as ineffective and out of touch. Ronald Reagan was about as slick a campaigner as Obama would be 28 years later in running against the legacy of a failed President if not the incumbent. Both reached for visceral concerns, and at that Reagan may have been more effective. Or that could be race.
Analysts of the time expected Reagan to win, but not as big as he did. They also found that voters born in 1961 and 1962 were much more conservative in economics and had less ambiguity in supporting a right-wing foreign policy than voters born as late as 1960. That may have been a complete shock. The Carter campaign sought the votes of people born in 1961 and 1962 -- and got burned.
Voters born as late as 1966 were voting in 1984. Voters in Generation X were still much more sympathetic to free-market solutions even at the cost of economic inequality through lower pay and through shifts from high-income income taxes to low-end consumer taxes. Of course Walter Mondale was a horrid campaigner that Democrats chose practically for long-standing, loyal and dedicated service to his Party. Almost like Alf Landon, and with much the same result.
Quote:Quote:Generation X became less conservative with time as Republicans doubled down on such social issues as abortion, gay rights, anti-feminism, and the Fundamentalist agenda, but it was more attuned to free-market ideas and less hostile to corporate power than any generation since the Lost Generation. Few conservatives predicted that X secularism and libertarian values on sexuality would be an open door for liberalism within Generation X.
I would argue that X hasn't become more liberal, but rather that the things that they are liberal about are issues that the liberals have used to gain their votes. The GOP's pandering to conservatism on sexual and cultural issues was pandering to Silents and older Boomers mainly. Groups more likely to oppose them than X on economic issues.
As I've told Eric in the past, people don't become more liberal or conservative as they age, what happens instead is that which is considered liberal or conservative changes.
If there is any tendency, it is that people tend to vote in accordance with the interests with which they develop rapport. But let us remember that Generation X was going to feel the brunt of sexual repression. A generation almost libertarian on economics was also libertarian on s-e-x. X was (and still is) largely secularist, and it disliked the agenda of the anti-secular Religious Right that sought to replace science with religious revelation. That was the pattern of the young-adult early Gilded and Lost.
Generation X was also having children. X could tolerate lower real incomes and real higher prices in the name of economic growth... but they were starting to have children. Low wages and high costs were hurting the children of Generation X. Generation X started drifting toward the political center as it saw its children having to pay the price for the plutocratic, fundamentalist agenda of the GOP in the 1980s. Yes, there were loud X proponents of this agenda, like Ralph Reed -- but shrillness of a minority is not enough.
So X was willing to make economic sacrifices in the name of economic growth from which they could derive benefit in This World. The largely Boom Religious Right really did believe in Pie-In-the-Sky-When-You-Die as an adequate reward for misery in This World. X did not fall for that. It had its limitations, and the corporatist-fundamentalist coalition associated with Reagan and Bush I simply went too far. Sometime political reality goes that way.
Quote:Quote:....The hack that Kinser shows in this video
I will admit that David Cullen is perhaps a novice amateur when it comes to generational theory, his main bailiwick is discussion of technology. I'm not even sure if he's read S&H unlike say Styxhexenhammer666, who I would be surprised if he hadn't considering that he edits and republishes herbology books from the 17th century. That being said if we give credence to polls and actual votes of people between 18-24 now (whether they are Millie Civics or Zed Adaptives is irrelevant at this point) then we must conclude that the youth is trending right.
Bear in mind in 2016 an 18 year old was born in 1998 and a 24 year old was born in 1992.
If the X/Millie line is around 1982 like S&H wrote, this means that even if these people are not an actual generation in and of themselves, they are definitely the later wave of Millies. Assuming a 20 year generation of humans 1982-1992 would be Millie^1 and 1992-2002 would be Millie^2.
It could be possible that what is happening is that Millie^2 is taking up the name of Generation Z because they are alienated from the older half of the generation. Indeed, there is evidence that this is relatively common at least in the current saeculum what with Aquarian Boomers and Disco Boomers, Atari Xers and Nintendo Xers, why should Millies be different?
As I have noticed, politics do not drive technology, and technology has at most subtle and usually unforeseen effects upon social patterns. Few people thought that the telephone would change how people did business. Few people foresaw that the automobile would change the patterns of dating, often bringing people not in the same proximity by then-recent standards.
Demographics may not decide things on the individual level, but in an economy of consumer choice, demographic reality can decide what succeeds and what fails. It can decide that obsolete models of business fail and that those in touch with economic reality succeed.
The Millennial Generation has yet to unite behind one or two overpowering realities. For GIs that was the Great Depression and World War II. Millennial adults have yet to see anything at all analogous to either. Millennial adults, to the extent that they were old enough to vote, did get behind Barack Obama to prevent an economic meltdown that looked much like the start of the Great Depression from getting that bad. But we are still 75 years away from the Pearl Harbor attack and 71 years away from the Allied victory... and 69 years away from the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Air Lift that solidified the world for a long time. (All in all, the independence of what had been British India may be far more relevant to contemporary reality than the Cold War, and the settlement of the Korean War as an easy armistice still has shapes current events. But that is what this amateur historian sees. Amateur? In the past much of the best work was done by amateurs).
Watch the demographics. The line between GI and Silent did not emerge until the end of World War II, separating soldiers who stormed Okinawa and put Dachau under more humane management from those who might have expected to storm mainland Japan but instead did occupation duty. The difference between cohorts of 1923 and 1928 would be obvious in 1948 would not be as clear between cohorts of 1924 and 1926 until the 1950s. The difference between 1924 and 1925 is still subtle. Lots of people thought that Marlon Brando was the Silent (although born in 1924) and that Paul Newman was the GI (although born in 1925).
Quote:Quote:seems to express wishful thinking more than anything else about politics. "X" and "Millennial" will be the strongest influences upon this generation, with Boomers likely to appear either as having grandparent-like influence as relics of a time when black-and-white television was the norm and before the Interstate Highway System was largely built or as old political figures (like Donald Trump this time or FDR in the last Crisis Era) to be recognized for greatness or to be rejected for awfulness.
Well I know of one Boomer politician that some of this set of cohorts revile, she lost the youth vote to Trump. As my son said of HRC "She represents everything wrong with society why would anyone vote for her?" Obviously he wasn't old enough to vote in the last election but he would have likely voted for Trump and I haven't checked but I suspect when he registered to vote he registered Republican, though he really has no use for partisan politics--but FL is a closed primary state.
The marginal voter of November 2016 who voted against Trump seems to become more proud of the choice. The marginal voter for Trump has drifted away, as shown in polling since the election.
Just look at the disapproval ratings for the President in some states that Donald Trump barely lost (Maine, Minnesota, and New Hampshire) and four of the six states that he most barely lost.
![[Image: genusmap.php?year=2012&ev_c=1&pv_p=1&ev_...NE3=0;99;6]](http://uselectionatlas.org/TOOLS/genusmap.php?year=2012&ev_c=1&pv_p=1&ev_p=1&type=calc&AL=2;;7&AK=2;;4&AZ=1;;5&AR=2;;5&CA=1;;9&CO=1;;5&CT=1;;9&DE=1;;7&DC=0;;9&FL=1;;4&GA=1;;4&HI=1;;9&ID=2;;7&IL=1;;7&IN=1;;4&IA=1;;5&KS=2;;7&KY=2;;9&LA=2;;7&MD=1;;9&MA=1;;9&MI=1;;7&MN=1;;7&MS=2;;5&MO=2;;5&MT=2;;9&NV=1;;5&NH=1;;9&NJ=1;;7&NM=1;;7&NY=1;;9&NC=1;;3&ND=2;;9&OH=1;;4&OK=2;;7&OR=1;;7&PA=1;;7&RI=1;;9&SC=2;;5&SD=2;;9&TN=2;;7&TX=1;;5&UT=2;;7&VT=1;;9&VA=1;;7&WA=1;;7&WV=2;;7&WI=1;;7&WY=2;;9&ME=1;;5&ME1=0;X;9&ME2=0;X;9&NE=2;;7&NE1=0;X;9&NE2=0;X;9&NE3=0;99;6)
Blue, positive and 40-43% 20% saturation
............................ 44-47% 40%
............................ 48-50% 50%
............................ 51-55% 70%
............................ 56%+ 90%
Red, negative and 48-50% 20% (raw approval)
.......................... 44-47% 30%
.......................... 40-43% 50%
.......................... 35-39% 70%
.......................under 35% 90%
White - tie.
Now for the theme of disapproval as shown in the Gallup data and subsequent polls:
![[Image: genusmap.php?year=2012&ev_c=1&pv_p=1&ev_...NE3=0;99;6]](http://uselectionatlas.org/TOOLS/genusmap.php?year=2012&ev_c=1&pv_p=1&ev_p=1&type=calc&AL=2;39;9&AK=4;48;1&AZ=1;54;3&AR=2;47;2&CA=1;71;9&CO=1;57;5&CT=1;59;5&DE=1;56;5&DC=0;;9&FL=1;51;3&GA=1;50;3&HI=1;59;5&ID=2;42;5&IL=1;58;5&IN=4;48;1&IA=1;52;2&KS=2;42;5&KY=2;36;9&LA=2;43;5&MD=1;64;7&MA=1;66;7&MI=1;55;5&MN=1;57;4&MS=2;46;2&MO=2;46;2&MT=2;41;5&NV=1;53;3&NH=1;55;5&NJ=1;58;5&NM=1;56;5&NY=1;62;7&NC=1;50;3&ND=2;36;9&OH=4;48;1&OK=2;39;9&OR=1;56;5&PA=1;54;3&RI=1;55;5&SC=2;44;2&SD=2;43;5&TN=2;42;5&TX=1;51;3&UT=1;50;2&VT=1;71;9&VA=1;61;7&WA=1;59;5&WV=2;36;9&WI=1;56;5&WY=2;36;9&ME=1;55;5&ME1=0;X;9&ME2=0;X;9&NE=2;43;5&NE1=0;X;9&NE2=0;X;9&NE3=0;99;6)
navy under 40
blue 40-43
light blue 44-47
white 48 or 49
pink 50-54
red 55-59
maroon 60-69
reddish-black 70+
...any possibility of Donald Trump winning re-election will depend upon him undoing the high disapproval levels in such states as Arizona (a state that Democratic nominees have won only once since 1948!). Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Maybe Ronald Reagan could get away with such by compelling Americans to take some hardships that reflect themselves in the President's approval rating. Donald Trump is not the new Ronald Reagan, someone able to push America in a right-wing direction. Neither is he a right-wing version of John F. Kennedy able to turn a bare win into increasing approval.
Polling in North Carolina, Florida, and even Texas (this is before Hurricane Harvey, and I doubt that he will get any help from handling the disaster) indicate trouble. He is not picking up support elsewhere as compensation.
Give him a chance and hope for the best? He's not the President to convince us.
He is far behind Obama at the same time.
Quote:Quote:Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth are yet to enter adulthood. Unlike Generation X, which was clearly much less pretentious about its culture having any educational or moral content and was much more reactionary on economics than its elders, the current child generation (Homelander, Digital native, Zee, or Zed youth) have yet to graduate from high school. For most whom we can expect to become leaders they have yet to enter college, and there they get to encounter adult ideas generally unavailable to those who go no further than High School or take a strictly-vocational course. They have yet to recognize the superficiality of the digital world. They will get some hard knocks in the workplace and in economic life.
College doesn't mean the same thing as it did when you went. These days going to college means that you were dumb enough to pay money to be indoctrinated with leftist nonsense. Maybe it made sense to pay money for an "education" before the internet existed but these kids have spent their entire lives exposed to adult ideas online. In fact they have never not been exposed to them which makes them different from previous generations, and even waves of generations if in fact what we are dealing with is just the second half of the Millennial Generation.
In the old days, the idea behind college was that the callow student who went in would come out better, whether at a good secular school like Harvard or the University of California or a good religious-oriented school like Notre Dame or Brigham Young. But even at the lower level of educational matriculation (as a courtesy I will not name names) practical education that might get one a job as a schoolteacher or county agricultural agent would have some structure intended to change the mind of the youth to take away some of the rough edges.
That is still a valid objective. It is better that we have people with ideas of how to live well other than to wallow in the base drives of the id and the unbending rules of a harsh superego. We need people who believe that there is more to life than consumerism, sex, drugs, booze, bureaucratic power, and mass culture so that leaders can contemplate the choices of their decisions. In view of the emptiness of the mass culture, the sophistication of our technology, the productivity of our economy outstripping the need for productive labor, and the ruthless cunning of our political bosses, we may need to rediscover the liberal arts. Add to this, our culture and even economy still promotes a focus on getting things now even at the cost of ruin later. A valid college education could promote a long-term focus that our society lacks so severely.
I think that you have the objective of most college students wrong. They do not go to college to get left-wing indoctrination (have you ever heard of Liberty University, founded by the late reactionary, traditionalist Jerry Falwell?) For its flaws, I can think of people who would get some improvement in their character by attending Liberty University.
Unless one gets into a skilled trade program, college is the best chance that most people have of avoiding becoming part of a permanent underclass in a plutocratic, inegalitarian society. Although the economic reward for attending college and getting a degree is generally slighter and less certain, and the cost of college education has become higher in real cost, it is increasingly the only real chance that most people have. If one sees pushing papers in an insurance company better as a glorified clerk than being a farm laborer or a kitchen helper, then one now practically needs the college diploma.
In a large college it is easy to evade the left-wing indoctrination that you dread.
Quote:That hack does suggest a positive in recognizing thrift as a merit in a world of debt. But the solution to personal debt is not self-denial.
Quote:I know that this is probably an alien concept to a Boomer but saving to buy something rather than going into debt for immediate gratification is not the same thing as self-denial. Rather it is merely having a lower time preference. Furthermore given the way technology and prices of manufactured goods go it is actually better to wait. That Ishit you want will be half-off in six months for example.
It is to be expected that persons who have live all or most of their lives in times of economic distress should be more strongly K selected.
I have been a saver when I had the chance. I am old enough to recognize that one of the most effective ways to save money is to not be an early-adapter. The ultimate late-adapter can buy stuff at Goodwill or Salvation Army for a fraction of what it was originally sold for. Even more, one can really save money by living in a place that is then unstylish -- like hick towns in the Midwest, where the local culture is church, high-school band, and whatever mass culture is available at Wal*Mart. It's not very satisfying, but on many respects life is not as easy as it was fifty years ago.
When Donald Trump offered the vapid slogan "Make America Great Again", he let people decide for themselves what that meant. I'm thinking that that meant 'easier' -- lower real rents, less suburban sprawl, lower costs of government activity, and shorter commutes. But what is possible in a country of 300 million people isn't so easy in a country with a population of 160 million people. People expect miracles of improvement in their lives through technology. Sure, we get more entertainment cheaply -- but some things like housing do not afford any benefits from economies of scale.
Quote:Quote:We need remember that government debt allows personal saving.
No it doesn't. Government debt is differed (sic) taxation. The reason that people buy treasury bonds or bills (depending on the maturity date) is because they know that the government has the power to tax the population. Even if the debt is merely recycled the population has to be taxed to service that debt even if it does nothing else.
Deferred taxation. Government typically replaces old debt with newer and slightly larger debt, ideally growing no faster than absolute GDP (population growth and improving productivity). Government can borrow at a lower rate than can Best Buy or Sears -- not that I would buy bonds floated by either. But I would buy shares of common stock which has potential for growth and some defense from inflation (and inflation will return) and not corporate or even government bonds.
Quote:Quote:It is difficult to save if rents and taxes are both high
That sounds like an argument for the government to not spend tons of money on a bunch of nonsense. I really don't care if it is food stamps or invading Turdworldistan.
Welfare goes back into the economy. You can trust that Wal*Mart, Safeway, and Kroger would rather get money from food stamps in profitable sales of sodas, chips, and meat than to lose money to people who shoplift such things. Given the choice between welfare and crime I prefer welfare. Prisons cost real money, and it is far easier to control people with welfare than with the police.
We cannot create enough jobs to solve all our social problems unless we were to commit to abysmal wages that would create social problems in their own right.
Quote:Quote:I can see the next adult generation finding ways to cut corners in the cost of living, and the most effective way that I can see is to move away from high-cost areas. If they must move from California to Ohio to take Grandma with senile dementia or Grandpa with Parkinsonism and find that they can do better economically working as a retail clerk in Dreariness, Ohio than as a technician in Silicon Valley because the rent is a third as much in Ohio, then maybe they will stay in Ohio. If you can live better in Dreariness, Ohio because the rent is as third as much and your wages are cut by a half, you might tolerate the ugly urban scene, the monotonous expanses of farmland, and having to shovel snow.
We delve into the world of subjectives now. But there are objective counters here.
1. Moving in with Grandma/Grandpa reguardless their health is probably a good idea. Grandma/Grandpa likely own their own home, in some cases it is completely paid off (so the only "rent" necessary would be covering the property taxes and necessary maintenance).
2. If one's cost of living is lower it doesn't really matter if one's salary is lower. No matter how much you make you can only buy so good a set of cloths, so nice a car, so big a house and on and on. Seriously Bill Gates is a multiGorillianaire, and he buys his cloths from Wal Mart.
As to the subjective. I've been to California. The most I can say about it is the weather is nice. Otherwise it is crowded and filled with people who are largely lunatics. I can say the same about New York City. You couldn't pay me to live in either now, and I've lived in both. NYC as a Civilian, California when I was in the USN. So given the choice between living in Commiefornia surrounded by people who would be convinced that my boyfriend is a Nazi because he is bald while white or living in Dreariness Ohio I'd pick Ohio every time. But I'm fortunate that my family is all located in Florida. Yeah it is god's waiting room but most people down here are not insane (I'm far enough north that it is still the South)
Because your bald white gay partner is with you, I assume that nobody would confuse him with a Nazi who would murder both of you. Nazi Germany did not send black people into death chambers in the same way that they did to Jews or Roma because they had few blacks. (The blacks that there were were typically half-German people that the Nazis were satisfied to keep out of the gene pool through sterilization). Homosexuals in Nazi Germany were targeted for abuse and murder in the camps.
The San Francisco Bay Area is expensive because people want to live there and because high incomes are available to some fortunate people. But supply and demand in housing results in renters bidding up housing costs. Needless to say, that results in high rents, some of the easiest money that anyone can make -- so long as one has made the investments. Unlike bond income that has an obvious limit and whose value (and that of the bond itself if it is long-term) rent can keep up with inflation so long as the rental property is in a place that people want to live in.
For obvious reasons, people do not want to live in Youngstown or Portsmouth in Ohio -- awful places with few opportunities. Owning rental property in such places is not a good way to make money. Were I a landlord I would not want Section 8 renters.
Quote:Quote:Yes, I understand that Kinser now sees Donald Trump as the most wonderful thing to have ever happened to American political life and to be the wave of a glorious future of national pride and of economic growth predicated upon extreme inequality.
Not quite. Inequality of outcome is a result of liberty. One can either be equal or they can be free. Given that choice I pick freedom.
Here's a nice book about some of my ideas. Its original price was 1 Shilling in 1899.
https://books.google.com/books?id=lQdDAQ...e&q&f=true
I'm going to leave the rest of your post PBR because it is just more of your pipe dreams about guillotines. Those are neither insightful nor interesting.
More precisely, inequality is the result of the liberty -- of elites -- and the paucity of choices for others. That's how feudalism and slavery operated.
But this said, Donald Trump thinks much like a medieval aristocrat, and in America that is a gross anachronism. But if you think he is so wonderful, maybe his successors won't have it so great when the masses get angry
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.
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(08-30-2017, 09:13 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 08:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I'm coming to see wealth inequality as indication of the the country still has a reserve. If we ever really decide to do anything, a means exists to do it. I care far more about there being a minimum floor for things like food, shelter and medical care than the few wanting to build uber yachts. However, with the economy frequently being optimized for Wall Street and Easy Street, you have to hope you can release Main Street when the time comes.
If we assume that by Main Street, what you mean is your average work-a-day American person of the proletariat then the best way to insure that they have a minimum standard of living is to ensure that they have jobs to provide that for them. Welfare has never lifted anyone out of poverty, it maintains them there. As such we have to use two different large policy direction.
First is to structure international trade to promote Americans making things and buying things made in America. Bringing money in and keeping the money here circulating, in other words.
Second to limit the import of new labor. Importing low wage unskilled labor depresses wages for the lower income/skill groups, blacks in particular. Importing lower wage skilled labor depresses domestically educated citizens. As I've said on the old forum before there isn't a shortage of STEM field graduates in this country, rather there is a shortage of them willing to accept 30K/year (cause they have student loans to pay off among other things).
Adopting the second policy position will cause a gradual rise in pay through labor constriction, it also helps developing countries as they won't suffer brain drain as badly.
I can sympathize with much of that. For example, ideally, unless the recipient is permanently disabled, welfare should be viewed as a last chance to dial in and not a permanent way of life.
I would say that ideally welfare should be completely replaced with family resources and private charity. I'm not sure how doable that is, but at least for Black Americans welfare has been far more destructive than slavery could ever hope to be. Over all if welfare is required, and state administration is required to over see it, it should be limited to those suffering from natural disaster, the permanently disabled and I mean the actually disabled, claiming to be an Aspie wouldn't count, you need to be missing like hands and shit, the very young and the very old.
Quote: I agree there are too many colleges, too many degrees, but good luck getting rid of hope.
Being burdened with a ton of student debt that cannot be discharged by bankruptcy and provides no guarantee of future employment is the exact opposite of hope. That being said there are tons of useless degrees I agree. For example I've often made the joke that a degree in social justice (some courses of which are REQUIRED PBR so good luck avoiding required courses), and the like are nothing more than degrees in unemployment, and racial or gender anger. Such degrees are worse than simply being non-productive, they are anti-productive.
Quote: People at least pretend to want to be dealt in.
They can be. There are plenty of jobs, in fact most of them that do not require a college degree. In large part the idea that a degree is necessary to do a job is the result of a desasterious governmental policy preventing employers from using IQ tests to determine if one can work for them. The thinking is that the degree means you went to school and thus have at least enough intellect to pass those courses. Problem is, when going to collage is not the province of the exceptionally smart and really becomes an additional 4 years of high school all degrees essentially become meaningless.
Degree inflation is a serious problem and one that won't be addressed by "free college".
Quote:But a few good ideas won't change the need for a basic change in balance. The uneven wealth distribution and who is creating it is obvious.
Universal basic income would be a disaster, and would ultimately be unworkable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMRaGxIOmnk
In the above video Stefan Molyneux explains why.
(08-30-2017, 08:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: In the same way, much of the alt right just wants to be uncivil to certain minority groups.
There is no evidence that this is the case.
Wearing a swatstica and waving a battle flag doesn't count? If you look you can find alt-right folk who almost plausibly hide their prejudice, but it's far easier to find prejudiced haters if you care to look. They want attention. I suspect you like that side of the alt right as little as I like what's recently become the alt left. That doesn't mean one should close one's eyes and pretend not to see.[/quote]
I'm not particularly concerned about the small, and unimportant neo-nazi movement which has existed for decades. Why? Because they are small and unimportant.
If you take a look at the ideologists of the Identitarian Right, or Alt-Right, like Spencer and Jared Taylor they aren't so much interested in rounding up blacks or jews and gassing them as they are in having an ethnostate that is exclusively white. Honestly I can see their point. Before Europe went insane they had just that. They were called Ireland, Britain, France, etc, etc, etc.
I don't have a use for their ideas as far as the US is concerned because there has never been a separation of the races, not even under slavery or segregation. Ideally I want to see the politics of identity completely smashed. As I've quoted before from TR hyphenated Americanism is anti-Americanism.
Quote: (08-30-2017, 08:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: (08-30-2017, 04:31 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I personally have no sympathy with that. There has been since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr's time a legal concept that negative rights to not protect the ability to harm others. Thus, you don't have a right to cry 'fire' in a crowded theory, and your right to swing you fist around ends where my nose begins. Old old principles. This very simple concept seems to be missed by many on the alt right. If they are systematically denying members of a certain subculture access, if they thank being cruel is harmless fun protected by the Constitution, they just aren't aware of where negative rights end.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. If the Left wins there won't be any free speech at all. I like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. am convinced the only limitations on free speech should be slander, libel and incitement (to riot or to violence or panic). Apart from that free speech is sacrosanct. Any attempt to restrict it past those common sense limitations is distinctly anti-American.
I will go further, if there are in fact positive rights in the Bill of Rights as it seems the ACA has opened the door for then I would say that it applies to the First and Second amendments just as much as any dubious right to health care. As such I demand that YouTube and etc provide me with a channel to spout off my nonsense, and that the federal government buy me an AR-15 (cause you can't have too many). I think the laundry room is still lacking a gun
I personally don't see hidden positive rights in the old Constitution. Freedom from Want was a justification to make war. The UDHR was a UN treaty we signed. It is binding perhaps, but who is running around enforcing it? The ACA may strive for similar principles, but it isn't structured as a bill of rights. If we are to share risks and costs, it will be because the modern people wish to do so.
But as long as there are areas of US culture that are reserved to a specific culture, gender or race, I don't see affirmative action going away. That counts as harm under law, as much as you dislike it. And while modern Nazi and Confederates aren't actively lynching and putting folks in gas chambers, the hatred is still there, and a few folk hate as much as they can get away with. I'll throw a few on the alt left in with the traditional folk. I see hateful violent behavior as worth getting rid of.
Bob, I don't either. But if the Supreme Court says there are, then there are--that's how judicial review works and that isn't a very controversial subject or at least it shouldn't be.
The UDHR is not enforceable, the UN doesn't have an army to enforce it. The UN is a paper tiger, it only has more teeth than the League it replaced because the US is often willing to act as world policeman. As for the ACA it isn't so much as a program to share risks and costs but rather a mandate that every citizen who doesn't qualify for Medicare or medicaid buy a certain product. It is in fact a giant subsidy to the insurance industry.
Where in the US is there space reserved for just one race, or gender? I won't go into culture because ideally there should only be one culture if we plan on being a functioning state. If I have the money I can live in a penthouse in NYC. A millionare if he desires to can live in a slum. This is a non-argument.
That being said, I would say that identitarian politics are ultimately entirely toxic. That toxicity manifests whether the direction it comes from is left or right. In America there is only one identity that should matter, the identity of being an American.
The ability to hate is a natural right. I'll even go further and say that the 14/88 crowd should even be allowed to openly say that "you know gassing the kikes and hanging niggers is fundamentally a good idea". I'm not concerned by their hate or their speech. It is when they start doing things that I grow concerned. And there already are laws for murder or assault.
The best way to limit violent behavior is to allow those that advocate it to speak. They will show themselves to be the assholes that they are and they will be ignored.
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(08-31-2017, 04:13 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: The best way to limit violent behavior is to allow those that advocate it to speak. They will show themselves to be the assholes that they are and they will be ignored.
Here we agree in full. The only caveat is actual violence, which cannot be ignored.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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08-31-2017, 04:50 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-31-2017, 05:04 PM by Bob Butler 54.)
Kinser Wrote:The UDHR is not enforceable, the UN doesn't have an army to enforce it. The UN is a paper tiger, it only has more teeth than the League it replaced because the US is often willing to act as world policeman. As for the ACA it isn't so much as a program to share risks and costs but rather a mandate that every citizen who doesn't qualify for Medicare or medicaid buy a certain product. It is in fact a giant subsidy to the insurance industry.
Where in the US is there space reserved for just one race, or gender? I won't go into culture because ideally there should only be one culture if we plan on being a functioning state. If I have the money I can live in a penthouse in NYC. A millionaire if he desires to can live in a slum. This is a non-argument.
That being said, I would say that identitarian politics are ultimately entirely toxic. That toxicity manifests whether the direction it comes from is left or right. In America there is only one identity that should matter, the identity of being an American.
The ability to hate is a natural right. I'll even go further and say that the 14/88 crowd should even be allowed to openly say that "you know gassing the kikes and hanging niggers is fundamentally a good idea". I'm not concerned by their hate or their speech. It is when they start doing things that I grow concerned. And there already are laws for murder or assault.
The best way to limit violent behavior is to allow those that advocate it to speak. They will show themselves to be the assholes that they are and they will be ignored.
Agreed on the UN.
I would say the intent of the ACA is to share risks and costs, rather than institute mandates for mandates sake. That's your politics speaking. I can sympathize with your characterization that the ACA didn't go far enough, but it's a headache getting anything through Congress. There are far better things than the ACA, and you're nudging in favor of some of them, but replacing before repealing seems out of reach just now.
There are places where you won't land a job if you aren't of the right gender, culture or pigmentation. Housing is much better than it was. Where you can't show prejudice in action, you shouldn't get affirmative action. However, there are still times and places for it. Some among the alt right suggest no place for affirmative action at all, which to me means they wish to continue prejudice. Personally, I find the desire to block affirmative action is often a desire to continue prejudice. It's just identity politics with an extra degree of indirection intended to say the liberal concerned with equality is at fault rather than the wannabe prejudice performer. If you accept that those attempting to continue prejudice are engaging in identity politics, I'm with you in preferring we could make identity politics of the past.
I'm pretty much in agreement on hate speech. I'm just inclined to expect violence following the speech. There's a reason I attach the spiral of rhetoric to the spiral of violence. Words leads to violence, and that's where we are in the spirals just now. However, if the cops wait until the words shift to violence, I've no beef. They should just expect and plan for it. I'll say that as much of Antifa as the so called neo Nazi and neo Confederates. Again, I suspect that for many it's as much the testosterone as well though out politics.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
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