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02-07-2019, 09:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-07-2019, 10:17 PM by Eric the Green.)
The 2020s are coming. Progress is returning soon. Society will be revving up. The dam is going to burst.
The stagnation will break up. The regression will be replaced by hope and imagination. Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism will be off our backs. Nationalist xenophobia will be forgotten. Pent-up ideas and dreams will be coming out of the woodwork. Poverty and inequality will not be acceptable. The punishment state will be passe. Freedom will be back in vogue, and so will society and civic responsibility. War will be seen as something to go beyond. Culture will revive. The train to freedom will be coming on through. Utopias will be back in style. No good idea will be off the table. No bad idea will be taken for granted. Democracy will revive. 40 years of nothing, means that 40 years, and more, of something, are overdue. Here they come!
So what new ideas will be coming into play? What will be proposed, and what will be adopted? You can post them here.
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Here's one:
https://youtu.be/ydKcaIE6O1k?t=13m38s
If history teaches us anything, it is that things could be different. There is nothing inevitable about the way we structure our society and economy right now. Ideas can and do change the world. And I think that especially in the past few years, it has become abundantly clear that we cannot stick to the status quo; that we need new ideas.
I know that many of you may feel pessimistic about a future of rising inequality, xenophobia, and climate change. But it's not enough to know what we're against; we also need to be for something. Martin Luther King didn't say, I have a nightmare. He had a dream. So, here's my dream. I believe in a future where the value of your work is not determined by the size of your paycheck, but by the amount of happiness you spread, and the amount of meaning you give. I believe in a future where the point of education is not to prepare you for another useless job, but for a life well lived. I believe in a future where an existence without poverty is not a privilege, but a right we all deserve.
Hey, counter-culture ideas from the sixties keep rising up, huh!
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(02-07-2019, 09:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 2020s are coming. Progress is returning soon. Society will be revving up. The dam is going to burst.
The stagnation will break up. The regression will be replaced by hope and imagination. Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism will be off our backs. Nationalist xenophobia will be forgotten. Pent-up ideas and dreams will be coming out of the woodwork. Poverty and inequality will not be acceptable. The punishment state will be passe. Freedom will be back in vogue, and so will society and civic responsibility. War will be seen as something to go beyond. Culture will revive. The train to freedom will be coming on through. Utopias will be back in style. No good idea will be off the table. No bad idea will be taken for granted. Democracy will revive. 40 years of nothing, means that 40 years, and more, of something, are overdue. Here they come!
So what new ideas will be coming into play? What will be proposed, and what will be adopted? You can post them here.
https://www.tulsigabbard.org/ 
I don't agree with her wrt illegal aliens. However I like all of the other stuff. Alas perfection doesn't exit in Ragsland.
---Value Added
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You can do better than Tulsi; try again. Post a cool idea that can change the world, not the false ideas from some jerky politician.
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(02-07-2019, 11:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: You can do better than Tulsi; try again. Post a cool idea that can change the world, not the false ideas from some jerky politician.
OK. Let's whip up a dotardzombie virus. Said virus only infects and turns dotards into zombies. I'd love to zombiefie Trump, Pompeo, and all of these things . I'm not gonna call them people, because real people are not evil like that. I'm sure there's some genetic commonality that's there for the exploiting!  Just imagine a world without Neocons. It's truly inspiring man. And let's go for a double header. I want this virus to also infect the Davos crowd and do the same thing to them. That would be champagne wishes and caviar dreams come true for Rags, that's for sure.
---Value Added
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02-08-2019, 01:15 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-08-2019, 01:15 AM by Eric the Green.)
Speaking of zombies, I posted a new thread about neoliberalism that included this wonderful interview with an idea man who can help rev up society and democracy in the 2020s, defeat the zombies of the neo-liberal and neo-con elite, and point us toward a society of fulfilling imagination and justice. "The biggest lie of all is equating democracy and capitalism."
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I wouldn#t mind if it became like that, but currently it sounds like a pipedream.
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Freedom is typically not in vogue during a 4T or 1T. On the contrary, both great tyrannies (Nazism and Bolshevism) reached their heyday during such a turning. Africa and some parts of the Middle East had their 4T in the 1960s, and tyrannies appeared there too.
Also, culture never flourishes during a 4T or 1T.
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02-08-2019, 01:09 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-08-2019, 01:25 PM by Eric the Green.)
(02-08-2019, 11:18 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Freedom is typically not in vogue during a 4T or 1T. On the contrary, both great tyrannies (Nazism and Bolshevism) reached their heyday during such a turning. Africa and some parts of the Middle East had their 4T in the 1960s, and tyrannies appeared there too.
Also, culture never flourishes during a 4T or 1T.
It's a good point, but it's not so either/or.
The American Revolution brought us a charter of liberties. The French Revolution brought one too; the first one. And it spurred romantic culture. Since I include the 1850s in the 4T, it's notable that the greatest transcendentalist literature came out in the early 1850s. The civil war brought more liberties to more people, the "new birth of freedom" declared in Lincoln's very-popular Gettysburg Address, and the New Deal brought greater freedom from want and freedom from fear, liberation from Prohibition, and then the war was waged to defeat the Nazis and declare a world-wide charter of human rights.
What we will see is restoration of the role of government and public institutions and social solidarity, overthrowing neo-liberalism in the 4T. Some drastic accretions of state power could occur for the purposes of making change or imposing tyranny, here and elsewhere. Such happens in 4Ts. Tyranny has made a comeback after the mostly-failed worldwide Arab Spring Revolution of 2011.
But I see a simultaneous reawakening of culture and fulfillment of the dreams of those seeking greater freedom too, as the seeds of the 2T come to fruition. It may be a pipedream, considering how thoroughly the dreams and visions of the hippies and the new age have been brainwashed out of us, but this is still a renaissance phase in the great cycle of civilization, and I place my hope in that larger cycle, knowing that the saeculum is not the only cycle and Uranus is not the only planet. The year 2022 could see a major artistic awakening as well as a year of compassionate action.
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02-08-2019, 05:49 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-08-2019, 05:54 PM by Eric the Green.)
Poverty and the neo-liberalism that perpetuates it are mutually confirming. In the red states, especially in the South, most people are more poor. They do more poorly in all the ways the TED speaker above mentioned. This reduces their intelligence and their time to learn and inform themselves, so they are swept up in neo-liberal blame-the-poor ideology and the religious right, and they vote Republican. This in turn puts neo-liberalism even more firmly in control, whose politicians further reduce support to the poor, and poverty grows further. Vicious cycle.
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(02-08-2019, 05:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Poverty and the neo-liberalism that perpetuates it are mutually confirming. In the red states, especially in the South, most people are more poor. They do more poorly in all the ways the TED speaker above mentioned. This reduces their intelligence and their time to learn and inform themselves, so they are swept up in neo-liberal blame-the-poor ideology and the religious right, and they vote Republican. This in turn puts neo-liberalism even more firmly in control, whose politicians further reduce support to the poor, and poverty grows further. Vicious cycle.
What you're describing is a positive feedback loop: the more something happens, the more it's encouraged to happen. Loops like this have only two end results: total embrace of the toxic force or the emergence of a countervailing force that slows and, hopefully, reverses the feedback. We're seeing the first inklings of that now, but it's only at the enlightenment stage. Fierce advocates like AOC are just the Paul Reveres of this issue. The real struggle lies ahead.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(02-08-2019, 11:18 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Freedom is typically not in vogue during a 4T or 1T. On the contrary, both great tyrannies (Nazism and Bolshevism) reached their heyday during such a turning. Africa and some parts of the Middle East had their 4T in the 1960s, and tyrannies appeared there too.
Also, culture never flourishes during a 4T or 1T.
Big band music was quite possibly the greatest popular music ever (unless you are going to count Haydn and Mozart as 'popular' because their music was similarly popular when it was new for much the same reasons -- omnibus appeal, catchy tunes, powerful rhythm, and tight structure... Benny Goodman's Let's Dance! is arguably better than the Invitation to the Dance by Carl Maria von Weber upon which it is taken). Note also that the Golden Year of American Cinema (1939) is definitely in a Crisis Era, as are many movies of great quality from surrounding years.
This said, the culture of a Crisis Era can be very good -- but it is almost never made for personal expression or narrow audiences. In view of what has come out of Pixar Studios and Marvel Studios in recent years, we are back to omnibus entertainment to which one can take the whole family. It is not over the heads of children, offensive to the elderly or devout, or too shallow or stupid for people with high IQs. Movies like Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or Bonnie and Clyde just would not be made today. But even such a masterpiece as Casablanca can have propaganda value. (I wrote a review of my favorite movie and recognized a Shakespeare-quality script and a subtle illusion to The Divine Comedy in that Nazi Germany was the Inferno, a place full of ambiguities like Morocco was Purgatory, and America was Paradise... and that a self-pitying American like "Rick Blaine" could achieve redemption only in giving up his self-pity and going unambiguously and whole-heartedly to the Allied cause). Even Gone With the Wind suggests how not to deal with a Crisis mode (defending something rotten like slavery is one sure way to fail and get horrible consequences).
Creative people have yet to get behind Donald Trump... and likely never will. Lincoln and Their Finest Hour (Churchill) allude to leaders to whom Donald Trump can never compare. Trump went low in his appeal and has missed much of America.
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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(02-08-2019, 01:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The year 2022 could see a major artistic awakening as well as a year of compassionate action.
Expect "compassionate" collectivism when the UK is ruled by Corbyn and France by Le Pen. In the meanwhile, America can get rid of Trump and begin the brand new cycle. It's not that a stretch to imagine a Crisis lasting only 14 years!
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People are more and more tired of politics and this is IMHO a sign that 1T is close!
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(02-09-2019, 11:21 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: (02-08-2019, 01:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The year 2022 could see a major artistic awakening as well as a year of compassionate action.
Expect "compassionate" collectivism when the UK is ruled by Corbyn and France by Le Pen. In the meanwhile, America can get rid of Trump and begin the brand new cycle. It's not that a stretch to imagine a Crisis lasting only 14 years!
Sidebar: It seems to me that the UK, at the moment, has the worst choices in politicians in Western Europe, the Italians being the perpetual exception. Macron and Le Pen aren't exactly paragons either, but the UK has the more unique problem that both the Tories and Labor have no obvious leaders between them. I mean, Teresa May is a lovely woman and a fine MP -- full stop! At that, she seems the best of the lot. And Corbyn is best suited to soapbox oratory, not governance. With the US in similar straits, I'm just hoping that the 2020 election here elevates a real leader and moves us forward. I hope the same for you in yours.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(02-10-2019, 08:00 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: People are more and more tired of politics and this is IMHO a sign that 1T is close!
Don't be silly. Looks more like the Crisis didn't really start yet.
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(02-10-2019, 11:43 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: (02-10-2019, 08:00 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: People are more and more tired of politics and this is IMHO a sign that 1T is close!
Don't be silly. Looks more like the Crisis didn't really start yet.
We are close to the beginning of the end. We are sorting through what works and does not work, and Trump looks like a failure. So we found that the most ruthless and selfish plutocrat that many thought would force change for the better would be a failure.
People are getting sick of right-wing politics except in the most backward parts of America.
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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(02-10-2019, 02:12 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: (02-10-2019, 11:43 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: (02-10-2019, 08:00 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: People are more and more tired of politics and this is IMHO a sign that 1T is close!
Don't be silly. Looks more like the Crisis didn't really start yet.
We are close to the beginning of the end. We are sorting through what works and does not work, and Trump looks like a failure. So we found that the most ruthless and selfish plutocrat that many thought would force change for the better would be a failure.
People are getting sick of right-wing politics except in the most backward parts of America.
Half way through COULD be described as the beginning of the end. But that's where we are. But remember, our crisis is basically an 1850s redux, and in the 1850s, it didn't seem as if the crisis had started either. Society and its leaders were avoiding, yet bringing on, the inevitable conflict. So it is with our cold civil war. I see a better outcome than that this time though.
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(02-09-2019, 11:21 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: (02-08-2019, 01:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The year 2022 could see a major artistic awakening as well as a year of compassionate action.
Expect "compassionate" collectivism when the UK is ruled by Corbyn and France by Le Pen. In the meanwhile, America can get rid of Trump and begin the brand new cycle. It's not that a stretch to imagine a Crisis lasting only 14 years!
LePen and Corbyn are opposites. I hope Corbyn gets in; that would fit a more 4T constellation. LePen could fit too, if France goes fascist. But I don't think that will happen.
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(02-10-2019, 08:48 AM)David Horn Wrote: (02-09-2019, 11:21 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: (02-08-2019, 01:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The year 2022 could see a major artistic awakening as well as a year of compassionate action.
Expect "compassionate" collectivism when the UK is ruled by Corbyn and France by Le Pen. In the meanwhile, America can get rid of Trump and begin the brand new cycle. It's not that a stretch to imagine a Crisis lasting only 14 years!
Sidebar: It seems to me that the UK, at the moment, has the worst choices in politicians in Western Europe, the Italians being the perpetual exception. Macron and Le Pen aren't exactly paragons either, but the UK has the more unique problem that both the Tories and Labor have no obvious leaders between them. I mean, Teresa May is a lovely woman and a fine MP -- full stop! At that, she seems the best of the lot. And Corbyn is best suited to soapbox oratory, not governance. With the US in similar straits, I'm just hoping that the 2020 election here elevates a real leader and moves us forward. I hope the same for you in yours.
It sounds like you look upon Corbyn the way I look upon all the announced Democratic US candidates so far. I think I have some confidence in Corbyn, whereas I have no confidence that the so-far announced Democratic candidates can either defeat Trump OR govern well even if elected. So if the USA 2020 election elevates a real leader, that leader has not stepped forward as yet. It still might happen though.
Teresa May I agree is a fine leader, but her unwillingness to back down on Brexit is a fatal flaw. And she is a conservative, which means she is not taking the UK in the best direction, although it's nowhere near as bad a direction as Trump is taking.
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