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(04-21-2020, 09:57 AM)David Horn Wrote: (04-21-2020, 01:05 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: (04-19-2020, 03:46 AM)Blazkovitz Wrote: (04-18-2020, 10:53 AM)Ghost Wrote: I think the most likely scenario is that both the nationalists/populists and fringe left will be called out by "normies".
Who are the normies? Neoliberals?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Normie
Neoliberal [ism] - An ideology that adheres to the liberalized flows of labor/capital/raw materials across nations states so as to achieve the maximization of profits. It's "success" is measured by this thing called "GDP". GDP = gross domestic product. The stuff it measures is stupid since MIC spending is a plus sign while a bunch of externialities like pollution never, never get a minus sign. Reagan,Thatcher,Blair,Bill Clinton, the EU, US "establishment", are all evil, nice festering fomites of this mind virus.
I agree with Rags: the neoliberal philosophy is now totally, as compared to partially, rancid. None of the neoliberal concepts were promulgated for the betterment of anyone other than those actually pitching the ideas. That they have had the economic clout and the balls-on patience to push them regardless of the situation speaks highly of their perspicacity, and badly about their humanity. Now those ideas are asked to solve problems they actually caused, and the chickens are flying home in droves.
Absolutely. They win largely because they are such good deceivers and communicators, starting with the great communicator. They tell us they are giving us "freedom." "Government is the problem." That's a good one; who likes "the govamint?" They tell us that the 1980s was a boom time, and that greed is good. But it was only good for those pitching the boom. They falsely call themselves populists now, and stoke the racism and xenophobia that underlie much of the neo-liberal line: "don't give my tax money to freeloaders," and you know whom they mean. Taxed Enough Already, they cry. Now they are protesting because they have to work a little bit and take some responsibility to keep others and themselves safe. Poor gun toters; they can't go out and go party. So they go to their new TEA Party and make themselves and others sick.
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04-22-2020, 09:16 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-22-2020, 09:24 AM by Tim Randal Walker.)
The USA may be able to reach agreement with countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Agreements based on this-If you don't bother us, we won't bother you.
Keep in mind that the USA no longer needs policies rooted in the Cold War.
Using North Korea as an example.... There could be a situation in which the USA no longer has a problem with North Korean nukes.
The deal? North Korea can keep its nukes, so long as it refrains from deploying missiles with the range to hit the USA. In exchange, the USA would withdraw its forces from South Korea.
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On North Korea -- both the Republic of Korea (South) and the People's Republic of China agree on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. The United States concurs to the extent of not having nukes in South Korea. North Korea seems destined to either be absorbed into a unified Korea or become a puppet state of the People's Republic of China.
Much depends upon a President with a sane foreign policy. The Cold War is over, and Trump may have given it an inconvenient, if disconcerting end. We cannot go back even to Obama foreign policy.
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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(04-21-2020, 03:22 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (04-21-2020, 09:57 AM)David Horn Wrote: (04-21-2020, 01:05 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: (04-19-2020, 03:46 AM)Blazkovitz Wrote: (04-18-2020, 10:53 AM)Ghost Wrote: I think the most likely scenario is that both the nationalists/populists and fringe left will be called out by "normies".
Who are the normies? Neoliberals?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Normie
Neoliberal [ism] - An ideology that adheres to the liberalized flows of labor/capital/raw materials across nations states so as to achieve the maximization of profits. It's "success" is measured by this thing called "GDP". GDP = gross domestic product. The stuff it measures is stupid since MIC spending is a plus sign while a bunch of externialities like pollution never, never get a minus sign. Reagan,Thatcher,Blair,Bill Clinton, the EU, US "establishment", are all evil, nice festering fomites of this mind virus.
I agree with Rags: the neoliberal philosophy is now totally, as compared to partially, rancid. None of the neoliberal concepts were promulgated for the betterment of anyone other than those actually pitching the ideas. That they have had the economic clout and the balls-on patience to push them regardless of the situation speaks highly of their perspicacity, and badly about their humanity. Now those ideas are asked to solve problems they actually caused, and the chickens are flying home in droves.
Absolutely. They win largely because they are such good deceivers and communicators, starting with the great communicator. They tell us they are giving us "freedom." "Government is the problem." That's a good one; who likes "the govamint?" They tell us that the 1980s was a boom time, and that greed is good. But it was only good for those pitching the boom. They falsely call themselves populists now, and stoke the racism and xenophobia that underlie much of the neo-liberal line: "don't give my tax money to freeloaders," and you know whom they mean. Taxed Enough Already, they cry. Now they are protesting because they have to work a little bit and take some responsibility to keep others and themselves safe. Poor gun toters; they can't go out and go party. So they go to their new TEA Party and make themselves and others sick.
The neoliberal idea is that people must give Big Business the freedom to privatize, monopolize, and gouge, holding that maximal profits are themselves a super-prosperity that solves all problems. Neoliberalism comes with more mindless consumerism and with more intense disparities of opulence and deprivation, on more rapid depletion of resources, the ravaging of the environment for quick bucks or enhanced profit, on lower pay, the sacrifice of of workplace safety, despotic management, bigger rewards to administrative elites, reduced taxes for the super-rich, and government representing economic and bureaucratic power instead of the People. It is hard to see what is liberal about that. It is fascism without the torture chambers (at least here), official racism, and reckless warfare, although wars for profit and support of brutal plutocracy in countries that have "American interests abroad" (meaning, in a particularly-American form of Orwellian Newspeak, American corporate investments overseas such as Kennecott Copper which caused America to support the Pinochet coup and subsequent dictatorship) are possible.
Should people attending the "Liberate (name state with a state Governor hostile to the Trump agenda)" rallies, contract CORVID-19 and die in large numbers, then such will reshape the political ethos of America from 2021 on. Nothing convinces those not involved in a failure of the failure of the idea than does self-destructive failure. Success inspires imitation even to the extent of doing much the same on a bigger scale; gross failure discourages imitation.
Donald Trump took Reaganomics (but not Reagan foreign policy!) to a preposterous conclusion and he has done more to kill it than any liberal crusader for social equity. After Trump, Obama is going to look very good for both liberal and conservative agendas, which reminds me of Eisenhower in America and DeGaulle in France, if without the military heroism. (This said, Obama seems to suggest the model of a senior military officer due to his temperament). The Mature Reactive is no visionary, but he makes few mistakes and allows people to do things on a small scale that, if highly successful on a small scale, work well enough on a grand scale. Trump wasn't even a good businessman.
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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(04-22-2020, 09:16 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: The USA may be able to reach agreement with countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Agreements based on this-If you don't bother us, we won't bother you.
Keep in mind that the USA no longer needs policies rooted in the Cold War.
Using North Korea as an example.... There could be a situation in which the USA no longer has a problem with North Korean nukes.
The deal? North Korea can keep its nukes, so long as it refrains from deploying missiles with the range to hit the USA. In exchange, the USA would withdraw its forces from South Korea.
So you're good with throwing our South Korean allies under the bus then? This is not a fringe regime; it's rogue, Trump's love letters not to the contrary. They need to be carefully watched and opposed every time they make offensive moves. Opposition doesn't have to be military, but it can't be off the table. It may be required in the future.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(04-22-2020, 03:27 PM)David Horn Wrote: (04-22-2020, 09:16 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: The USA may be able to reach agreement with countries such as Iran and North Korea.
Agreements based on this-If you don't bother us, we won't bother you.
Keep in mind that the USA no longer needs policies rooted in the Cold War.
Using North Korea as an example.... There could be a situation in which the USA no longer has a problem with North Korean nukes.
The deal? North Korea can keep its nukes, so long as it refrains from deploying missiles with the range to hit the USA. In exchange, the USA would withdraw its forces from South Korea.
So you're good with throwing our South Korean allies under the bus then? This is not a fringe regime; it's rogue, Trump's love letters not to the contrary. They need to be carefully watched and opposed every time they make offensive moves. Opposition doesn't have to be military, but it can't be off the table. It may be required in the future.
Well, I would be perfectly satisfied with throwing North Korea under the "bus" known as the People's Liberation Army (of China). Such would be an improvement.
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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(04-22-2020, 03:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Well, I would be perfectly satisfied with throwing North Korea under the "bus" known as the People's Liberation Army (of China). Such would be an improvement.
Unfortunately, China is in range of North Korean nukes. I'm sure they'd rather the US did it.
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01-13-2021, 01:01 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-13-2021, 01:06 PM by Tim Randal Walker.)
I was reviewing archived threads. Consider The Saeculum in Ancient Rome. Kurt Horner listed turnings in his post of January 29, 2004.
One 4T that he listed was Land Reform and Constitutional Crisis. I don't recall the details, and the links I had posted no longer work. But I believe that was a 4T with an internal focus, without turning into a full blown civil war.
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01-13-2021, 01:18 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-13-2021, 01:18 PM by Tim Randal Walker.)
I was reviewing an archived thread, The Two Lifetime Cycle. Based on the double rhythm. According to our current position in this cycle, the question before us is whether the USA will stick with the status quo, or return to pre-New Deal era.
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(01-13-2021, 01:18 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I was reviewing an archived thread, The Two Lifetime Cycle. Based on the double rhythm. According to our current position in this cycle, the question before us is whether the USA will stick with the status quo, or return to pre-New Deal era.
Where can you view archived threads? I'm wondering if my old posts are in there (presuming I can even remember my old user name).
What do you mean by a 'pre-New Deal' era because some aspects of that are, I believe, off the table even on the conservative side. Discrimination based on race is, effectively, dead on both sides. The central conflict is over to what extent we go past 'just don't discriminate' and into active efforts to reduce inequity of outcome.
I've been reading up on the Revolutionary war, specifically the experience of British loyalists, and realized something interesting. It was those loyalists who, in the waning days of the 4T, helped establish the concept of a central government that protected the rights of states against each other and of the citizens of those states. This addressed the primary concerns of those who could not commit fully to the Revolutionary cause and, when you project out a few more turnings, became the Northern Liberal cause that was 'union must be preserved' while the old independence movement became the new 'states rights' one.
You can follow that pattern through the next two turnings where more moderate members of the defeated (or excluded) side helps to form the final social compact in a way that addresses the values they are most concerned about. Those values become the new progressive ones for those rebelling against that (now conservative) social consensus. They don't *exactly* look like the last turnings conservatives because the losing side goes through a process by which it realizes some of the things it thought aligned with it's values really didn't or policies it wanted are no longer important. The winning side does not go through this self-examination, which is why it is rife with contradictions for the new Prophets to point out.
I guess, my open question would be, who (or what groups) within the conservative group do you think would be able to help form the final social compact, what conservative values or principles do you think would need to be protected for that consensus to occur, and what elements of the dominant left do you think the next Prophets will rebel against?
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01-13-2021, 05:41 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-13-2021, 05:42 PM by Tim Randal Walker.)
Scroll down to the bottom and click on Old Fourth Turning Posts.
Then click on the Fourth Turning Archive.
Then scroll down and click on the link.
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(01-13-2021, 05:41 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Scroll down to the bottom and click on Old Fourth Turning Posts.
Then click on the Fourth Turning Archive.
Then scroll down and click on the link.
Thanks! Sadly, I couldn't find anything that resonated, I might have stopped actively posting back in the old Netforum days. Did recognize a lot of names, though.
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