Generational Dynamics World View News

[guest]

Let's get the war started.

[Guest]

American citizens will live in tents on city sidewalks, before they will harvest food that is rotting in the fields. A country that will not harvest its own food does not deserve to survive.

This country needs a system of transporting indigent people to where labor is needed, and a firm policy of work or starve for the physically fit for physical work.

Until the 1970s, most farm laborers were US Citizens. I picked crops while a teenager in the 1980s. Cindy Crawford, the supermodel, picked corn with her classmates in Ohio while in high school in the 1980s. That used to be the norm.

[Amazon]

Virtually everything I have ordered from Amazon in the last two months has arrived broken or the wrong items have been delivered. And these items were not sent by vendors, but by Amazon directly.

All of my friends have had this problem too. I have been ordering books from Amazon since 2000.I have an Amazon Prime membership. I will never buy anything outside of books from them again. What a debacle.

Amazon has not done itself any favors during this pandemic. Everyone I know is looking for alternatives. Yes, Americans will buy much less in the future. I doubt much of it, if any, will be purchased from Amazon.

This pandemic has changed us. I read about this every day. But I DON'T think the pundits are right about Amazon coming out on top. I don't. If good products are offered by a reliable company, then they will find customers. Amazon is a prison ship will with convict labor. Go online and look at any forum; there is nothing but anger directed towards Amazon. I suspect any positive feedback to have been planted by paid Amazon trolls.

This pandemic will be the undoing of Amazon.com, not the making of it.

[balrog]

Virtually everything I have ordered from Amazon in the last two months has arrived broken or the wrong items have been delivered. And these items were not sent by vendors, but by Amazon directly.

All of my friends have had this problem too. I have been ordering books from Amazon since 2000.I have an Amazon Prime membership. I will never buy anything outside of books from them again. What a debacle.

Amazon has not done itself any favors during this pandemic. Everyone I know is looking for alternatives. Yes, Americans will buy much less in the future. I doubt much of it, if any, will be purchased from Amazon.

This pandemic has changed us. I read about this every day. But I DON'T think the pundits are right about Amazon coming out on top. I don't. If good products are offered by a reliable company, then they will find customers. Amazon is a prison ship will with convict labor. Go online and look at any forum; there is nothing but anger directed towards Amazon. I suspect any positive feedback to have been planted by paid Amazon trolls.

This pandemic will be the undoing of Amazon.com, not the making of it.

With the average Americans bankrupt, I do see them buying anything from Amazon. Nada. Amazon will collapse along with most restaurants and movie theaters.

I know six local businesses that have gone online since this chaos began and they sell locally. They are doing better now than before Corona hit. One of these stores sells pottery like bowls and cups. And they delivery and pick up. A local pizza joint had to hire people to keep up with orders and deliveries.

If people do buy anything, they will buy quality because it lasts. Many Americans are learning valuable lessons now. the ones that don't will die.

The worse Amazon behaves, the more people will look for alternatives. I refuse to buy anything except books on Amazon. And I buy books locally if possible. Always.

[Guest]

The day we consent to mandatory tracing, tracking and being injected with unknown substances is the day that this country is finished. And I mean done. The government would be illegitimate and must be replaced by force if necessary. To fail to do so will likely mean the death of us all. These technocrats with God complexes are dangerous.

[Guest]

And......All you NY fucksticks…..do me a favor and stay up there......and do NOT come down to the SE......Thanks

[John]

** 08-May-2020 World View: Human Rights

> Just wondering. Do you perceive yourself as inventing the idea
> that progress is driven by technology? I’ve bumped into it in many
> places, including Toffler. While I include it as part of my
> system, I don’t claim any particular credit for inventing it. Some
> of the other ideas, yes, but not that one. One doesn’t have to be
> a fan of Generational Dynamics to be aware of it.

Continuing your trend of each comment being more idiotic than the last
one.

You've claimed some sort of magical "arrow of progress" in human
rights. You gave a bunch of examples in previous messages, but I
can't see any of them having to do with human rights, although they're
all driven by technology.

So let's take an actual human right: The right to be safe from
extrajudicial arrest.

This is generally a cyclic human right in most countries. It's
usually agreed at the beginning of the Recovery era, but during the
Awakening era, in countries that have fought a tribal or racial civil
war, extrajudicial arrest becomes more common, and that particular
human right is diminished.

So I've given two examples of human rights. Women's rights are
generally tied to technology, but freedom from extrajudicial arrest is
cyclic. So put that into your "system" and smoke it.

[John]

** 08-May-2020 World View: Code of Napoleon

The code of Napoleon was not a human right. It was a piece of paper
that listed human rights, such as freedom from extrajudicial arrest,
that were most likely enforced or not enforced cyclically, depending
on the generational era.

[John]

** 08-May-2020 World View: Sri Lanka: An 'Ordinary' Genocidal Climax

> World War II was as horrible as it was because of the criminality
> of all Axis Powers except Finland and of the criminal and
> incompetent leadership two of the main Allies (China and the
> Soviet Union). As such it makes the opposing sides of the American
> Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the struggle for Italian
> unification, the Mexican Revolution of 1867, and the Meiji
> Restoration look like gentlemen by contrast. (The Taiping Uprising
> in China of 1861 was unbelievably horrible by the standards of the
> time). Whether the Crimean War was one of the Crisis Wars of the
> general era is in doubt. The Crisis wars of the earl latter half
> of the nineteenth century were savage enough, but contemplate
> whether you would rather have been a slave in the Confederacy or
> the Third Reich. Had you been a subject of the Soviet Union, would
> you have rather come under the dominion of Bismarck -- or
> Hitler?

You've given some interesting examples of genocidal crisis war climaxes
that were particularly horrific in the view of history.

The point I'd like to make is that a crisis war can end with a less
dramatic genocide, or even a "small genocide," as long as it horrifies
and traumatizes the people involved.

One interesting example is the Sri Lanka civil war that I'm familiar
with because I was writing about it for years. The government's army
was Sinhalese, while the rebel separatists were Tamils. However, only
a relatively small group of Tamil separatists, known as the Tamil
Tigers, were actually fighting.

By 2006, it had been going on as low-level violence since the 1970s
Awakening era. But in the Crisis era it became more serious, and in
January 2008 the army declared that the Tamil Tigers would be
defeated by the end of the year. So the army stepped up its attacks
against the rebels, and the rebels began using Tamil civilians as
human shields.

This set up a situation that's common in many wars. The army was
attacking the rebels, but were killing civilians, which is a war
crime, while the rebels were using civilians as human shields, which
is also a war crime. So both sides were committing war crimes, and
every now and then in the United Nations some politician angrily
demands that one side or the other (usually the Sri Lankan government)
be punished for war crimes.

So in March 2009, the Tamil Tigers finally surrendered, after a
particularly brutal -- and genocidal -- fight. This wasn't one of the
grand historic examples, like the ones you described, but was just an
"ordinary genocide," or even a "small genocide." But imagine a mother
whose children were killed by army bombings because she and her family
were being used as human shields by the Tamil Tigers. Whom does she
blame for her dead children? Probably everyone. But at that point,
everyone is so sickened and traumatized by their own actions that
they're ready to stop fighting and enter a Recovery Era.

> Not quite. Probably because Trump-haters are rightly more scared
> of a little virus than of the anger of a petty man with a potty
> mouth, we don't even have mass protests of Trump policies. If
> anything, Trump has egged on his supporters to challenge State
> governments that have yet to open the doors on venues in which
> COVID-19 could spread like a forest fire up a hill of dry brush
> and trees under the stress of severe drought. If you think that
> Donald Trump can go after his political opponents... about half
> the American adult population consists of dissidents.

Wow! You were responding to a comment about Lincoln and habeas corpus
and the 1919 Sedition act, and you managed to twist yourself into a
pretzel so far that you could turn it into a Democratic campaign
speech. You should be a politician, if you aren't one already.

[John]

** 08-May-2020 World View: Celebrating VE Day

May 8, 1945, was VE Day, or Victory in Europe day.

During today's coverage by the BBC World Service, there were comments
by historian Keith Lowe that I found very interesting.

He pointed out that the war in Europe did not end when the Germans
surrendered in May, 1945, but continued for years in the form of
smaller wars -- civil wars, ethnic cleansing, wars of national
liberation.

For example, in Greece, there was a civil war, with the people
fighting against one another, specifically a war between those who had
been collaborating with the Germans, and those who had been resisting,
who were mostly communists. And within the resistance there was
another civil war, between communists and non-communists. Fighting
continued until 1949. More people died after the war than during the
war.

That's just one example. There were ethnic civil wars in Ukraine,
Poland and other parts of Europe, according to Lowe.

This is interesting to me because it provides information about a
conundrum that I've been dealing with for years.

According to the Generational Dynamics model that I've developed, war
rarely has any purpose and rarely accomplishes anything, since
everything usually springs back to the way it was before the war by
the end of the subsequent Awakening era.

But there is one very important thing that war accomplishes: It kills
off enough people so that there will be enough food for everyone else.
In fact, this is why genocidal wars are necessary. The food supply
grows exponentially with new technology, but the population grows
exponentially faster than the food supply. So within a few decades, a
society will run out of food, and people have to start a genocidal war
to have enough to eat.

But for years, every time I mentioned this, someone would point out
that not that many people were killed in World War II, and I never had
a good answer for that. But Lowe's comment shows that there can be a
lot more people killed after the war than during the war. This would
resolve the conundrum.

Previously, I've also discussed a related concept called "democide,"
which describes how the winning side in a tribal or ethnic civil war
takes control of the government, and continues to kill people in the
losing tribe in the decades following the end of the war.

So it's still true that war doesn't accomplish anything, since
everything springs back to the way it was by the end of the following
Awakening era.

But it's also true that the genocidal crisis war -- and its aftermath
-- are very useful in killing off enough people, so that everyone else
has enough to eat. Think of genocidal war as an act of kindness.