What the next First Turning won't be like

[Mickey123]

There's a general impression in this forum that the worst of the Crisis is behind us and we're on the verge of entering the next High, without much of a crisis ever actually happening.  I've realized that the reason for this is that people here have no concept of what the next High is actually going to be like.

There's a vague idea among many people here that the next High is basically going to be like the unraveling, except with some laundry list of liberal improvements, like racism having disappeared or big corporations being forced to behave themselves and pay workers more.  But this isn't what it will be like at all.  It can't be, because that's not what a first turning is like.

First turnings are culturally conservative. They are a time of conformity.  Yes, the divide between wealthy and poor is less, but this is not because people are more liberal, but because everyone, including large corporations, is expected to do what's best for the group instead of what's best for themselves.  The last awakening began with hippies doing their own thing in the parks, and ended with big companies doing their own thing and not having to follow any particular rules or standards.  By the High this process has been reversed.  Companies do what's best for society, and so do individuals, because everyone must conform.

There will be a repolarization of male/female sex roles.  Men and women will be seen as fundamentally different, and these differences will be accepted and even celebrated.  This doesn't mean a return to the 1950s system where women were not allowed to work most jobs, but it means that any ideas that men and women are the same will be abandoned.  Feminism as a movement will not exist, unless it is repurposed to point out the value of being a woman (under society's new consensus on what it is to be a woman).

People will respect social institutions, respect the government, the press, the police, and so on.  This doesn't mean that these institutions will fundamentally be better than they are now or were in the past, but the time for criticism of them will be over.

We are a long, long way from the above.  How do we get there from here?  The answer is, we don't.  We can't go directly from here to there.  The only way to get there is for the crisis to be so large that everyone comes together to solve it, and then the spirit of coming together lasts once the crisis is over. 

I'm guessing this will take some sort of revolutionary or civil war in the U.S.  It might be something else, but it won't be "and then Joe Biden was elected and a vaccine was found for covid-19 and everyone lived happily ever after".

[jleagans]

Crisis was resolved (new theory ) through the over education of millennials . Innoculated then from Donald Trump nonsense .

[Camz]

I wonder how the revival of gender roles will affect gay, trans, and non-binary people. I'm really scared for that honestly. If there will be a new wave of cis-heteronormativity I'm really not gonna enjoy this High.

[Isoko]

Camz, 

I think that the new High will actually be a very weak high. We have had a weak crisis and I expect no major changes during the high. What was established in the previous turnings will continue and become the new Conservative. 

What I do feel though is that the next Awakening will be more centre right in nature. People are not going to persecute homosexuals but there will be more focus on family values. This is needed to resolve the low birth rates the rest of the world is facing. 

To be honest, I expect people of the future to be not right wing anymore but not left wing either. I suspect they will be centrist in their points of view. I'm starting to see this new centrism arising in the Gen Z age group slowly and I expect it will continue as the future turnings come.

[pbrower2a]

(10-26-2020, 11:46 PM)Mickey123 Wrote: There's a general impression in this forum that the worst of the Crisis is behind us and we're on the verge of entering the next High, without much of a crisis ever actually happening.  I've realized that the reason for this is that people here have no concept of what the next High is actually going to be like.

There's a vague idea among many people here that the next High is basically going to be like the unraveling, except with some laundry list of liberal improvements, like racism having disappeared or big corporations being forced to behave themselves and pay workers more.  But this isn't what it will be like at all.  It can't be, because that's not what a first turning is like.

America had an economic meltdown similar in severity after a year and a half to the first year and a half of the meltdown that began the Great Depression. 



The blue squiggly curve beginning in September 2007 at points digs lower than the gray squiggly curve beginning in September 1929 at a couple of points in late 2008 and early 2009. It's obvious that with similar policies by the federal government in 2009 that things could eventually get much worse -- like tigntening fiscal and monetary policy that was the economic orthodoxy of the late 1920's (one must balance the budget at all costs, and Hoover's attempts to economize further gutted the economy). Hoover could have prevented further meltdown by backing the banks from the destructive bank runs that utterly destroyed the financial system and nearly put America on a barter system.

Federal deposit insurance protects against bank runs, so another depression of the sort of the 1930's is impossible. 

We are not going to solve all our problems cheaply. I don't expect the full laundry list of liberal proposals to be enacted this time any more than they were enacted in 2009 and 2010 (if anything, America became increasingly reactionary in its politics through the first two years of the Donald Trump Presidency. But the sorts of reactionary practices that Trump wanted (including mass privatization of the public sector) also failed.  

Quote:First turnings are culturally conservative. They are a time of conformity.  Yes, the divide between wealthy and poor is less, but this is not because people are more liberal, but because everyone, including large corporations, is expected to do what's best for the group instead of what's best for themselves.  The last awakening began with hippies doing their own thing in the parks, and ended with big companies doing their own thing and not having to follow any particular rules or standards.  By the High this process has been reversed.  Companies do what's best for society, and so do individuals, because everyone must conform.

Figure that the cornerstone of liberal victories in elections is America's model minorities: Jews, middle-class Latinos, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, and the Black Bourgeoisie. Do these people seem to be part of any cultural avant-garde? It may be best that they are not. America's distress is economic, and not cultural. Such people will shape much about American culture, and much of the new shape will fit these people. The cultural divide in America will be between traditions and not between cultural hypermodernity and daring innovation in style. I expect all of these groups to return educational practice to the tried and true. Maybe norms of public education will shift from the norm of K-12 education to K-14... but such will come with more compulsory classes and fewer electives. Survey courses in economics, philosophy, psychology, comparative economic and political systems, probability and statistics, and child development look like obvious candidates. Maybe there will be some choice on a foreign language (best for most Americans would be one Romance, one Germanic, and one Slavic language, but I could not guarantee that).  Maybe I would throw in an art appreciation and a music appreciation class... people will be working fewer hours, and not more around 2040, and I can assure people that time spent in art galleries or listening to non-pop music (classical, jazz, folk, maybe rhythm-and-blues) isn't wasted time. 

If you wonder why I chose the classes that I suggested, then philosophy is the core of all learning and where one can learn formal logic. Psychology can teach us how to avoid cons; economics can give the essential lessons that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that very little that is good is cheap. Comparative systems might inoculate us against demagogues who offer some foreign ideology that somehow fails to fit America. Demagogues against which I wish we could have been inoculated include Donald Trump.        

Quote:There will be a repolarization of male/female sex roles.  Men and women will be seen as fundamentally different, and these differences will be accepted and even celebrated.  This doesn't mean a return to the 1950s system where women were not allowed to work most jobs, but it means that any ideas that men and women are the same will be abandoned.  Feminism as a movement will not exist, unless it is repurposed to point out the value of being a woman (under society's new consensus on what it is to be a woman).

Probably so. There will be fewer hours needed to achieve our basic needs, so it may be far safer to put women back in the kitchen with the children and going to religious services with the children in tow rather than creating a large number of unemployed men who go to the bar to get drunk on liquor and extremist politics. (Think carefully; all fascist causes are bad-boy clubs, whether the KKK, Mussolini's Fascii di Combattimento, Nazis, and [if perhaps without the liquor] al-Qaeda and Daesh. There's good reason for the victorious Allies insisting on votes for women in Italy and Japan upon victory and even in France, which had more than its share of defeatists and collaborators aligned with German and Italian fascism). Talented women will get highly-desirable jobs, but I expect the large number of female salesclerks and cleaners to diminish greatly. 

I expect real costs of housing to plummet, mostly because much economic activity will return or emerge in places recently ravaged. Concentration of economic activity on the coasts will diminish, so people will be able to make solid incomes in places like Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, and St. Louis again. If one can make it there one need not pay the exorbitant rents of coastal cities -- right?    

Quote:People will respect social institutions, respect the government, the press, the police, and so on.  This doesn't mean that these institutions will fundamentally be better than they are now or were in the past, but the time for criticism of them will be over.

People will demand better of institutions and get better behavior from those institutions. I look at Black Lives Matters as a cause that can attract people to the recognition that we have far too many cops much more trigger-happy with black people that they stop than with white people.  On the other hand, criminal behavior will be far easier to detect, and prosecution of offenders will be far more efficient and decisive. Welcome to a pattern known in another advanced industrial country: Japan. Do not be a criminal in Japan, for you will be treated like a political offender is in China with thought reform.  

I expect much consolidation of media markets. It may not be so obvious, but I can easily imagine close-by cities being merged into the same media market for newspapers and television (if not radio). As an example, expansive Nevada is basically two TV markets (Reno and Las Vegas). Nebraska has lots of small-town TV stations... except that those are really repeaters of the Lincoln market. I can see much the same happening in such states as Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. I expect people to demand better of news media (more genuine news and less fluff, let alone overt propaganda -- on that here's a Bronx cheer to "Stinking Liar Broadcasting"

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/sinclair-...ast-group/

Again, a well-educated populace is much less vulnerable to propaganda because it recognizes the manipulation and fabrication when such presents itself. 

Quote:We are a long, long way from the above.  How do we get there from here?  The answer is, we don't.  We can't go directly from here to there.  The only way to get there is for the crisis to be so large that everyone comes together to solve it, and then the spirit of coming together lasts once the crisis is over. 

After the invective that seems built into the system, we will be ready for more placidity in politics and find such refreshing when it arrives. It will be a good idea to have a tax system that creates niches for small business so that people create jobs instead of depending upon a race-to-the-bottom in a bidding war for employment in corporate America. We are at the end of the era in which further productivity itself creates more happiness through the potential for consumer spending (no, we don't need two washing machines or two dryers, more than one car per adult driver, two giant refrigerators, or more than one TV per person)... Status symbols will become meaningless. 

Quote:I'm guessing this will take some sort of revolutionary or civil war in the U.S.  It might be something else, but it won't be "and then Joe Biden was elected and a vaccine was found for covid-19 and everyone lived happily ever after".

"Happily ever after" exists only in fairy tales. People will eventually tire of the 1T.

By the way -- COVID-19 is a genuine crisis event. In eight months we have more deaths from it than the total combat deaths of the Union side in the Civil War (which took four years, even if with a much smaller population); we are approaching the total combat death toll of American armed forces in World War II. Some Americans are responding to COVID-19 as if it were a genuine Crisis necessitating major changes in life, and some are failing to do so... and failing to do so could cause mass death.

[Warren Dew]

(10-29-2020, 02:05 PM)Camz Wrote: I wonder how the revival of gender roles will affect gay, trans, and non-binary people. I'm really scared for that honestly. If there will be a new wave of cis-heteronormativity I'm really not gonna enjoy this High.

That's the way highs are.  You get to conform to the majority and if you don't like it, tough luck.  You may have to hang in there until the awakening.

[Bob Butler 54]

(10-29-2020, 06:38 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(10-29-2020, 02:05 PM)Camz Wrote: I wonder how the revival of gender roles will affect gay, trans, and non-binary people. I'm really scared for that honestly. If there will be a new wave of cis-heteronormativity I'm really not gonna enjoy this High.

That's the way highs are.  You get to conform to the majority and if you don't like it, tough luck.  You may have to hang in there until the awakening.

If the usual case occurs, and the new values come out ahead, which in this crisis seems to mean a Biden victory Tuesday, you won't have to worry too much.  Biden is not out to divide or to oppress those not like him.  The old values will collapse, have no real meaning.  Otherwise...  Let's worry about that on Wednesday.

[Eric the Green]

(10-26-2020, 11:46 PM)Mickey123 Wrote: There's a general impression in this forum that the worst of the Crisis is behind us and we're on the verge of entering the next High, without much of a crisis ever actually happening.  I've realized that the reason for this is that people here have no concept of what the next High is actually going to be like.

There's a vague idea among many people here that the next High is basically going to be like the unraveling, except with some laundry list of liberal improvements, like racism having disappeared or big corporations being forced to behave themselves and pay workers more.  But this isn't what it will be like at all.  It can't be, because that's not what a first turning is like.

First turnings are culturally conservative. They are a time of conformity.  Yes, the divide between wealthy and poor is less, but this is not because people are more liberal, but because everyone, including large corporations, is expected to do what's best for the group instead of what's best for themselves.  The last awakening began with hippies doing their own thing in the parks, and ended with big companies doing their own thing and not having to follow any particular rules or standards.  By the High this process has been reversed.  Companies do what's best for society, and so do individuals, because everyone must conform.

There will be a repolarization of male/female sex roles.  Men and women will be seen as fundamentally different, and these differences will be accepted and even celebrated.  This doesn't mean a return to the 1950s system where women were not allowed to work most jobs, but it means that any ideas that men and women are the same will be abandoned.  Feminism as a movement will not exist, unless it is repurposed to point out the value of being a woman (under society's new consensus on what it is to be a woman).

People will respect social institutions, respect the government, the press, the police, and so on.  This doesn't mean that these institutions will fundamentally be better than they are now or were in the past, but the time for criticism of them will be over.

We are a long, long way from the above.  How do we get there from here?  The answer is, we don't.  We can't go directly from here to there.  The only way to get there is for the crisis to be so large that everyone comes together to solve it, and then the spirit of coming together lasts once the crisis is over. 

I'm guessing this will take some sort of revolutionary or civil war in the U.S.  It might be something else, but it won't be "and then Joe Biden was elected and a vaccine was found for covid-19 and everyone lived happily ever after".

If the struggle in this 4T is that severe, which it may be, there's no way the winners (assuming them to be the progressive side) will go right back to anti-feminism. The tide toward respect for diversity among genders is so strong that I doubt it can be put back. I understand the idea as you express it, but color me dubious.

[Eric the Green]

(10-29-2020, 02:46 PM)Isoko Wrote: Camz, 

I think that the new High will actually be a very weak high. We have had a weak crisis and I expect no major changes during the high. What was established in the previous turnings will continue and become the new Conservative. 

What I do feel though is that the next Awakening will be more centre right in nature. People are not going to persecute homosexuals but there will be more focus on family values. This is needed to resolve the low birth rates the rest of the world is facing. 

To be honest, I expect people of the future to be not right wing anymore but not left wing either. I suspect they will be centrist in their points of view. I'm starting to see this new centrism arising in the Gen Z age group slowly and I expect it will continue as the future turnings come.

I'm not with you again on this. Not entirely. It could be a weak high, because of various factors. The climate crisis will not go away, even if we start to deal with it in the 2020s. Resources will be under strain, so it won't be the prosperous and easy American High or American Decade like last time. Also, activism will not go away, and the post cold-civil war will not entirely diminish in the early 2030s. The double rhythm and the planetary cycles indicates a period like the post-civil war of the 1870s. The right wing may have some victories in this period, however.

But nothing has been "established" in the previous turnings. All we have had is just a conservative reaction, especially in the economics sphere. We have had a weak crisis so far because the crisis has not erupted yet. The way I have seen this decade since decades ago, is that the struggle will be fierce, and demands for change and activism intense and unflagging. People power is rising all over the world to resist our revitalized tyranny system and to demand action on the myriad of long-unfinished business. Climate change, gun massacres, repression of voters and workers, health care debacles, repression of democracy, cultural/religious/race repression; all are unacceptable to the people and will be resisted tool and nail by them. We have seen it in the USA during the months when Saturn dipped into Aquarius this Summer. It is about to dip back in for good in December. The late lame duck session or early new congress will finally pass that second covid relief bill, for example; just like when it passed the first one immediately upon Saturn's first entry into Aquarius. It was an unprecedented spending bill for a trickle-down economics congress and president to pass so quickly. This time, it will be both Jupiter and Saturn making that entrance together.

It is impossible to say that the USA will be right, left or center per se. This changes with the times. We have had rule by the right-wing for 40 years. It is unsustainable. It needs to go left now, like during the last 4T crisis. I still think it will; at least center-left and quite possibly hard-left. But later on, during the later years of the coming 1T (resembling the late 1950s or early 1880s), a more centrist or corporate government and society will be OK for a while. I expect this moderate center-right trend to fully take hold in the mid-2030s and climax around 2040. But it could be brief, because the next awakening, like the last, will be speeded up in its schedule by the Uranus-Pluto alignment from 2045 to 2050, just like it did in 1963-1969.

There is a slight uptick toward the right now in what Pew calls Gen Z (but is really late Gen Y/Millennial), according to polls and graphs I have seen, but it is small so far, and the preferences of this new voting block are still strongly left. Whatever slowing down this small group may be having on the leftward thrust of the Millennials is not enough to change the very strong support for Democrats and liberal ideas among the youngest voting blocs. See the CNN poll posted under Election 2020.

[pbrower2a]

(10-29-2020, 06:38 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(10-29-2020, 02:05 PM)Camz Wrote: I wonder how the revival of gender roles will affect gay, trans, and non-binary people. I'm really scared for that honestly. If there will be a new wave of cis-heteronormativity I'm really not gonna enjoy this High.

That's the way highs are.  You get to conform to the majority and if you don't like it, tough luck.  You may have to hang in there until the awakening.

LGBT people got the rights that they deserve by 

(1) showing that fair treatment was necessary for domestic tranquility (gay-bashing is inexcusable violence)
(2) separating themselves from the child-abusing perverts, and
(3) joining straight people in throwing the perverts and pedophiles under the bus.  

What won't happen? Pervs and pedophiles are not going to gain respectability.

[User3451]

The debate over things like lgbt rights has been settled

A return to conformity in the next high is outside of the context of the culture wars. The culture wars will be done in the next high. That's the point. They're already done now, just a lot of people playing catch-up.

I would have never guessed that the gray champions would be Trump, Biden, hillary and bernie. Nonetheless, we will move through this crisis and discard neoliberalism and the reactionary right.

I expect a recalibrated economy, progress on climate, new infrastructure, and a repudiation of extremism like radical islam, Trumpian, wokism and the like

[pbrower2a]

(10-31-2020, 08:02 PM)User3451 Wrote: The debate over things like lgbt rights has been settled

A return to conformity in the next high is outside of the context of the culture wars. The culture wars will be done in the next high. That's the point. They're already done now, just a lot of people playing catch-up.

I would have never guessed that the gray champions would be Trump, Biden, hillary and bernie. Nonetheless, we will move through this crisis and discard neoliberalism and the reactionary right.

I expect a recalibrated economy, progress on climate, new infrastructure, and a repudiation of extremism like radical islam, Trumpian, wokism and the like

Basically, what society as a whole deems settled remains settled. 

We are two days from the 2020 election, and that will determine much. It is a choice between old decencies and more primitive standards of irresponsible power of those in position to determine who gets the opportunities for the hereditary Good Life and who become hereditary peons. (Inheritance is a shady way of determining wealth and poverty, but at least it isn't everything). A rigid class system, an economic Apartheid so to speak, makes even personal enterprise impossible or irrelevant. 

We are going to see standards emerge to determine what is acceptable and what is not in public life. We all know what we would like to see fade out: in my case, the celebrity circus, the denial of reason, the "stick-it-to-the-loser" ethos, and shock-jock rhetoric. I'd like to see politics become a means of service and not simply a means of dividing the tax revenues among "winners". I want to see a personality cult of any kind become unthinkable.  I want people to accept reason, with a dollop of human kindness and conscience, as the arbiter of public choices. I want quality to matter more than identity in political life. 

We are headed to a First Turning. I see COVID-19 as the core of this Crisis. It certainly kills like a Crisis war even if the distribution of death is not so much "young men who never got a real start in adult life" as one would have expected in a shooting war. (It may be more likely to kill veterans of the Korean Conflict or the Vietnam War, veterans of which are now elderly). We have an enemy, a virus, as loathsome as any enemy that America has ever had, except perhaps Hitler. It is killing Americans at a faster clip than World War II or the Civil War. 

The difference between this Crisis Era and the previous three is of course the quality of leadership. American leadership in the Continental Congress was collective but on the whole competent. Abraham Lincoln and FDR are about as stellar wartime leaders as one could have. Donald Trump may not be as horrible as the Axis leadership of WWII, but he has failed badly. He appeases an enemy that has already invaded. Someone who does that in a shooting war is a defeatist traitor who can rightly expect to die by firing squad or noose if the country that he betrayed should end up winning the war. Who knows? This President might yet die of complications of COVID-19, the worst enemy of America since America faced the Third Reich and Thug Japan. It is up to you to decide whether such a cosmic fate is right.

Darwinian natural selection has a way of excising fools. Surely you know of the Darwin Awards by now, but those encompass people who do something spectacularly, inexcusably, and creatively stupid. Smoking a cigarette after having gargled with gasoline, attaching a rocket to a car and then igniting the rocket, or challenging someone to stab a bullet-proof vest are spectacular ways to die. There are plenty of stupid ways to die, like pulling a gun on a cop, drunk driving, swimming in unsafe waters, breaking into a dog-infested house (dogs are built like bears and Big Cats), failing to heed warning signs about cliffs and waterfalls, speeding, mixing pills and liquor, eating the wrong mushrooms, having a faulty heater, using a hibachi inside a house, or contracting COVID-19. Nature has a way of culling losers or at least ensuring that they be unattractive people in the reproductive game. Some of these means are tragic and may involve people who did nothing wrong (let us say victims of the sinking of the Titanic). 

Dying of COVID-19 is pointless. People who followed Donald Trump in his statements that "like a miracle it will go away" may not deserve to die, but they may die nonetheless. Most importantly, people will live into the 1T with habits that the 4T established as necessary for avoiding the Worst. 

Ask me in a couple days how I expect America to change. First comes the 2020 election. The wait agonizes many of us.

[User3451]

(11-01-2020, 06:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-31-2020, 08:02 PM)User3451 Wrote: The debate over things like lgbt rights has been settled

A return to conformity in the next high is outside of the context of the culture wars. The culture wars will be done in the next high. That's the point. They're already done now, just a lot of people playing catch-up.

I would have never guessed that the gray champions would be Trump, Biden, hillary and bernie. Nonetheless, we will move through this crisis and discard neoliberalism and the reactionary right.

I expect a recalibrated economy, progress on climate, new infrastructure, and a repudiation of extremism like radical islam, Trumpian, wokism and the like

Basically, what society as a whole deems settled remains settled. 

We are two days from the 2020 election, and that will determine much. It is a choice between old decencies and more primitive standards of irresponsible power of those in position to determine who gets the opportunities for the hereditary Good Life and who become hereditary peons. (Inheritance is a shady way of determining wealth and poverty, but at least it isn't everything). A rigid class system, an economic Apartheid so to speak, makes even personal enterprise impossible or irrelevant. 

We are going to see standards emerge to determine what is acceptable and what is not in public life. We all know what we would like to see fade out: in my case, the celebrity circus, the denial of reason, the "stick-it-to-the-loser" ethos, and shock-jock rhetoric. I'd like to see politics become a means of service and not simply a means of dividing the tax revenues among "winners". I want to see a personality cult of any kind become unthinkable.  I want people to accept reason, with a dollop of human kindness and conscience, as the arbiter of public choices. I want quality to matter more than identity in political life. 

We are headed to a First Turning. I see COVID-19 as the core of this Crisis. It certainly kills like a Crisis war even if the distribution of death is not so much "young men who never got a real start in adult life" as one would have expected in a shooting war. (It may be more likely to kill veterans of the Korean Conflict or the Vietnam War, veterans of which are now elderly). We have an enemy, a virus, as loathsome as any enemy that America has ever had, except perhaps Hitler. It is killing Americans at a faster clip than World War II or the Civil War. 

The difference between this Crisis Era and the previous three is of course the quality of leadership. American leadership in the Continental Congress was collective but on the whole competent. Abraham Lincoln and FDR are about as stellar wartime leaders as one could have. Donald Trump may not be as horrible as the Axis leadership of WWII, but he has failed badly. He appeases an enemy that has already invaded. Someone who does that in a shooting war is a defeatist traitor who can rightly expect to die by firing squad or noose if the country that he betrayed should end up winning the war. Who knows? This President might yet die of complications of COVID-19, the worst enemy of America since America faced the Third Reich and Thug Japan. It is up to you to decide whether such a cosmic fate is right.

Darwinian natural selection has a way of excising fools. Surely you know of the Darwin Awards by now, but those encompass people who do something spectacularly, inexcusably, and creatively stupid. Smoking a cigarette after having gargled with gasoline, attaching a rocket to a car and then igniting the rocket, or challenging someone to stab a bullet-proof vest are spectacular ways to die. There are plenty of stupid ways to die, like pulling a gun on a cop, drunk driving, swimming in unsafe waters, breaking into a dog-infested house (dogs are built like bears and Big Cats), failing to heed warning signs about cliffs and waterfalls, speeding, mixing pills and liquor, eating the wrong mushrooms, having a faulty heater, using a hibachi inside a house, or contracting COVID-19. Nature has a way of culling losers or at least ensuring that they be unattractive people in the reproductive game. Some of these means are tragic and may involve people who did nothing wrong (let us say victims of the sinking of the Titanic). 

Dying of COVID-19 is pointless. People who followed Donald Trump in his statements that "like a miracle it will go away" may not deserve to die, but they may die nonetheless. Most importantly, people will live into the 1T with habits that the 4T established as necessary for avoiding the Worst. 

Ask me in a couple days how I expect America to change. First comes the 2020 election. The wait agonizes many of us.

I just don't think this election is a referendum on the direction of the 1T

Biden is not a grand new day, he's a 3T throwback. 

The next 4 years will still be core 4T

[Bob Butler 54]

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote: I just don't think this election is a referendum on the direction of the 1T

I suspect otherwise.  I suspect Trump is playing the Buchanan / Hoover role, demonstrating that the old values have to go.

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote: Biden is not a grand new day, he's a 3T throwback. 

We will see.  Lincoln and FDR were seen as not impressive when they were first elected too.  It is a question whether the time makes the man, or the man makes the time.  After the Buchanon / Hoover / Trump moment and the unraveling debate on the old values or new, I suspect the new values are set up to succeed and whomever is in charge has no choice but to shift values but gets the credit for changing the values.

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote: The next 4 years will still be core 4T

You may be right if the core 4T is the solving of the problem that immediately follows the regeneracy, the decision to solve the problem.  The bug still need a vaccine.  The racist violent police and other elements of systematic racism need to be reigned in.  The focus has to be shifted onto global warming.  The actual work of solving the problems confronting the culture remains to be done.  I suspect the 4T mood will end sooner than the common guess of 2030.  Four years is closer to the truth.  After the vaccine is developed and the police realigned, much work will still be needed on global warming, but that will take decades.  The never again phase and a shift in mood will likely come far sooner.  

But still, the first step is recognizing you have a problem that has to be solved.  That may happen tomorrow.

[pbrower2a]

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote:

(11-01-2020, 06:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-31-2020, 08:02 PM)User3451 Wrote: The debate over things like lgbt rights has been settled

A return to conformity in the next high is outside of the context of the culture wars. The culture wars will be done in the next high. That's the point. They're already done now, just a lot of people playing catch-up.

I would have never guessed that the gray champions would be Trump, Biden, hillary and bernie. Nonetheless, we will move through this crisis and discard neoliberalism and the reactionary right.

I expect a recalibrated economy, progress on climate, new infrastructure, and a repudiation of extremism like radical islam, Trumpian, wokism and the like

Basically, what society as a whole deems settled remains settled. 

........

Ask me in a couple days how I expect America to change. First comes the 2020 election. The wait agonizes many of us.

I just don't think this election is a referendum on the direction of the 1T

Biden is not a grand new day, he's a 3T throwback. 

The next 4 years will still be core 4T

Mass death from COVID-19 isn't going away fast, and there will be plenty of people whose complications from COVID-19 will shorten their lives. I used to think that the Lost had much shorter lives, on the whole, than GI's and the Silent because they smoked like chimneys, but the influenza epidemic of a century ago led to plenty of premature deaths that had nothing to do with smoking (I saw lots of Lost dying of such heart failure and nephritis when they were in their twenties and thirties... and this is before I even discuss vehicle crashes that resulted from bad cars, bad roads, and bad driving). 

I see Joe Biden as a transition to some 'new normal' of the upcoming 1T. The last Crisis will not end in victory parades.  The closest thing to a big celebration will be mass inoculations, and those might come with a hitch (you celebrate and you get a poke with a needle.

[Mickey123]

(10-29-2020, 03:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: By the way -- COVID-19 is a genuine crisis event. In eight months we have more deaths from it than the total combat deaths of the Union side in the Civil War (which took four years, even if with a much smaller population); we are approaching the total combat death toll of American armed forces in World War II. Some Americans are responding to COVID-19 as if it were a genuine Crisis necessitating major changes in life, and some are failing to do so... and failing to do so could cause mass death.

750,000 people died in the U.S. civil war, at a time when the population was 9% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of over 8 million deaths today.  There were 400,000 U.S. deaths in WW2, at a time when the population was 40% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of 1 million deaths today.

Meanwhile, there were around 700,000 U.S. deaths due to the Spanish Flu, at a time when the population was less than 30% of what it is today.  That is the equivalent of perhaps 2.4 million deaths today.  And this wasn't even during a crisis.

The idea that the core of the Crisis is going to be the coronavirus is silly.  There aren't anywhere near enough deaths, and we're going to have a vaccine within a few months in all probability.  Then it will take 6 months to vaccinate the population, during which time new vaccines will come out and they will also be used to vaccinate people.  With substantial herd immunity, the U.S. and the rest of the first world will move on.

This is just a small part of the crisis.  Much worse things are going to happen.

[Eric the Green]

(11-02-2020, 06:08 PM)Mickey123 Wrote:

(10-29-2020, 03:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: By the way -- COVID-19 is a genuine crisis event. In eight months we have more deaths from it than the total combat deaths of the Union side in the Civil War (which took four years, even if with a much smaller population); we are approaching the total combat death toll of American armed forces in World War II. Some Americans are responding to COVID-19 as if it were a genuine Crisis necessitating major changes in life, and some are failing to do so... and failing to do so could cause mass death.

750,000 people died in the U.S. civil war, at a time when the population was 9% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of over 8 million deaths today.  There were 400,000 U.S. deaths in WW2, at a time when the population was 40% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of 1 million deaths today.

Meanwhile, there were around 700,000 U.S. deaths due to the Spanish Flu, at a time when the population was less than 30% of what it is today.  That is the equivalent of perhaps 2.4 million deaths today.  And this wasn't even during a crisis.

The idea that the core of the Crisis is going to be the coronavirus is silly.  There aren't anywhere near enough deaths, and we're going to have a vaccine within a few months in all probability.  Then it will take 6 months to vaccinate the population, during which time new vaccines will come out and they will also be used to vaccinate people.  With substantial herd immunity, the U.S. and the rest of the first world will move on.

This is just a small part of the crisis.  Much worse things are going to happen.

I get that. But I wonder if we had the civil war today, with our larger population, would there really be more soldiers involved than in 1865? Not necessarily.

We will be much better able to handle what comes up in the rest of this 4T if we vote out Trump today. Whatever part it may play in our current 4T, it has demonstrated that we don't have a leader who can handle a crisis. And why would anyone have expected that we would, given who the leader is?

[pbrower2a]

(11-02-2020, 06:08 PM)Mickey123 Wrote:

(10-29-2020, 03:54 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: By the way -- COVID-19 is a genuine crisis event. In eight months we have more deaths from it than the total combat deaths of the Union side in the Civil War (which took four years, even if with a much smaller population); we are approaching the total combat death toll of American armed forces in World War II. Some Americans are responding to COVID-19 as if it were a genuine Crisis necessitating major changes in life, and some are failing to do so... and failing to do so could cause mass death.

750,000 people died in the U.S. civil war, at a time when the population was 9% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of over 8 million deaths today.  There were 400,000 U.S. deaths in WW2, at a time when the population was 40% of what it is today.  This is the equivalent of 1 million deaths today.

Meanwhile, there were around 700,000 U.S. deaths due to the Spanish Flu, at a time when the population was less than 30% of what it is today.  That is the equivalent of perhaps 2.4 million deaths today.  And this wasn't even during a crisis.

The idea that the core of the Crisis is going to be the coronavirus is silly.  There aren't anywhere near enough deaths, and we're going to have a vaccine within a few months in all probability.  Then it will take 6 months to vaccinate the population, during which time new vaccines will come out and they will also be used to vaccinate people.  With substantial herd immunity, the U.S. and the rest of the first world will move on.

This is just a small part of the crisis.  Much worse things are going to happen.

We had the usual start of a Crisis Era in the Crash of 2008, which was much like the Crash of 1929. So things turned out differently. Hoover failed to back the banks to ensure that there would be funds for payrolls and accounts payable, and America got the bank runs that made the Great Depression as horrible as it was. Obama did after a year and a half of the economic decline (which rally began in late 2007)   what FDR did after three years of economic meltdown, rescuing the System from itself. It may be that the severity of the economic meltdown made the rise of Hitler possible -- and the greatest scale of human tragedy since the Mongol invasions of East, South, and Southwest Asia and Europe as far west as Silesia. No Hitler means no Holocaust. Holodomor in Ukraine, of course. 

Much of what was so horrible about the last Crisis relates to the personality of Hitler. Without Hitler, Germany takes some different course, one in which German Jews play a key role much as American Jews played a key role in American life in the 1930's and 1940's in establishing the creative and moral culture. (Jews really did dominate the American movie industry in the 1930's, but before someone screams "conspiracy", one must recognize the result. The Hollywood Jews pushed a life-affirming wholesomeness by deputing a non-Jew to establish a motion-pictures code that the Jews found good for business -- no overt sexuality, no promotion of marital infidelity, no praise for bad people, no pointless violence (OK, bad guys can victimize people, but they ideally end up badly) and no mockery of any religious heritage. Jewish writers knew that most of their audience was not Jewish, so they created a stock hero that might seem unlikely: the wise Roman Catholic priest as the guide to ethnic groups (then Italian- and Irish-Americans) concerned about their kids turning to lives of crime.  Not surprisingly, Nazis became stock villains... 

There are differences this time other than Hitler and Tojo, for which there is no obvious equivalent, at least in American politics. American political life got very placid by the 1930's, probably because the Depression ensured that what remained of Big Business was more concerned with survival than with buying the political process. By 2010, Big Business that Obama and Democrats in general rescued from the consequences of its worst tendencies, had the means with which to buy the political process, culminating in the rise of Donald Trump and stooge majorities for him in Congress.

[User3451]

(11-02-2020, 07:02 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote: I just don't think this election is a referendum on the direction of the 1T

I suspect otherwise.  I suspect Trump is playing the Buchanan / Hoover role, demonstrating that the old values have to go.

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote: Biden is not a grand new day, he's a 3T throwback. 

We will see.  Lincoln and FDR were seen as not impressive when they were first elected too.  It is a question whether the time makes the man, or the man makes the time.  After the Buchanon / Hoover / Trump moment and the unraveling debate on the old values or new, I suspect the new values are set up to succeed and whomever is in charge has no choice but to shift values but gets the credit for changing the values.

(11-01-2020, 08:26 PM)User3451 Wrote: The next 4 years will still be core 4T

You may be right if the core 4T is the solving of the problem that immediately follows the regeneracy, the decision to solve the problem.  The bug still need a vaccine.  The racist violent police and other elements of systematic racism need to be reigned in.  The focus has to be shifted onto global warming.  The actual work of solving the problems confronting the culture remains to be done.  I suspect the 4T mood will end sooner than the common guess of 2030.  Four years is closer to the truth.  After the vaccine is developed and the police realigned, much work will still be needed on global warming, but that will take decades.  The never again phase and a shift in mood will likely come far sooner.  

But still, the first step is recognizing you have a problem that has to be solved.  That may happen tomorrow.

I rest my case. If Biden wins it's actually a referendum on the democrats. 

This 4t is far from over. Hang on to your butts

[pbrower2a]

As usual we have conflicting indicators of how things will go. The Republican Party continues to depend upon Hillary Clinton's "Basket of Deplorables" -- people dim-witted enough to see "deplorable" as a badge of honor. Trump expressed his love for "low-information voters", but those people are getting older and rarer every year. Formal education seems to increase for just about every generation, and it is easy to see how betting on winning by attracting ignoramuses will be an increasingly-losing proposition. It is easy to see Donald Trump as a catastrophic failure as President even if he was good at bamboozling just enough people in 2016 in view of the Skowroneck cycle as a sick and ineffective parody of the initiator (in this case Ronald Reagan) of the current cycle. The political system casts such a failure off; the last to fit that pattern is Jimmy Carter, one last echo of the New Deal as its natural constituency was fading off.

On the other side, Joe Biden seems destined to be a one-term President because of the obvious risks of a leader crossing age 80. Sure, he's smart, decent, honest, and articulate... but he is already past the life expectancy of the American public. I don't see him making as many mistakes, and the American system does well in dealing with a fading leader -- which is to reshape him into a participant in a basically-ceremonial role, as was the case with Ronald Reagan. That would have ill suited the headstrong character of Donald Trump.

Senate Republicans, if they still have a majority, may end up rudderless. They are about to lose their current rudder, Donald Trump. So what do they do?