Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

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Bob Butler
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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by Bob Butler »

John wrote:
Sun Jan 03, 2021 8:08 pm
No, that's not true. I was never in the Fourth Turning forum to convince Democrats of anything. I was there to learn.
I have learned from you in the intensive research of places where tribal thinking is still dominant.

It is hard to ignore Mike Aleander, who is one of the few others who has a scientific world view rather than a political one. I have learned that when he engages to stand back and watch.

I remember creating the Criticisms of Generational Dynamics thread, as most of the posts you moved had nothing to do with Strauss and Howe. You were messing up the goal of setting up a discussion of their theories, something which has not developed.

The stuff you call garbage? It is no more garbage than what you present. It is ideological. It is more about where it is being presented. An area intensely concentrated on one perspective rejects the other perspective. I am rejected here much as you were rejected on MyBB. A place where ideas can constructively collide is in many ways to be preferred.

If there are oppressed, there are oppressors. If you attack someone fighting for the oppressed, what does that make you?

If you wish this site to remain an ideological cocoon, isolated from all thoughts that disagree with yours, that is your choice.

John
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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by John »

** 04-Jan-2021 World View: Ideological garbage
Bob Butler wrote:
Mon Jan 04, 2021 1:08 am
> The stuff you call garbage? It is no more garbage than what you
> present. It is ideological. It is more about where it is being
> presented. An area intensely concentrated on one perspective
> rejects the other perspective. I am rejected here much as you
> were rejected on MyBB. A place where ideas can constructively
> collide is in many ways to be preferred.
This is a lie, as you're well aware.

I set up the GenerationalDynamics.com web site in 2003 as an
experiment, as I stated at the time. Most people who claim they had
been right about something are simply lying about their previous
views. So I would make analyses, forecasts and predictions, and post
them in articles on that web site. If the predictions turned out to
be right, then I would continue. The predictions would be there for
all time. I couldn't conveniently say that I used to believe such and
such, since that was always verifiable. If the predictions turned out
to be wrong, then I would abandon it. There was no ideology involved
whatsoever, as you're well aware.

So today I can point to a large body of work -- over 6,000 articles
containing thousands of analyses and predictions on hundreds of
countries, all of which are either true or trending true. I've also
written five books. There have been several examples where I was
literally almost the only person in the world making a prediction, and
my prediction turned out to be right, and everyone else's turned out
to be wrong. So the experiment that I set up in 2003 has been a
spectacular success. There is no web site in the world with a better
successful forecasting and analysis record than mine. These are 6,000
data points and five books that prove the validity of generational
theory and Generational Dynamics. That has nothing to do with
ideology.

So you come into this forum, and flood it with posts describing my
work as ideological garbage. You fabricate lies, and claim that
what you post is the same as mine.

Have you ever written and posted a real article? If you, please
provide a link. I don't believe you're capable of writing a
well-researched article. You're nothing but an ignorant asshole who
gets enjoyment out of posting troll garbage.

This isn't some random forum. This forum is my home. If you can't
respect me and my work in my own home, then you shouldn't be here.
Leave.

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Bob Butler
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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by Bob Butler »

FullMoon wrote:
Mon Jan 04, 2021 1:35 am
Bob should stay but he knows when and how he's pulling John's strings. John and Bob, please show some restraint. You both have the common good in mind. You are both good people helping others. Likely more than you know. Please keep it civil for that sake.
That may b e a bit hard. There is a temptation for folks around here to assume the worst about blue motivation. It is too tempting to respond in kind.

For example John recently made a post about all that voter fraud. Excuse me? Biden was up in the polls forever. Why give Trump an excuse? It was fairly clear that Trump would be out to win in court. He just about said so. The winning strategy was to bet on the polls being right. to be squeaky clean, to make the legal challenges look silly, to give the judges no choice but that 50 loses to 1 win in court cases situation.

But John went all in on the clear opposite. How gently have I got to go in the response? How do you make it clear there is another way of looking at it? How do you gently tiptoe around saying the courts got it right, the coastal media got it right, that the Constitution is working as it was designed?

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Bob Butler
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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by Bob Butler »

John wrote:
Mon Jan 04, 2021 6:38 am
Bob Butler wrote:
Mon Jan 04, 2021 1:08 am
The stuff you call garbage? It is no more garbage than what you
present. It is ideological. It is more about where it is being presented. An area intensely concentrated on one perspective rejects the other perspective. I am rejected here much as you were rejected on MyBB. A place where ideas can constructively collide is in many ways to be preferred.
This is a lie, as you're well aware.
Nope. Note a lie.

Some of your stuff is clearly ideological. Not all of it. But some. In the ideological stuff you clearly do not understand blue motivation. I clearly have many times drawn a line between your good stuff and the not so good. If you were really out to learn, you could spend a bit of your research on truly learning how your opposition believes. But you are not. You would rather exile people who ideologically oppose you? You would rather concentrate on ideological propaganda?

Primarily back in the 1990s I created a hobby web site. Apple discontinued my favorite web editor, so I dropped my hobby, but I left it as it ended. It is at http://polyticks.com/home/ It was written for a true computer, so don’t try to access it on a phone. It contains an absurdly wide variety of topics. It was never intended or pretended to be a professional site, but each of the sections covered might be considered an article. Go wild.

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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by Bob Butler »

Getting back to the original point of the thread, I asked a question of another forum and thought I'd repeat it here. It presumes that a trigger and the worst fault in the crisis which has to be solved is not necessarily a crisis war. The major problems may be domestic. As such, it does not seem to fit well with Generational Dynamics.

A three ring crisis?

FDR’s crisis could reasonably be called a double crisis. The Great Depression was first, with a trigger of the stock market collapse. World War II followed, with the trigger for the US being the Pearl Harbor attack. Thus, in one period of the generations aligning for a crisis, we had two distinct issues.

What about this time?

The first issue is the virus. Its trigger might be its discovery in China though you could argue that for us it was the New York first spike. The second issue might be racism, with the death of George Floyd being the trigger of driving the issue to crisis level, though there was no lack of catalysts leading up to the massive protests. With hindsight, we should have seen that one coming. These were much closer together time wise than in FDR’s time, virtually simultaneous.

Is the division of world views a third and separate crisis issue, that a house divided against itself cannot stand? Was what happened yesterday with the capitol riots a trigger? For a long time the red and blue subcultures have projected different realities and reached different conclusions. Yesterday it blew up. At worst it could lead into the oft foretold new civil war or a division with succession. Alternately we could have spreading lies become a hallmark of the unravelling, that those who create, spread or believe in an alternate reality becoming unacceptable in the crisis and beyond.

Is this significant and separate enough to be risen now to a crisis issue? Can we put it equal with the virus and its resulting economic crash, and equal again to the racist violent police and systematic racism?

I am inclined to see it that way. Again we had no triggers for much of the generational alignment, but we seem to be making up for it with a surplus of triggers late. The three do interact somewhat, but don’t think they can be put together.

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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by tetmo »

Yesterday it blew up.
No. It's been blowing up all year, and you could probably even argue for the last 20 years or so. The division in world view has been on full display all year. This is straight up Fourth Turning. People find (either real or imagined) that their society and government isn't dealing with the issues that are important to them. If you're a BLM supporter you see a racist society that needs to be changed. If you're a fly-over Republican then you view CEOs and coastal elites who insult you and take your job as the problem. Conservative Christians see the moral decay of the country and increased attacks on them through the government. With a Fourth Turning the opposing sides have forgotten the horrors of war and think they can win. They become uncompromising. That's where we're at. We are following Strauss, Howe, and John's Fourth Turning prediction almost exactly. Things have been blowing up for a long time. It wasn't just yesterday.

People don't seem to get what's going on. Human psychology is highly predictive. We aren't unique - at least on the scale of human history. 2021 will be much worse than 2020. Right now we have two extremely large problems. We have a civil war going on in America. Yes, the Democrats started it, but the Republicans haven't done a good job dealing with it. Trump is a deeply flawed individual who seems to lack a basic understanding of how to use words properly and gauge all of their impact. So right now I'm sticking more to the Republican side of things, but I have no doubt they will become as violent as the left. That's what we saw yesterday. The right will now start physically fighting back. And they got the template from the Democrats over the last four years.

The second issue is China. They are the new Nazis. I'm betting that if you put a timeline of WW2 Germany against modern China you'd see very frightening similarities. Land claims, the Vatican not going against them, financial metrics, concentration camps, etc. will probably be right on top of each other from a timing perspective. I haven't done this, but I'd love to see John take a crack at it.

But here's the scary thing. The Chinese have bent over backwards to transparently state what they are going to do. They've done it with everything over the last ten years or more. They said they were going to claim ownership over the South China Sea and they did it. They said they were going to enforce their way of doing things in Hong Kong. Now they've done it. If anything, they have been massively honest and transparent about what they are going to do. Over the last few months or year maybe, Xi has been saying the PLA needs to get ready for war. Every new comment has had a decreased time frame. In the last few days it came out that Xi told the PLA to get ready 'at any second.' That's new. They will be heading for Taiwan within the next few months if not weeks while the U.S. is transitioning to the Biden administration.

So the only question now is what will happen with the U.S. Will we continue the new civil war while Taiwan is invaded or will this break our current psychology and unite us against China? That is the biggest unknown in the world right now. China will attack Taiwan. The U.S. will be divided. How those two mix is what will decide the future of the world.

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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by John »

** 07-Jan-2021 World View: Regeneracy

The problem is that there are lots of crises, but the only crises that
are generational crises are the ones that are triggered by
generational Regeneracy events -- events that regenerate civic unity
for the first time since the end of the preceding Crisis war and unify
the country behind the leaders.

Many crises are actually divisive, not unifying. The current pandemic
crisis has clearly split the country still further, so it's a crisis
but not a generational crisis. The 9/11/2001 crisis did unify the
country briefly, but that fizzled quickly, so it's not a generational
crisis. The Great Depression split the country, so it's not a
generational crisis.

It was the Pearl Harbor bombing and the Bataan Death March that united
the country behind the extremely divisive president Franklin
Roosevelt, so those are generational Regeneracy events, triggering a
generational crisis.

We can only guess what the Regeneracy events will be this time.
Certainly the current political crisis is no generational crisis, as
it will lead to bitterly divisive political conflicts in the next few
months. Maybe the Regeneracy events will be invasions of Taiwan or
Japan, or maybe the sinking of an aircraft carrier in the South China
Sea, or maybe a nuclear missile landing in Los Angeles. We can only
guess.

But when it happens, everyone in the country will be so frightened
that the Democrats and Republicans will set aside their political
differences to save the country from a real existential crisis.
That's the way the world works.

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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

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tetmo wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:01 pm
Yesterday it blew up.
No. It's been blowing up all year, and you could probably even argue for the last 20 years or so. The division in world view has been on full display all year. This is straight up Fourth Turning. People find (either real or imagined) that their society and government isn't dealing with the issues that are important to them. If you're a BLM supporter you see a racist society that needs to be changed. If you're a fly-over Republican then you view CEOs and coastal elites who insult you and take your job as the problem. Conservative Christians see the moral decay of the country and increased attacks on them through the government. With a Fourth Turning the opposing sides have forgotten the horrors of war and think they can win. They become uncompromising. That's where we're at. We are following Strauss, Howe, and John's Fourth Turning prediction almost exactly. Things have been blowing up for a long time. It wasn't just yesterday.
I would agree that through the unravelling there were catalyst events clear enough. The BLM protests were preceded by earlier protests and Kaepernick kneeling. There has certainly been divides and debates over worldview. You could fold how the elites have created division of wealth and how the conservative Christians have grown concerned about morality as related to the worldview clash. The virus was in many ways unpredictable, but you could see even see Ebola and HIV as giving warning of pandemics.

But if all three issues have associated catalysts, the endless debate and no change policies remained intact. McConnell obstructed any attempt to solve problems. The crisis remained a possibility not distinctly here. I would suggest the three triggers - say the New York first wave, the George Flynn killing, and now the Capitol Riots, brought things into the class of having to solve the problems right now. The created the mood for a decisive focused government. That is not easy for the posters here to see. There is a habit of viewing the blues as anything but focused and decisive. They are just more decisive in the turning moods. The unraveling selfishness is turning to a crisis willingness to sacrifice for the common good.
tetmo wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:01 pm
People don't seem to get what's going on. Human psychology is highly predictive. We aren't unique - at least on the scale of human history. 2021 will be much worse than 2020. Right now we have two extremely large problems. We have a civil war going on in America. Yes, the Democrats started it, but the Republicans haven't done a good job dealing with it. Trump is a deeply flawed individual who seems to lack a basic understanding of how to use words properly and gauge all of their impact. So right now I'm sticking more to the Republican side of things, but I have no doubt they will become as violent as the left. That's what we saw yesterday. The right will now start physically fighting back. And they got the template from the Democrats over the last four years.
I would disagree that the Democrats really started it. If you acknowledge the three crisis, no one made the virus happen when it did. If Obama brought racism to the surface and the resurgence of the KKK and New Nazi activity resulted, the KKK and New Nazi brought hostility to the racist oppressors to the surface. At any rate, the problem of oppression has been there a long time. It was one of the major flaws in the culture which was to be addressed.

And the capitol riots were not started by the Democrats. Many rioters were waving Trump flags and the Confederate battle flag. Some of the insurgents were identified as having ties to militias or conspiracy theory sites. I could agree that there are valid reasons for the two ways of looking at the world, but the big one is that the extremists had bought into the lies about voter fraud. That was the key issue and leads back to Trump.
tetmo wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:01 pm
The second issue is China.
It depend on what China does. I can sympathize for their waiting until Trump is gone. Trump is rather unpredictable and in a mood to do something outrageous. It would be prudent for them to wait for Biden to get in. Anyway, I have no special expertise in where or when the CCP will jump.

My instinct would be that the Australian coal boycott, the virus and the big floods have left China's economy in a mess. The West is the only big enough economic force that could possibly bail them out, and they would be tempted to put conditions on aid. While the CCP leaders could gain popularity with the talk of brinkmanship, this may not be the best time to actually jump, and they have to consider keeping their elites happy. We'll see, but I'm not fully sold on their jumping right now. The CCP and I have very different instincts.

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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by Bob Butler »

John wrote:
Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:33 pm
The problem is that there are lots of crises, but the only crises that are generational crises are the ones that are triggered by generational Regeneracy events -- events that regenerate civic unity for the first time since the end of the preceding Crisis war and unify the country behind the leaders... (snip)

That's the way the world works.
That is how the world worked in the last age.

There might be a distinction made between a domestic and and a foreign crisis. When there is a foreign oppressor, you could pretend the conservative and progressive factions come together. This neglects the presence of conservative ideas which cling to the old values and world order. In the US Revolution, there were loyalists to the king who wanted to keep the old pattern. The progressive faction was fighting for democracy and against colonial imperialism, even if colonial imperialism was not called that yet. In the Great Depression, the conservative faction noted that the government should not regulate the economy, that the periodic depressions getting ever worse should be allowed to continue. Prior to World War II there were isolationists. The US should not entangle itself in foreign wars.

A crisis is about getting rid of the obsolete ideas. Generally, these are held by the conservatives, keep the old structure, do not solve the crisis problem faction. The old values are stomped out by a progressive faction that is itching to solve problems which have come to a head. It is not a matter of an external enemy creating a common cause, but of their embodying a problem that has to be solved. The old structure and values have to go.

The virus, the systematic racism, the ability to create fantasy alternate worldviews are all domestic problems. They are the worst problems faced by the culture, with global warming receiving an honorable mention. The worst problems facing the culture are solved in a crisis. In the process, the old values often have to be submerged, driven down.

Now many on this website are conservative. They would have reason to assume a different perspective. The idea of a focused dedicated crisis government led by the Democrats is nigh on inconceivable. They may not see those three problems as the greatest the culture is facing, but are focused on a hypothetical tribal thinking Industrial Age thinking foreign threat which has yet to materialize. They have ignored that major powers have not initiated a crisis war in the Information Age, but have instead worked economic rackets. Their instinct would be to defend their worldview rather than perceive it as inevitably fading.

But just be aware that others are following a different approach to the turning theory.

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Re: Strauss-Howe Fourth Turning discussions

Post by Cool Breeze »

Your premises are all false, please stop making stuff up. Of course, that's why you come to bad conclusions. You're obsessed, and you are wrong about it all. You progressives create all of these problems, and you aren't even honest about the problems. So ho hum, another 3 meaningless paragraphs from Bob. As for me, this'll be my last reply, since it's not worth it.

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