Generational Dynamics World View News

[John]

** 27-May-2021 World View: Orange Man

> Orange Man Bad gone now; mommie needs to find a new bogeyman for
> you.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk

[Higgenbotham]

It's a judgement call as to how meaningful it is when people like Reid cross lines that have never been crossed before. I posted something years ago: "I can't remember the exact quote, but in the 1930's the US Central Bank was quoted as saying to the effect that, "We did all we could to stop the deflation." Now I need to add to that, "We did all we could to stop the deflation within the moral precepts that confined activity at that time."" To me, what Reid did and what the Fed has done now versus the 1930s are both meaningful in that in both cases lines like those are being crossed that should not be crossed if our civilization is to be preserved intact. And the fact that Reid, the Fed, and many others, particularly others who have the power to change that, don't agree with me is, I believe, problematic.

This morning I happened to run across an interview with Barbara Tuchman from 1979 which addresses this topic. If I have time, I'll provide some quotes.

"A Distant Mirror" The 14th Century and Today
https://archive.org/details/openmind_ep ... ep1405.mpg

Tuchman: The people of that period, calamitous as it was and troubled as they were and distressed and disturbed, yet they thought of what was going on as rather exciting - at least those on the top - and heroic and chivalric, colorful. It's very hard to see your own time in any total sense or to draw - we know we are disturbed and uncomfortable and uneasy and, you know, there are people who don't agree...and why did I call it a mirror, the usual questions, and I said, well, I thought there are similarities in our time of disintegrating institutions and a sense of forces beyond our control and standards collapsing and norms all giving way and general distress and he said "Oh, we don't feel that way in Texas!"

Interviewer: And in a sense I think you don't feel that way?

Tuchman: Yes, I do.

Interviewer: About the 20 century?

Tuchman: Oh, gosh yes...I think it's a very disturbed and disintegrating period. I think we're all getting used to living with - there's a lot of collapsing standards, that's what I find so -

Interviewer: Standards? Moral standards?

Interviewer: Tuchman: Yes, and physical too, and behavioral standards, and standards of individual responsibility - that's the one I find the most evident. People are no longer held to be responsible for their own actions.


She then goes on to say that we don't have a sense of sin anymore and that World War 1 caused a sense of disillusionment because everyone felt that so huge and agonizing an effort couldn't be done except for making a better world and when it didn't there was a tremendous sense of disillusionment in our own capacity, in mankind's capacity to control its fate and as a result of disillusionment you get a dislike for your own kind. Later she briefly touches on her original interest in writing about that period was the Black Plague, which she compares to the H-bomb (and not any impending plague).

[John]

** 27-May-2021 World View: Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror

Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror The 14th Century and Today

VTR Date: December 4, 1979

Guest: Tuchman, Barbara

THE OPEN MIND
Host: Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Barbara Tuchman
Title: “A Distant Mirror” The 14th Century and Today
VTR: 12/4/79

https://www.thirteen.org/openmind-archi ... and-today/

[Higgenbotham]

** 27-May-2021 World View: Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror

Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror The 14th Century and Today

VTR Date: December 4, 1979

Guest: Tuchman, Barbara

THE OPEN MIND
Host: Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Barbara Tuchman
Title: “A Distant Mirror” The 14th Century and Today
VTR: 12/4/79

https://www.thirteen.org/openmind-archi ... and-today/

Thank you, John.

There's a transcript under the video.

As I've said before, I don't advocate that anyone adopt my view, but this interview gives some of the reasons for it. Obviously, Tuchman felt in 1979 that the world was in a similar situation to the 14th Century collapse (a distant mirror). Though aware of the reasons for others thinking so, I didn't feel that way until 2011.

In my personal experience, the difference between 1979 and post 2011 is that, in the period from 1979 to 2011, those with higher standards had the power to elevate the standards around them to avoid low standard outcomes. Today that is impossible on every level. Anyone with high standards today is forced to accept lower standards. I write about this constantly.

[DaKardii]

Does anyone in America really understand what they have done? They don't care. And everyone in the Muslim world knows that. Please, spare me your moralizing. It was the Americans under G.W. Bush that ushered in the new dark Age, not Muslims.

Most Americans are too brainwashed by Democrat/Republican party line propaganda from cable tv channels like ABC, CBS, CNN, (C)(MS)NBC, and FOX.

If they care about what their government has done over the past 20 years AT ALL, they tend to only care when their party is in the opposition. Democrats screamed about Bush, kept silent on Obama, screamed about Trump, and are now keeping silent on Biden. Republicans kept silent on Bush, screamed about Obama, kept silent on Trump, and are now screaming about Biden.

Based on my personal experiences trying to talk to other people about this issue (or virtually any other issue for that matter), I've concluded that at this time it's almost impossible to have an honest discussion about it, especially when their party is in power. Whenever I try to talk to them about it, they either (A) act like it's ALL the other party's fault; (B) briefly acknowledge the problem, dismiss it, and then try to change the subject; or (C) use the most convoluted "logic" imaginable in order to defend their party from (correct) accusations of complicity.

And that's another reason I left the GOP. I'm sick of the ideological dishonesty. The GOP is just as bad as the DNC on virtually every level. Both parties need to be abolished and replaced with new parties that actually give a shit about the issues, or at least have some sort of moral compass.

[Xeraphim1]

And that's another reason I left the GOP. I'm sick of the ideological dishonesty. The GOP is just as bad as the DNC on virtually every level. Both parties need to be abolished and replaced with new parties that actually give a shit about the issues, or at least have some sort of moral compass.

You must be young. I was where you are now some 25+ years ago. You learn to not take such things personally after a while.

I belong to a party of one and I'm not admitting new members. I have no political allies, only co-belligerents.

And you really need to get off the petro-dollar thing. You're using it as a shorthand for a bunch of complicated and interconnected things.

[Navigator]

** 27-May-2021 World View: Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror

Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror The 14th Century and Today

VTR Date: December 4, 1979

Guest: Tuchman, Barbara

THE OPEN MIND
Host: Richard D. Heffner
Guest: Barbara Tuchman
Title: “A Distant Mirror” The 14th Century and Today
VTR: 12/4/79

https://www.thirteen.org/openmind-archi ... and-today/

Thank you, John.

There's a transcript under the video.

As I've said before, I don't advocate that anyone adopt my view, but this interview gives some of the reasons for it. Obviously, Tuchman felt in 1979 that the world was in a similar situation to the 14th Century collapse (a distant mirror). Though aware of the reasons for others thinking so, I didn't feel that way until 2011.

In my personal experience, the difference between 1979 and post 2011 is that, in the period from 1979 to 2011, those with higher standards had the power to elevate the standards around them to avoid low standard outcomes. Today that is impossible on every level. Anyone with high standards today is forced to accept lower standards. I write about this constantly.

I would also strongly recommend her book "The Proud Tower", concerning the world before WW1. I believe that we are at the cusp of a similar conflagration with similar consequences. It would be no shock to most here that such things are the result of similar attitudes/actions on the part of populations.

Here is a summary from a review of this book written last year in the Key Peninsula News:

“The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914” was a bestseller when it was published by historian Barbara Tuchman in 1966. Drawn from a collection of lengthy essays she had written for various magazines, it is a page-burning story of a world blundering toward collapse in what we now call “the Golden Age,” though no one who lived through it thought of it that way at the time.

“A phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age,” Tuchman wrote.

The book takes its title from the 1845 Edgar Allan Poe poem “The City in the Sea” — “While from a proud tower in the town/Death looks gigantically down.”

“The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,” Tuchman wrote. “In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs. This book is an attempt to discover the quality of the world from which the Great War came.”

And that’s just the second paragraph.

Like her more famous 1978 portrait of 14th century France, “A Distant Mirror,” Tuchman here too finds parallels in a bygone age that illuminate our own despite the esoteric subject. It’s as if she deliberately chose the most obscure pages of history to prove that modern society is just as vulnerable to the same kind of corrupting human foibles as that bygone age, and that we should guard against it, whether we live in the 1960s or 2020s.

The book is divided into eight chapters, each describing political and social developments in a different country, stretching from the United States across Europe to Russia, and the personalities who drove them. Reading it is something like attending a family reunion with relatives one has never met, resurrecting forgotten history lessons like buried memories (the Haymarket trial, the American invasion of the Philippines, that eccentric introvert Alfred Nobel), coupled with the unnerving sensation of having one’s own passions and antipathies echoed by people now dead for a century.

We step back through time to the era of the landed gentry and patrician parliamentarians of Great Britain at the zenith of her empire, to the fight for universal suffrage for (white) male voters and the eight-hour day on the continent, to the swelling imperialism of the United States, to a decade of assassination and bomb-throwing as a young intellectual movement called Anarchism is hijacked by the impoverished refugees of an eternal underclass who equate lack of government with freedom.

Presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt publicly calls for the summary execution of socialists and trade unionists, including his opponent Eugene V. Debs. The Czar who freed the serfs is murdered and all thought of further reform in Russia disappears. A nobody French artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, is framed for espionage and sent to Devil’s Island, only to be released after the revelation of the corruption and anti-Semitism that sent him there destroys the government. World-weary diplomats establish rules for international arbitration at The Hague, with the certainty that modern war is obsolete. The premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, “The Rite of Spring,” in 1913 is so radically different from anything that came before, the white-tied gentlemen and elegant ladies of the audience erupt in riot. The first socialist leader of France is shot in the back in a Paris café by a French nationalist and the next day, Aug. 1, 1914, France and Germany mobilize for war.

Critics in 1966 and since have faulted Tuchman for a broad embrace that lacks analysis of the behavior of the Great Nations that led to the Great War. But she admits directly in her preface that while that was her intention at the start, the facts took her elsewhere.

“The Grosse Politik approach has been used up. Besides, it is misleading because it allows us to rest on the easy illusion that it is ‘they,’ the naughty statesmen, who are always responsible for war while ‘we,’ the innocent people, are merely led. That impression is a mistake.”

[DaKardii]

You must be young. I was where you are now some 25+ years ago. You learn to not take such things personally after a while.

I belong to a party of one and I'm not admitting new members. I have no political allies, only co-belligerents.

And you really need to get off the petro-dollar thing. You're using it as a shorthand for a bunch of complicated and interconnected things.

Yes, I am young. 25, to be exact. Maybe this just a phase for me, I don't know.

All I have to say is that right now I'm totally disillusioned with just about everything in American politics. I feel like Syndrome, the villain of The Incredibles, when he says:

You can't count on anyone, especially your heroes.

[Tom Mazanec]

I feel the sane way about American politics.
And I am 63.

[Cool Breeze]

The globalists and the elites of the country are deceived. The devil always throws them under the bus. But division and chaos is a larger part of the plan, and the powers that be know that christian europeans are the only real bulwark against the state, so they do their best to propagandize them (and this is also why they hate Russia and China is on the shit list too). That main form of propaganda, as far as fertility or fecundity go, is feminism. Grab a cubicle job while you waste your most fertile and attractive years to men, then complain when they don't want you post 30 when you are supposedly "ready" to have a family. Ha. Promote promiscuity so men also see that you are not their first; convince women to reward guys who are not and won't be their husbands with their most prized assets (first love, virginity, etc).

By the way, yes, there are also too many men out there, not that we can't survive with many men, but rather we promote dysgenic rearing of kids through welfare and unstable families, single moms, etc.

I would note that a real defining construct is digital versus non digital. While “digital” existed pre 2000 most information was conveyed in hard print. Screens didn’t show pictures (until late 90s).

Obtaining information pre-digested by others via digital format greatly reduces the universe of possible information you receive. For one thing, reading long works digitally is biologically inferior to hard print due to your eye/brain rejection of invisible flickering on screens. It tires you out and limits in most the time they can productively spend reading. Yes, you can read long things, but few do. At some point your brain tires of the invisible assault.

With the “social media” infection where everyone is told they too have brilliant thoughts in small chunks, and thus can attract “likes” or “followers” like actual thinkers, you have a flood of garbage constantly touted as trendy by social media promoters. Important stuff is immune to short cutting or truncation by digital means. It isn’t that digital is bad per se, but highly limiting. So few millennials read books. Screens dominate eyeballs with visuals and short mostly inane comments. Don’t think, view! This is mental junk food with the same dismal outcomes. Junk thinking. This infection is due entirely to ad sales by people like Zuckerberg and the Google monsters.

Hello Bernie Sanders, et. al. and “free” everything for everyone! Don’t think, just “follow.”

One can only hope there will be a strong counter reaction to this at some point.

Good points.

The overlords know what foibles humans have, especially if they are not in healthy family settings.