Old assumptions no longer valid. Respected institutions no longer trusted. Illusions about how life is "supposed to" unfold. People realize the game is rigged and rigged rotten. Ideas about "fairness" are bubbling up. That's back-brain stuff, very hardwired. Once people get their hackles up about what is "fair" and "unfair", polite rational discussion goes out the window. Denial is no longer possible. What next?
Posted 1/27/2012 2:53 pm
This kind of thing has been going on since Vietnam. You underestimate the power of denial -- entire segments of our world depend and continue to thrive quite well on it.
Posted 1/27/2012 2:55 pm
You underestimate the power of propaganda. Look at the front page here, no one is complaining about "respected institutions", they all blame spics, joos, and liberals.
But if we accept that there are underlying problems being denied, it stands to reason that eventually they will rear their heads and become unavoidable. I think that's what's coming up. America has known peace and prosperity, more or less, since WWII but that's a blink of an eye on the historical scale.
You could have said that in 1776. Or with the Louisiana Purchase. Or in the 1840's. Or the Civil War. Or the industrial revolution. Or the Roaring 20's. Or the Depression. Or World War 2. Or cold war and the rise of US dominance. Or the 1960's. Or the computer age. Or the mobile /internet age. Or today.
You complain about the possibility of great social upheaval and denial and then deny that American history is basically our successful survival of a sequence of social upheavals. We're good at it, it's what we do. That's not to say it'll stop or that everyone will come out fine on the other end, but people tend to prefer order over chaos and act accordingly.
No. What he's saying is that people are really, really stupid and never learn. When they get really fucked over by the powers that be the most they do is take it out on each other.
Posted 1/27/2012 3:13 pm
In times past, everyone was still American and were here because they wanted to be Americans.
In the current invasion, we have been invaded by Mexicans and Nigerians and Muslims who despise America and work to change it. They don't hold to American values.
You make it sound like this stately, neat tidal sequence that ebbs and flows with the same sort of inevitable permanency as the phases of the moon. But America is not even 250 years old, that's a fart in the wind in historical terms. Going simply by the various horrors of history, statistically speaking America is due for something truly nasty one of these days.
You don't think that the Civil War was truly nasty? You have no fucking idea. Most humans who ever lived could not imagine even the lifestyle of even the poorest Americans today. And if you really think that our world is about to come crashing down around us, get your thumb out of your ass, get off F2 and go do something productive about it.
Every society in history was good at surviving upheavals right up to the last one that they didn't survive. By definition. There are no societies that failed to survive more than one upheaval.
The Ancient Egyptians maintained their society for 5000 years before it collapsed and by a few hundred years later the people could not even read the inscription on their ancestors' monuments.
The Romans maintained there's in the West for 1000 years and another 1000 in the East.
What makes you think that US society is "good at it"?
All the indications are that US society is one of the more unstable that has arisen in human history and is unlikely to be long lived
The Taiping War and associated mid century convulsions in the Manchu Empire makes the American Civil War look like a fucking knobjoust. Christ, even the English Civil War killed a tenth of our population and that only involved relatively small armies for most of its duration.
That's was not at all untypical for China. It tended to be a century or two of unbelievable chaos before another emperor got a peasant army going and took over.
90 years is nothing in Chinese history. Most Americans couldn't tell you why Nixon resigned. The Chinese can argue about generals who died 4 centuries ago.
Agreed. The US will break because of ethno-religous strife. It will then dissolve itself, or more likely, become a military controlled state. Just a question of when.
Posted 1/27/2012 4:23 pm
The US of the great depression and the US of today are two totally different nations culturally and genetically. If the underlying population changes old rules about this and that goes out the window. If you want to see the future of USA, visit some poor latin american nation.
