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Thread: Official 'Map Project' Thread - Page 17







Post#401 at 07-09-2007 08:11 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Quote Originally Posted by 1990 View Post
All well and good, except how is Putin at all like Truman, aside from being a Nomad leading a 1T? His approval rating when he leaves office will very likely be no less than 70%. Truman's was 22%, IIRC. Their styles are totally different. Truman was scrappy, earthy, and tough. Putin is as slick as they come.
Gah, that was a bad comparison. I meant "Truman Equivalent" as in a Nomad that comes to power at the 4T-1T cusp, I wasn't saying Putin was like Truman.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#402 at 07-10-2007 03:53 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by Uzi View Post
The reason Putin is popular is because there is a growing middle class that has access to choices -- in lifestyle, education, media, etc. -- that their parents never had. As long as that continues, who is to argue with he who is pulling the strings.
1T's are not really characterized by ideology. Once the inertia of success runs down, cracks in the social structure will start to appear, and the Awakening will be underway. At least, that's how the generational theory holds things. Coming up now to the turnover (if it goes through that way), there's absolutely no sense whatsoever that things will change in any significant manner under Son-of-Putin. In fact, if you look to the concerns people have about this, the only thing that comes up is a mild worry that stability will be injured -- that is, that the 1T will somehow be lost.

But then, that being the concern, pretty much the entire system is gearing up to ensure that it does not happen. Stability will be maintained for the next chunk of time, because that is what people -- what the society and its systems -- want.

I personally dislike the Yeltsin bashing that is in vogue these days. We forget that Russia would not be where it was if the hardline coup had won out in 1991. Russia would not be sipping wines at the G8 if Yeltsin hadn't climbed on top of that tank. There wouldn't be enthusiastic investment conferences if Russia remained the center of a continent-wide party dictatorship.
Yeltsin himself arguably didn't do anything that wasn't bound to happen anyway. The Russian people were ready for a change, and Yeltsin -- in true Prophet style -- got on top of the wave and rode it as far as he could. It's really not unfair to deny him all but token credit for the successes the Russian people achieved, while placing on him a large share of the blame for the weaknesses that his discretionary actions introduced.

And those war criminal NKVD officers that loaded humans into cattle cars and sent them to die in Siberia? That wasn't so bad, say the history books in creepy Putin Russia.
What history books are you reading? In the schools (again, in the Petersburg federal district, at least) they devote a week each year to commemorating the victims of the camps. I happened to be meeting with the director of Zack's to-be-school on one of the mornings in that week; the morning begin with a reading by the students of a group of letters written by zeks about the camps; felling trees in the frozen swamps without tools, trying to survive on the equivalent of five slices of bread a day, the dogs and the watchtowers. You don't meet a single person who has any unalloyed good to say about that; Russia is still working out how to come to terms with it.

But don't worry, even though they were speaking Russian and were in Russia at the time and had Russian names, they weren't really Russian. They were really Soviet.
Well yeah. Since there were German and Georgian and Uzbek and Estonian and Ukranian names among their number, it's only fair to call them by what they called themselves.
Again I would echo Gorbachev: the greatest victims of the Soviet Union were the Russian people. I mean, they suffered under it for twenty years before it turned its eye on anyone else.
Last edited by Justin '77; 07-10-2007 at 04:59 AM.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#403 at 07-10-2007 04:59 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
Leningrad (now known as Saint Petersburg, of course) was under a protracted (900 days) and very lethal siege. German shells hit Leningrad, so the city was a war zone. That reeks of Crisis. Leningraders knew what they were fighting for: their very lives. Leningrad and its suburbs were a major war zone.
Bad things happen during 1Ts, too. Strictly speaking, though, Leningraders weren't for the most part fighting. The fighting took part on the outskirts -- it was well-enough fortified that no invasion was even attempted over the years of bombardment. You're probably thinking of Stalingrad (I know, the names sound a lot alike). In fact, Leningrad was bombarded for three years, but only cut off for a few months of the siege. The city itself was hardly a war zone -- no combat took place their at all, and even the breaking of the siege was effected by the arrival and passing-through from the north of the Volkhonskiy Front.

The siege sucked ass, to be sure. But a world-shattering, society-molding event? Not really. People lived their lives as well as they could and emerged from it more or less intact.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#404 at 07-10-2007 05:07 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
I look at Russian history and I see nothing analogous to a 2T in Russia or the Soviet Union between 1910 and 1985. That looks abnormal.
Funny, I look at Soviet history and see primarily lies, evasions, and half-truths. What's particularly cool about that is that my reading of it tends to be confirmed by the people who don't have to read about it to find out what happened.
There was no generation of pampered children
This is an absolutely insane statement. The post-Revolution generation was to be the Future of Communism. The entire of society was set up around helping them to achieve the bright, prosperous future that would be their birthright, gift of their parents who fought to build the system for them.

How can you get more indulged than that? I mean, it doesn't actually all come down to a comparison of quantities-of-toys for you, does it? If it does, how do you explain the Millennial Generation -- whose toys are much better and in much greater quantity than those of the Boomer gen -- not being Prophets?

Children's lives were highly structured
Actually, relatively speaking not so much. Society was fairly highly structured (as you would expect in a 1T), but people who were kids during those days say that it was a good time to be young.

And yes, even kids from little villages.


I hate to break it to you, but your thesis appears to be based on faulty information. It happens.
Last edited by Justin '77; 07-10-2007 at 11:48 AM.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#405 at 07-10-2007 11:36 AM by David Krein [at Gainesville, Florida joined Jul 2001 #posts 604]
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And I thought Vince Lamb was The Pervert

My goodness, Mr. X., if these weren't clichés I'd say get a grip, lighten up, and chill out. Nowhere did I say that your work, or that of your acolytes, or that of Strauss and Howe was crap. I was criticizing the notion that one could talk about generational theory without engaging with the generations that underpin it. But you are proving hostile to all criticism.

Your response reminds me of Eric Hoffer's contention that True Believers are basically incomplete human beings, insecure and neurotic. And I'll leave it to others to judge who in our recent exchange has been "spewing venom, hatred and contempt."

As to your disquisition on induction and deduction, I view the process this way: it's like a step ladder with steps on both sides. One walks up the inductive side of the ladder until reaching a conclusion at the top, and then walks down the deductive side to ensure that all the steps going up were logical. As I said, I am an empricist and a nominalist and I'll take Francis Bacon while you can have Conan Doyle.

Pax,

the new pervert

Dave Krein '42

By the way your statement that "There is no such volume of diaries and histories available for other countries" after being informed otherwise reflects an appalling ignorance that is, what is worse, superceded by your refusal to learn.
"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it." - Omar Khayyam.







Post#406 at 07-10-2007 11:48 AM by Uzi [at joined Oct 2005 #posts 2,254]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
Well yeah. Since there were German and Georgian and Uzbek and Estonian and Ukranian names among their number, it's only fair to call them by what they called themselves.

Again I would echo Gorbachev: the greatest victims of the Soviet Union were the Russian people. I mean, they suffered under it for twenty years before it turned its eye on anyone else.
There was Walloon SS units as well. Yet its leaders were not to be found in Belgium. And their fight songs were probably auf Deutsch. So again, the eastern front was a battle between two empires, one centered in Moscow, the other centered in Berlin, over territory and who gets to colonize it.

Yeltsin himself arguably didn't do anything that wasn't bound to happen anyway. The Russian people were ready for a change, and Yeltsin -- in true Prophet style -- got on top of the wave and rode it as far as he could. It's really not unfair to deny him all but token credit for the successes the Russian people achieved, while placing on him a large share of the blame for the weaknesses that his discretionary actions introduced.
Take a step back and look at the big picture. Most of Russia's leaders have been shitty.They shot Tsar Nicholas and his family in a basement. Then there was the jerk-off Lenin, then Stalin -- talk about super evil. Khruschev -- could smile for the camera, but mostly sucked. Brezhnev? Let's not even get started talking about those eyebrows. And, despite a charismatic birthmark, everybody hates Gorbachev still because "he broke up great Soviet Union".

So in the scheme of things, is Yeltsin really that bad?

What history books are you reading?
I get my information on Russian history books from the two languages I can read: Estonian and English. I have read some of the Soviet era history books in Estonian, I assume they are direct translations from the Russian. They basically sum up the 1918-1940 period in about half a sentence: "In the 1930s Estonia was ruled by a bourgeosie dictatorship."

Still, to this day you can have one student who takes a Russian history class here and gets fed one story -- usually the Stalinist one -- and another who takes an Estonian history class and gets another one -- usually the Mart Laar one.

Because I have decided that I should probably learn Italian before I get to Russian, I have to rely on English language journalists who write for independently owned organizations to supply me with information, like this tidbit za Stalina, za rodina.

Again I would echo Gorbachev: the greatest victims of the Soviet Union were the Russian people. I mean, they suffered under it for twenty years before it turned its eye on anyone else.
Really? Then why do they still protect Soviet war criminals in Russia today? I am sure that the Lithuanians would love to get their hands on the Soviets behind the massacre at the TV Tower in January 1991. Perhaps the Russians, feeling their neighbors' pain, would gladly hand over those Soviets that have been convicted in absentia.

The USSR did to its western neighbors in 1939-40 exactly what Nazi Germany did. The Nazi Germans similarly occupied Denmark and Norway to "protect" them from the British. Yet the Germans atone and the Russians say, "it wasn't us." If you are a resident of Finland or Estonia or Poland today, then you hope that some Russian some day will come forward and say, "yeah, what happened to you was bad. That kind of thing should never happen again." That sort of put the Western Europeans at ease about Germany, although that subtle anxiety is still there. But I am not holding my breath for anything like that out of today's Russia. It seems like normalization of relations with them is just impossible.

Maybe the capitalists will win out in 2008. Medvedev, should he win, has nothing to lose by acting normal with regards to Russia's western neighbors. Ivanov will probably continue in the vein of Putin -- reliving his Soviet boyhood from the top. I am not sure I care so much. If I didn't have to read about Putin (he is in most newspapers), I wouldn't. But when I do, he annoys me.
Last edited by Uzi; 07-10-2007 at 12:09 PM.
"It's easy to grin, when your ship's come in, and you've got the stock market beat. But the man who's worth while is the man who can smile when his pants are too tight in the seat." Judge Smails, Caddyshack.

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy of the human race." Henry Miller.

1979 - Generation Perdu







Post#407 at 07-10-2007 12:16 PM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by Uzi View Post
Take a step back and look at the big picture. Most of Russia's leaders have been shitty.They shot Tsar Nicholas and his family in a basement. Then there was the jerk-off Lenin, then Stalin -- talk about super evil. Khruschev -- could smile for the camera, but mostly sucked. Brezhnev? Let's not even get started talking about those eyebrows. And, despite a charismatic birthmark, everybody hates Gorbachev still because "he broke up great Soviet Union".

So in the scheme of things, is Yeltsin really that bad?
Not in the grand scheme of things (they also had Ivan the Terrible and were under Genghis Khan for a fair bit of Russia's history, too -- if you want to talk jag-offs). But he's the one that pretty much everyone remembers. Just like Clinton and Reagan in the US.
And then there's the fact of the concerted effort being put forth to sink the meme, "Yeltsin = good" into the public consciousness. Generally speaking when it comes to politicians, I'm always going to find myself in opposition to those kind of things.

I get my information on Russian history books from the two languages I can read: Estonian and English. I have read some of the Soviet era history books in Estonian, I assume they are direct translations from the Russian. They basically sum up the 1918-1940 period in about half a sentence: "In the 1930s Estonia was ruled by a bourgeosie dictatorship."
Yeah. A lot of Soviet-era kids' books are that way. A fairly huge chunk of the first readers that we are getting handed-down to us by friends around here are pretty propaganda-heavy.
Of course, those are the Soviet-era books. Vanishingly few Russian schools teach from such outdated material. You should look at some newer stuff. If you know anyone who could help you translate, I could send you a couple of more current materials (it approaching back-to-school season, they're not hard to come by). If that interests you at all, that is...

Because I have decided that I should probably learn Italian before I get to Russian, I have to rely on English language journalists who write for independently owned organizations to supply me with information, like this tidbit za Stalina, za rodina.
It's unfortunate that you have to rely on the anti-Russian press.. If you looked at what he said in a more neutral source, you would realize that the majority of his complaint -- in fact, nearly the total extent of what's being mis-nomered the 'Stalin rehabilitation' deal -- is the fact that Western sources have long airbrushed out the criticality of the USSR in defeating the Germans during WWII. Particularly since there are still people alive who fought that fight, it's only reasonable to insist on a reading of history with a bit more depth than a Spielberg movie. The tack on Stalin that Russian society seems to be moving towards seems like it will be along the lines of, "He was a very bad guy, though he did lead us to victory over the fascists". One nice thing I find out about Russians is their willingness not to paint everything in either pure black or pure white. You'll find them able to be cynical about the most apparently-saintly person, and at the same time able to recognize the lone positive achievement of an otherwise wholly evil person.

Really? Then why do they still protect Soviet war criminals in Russia today? I am sure that the Lithuanians would love to get their hands on the Soviets behind the massacre at the TV Tower in January 1991. Perhaps the Russians, feeling their neighbors' pain, would gladly hand over those Soviets that have been convicted in absentia.
Good questions. Have they ever been asked in a relatively civilized manner to do just that? I've honestly never heard one way or another...

And if you are a resident of Finland or Estonia or Poland, then you hope that some Russian some day will come forward and say, "yeah, what happened to you was bad. That kind of thing should never happen again."
Umm. Several have done just that. What it seems people want them to do, however, is to accept some kind of responsibility for it. No one, regardless what they say they want, is ever satisfied by a mere acknowledgment of the common tragedy. And, given the fact that the Soviet government was overthrown, to expect that an emissary of the government that replaced it to take responsibility for the actions of the bad men they got rid of seems a bit silly.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#408 at 07-10-2007 01:02 PM by Uzi [at joined Oct 2005 #posts 2,254]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
Umm. Several have done just that. What it seems people want them to do, however, is to accept some kind of responsibility for it. No one, regardless what they say they want, is ever satisfied by a mere acknowledgment of the common tragedy. And, given the fact that the Soviet government was overthrown, to expect that an emissary of the government that replaced it to take responsibility for the actions of the bad men they got rid of seems a bit silly.
No one can accept responsibility for a past of which they were not part. But I don't hear a lot of that from Russia. I hear a lot of defensiveness and pangs of self-victimization. They still can't bring themselves to believe that they basically got rid of 25 percent of the people in this land in which I am typing.

That's what is scary. Because there are some Russian Nazis out here in Internet land that think it was just fine. I have argued with them in all sorts of quasi-respectable places. They subscribe to the Zhiranovsky vision of the Venäjän Idea (as a Finnish author put it), that they have some sort of birthright to most of the world. Only those settlers in the West Bank with their goats and rifles unnerve me more. Thankfully though, they are far away.

It's unfortunate that you have to rely on the anti-Russian press.
Like I said, I really wish I didn't have to read anything about Russia. Or China. Or Iraq. Estonia is myopic enough. I wish we could have the world-proof bubble they have over their heads in Stockholm. They are the true masters of sticking their heads in the sand. My advice for Estonia's politicians is to avoid all bilateral dealings when possible with Russia and lean mostly on Brussels. It would be nice if they forgot about us. Unfortunately the right wing politicians like to stick it to Moscow any chance they get.
"It's easy to grin, when your ship's come in, and you've got the stock market beat. But the man who's worth while is the man who can smile when his pants are too tight in the seat." Judge Smails, Caddyshack.

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy of the human race." Henry Miller.

1979 - Generation Perdu







Post#409 at 07-10-2007 01:12 PM by Mustang [at Confederate States of America joined May 2003 #posts 2,303]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
One nice thing I find out about Russians is their willingness not to paint everything in either pure black or pure white. You'll find them able to be cynical about the most apparently-saintly person, and at the same time able to recognize the lone positive achievement of an otherwise wholly evil person.
Excellent observation. That comes right out of the Christianity which traditionally informed the culture. Once upon a time, all Christians regarded evil as truth twisted (Good and Evil on a continuum of incrementally distorted Truth). Then along came Augustine in the West, never fully recovered from his earlier Manichaeanism, who presented Good as Truth and Evil as the absence of Truth (dichotomous Good and Evil). The West never recovered. Where an Eastern Christian could look at a witch and say, "This much of what you believe is True, but here is where it becomes distorted," a Western Christian necessarily felt compelled to burn her at the stake to blot out the "pure evil." Carried forward to today, many Western Christians (and Western non-Christians having inherited the Augustinian-influenced culture) seemingly would like to exterminate all Muslims, oblivious to the fact that most Muslims are almost certainly "lukewarm" in their faith, as is true of any other group. I would hope that Russians by and large still see the "distorted truth" which provides the hope that the individual can correct his errors. This belief would encourage removal of an adversarial group from control of territory without desiring their extermination (contrary to what really drives certain extreme Augustinian Christians in the West).
"What went unforeseen, however, was that the elephant would at some point in the last years of the 20th century be possessed, in both body and spirit, by a coincident fusion of mutant ex-Liberals and holy-rolling Theocrats masquerading as conservatives in the tradition of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan: Death by transmogrification, beginning with The Invasion of the Party Snatchers."

-- Victor Gold, Aide to Barry Goldwater







Post#410 at 07-10-2007 04:21 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Quote Originally Posted by David Krein View Post
As to your disquisition on induction and deduction, I view the process this way: it's like a step ladder with steps on both sides. One walks up the inductive side of the ladder until reaching a conclusion at the top, and then walks down the deductive side to ensure that all the steps going up were logical. As I said, I am an empricist and a nominalist and I'll take Francis Bacon while you can have Conan Doyle.
I thought that first Hume and latter Popper proved that induction is nonsense.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#411 at 07-10-2007 08:14 PM by Matt1989 [at joined Sep 2005 #posts 3,018]
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Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
I thought that first Hume and latter Popper proved that induction is nonsense.
Well, since they obviously "proved" it, then there is no point for TFT and the Map Project and this entire board. Gosh! All that hard work wasted!







Post#412 at 07-10-2007 08:58 PM by Odin [at Moorhead, MN, USA joined Sep 2006 #posts 14,442]
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Quote Originally Posted by MichaelEaston View Post
then there is no point for TFT and the Map Project and this entire board. Gosh! All that hard work wasted!
Uh, no. "The theory" is a perfectly falsifiable hypothesis and induction is not necessary for it or any other theory for that matter.

From Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Karl Popper, an influential philosopher of science, sought to resolve the problem in the context of the scientific method, in part by arguing that science does not rely on induction, but exclusively upon deduction, in effect making modus tollens the centerpiece of his theory. On this account, when assessing a theory, one should pay only heed to data which is in disagreement with the theory rather than to data which is in agreement with it. Popper went further and stated that a hypothesis which does not allow for experimental tests of falsity is outside the bounds of empirical science.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism







Post#413 at 07-11-2007 01:13 AM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
Bad things happen during 1Ts, too. Strictly speaking, though, Leningraders weren't for the most part fighting. The fighting took part on the outskirts -- it was well-enough fortified that no invasion was even attempted over the years of bombardment. You're probably thinking of Stalingrad (I know, the names sound a lot alike). In fact, Leningrad was bombarded for three years, but only cut off for a few months of the siege. The city itself was hardly a war zone -- no combat took place their at all, and even the breaking of the siege was effected by the arrival and passing-through from the north of the Volkhonskiy Front.

The siege sucked ass, to be sure. But a world-shattering, society-molding event? Not really. People lived their lives as well as they could and emerged from it more or less intact.

No confusion between Leningrad and Stalingrad any more than I would confuse Lenin and Stalin. Stalingrad was itself the front line in late 1942/early 1943. Stalingrad (now Volgograd) is on the southern part of the Volga; Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) is on the Neva delta at the Gulf of Finland.

Stalingrad came under only a partial siege once the Soviet Armies cut off the part in German hands from the main forces of the German Army and let the German Army run out of food and ammunition while fighting. Leningrad was under full siege. It was frequently shelled. That's war. Leningrad existed under famine that the Nazis chose to allow. That's warlike. People were dying of warlike actions in Leningrad for a considerable time. If that isn't Crisis, then what is?

After the war, Stalin purged the wartime leadership of Leningrad because it had developed 'too much' independence from Kremlin authority.

To say that people lived their lives as well as they could also described the Warsaw Ghetto -- not that it was their fault, they failed largely to stay alive.







Post#414 at 07-11-2007 07:55 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
Leningrad was under full siege. It was frequently shelled. That's war. Leningrad existed under famine that the Nazis chose to allow. That's warlike. People were dying of warlike actions in Leningrad for a considerable time. If that isn't Crisis, then what is?
Well, according to the generational theory, a Crisis is a time where:
  • Artists are born
  • Civics transition from childhood to young-adulthood
  • Nomads move from young adulthood to mid-life
  • Prophets move from mid-life to old age
  • older Artists die or go senescent.
You may note a distinct lack of mention of any particular unfortunate events in the description... 'crisis' and 'Crisis' are two very different things when we're coming from the standpoint of generational theory.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#415 at 07-11-2007 01:01 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
Well, according to the generational theory, a Crisis is a time where:
  • Artists are born
  • Civics transition from childhood to young-adulthood
  • Nomads move from young adulthood to mid-life
  • Prophets move from mid-life to old age
  • older Artists die or go senescent.
You may note a distinct lack of mention of any particular unfortunate events in the description... 'crisis' and 'Crisis' are two very different things when we're coming from the standpoint of generational theory.
Let's see... Yevtushenko? Shchedrin? Gagarin? Clearly Artists. I'd say that Russians born between 1928 and 1943, more or less, were Artists, much as was so in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan.

They were the children of the time in which Josef Stalin enacted about the only admirable legislation... that that prohibited corporal punishment in schools. They were fortunate that they were not purged in Stalin's persecutions of real and imagined enemies. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were reformers -- not revolutionaries. Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet system by humanizing it. Glasnost and perestroika were intended to reform the system into a going concern... and we can only guess whether those who sought a continuation of the hard-line characteristics of the system proved Gorbachev's efforts futile. A democratic Soviet Union might have been nice to have around.

Shostakovich? Solzhenitsyn? Sakharov? Kalashnikov? Artem Mikoyan? Those seem clear-cut Civics in my book. They got cold feet about the System only after the Second World War, if at all. Think of all those images of veterans of the Great Patriotic War -- common people -- wearing medals from that war. Later generations didn't experience the war -- or get the medals.

Khrushchev... Zhukov... Malinovsky...Anastas Mikoyan? clear-cut examples of the sorts of Nomad leaders who lead the troops, do the diplomacy, and administer the home front. (Sure, most of Stalin's henchmen were of this generation. I'm going to accept that the Idealist/Reactive boundary in Russia as well as most of Europe was around 1877 so that I can fit Stalin into the model of a Reactive who shoves aside or "purges" out elder Idealists).

No Idealists? Sure. They were either puppets like Kalinin or... gone, like most of the early Bolsheviks that Stalin purged as potential rivals. That's how things were in Germany, Italy, and Japan, too... but not America, Great Britain, or Canada. That some generational constellation is the ideal for meeting a Crisis Era hardly indicates that that generational constellation will be in place.

Russian children (born in the 1840s and 1850s) at the time of the Crimean War through Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs were well off the scene around the time of the Russian Revolution.

I see Russia as having gone through a Crisis of unusual length and severity, beginning with the Bolshevik Coup and the subsequent (and extermination-filled) Russian Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, Stalin's forced collectivization (with enforcement of extreme ferocity) and Great Purge (another Revolution, in effect), and of course the Great Patriotic War -- conducted genocidally. Have you ever sampled the writings of Ilya Ehrenberg, who said things nearly as blood-curdling as anything Josef Goebbels or Julius Streicher ever said or penned? If you think the American deportation of Japanese-Americans and resident aliens harsh, what can you say of the wholesale uprooting of ethnic groups (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans) seen as potentially treacherous?

In few places was life so cheaply forfeit -- often for illusory grounds -- than in Russia for about 30 years. Sure, there were comparative respites, as in the late 1920s and perhaps the very late 1930s... that means little. Those were eyes of the storm, so to speak, and clearly not eras in themselves.

The three-wave Crisis solved little, but at a huge cost. Was Russia in 1946 much improved from Russia in 1913? There was more literacy and some industrial development... but far less than had there been peace and greater respect for human dignity. Some things were obviously worse. Infamous as tsarist Russia was, it had an independent and well-respected judiciary. It had cultural and scientific freedom, and Russian achievements in science and culture in late tsarist times were quite good. Many of those people who might have otherwise created a very different Russia during that time were either dead or making their contributions to progress (including about half the Jewish population of the United States).

Its industry had been in boom. Russia was poor by the standards of western Europe... but no worse than Japan or India at the time, let alone China. A few reforms at the right time could have saved the system -- and the right time was the 3T of the previous Saeculum. It's easy to see how Nicholas II could have saved Russia from thirty years of disaster: he could have revoked the anti-Jewish measures that ensured that talented Jews disenchanted with the system either fled or turned to Bolshevism, he could have allowed the Duma -- which could have become a distinguished Parliament -- genuine authority; he could have allowed trade unions to operate openly. It would have been wise also to improve the road system in Russia even as a military measure for better logistics and maneuver in the event of war as well as for better distribution of civilian goods.

Could a Reactive/Nomad generation follow an Adaptive/Artist generation in a cycle if the Crisis ensures that the post-war children will be impoverished instead of indulged? It seems unlikely -- but so does a three-wave, thirty-year Crisis Era. Systems as totalitarian as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are capable of ensuring that youth never get the chance to challenge the political or cultural norms of society. Marxism-Leninism operates by different rules than those of any other ideological basis of governance, and those rules nearly preclude dissent. Marxism-Leninism ignores the generational cycle and the complexities of human nature at the risk of catastrophic failure.

***************

Let's all agree on this point, an answer to an obvious question: why do we even discuss this topic?

Because history is important, and it is no mere disjointed collection of events and biographical details. We are trying to make sense of history.

Whatever differences we may have on interpreting events in Russia, a big player in human history if not always for the best, we would all have to agree that thirty years of history so ferocious as those that Russians experienced between August 1914 and May 1945 would ensure that even a great military victory would leave a wrecked people in its wake. The weapons in place at the 3T/4T cusp are enough to bring about the extinction of humanity, and even 'reasonable' restraint might leave a ruined world for children unfortunate enough to be born into the wreckage of a world that failed to appreciate what it stood to lose. Destruction of two hundred years of industrial development and investment, five hundred years of scientific and intellectual progress, and perhaps the entire moral fabric of society won't require thirty years of political and military catastrophe; it might take only thirty minutes of folly -- and the catastrophe could be world-wide. There might not be a university or even a library to restart the intellectual life, no electric power, a credible government anywhere, or even the Swiss banking system to survive the unspeakable calamity. Books -- and not only the abandoned best-sellers and obsolete how-to books -- and computer, video, and music disks will be burned as fuel to stave off the cold. So long Shakespeare -- and so long Mozart.

Think of a world in which children live and die in radioactive ruins. Think of a world in which people are so cold and desperate that they send children back to the mines to retrieve coals and are so hungry that they latch their children to plows to eke some grain from polluted fields. Think of that scenario lasting for a few centuries in a new Dark Age. That's not the worst scenario possible. Another has little characterization because there will be nobody surviving with the capacity to judge a great failure.

Humanity would have to re-learn what Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, Mendel, Mendeleyev, Freud, Einstein, and others learned with considerable difficulty and that we all take for granted today -- with even more difficulty. Children of a world so badly wrecked would not become the pampered youth who grow up to write great poetry or novels of unusual insight, and they would not become founders of new religions. They would be more like the children of the dull Dark Age that followed the collapse of Classical civilization in the 5th century of the Christian Era.

The past is the key to the future. Maybe it takes humanity eighty years to re-discover a fad or folly once rejected only to find out why it was rejected.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 07-11-2007 at 01:06 PM. Reason: add material







Post#416 at 07-11-2007 03:30 PM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
Let's see... Yevtushenko? Shchedrin? Gagarin? Clearly Artists.
Um. Why, exactly? That is, what about their stories says to you, "Artist"?
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were reformers -- not revolutionaries.
Gorbachev? You might argue it. But Yeltsin? A Reformer? I am to laugh.
Shostakovich? Solzhenitsyn? Sakharov? Kalashnikov? Artem Mikoyan? Those seem clear-cut Civics in my book.
Again, why? Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918, given the war and all, clearly early 4T; so an Artist) in particular was hardly a joiner. Even a cursory reading of his biography (even just his wikipedia one...) belies the characterization of his as a Civic. If you're actually interested in learning a bit about him, I might recommend "The Oak and the Calf" -- a book about a little mini-saga he went through.
One sees almost the exact kind of similarity in the life of Sakharov (b. 1921). Again, he was an fiercely independent thinker in his later days -- no Civic, but a pretty clear Artist.
And Kalashnikov (b. 1919)? What do you know about him other than that he invented the most democratic weapon the world has ever known? What at all does that little tidbit have to say about him as a person?
Really, Shostakovich is the only one I couldn't pretty quickly eliminate as a Civic. But then, he was born in 1906, right smack in the middle of the Russian 3T.
Khrushchev... Zhukov... Malinovsky...Anastas Mikoyan? clear-cut examples of the sorts of Nomad leaders who lead the troops
So then. You've never read a bibliography of any of those gents, then? The elder Mikoyan might actually have been Prophet-gen, though he more closely resembles the cynical power-brokers that are frequently found on the Prophet/Nomad cusp. Which makes sense, since he was born in 1895. Zhukov (born 1896 -- the latter part of the Russian 2T) fit the profile of a Nomad; Malinovsky (b. 1898, tail end 2T) did, too. So it makes sense that those would all be Nomads; given the Turning they were born in. And as you may remember, during a 1T (like Russian during WWII), it is Nomads who are in charge. During a 4T, they are the middle-management.
I see Russia as having gone through a Crisis of unusual length and severity
I know what you see -- you've made it pretty clear. However, it is similarly clear that you have fallen victim to an unfortunate fallacy associated with generational theory, wherein crises are confabulated with a Crisis.
The condition is exacerbated by your woeful misreading of Russian history. Such as:
...the Great Patriotic War -- conducted genocidally.
...a funny thing to say, given the fact that the USSR ended up the rulers of half of the enemy's citizens, and somehow failed to even make a significant dent in the German civilian population. In fact, the Soviet fight was first, against invaders, and second, against an ideology (you know, kind of like how the Korean War was fought against 'Communism'). The Soviets did some pretty messed-up things to the peoples they conquered, but to call the conflict itself genocidal is stretching that word pretty severely out of any kind of meaningful shape.

Have you ever sampled the writings of Ilya Ehrenberg
I can't say I have. I'm approaching certainty, however, that you never have either.
Really, the only objectionable thing I was able to find that was attributed to him was:
Вот отрывки из трех писем, найденных на убитых немцах: Управляющий Рейнгардт пишет лейтенанту Отто фон Шираку:
"Французов от нас забрали на завод Я выбрал шесть русских из Минского округа. Они гораздо выносливей французов. Только один из них умер, остальные продолжали работать в поле и на ферме. Содержание их ничего не стоит и мы не должны страдать от того, что эти звери, дети которых может быть убивают наших солдат, едят немецкий хлеб. Вчера я подверг лёгкой экзекуции двух русских бестий, которые тайком пожрали снятое молоко, предназначавшееся для свиных маток..."
Матеас Димлих пишет своему брату ефрейтору Генриху Цимлиху:
"В Лейдене имеется лагерь для русских, там можно их видеть. Оружия они не боятся, но мы с ними разговариваем хорошей плетью..."
Некто Отто Эссман пишет лейтенанту Гельмуту Вейганду:
"У нас здесь есть пленные русские. Эти типы пожирают дождевых червей на площадке аэродрома, они кидаются на помойное ведро. Я видел, как они ели сорную траву. И подумать, что это - люди..."
Рабовладельцы, они хотят превратить наш народ в рабов. Они вывозят русских к себе, иэдеваются, доводят их голодом до безумия, до того, что умирая, люди едят траву, червей, а поганый немец с тухлой сигарой в зубах философствует: "Разве это люди?.."
Мы знаем все. Мы помним все. Мы поняли: немцы не люди. Отныне слово "немец" для нас самое страшное проклятье. Отныне слово "немец" разряжает ружье. Не будем говорить. Не будем возмущаться. Будем убивать. Если ты не убил за день хотя бы одного немца. твой день пропал. Если ты думаешь, что за тебя немца убьет твой сосед, ты не понял угрозы. Если ты не убьешь немца, немец убьет тебя. Он возьмет твоих и будет мучить их в своей окаянной Германии. Если ты не можешь убить немца пулей, убей немца штыком. Если на твоем участке затишье, если ты ждешь боя, убей немца до боя. Если ты оставишь немца жить, немец повесит русского человека и опозорит русскую женщину. Если ты убил одного немца, убей другого - нет для нас ничего веселее немецких трупов. Не считай дней. Не считай верст. Считай одно: убитых тобою немцев. Убей немца! - это просит старуха-мать. Убей немца! - это молит тебя дитя. Убей немца! - это кричит родная земля. Не промахнись. Не пропусти. Убей!
Which starts out relating some atrocities that Germans had perpetrated against French and Russian civilians, and ends with the conclusion that the German Army had to be destroyed utterly. Hardly genocidal. People said the same things about Godless Commies during Korea.


*******

Whatever differences we may have on interpreting events in Russia, a big player in human history if not always for the best, we would all have to agree that thirty years of history so ferocious as those that Russians experienced between August 1914 and May 1945 would ensure that even a great military victory would leave a wrecked people in its wake.
Unfortunately, we wouldn't so agree. Once I might, lacking any better than spotty fourth-hand information, have come to the same conclusion you (and so many others) seem to be reaching. But the funny thing about primary sources -- sometimes they give a different picture than that fourth-hand-filled-in-with-assumptions stuff. While you seem to be totally focused on avoiding the EotWaWKI that you envision coming along with a worldwide 4T; recognizing the very strong unlikelihood of that coming to pass (since in fact majorities of the civilized world are not gearing up for the Big Smash-Up), on the other hand, puts one back in perspective. If a 1T can be as bad as the early Stalin years, it kind of brings into clear relief the fact that how the 4T is ended is the critical question.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#417 at 07-11-2007 04:53 PM by Matt1989 [at joined Sep 2005 #posts 3,018]
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07-11-2007, 04:53 PM #417
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a
Let's all agree on this point, an answer to an obvious question: why do we even discuss this topic?

Because history is important, and it is no mere disjointed collection of events and biographical details. We are trying to make sense of history.

Whatever differences we may have on interpreting events in Russia, a big player in human history if not always for the best, we would all have to agree that thirty years of history so ferocious as those that Russians experienced between August 1914 and May 1945 would ensure that even a great military victory would leave a wrecked people in its wake. The weapons in place at the 3T/4T cusp are enough to bring about the extinction of humanity, and even 'reasonable' restraint might leave a ruined world for children unfortunate enough to be born into the wreckage of a world that failed to appreciate what it stood to lose. Destruction of two hundred years of industrial development and investment, five hundred years of scientific and intellectual progress, and perhaps the entire moral fabric of society won't require thirty years of political and military catastrophe; it might take only thirty minutes of folly -- and the catastrophe could be world-wide. There might not be a university or even a library to restart the intellectual life, no electric power, a credible government anywhere, or even the Swiss banking system to survive the unspeakable calamity. Books -- and not only the abandoned best-sellers and obsolete how-to books -- and computer, video, and music disks will be burned as fuel to stave off the cold. So long Shakespeare -- and so long Mozart.

Think of a world in which children live and die in radioactive ruins. Think of a world in which people are so cold and desperate that they send children back to the mines to retrieve coals and are so hungry that they latch their children to plows to eke some grain from polluted fields. Think of that scenario lasting for a few centuries in a new Dark Age. That's not the worst scenario possible. Another has little characterization because there will be nobody surviving with the capacity to judge a great failure.

Humanity would have to re-learn what Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Locke, Jefferson, Darwin, Mendel, Mendeleyev, Freud, Einstein, and others learned with considerable difficulty and that we all take for granted today -- with even more difficulty. Children of a world so badly wrecked would not become the pampered youth who grow up to write great poetry or novels of unusual insight, and they would not become founders of new religions. They would be more like the children of the dull Dark Age that followed the collapse of Classical civilization in the 5th century of the Christian Era.

The past is the key to the future. Maybe it takes humanity eighty years to re-discover a fad or folly once rejected only to find out why it was rejected.
In essence, what you are still saying is that catastrophe = Crisis. Of course, once again, you completely ignore generational structure, preferring to believe that things must magically reset in a catastrophe because the children are growing up in an age to rebuild... and something about children not having toys.

You still have failed to prove that this has ever happened. You gave me Ethiopia, which Italy just before WWII, but your source showed Italian atrocities but no Ethiopian ones. Furthermore, the next couple of decades in Ethiopian history indicate a late Awakening/Unraveling mood. You haven't disputed this.







Post#418 at 07-11-2007 04:54 PM by Matt1989 [at joined Sep 2005 #posts 3,018]
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07-11-2007, 04:54 PM #418
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Vietnamese Awakening

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070711/...evolution_dc_1

Young people are dating more before marriage, having pre-marital sex, and have more outlets through the Internet to talk about the joys and problems of relationships than previous generations.

Parks in the city still called Saigon are popular at night among canoodling couples for whom privacy is a premium. Although economic change has altered the model of three generations living under one roof, it is still the norm for most.

Sitting on motorcycles with their backs to the road and oblivious to the surroundings, these couples are usually in their 20s, the age group that makes up more than half of Vietnam's 85 million population.







Post#419 at 07-12-2007 10:44 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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07-12-2007, 10:44 PM #419
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Dear David,

Quote Originally Posted by David Krein View Post
> My goodness, Mr. X., if these weren't clichés I'd say get a grip,
> lighten up, and chill out. Nowhere did I say that your work, or
> that of your acolytes, or that of Strauss and Howe was crap. I was
> criticizing the notion that one could talk about generational
> theory without engaging with the generations that underpin it. But
> you are proving hostile to all criticism.

> Your response reminds me of Eric Hoffer's contention that True
> Believers are basically incomplete human beings, insecure and
> neurotic. And I'll leave it to others to judge who in our recent
> exchange has been "spewing venom, hatred and contempt."
Quote Originally Posted by David Krein View Post
> You alternate between naivete, ignorance, and arrogance. Most
> pointedly, you seem to have little respect for the messy nature of
> human behavior in the past and not much for what historians do,
> and have done. Otherwise you wouldn't talk about "forgotten" wars
> and other nonsense, such as an algorithm for defining historical
> periods.
In the past, you've called me naive, ignorant and arrogant. You've
called my work "nonsense."

Here you called my work "absurd":

Quote Originally Posted by David Krein View Post
> Should I live as long as my parents did, I will still be here in
> 2027 which should be enough for me to see another 1st Turning. If
> this happens, I shall look back with glee at the absurdity of the
> mordant prognostications of Mr. Xenakis.
You also referred to Generational Dynamics forecasts as being
"mordant," which means "bitingly sarcastic." I've received many
criticisms and flames, but this one is one of the most bizarre.

Recently you claimed the Generational Dynamics has nothing to do with
generations:

Quote Originally Posted by David Krein View Post
> I registered a complaint about this some months ago. You cannot
> call what you are doing generational analysis if you don't analyze
> the generations. You can call it turning analysis, but you can't
> have S & H style turnings without generations, and vice versa.
I've tried to be patient with you, and not respond to your personal
attacks in kind. Since it was obvious that you have no idea what
Generational Dynamics is about, I tried to explain it using analogies
from other scholarly fields - archeology and astronomy. Your
response:

Quote Originally Posted by David Krein View Post
> Now much of your post is a rant about archeology and Galileo and
> Einstein and I fail to see what that has to do with anything.
So if I try to explain Generational Dynamics to you, it's just a
rant.

In your latest message, you refer to Matt and Nathaniel
contemptuously as acolytes, a word usually applied to followers of a
religious cult.

You reinforce that opinion by writing: "True Believers are basically
incomplete human beings, insecure and neurotic," implying that
Generational Dynamics is a cult requiring "True Believers," and that
I personal am an "incomplete human being" (whatever that is),
insecure and neurotic.

So I have no problem at all characterizing what you've been writing
as "spewing venom, hatred and contempt." What you've been writing is
definitely venomous, hateful and contemptuous.

I don't believe that I overreacted at all, but if I had, it would be
because of what is happening right now -- a rather obscure news story
about the collapse of the market for CDO (collateralized debt
obligation) securities, and other credit derivatives. I've written
about this quite a bit on my web site, and I summarized it in a
posting in "Objections to Generational Dynamics."

http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/showpost.php?p=204385&postcount=2392


The news about this obscure subject wouldn't be so important except
that there are literally tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars
invested in these credit derivatives, in the portfolios of mutual
funds, investment trusts, hedge funds, savings banks, pension funds,
college endowments, money market funds, insurance companies, and so
forth, meaning that in the next few months, millions of people are
going to lose much of their life savings. And this is going on RIGHT
NOW, not awaiting some regeneration or other generational change.

You may think of me as some kind of contemptuous happy-go-lucky
neurotic cult leader, but as it turns out that this kind of news makes
me cranky and depressed, and causes me to lose sleep, because of what
this news means to me, my friends, the country and world.

And when I see postings like yours, spewing absolutely incredible
nonsense, expressing contempt not only for me but also indirectly for
the pain that those millions of people will feel, and even though I
try not to respond in kind to your nonsense, what you write gets me
angry because your obliviousness is exactly the kind of attitude that
caused the problem in the first place, and is making it worse right
now. So if I had overreacted, that would have been the reason.

The fact is that I already know what you think of me and the work
I've done. You're repeated it several times, so there's no need to
repeat it over and over. Frankly, I understood it the first time. My
mistake was trying to explain it to you, which only encouraged more
insults. But this isn't about facts and explanations, but rather
about you just wanting to be contemptuous, no matter what the facts
are.

You're probably a very nice guy in person, so I'm going to ask you as
a PERSONAL FAVOR to stop insulting me. As I said, this time is very
depressing to me, and it would be a kindness for you to stop what
you've been doing.

There's one more point. You say that I'm insecure and neurotic.
Perhaps you believe that I'm stark raving crazy. I know that over
the years I've had a comment or two from web site readers saying as
much. (People get especially freaked out when I post figures showing
that we're running out of enough food to feed the world.) If you
think that I'm stark raving crazy, then it's just COMMON SENSE that
you definitely shouldn't insult me. You know the old saying -- "Don't
provoke the crazy guy."

So that's three reasons, and hopefully one of them will appeal to
you: (1) You've already made your point many, many times, (2) a
personal favor out of kindness, and (3) common sense. Please bring
this behavior to a close.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com







Post#420 at 07-12-2007 10:46 PM by John J. Xenakis [at Cambridge, MA joined May 2003 #posts 4,010]
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Dear Matt and Nathaniel,

I'd like to ask you to to start your country studies with the more
"obscure" countries, rather than the US and Europe, which we already
have plenty of information on already. These would specifically be
the African and South American countries you've been working with
lately, where we have almost no information.

What we want is something to build on. This is just a rough draft.
If you could post just a few sentences each for 20-40 countries,
then that would be fantastic, because there's NO information
available about these countries up till now. Then we'd have the
basic facts down, and other people could add things, if they're
familiar.

You don't have time to get a lengthy detailed outline down for more
than a few countries. You could post your rough notes much more
quickly. But you do have extremely valuable information in the form
of rough notes for the many countries you've analyzed.

Please give it a try, without wasting time on format. Don't even
worry about spelling. Just try posting your notes for a few
countries, and see how it goes, and then we can move on from there.

Your cult leader,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com







Post#421 at 07-13-2007 12:50 AM by Matt1989 [at joined Sep 2005 #posts 3,018]
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07-13-2007, 12:50 AM #421
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Quote Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis View Post
Dear Matt and Nathaniel,

I'd like to ask you to to start your country studies with the more
"obscure" countries, rather than the US and Europe, which we already
have plenty of information on already. These would specifically be
the African and South American countries you've been working with
lately, where we have almost no information.

What we want is something to build on. This is just a rough draft.
If you could post just a few sentences each for 20-40 countries,
then that would be fantastic, because there's NO information
available about these countries up till now. Then we'd have the
basic facts down, and other people could add things, if they're
familiar.

You don't have time to get a lengthy detailed outline down for more
than a few countries. You could post your rough notes much more
quickly. But you do have extremely valuable information in the form
of rough notes for the many countries you've analyzed.

Please give it a try, without wasting time on format. Don't even
worry about spelling. Just try posting your notes for a few
countries, and see how it goes, and then we can move on from there.

Your cult leader,

John

John J. Xenakis
E-mail: john@GenerationalDynamics.com
Web site: http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com
1990 already did the U.S. and is nearly done with Mexico. I think he is revising the latter right now. I do agree that we should move on to more "obscure" countries before going into Europe, but I'd like to jot down more than just a few random notes and instead keep the format, or some variation of it.

I've been busy recently, but I have the next two days off. I will try to crack a set or two out.

Not the first time I've been called an acolyte on this board. Probably won't be the last.







Post#422 at 07-13-2007 01:27 AM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by MichaelEaston View Post
In essence, what you are still saying is that catastrophe = Crisis. Of course, once again, you completely ignore generational structure, preferring to believe that things must magically reset in a catastrophe because the children are growing up in an age to rebuild... and something about children not having toys.

You still have failed to prove that this has ever happened. You gave me Ethiopia, which Italy just before WWII, but your source showed Italian atrocities but no Ethiopian ones. Furthermore, the next couple of decades in Ethiopian history indicate a late Awakening/Unraveling mood. You haven't disputed this.
Ethiopia is small fry in contrast to Russia. Crises can hit at inconvenient times for a country... Ethiopia seems to have behaved very well during World War II. Of course, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea, an Italian colony, after World War II. That's quite significant, giving Ethiopia a coastline.

You might have the case that Ethiopia didn't try Italian military and administrative personnel as war criminals, whether because the Italians got away or the British suggested otherwise.

...

Can we agree that Russian history between 1914 and 1945 was a catastrophe with a victory that rings hollow despite the victory over Germany? That after one time of Crisis, Russia ended up in a relatively short time under a tyrant willing to impose another? That even if Stalin attempted to prevent a war with Germany he still got one and in the worst possible way? That the Soviet Union waged the war against Germany with greater ferocity than countries that were supposedly more 'classically' in Crisis mode?

Can anyone deny that even if Russia was victorious as a nation (and the USSR as an empire), it was left devastated and exhausted? That it would take longer to pick up the pieces than most other participants in the Second World War? That's not only because of the absurdities of Soviet economics.

Sure, not all of the Soviet Union was physically devastated, and some parts may have been fortunate to have lost fewer sons than others. So what? The United States experienced no great damage from aerial attacks, naval bombardments, or land warfare on its mainland. Britain experienced no land warfare on its territory. So how is World War II a Crisis for Britain and America but not for the Soviet Union?

Let's contrast the difference between Crisis Eras in Russia and those almost anywhere else. Can anyone see another industrialized country that made on the whole less net material progress between 1914 and 1945 than the Soviet Union? That's not for lack of effort. Soviet efforts at industrialization were heroic -- even if they were often misguided. With enough of those the Soviet Union should have had on the whole made spectacular progress in industrial development. But there was the bloody collectivization and there was World War II.

Would anyone claim that the Soviet Union after World War II was in any respect a consumer paradise? That with the exception of China (whose Crisis lasted until 1949) it was a better place in which to be a small child between 1945 and 1960 than any major participant in World War II?

The World War II catastrophe was so severe that it uncharacteristically shoved the children born in the two decades after the war into a Reactive mode -- a generation unlikely to grow up narcissistic and inner-directed. They would be more concerned with survival than with principle.

I notice that someone says that the generation that corresponds to the American Silent is "Idealist/Prophet". I see Adaptive characteristics... but if they seem to show more principle than the hubristic war veterans or the damaged post-war youth it is because they took the role of visionaries and principled leaders. Could a generation become an Adaptive-Idealist composite, perhaps by default?

Let's look to the American Civil War, when a hard-luck generation (the Gilded) were thrust into a heroic role and the following generation (the Progressive), largely raised in early childhood in a pattern that usually leads to a Civic generation were suddenly smothered and sissified. The Gilded took on many of the traits of a Civic generation (an indulgent pattern of child raising, a long stay in political office, cultural conformity, and marked secularism) but little material success despite materialism and sharp inequality -- characteristic of a Reactive generation. That could have happened in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War (which, like the Civil War in America, came too early and too hard) -- except that Russian contemporaries of the American Lost had to endure the worst effects of Stalin's collectivization and Great Purge. Considering what happened to many of their leaders -- Kirov, Radek, Bukharin, Tukhachevsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev -- that generation remained quite luckless on the whole. That's before one even discusses the vast numbers of people in early-middle age during the 1930s who had the most to lose under collectivization. Their stay at the apex of power is quite long if you consider Stalin one of them (1920s-1964, short break for the GI-contemporary Malenkov, born 1901) -- and quite short (Khrushchev only) if you don't see Stalin as one of them.

The young adults at the time of the Great Patriotic War seem to have responded to the war much as their young contemporaries also participating in World War II... and were proud of it afterwards. Medal-bedecked GPW vets have obvious parallels to the highly-visible GIs in America until recently, and they held the role of General Secretary of the CPSU from 1964 to 1985 -- after a short appearance of Malenkov. Of course Soviet soldiers were far less likely to survive World War II than their American or British counterparts... but it is the survivors who establish the character of a generation.

Stalin seemed to avoid killing the children of his purge victims. One can safely say that they were quite possibly the ones who saw the short-lived relaxation of Stalin's terror. As a rule they did not know anything of the worst of the Russian Civil War, let alone the pre-Soviet order. They were young enough to not have their personal habits too set to not feel the short-lived relaxation of Soviet life after Stalin's death. They would not achieve the hubris arising from service in World War II. Their stay in power would be short -- fewer than fifteen years between the rise of Gorbachev and the fall of Yeltsin.

The Brezhnev-era repression ensured that the next generation would not get any semblance of an Awakening era. Russian contemporaries of the American Boom could not become Idealist/Prophets. They could not develop any principle independently. Russian contemporaries of the American Silent got to exercise principle and vision by default.

A generation damaged in childhood ordinarily becomes Reactive. Vladimir Putin seems to exemplify that. He seems more canny than principled, and he rarely makes a moral pronouncement unless it is on the obvious interests of Russia. Patriotism and nationalism are easy principles to acquire, maintain, and express. He's certainly no Bill Clinton or Tony Blair -- the style is too different. Dubya, who supposedly looked into his eyes and discerned his character? I'll bet that Putin found more in Dubya's character from that little gaffe than Dubya even pretended to find from gazing into someone's eyes.







Post#423 at 07-13-2007 03:17 AM by Justin '77 [at Meh. joined Sep 2001 #posts 12,182]
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
Ethiopia is small fry in contrast to Russia.
I'm sure Ethiopians (and Somalia and Eritreans) would all totally agree with you. Because generations only really matter in places that seem important from far away.

Can we agree that Russian history between 1914 and 1945 was a catastrophe with a victory that rings hollow despite the victory over Germany?
Um. No, we can't. The most we could agree upon is that the Russian sociopolitical environment sucked for those outside the system, and achieved less than the maximum possible benefits for those inside the system.

A 1T under a defective political and economic system would look that way.

That after one time of Crisis, Russia ended up in a relatively short time under a tyrant willing to impose another?
Here again you're mixing up the Generational Crisis with the just-plain-sucky crisis.
T
That the Soviet Union waged the war against Germany with greater ferocity than countries that were supposedly more 'classically' in Crisis mode?
This claim is flatly incorrect. Russia waged a war on its own territory to expel an invader. That being the case, the war looked different for them than it did for American or England, who joined up in a war far outside their lands. But to read into Russia's defeat of Germany some sort of generational ferocity is a mistake.

Can anyone deny that even if Russia was victorious as a nation (and the USSR as an empire), it was left devastated and exhausted?
Actually, Russia ended the war pretty much as energized as it went into it. Plus the infusion of fresh victim-states. There was hardly any lag time at all in rebuilding in Russia relative to the rest of Europe -- and this in spite of the inherent weaknesses of the communist model.

Sure, not all of the Soviet Union was physically devastated, and some parts may have been fortunate to have lost fewer sons than others. So what? The United States experienced no great damage from aerial attacks, naval bombardments, or land warfare on its mainland. Britain experienced no land warfare on its territory. So how is World War II a Crisis for Britain and America but not for the Soviet Union?
For f-ck's sake.
Because it's not the extent of suck that makes a Crisis; it's the Generational constellation
It was a Crisis for the US and UK because they were in the 4T phase of their saeculum; it was not a Crisis for Russia because they had finished the 4T phase of their saeculum more than a decade previously.

Would anyone claim that the Soviet Union after World War II was in any respect a consumer paradise?
And here you come back to the 'quantity of toys' criterion. Does it bother you at all that this innovation of yours doesn't even fit with American saecula -- to say nothing of foreign ones?
That with the exception of China (whose Crisis lasted until 1949) it was a better place in which to be a small child between 1945 and 1960 than any major participant in World War II?
Well, since 1945-1960 was the Russian 2T (you know, when Nomads are born), there's a part of an explanation for the assertion you are making. But frankly, while I could make assumptions based on a spotty reading of inaccurate sources of how life was in a place that I wasn't during a time that I wasn't, I prefer instead to meet people who were there and ask them to tell their stories.
Of course, people who were small children here in the 50s have no idea what it was like to be a small child in Chicago in the 50s. I'm fortunate in that my parents were both born in '52, so I have their stories second-hand (and access to them for clarification if necessary) for at least an attempt to make apples-to-apples comparisons.
It suffices to say that the childhood of a Russian '52 cohort and an American '52 cohort were qualitatively different. But that the childhood of the Russian '52 cohorts I've talked with rhymes pretty strongly with the childhood stories of American '69 cohorts.

By the way, you are making a major mistake here in confabulating the USSR -- which was pasted together from a whole slew of countries, several of which were and still are on different generational cycles -- and Russia, which has been more or less generationally-coherent for the better part of a thousand years. Just thought you should keep that in mind.

The World War II catastrophe was so severe that it uncharacteristically shoved the children born in the two decades after the war into a Reactive mode -- a generation unlikely to grow up narcissistic and inner-directed. They would be more concerned with survival than with principle.
You make that assertion at best in absence of evidence (and factually speaking, in defiance of evidence to the contrary). That's the main reason I keep arguing against it.

As for your attempt that followed at generational analysis.. I see a classic example of massaging data to get results that fit a pre-conceived conclusion. Not very scientific...
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela, la loi ? On peut donc être dehors. Je ne comprends pas. Quant à moi, suis-je dans la loi ? suis-je hors la loi ? Je n'en sais rien. Mourir de faim, est-ce être dans la loi ?" -- Tellmarch

"Человек не может снять с себя ответственности за свои поступки." - L. Tolstoy

"[it]
is no doubt obvious, the cult of the experts is both self-serving, for those who propound it, and fraudulent." - Noam Chomsky







Post#424 at 07-13-2007 12:15 PM by Matt1989 [at joined Sep 2005 #posts 3,018]
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What he^ said.

Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
Ethiopia is small fry in contrast to Russia. Crises can hit at inconvenient times for a country... Ethiopia seems to have behaved very well during World War II. Of course, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea, an Italian colony, after World War II. That's quite significant, giving Ethiopia a coastline.

You might have the case that Ethiopia didn't try Italian military and administrative personnel as war criminals, whether because the Italians got away or the British suggested otherwise.
I have not found any real correlation between annexation - even major ones like this - and generational Crisis eras. It depends on the context (hubris, stupidity, panicky, etc.).

However, there is a strong correlation between genocidal violence (or energy) and Crisis eras. True, war is war, and war is hell, but I'm not looking at a platoon or squad; I'm talking about the energy and will as a whole. Ethiopia fails to stand out as a war pursued with the energy characteristic of a Crisis era. This is supported by the late Awakening/Unraveling mood in the following years.

I'd be open to the suggestion of a generational reset in response to a bad war - no matter how nonsensical it appears - if I could have some examples. Ethiopia isn't one of them.







Post#425 at 07-13-2007 01:57 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by Justin '77 View Post
I'm sure Ethiopians (and Somalia and Eritreans) would all totally agree with you. Because generations only really matter in places that seem important from far away.

Um. No, we can't. The most we could agree upon is that the Russian sociopolitical environment sucked for those outside the system, and achieved less than the maximum possible benefits for those inside the system.
Russia has nukes and gigantic land, sea, and air forces. That makes it much more significant than Ethiopia -- except to Ethiopians, I suppose.

A 1T under a defective political and economic system would look that way.

Here again you're mixing up the Generational Crisis with the just-plain-sucky crisis.
TThis claim is flatly incorrect. Russia waged a war on its own territory to expel an invader. That being the case, the war looked different for them than it did for American or England, who joined up in a war far outside their lands. But to read into Russia's defeat of Germany some sort of generational ferocity is a mistake.
Three waves of Crises with abortive 1Ts between them. (NEP, post-Purge 'breathers'. A mix-up between a 4T and 1T followed by a bad 1T? NEP times and the post-Purge silence aren't what most people recognize about Russian history between 1914 and 1945. Russian and Soviet history for those thirty or so years was awkward in the extreme -- and "awkward" is a euphemism -- because of the catastrophic bungling of Nicholas II, the genocidal ruthlessness of both Reds and Whites in the Russian Civil War, the paranoid despotism of Stalin, and then the viciousness of the Nazi assault upon the Soviet Union.

Actually, Russia ended the war pretty much as energized as it went into it. Plus the infusion of fresh victim-states. There was hardly any lag time at all in rebuilding in Russia relative to the rest of Europe -- and this in spite of the inherent weaknesses of the communist model.
But there had to be lots of war widows and purge widows.

Because it's not the extent of suck that makes a Crisis; it's the Generational constellation
It was a Crisis for the US and UK because they were in the 4T phase of their saeculum; it was not a Crisis for Russia because they had finished the 4T phase of their saeculum more than a decade previously.

And here you come back to the 'quantity of toys' criterion. Does it bother you at all that this innovation of yours doesn't even fit with American saecula -- to say nothing of foreign ones?
Well, since 1945-1960 was the Russian 2T (you know, when Nomads are born), there's a part of an explanation for the assertion you are making. But frankly, while I could make assumptions based on a spotty reading of inaccurate sources of how life was in a place that I wasn't during a time that I wasn't, I prefer instead to meet people who were there and ask them to tell their stories.
Of course, people who were small children here in the 50s have no idea what it was like to be a small child in Chicago in the 50s. I'm fortunate in that my parents were both born in '52, so I have their stories second-hand (and access to them for clarification if necessary) for at least an attempt to make apples-to-apples comparisons.
It suffices to say that the childhood of a Russian '52 cohort and an American '52 cohort were qualitatively different. But that the childhood of the Russian '52 cohorts I've talked with rhymes pretty strongly with the childhood stories of American '69 cohorts.
With which I concur to some extent. I can attribute much of the Reactive character of people of Putin's age in Russia, in contrast to the Idealist character of most of their American, non-Soviet European, Japanese, and Indian contemporaries, to the peculiar hardships of Russian post-war children and to their lack of access to western pop culture. (China is much the same as Russia in that respect). Which was more significant? I cannot tell.

By the way, you are making a major mistake here in confabulating the USSR -- which was pasted together from a whole slew of countries, several of which were and still are on different generational cycles -- and Russia, which has been more or less generationally-coherent for the better part of a thousand years. Just thought you should keep that in mind.
The Soviet Union was not a cultural monolith and was never intended to be. Nobody would rightly confuse Estonians with Uzbeks or Lithuanians with Yakuts. Estonians had access to Finnish mass media (television, especially) that was almost mutually intelligible. Lithuanians had old cultural ties to Poland... and I suspect that there is much revival of that. Of course some parts of the Soviet Union were more ravaged than others -- Ukraine and Belarus as opposed to Central Asia and Siberia.

You make that assertion at best in absence of evidence (and factually speaking, in defiance of evidence to the contrary). That's the main reason I keep arguing against it.

As for your attempt that followed at generational analysis.. I see a classic example of massaging data to get results that fit a pre-conceived conclusion. Not very scientific...
Generations shape events and economic trends-- but just as significantly, events and economic trends shape generations. The generational cycle is a feedback loop -- but like most feedback loops it can go haywire when something from outside forces a huge disruption.

I have few conclusions about Russia. I suspect that it is in a 3T/4T cusp as is most of the West (parts of Latin America possibly excepted) because of the distance from World War II. I interpret the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era as largely 3T because of social rot... but comparative freedom. I see the 1991 coup and the downfall of the Soviet Union as a failed Crisis... an event that, had it happened later (like about now), would have been a catastrophic and particularly nasty Crisis... but somehow the generational cycle dictated could not have become a Crisis at any time before about 2000. The Crisis constellation did not quite exist in Russia in 1990 or so because any true Idealist generation was not at the apex of political power.

By the way -- I think that parts of Central Asia and the Caucasus region, and especially Chechnya, is in Crisis in part because their last real Crises were in the time of Stalin's forced collectivization.

I can make some predictions about the for the coming 4T:

1. We don't know what it will be, or who the opposing sides will be, or any exact timetable.

In 1927, nobody could have predicted that Germany would have fallen to what was then a tiny party whose leader was a crank, that that crank could have meant what he wrote in Mein Kampf, and that something so contemptibly obsolete as religious bigotry could be revived as a cornerstone of public policy and a basis for one of the most senseless slaughters in history. . Nobody could have predicted that Josef Stalin would impose a mad collectivization upon Russian agriculture. Nobody could have predicted the potential for a Japanese military menace that within 15 years would conquer much of China most European colonies in southeast Asia. Few foresaw the potential of a Great Depression that would undo about a quarter century of progress and threaten the stability of such Powers as France and Germany. (France almost went fascist in the 1930s!)

That there might be an economic downturn? Sure. That religious fundamentalism would weaken in short order? Sure. That the gangsters of America in the 1920s would become the victims of stern and efficient law enforcement? Sure. Some trends peak in some turnings and fade in the next ones, and recessions happen all the time.

2. We don't know who will win the Crisis
or whether the world will be a very desirable place afterwards. This time, the tools of war are far more destructive than they were the last time.

The Crisis constellation itself practically ensures maximal recklessness, self-righteousness, harsh judgment of foreign and domestic enemies, and above all else the social cohesion necessary to force momentous change.

3. How well a country solves its problems without creating intractable new ones -- the ones that can be solved only by overthrow of the system -- will likely determine who has an edge.

All polities enter Crises with potential rifts that existed from prior times. One can hope that before the Final Exam that is a Crisis that it has solved many of its problems without creating new ones. Problem-solving is one essential characteristic of good statesmanship in any time. At times a country can solve some of its problems during a Crisis -- but that is awkward.

Warlord rule in China between 1912 and 1937 made China vulnerable to an attack from a country of numerical inferiority but organizational superiority. Stalin's brutal order would have made the Soviet Union vulnerable to any invader except the Nazis who established themselves as even more objectionable overlords. Racist ideology and rapacious exploitation ensured that people in no conquered country would find Nazism conscionable. Racist attitudes by colonial overlords in Indochina, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines ensured that the skeletal military forces of colonial overlords would be overwhelmed by the mobile forces of Japan that struck with utter surprise. Racist practices of the Japanese ensured much the same contempt for them that the Nazis experienced in occupied Europe.

National vices ensured the severity of World War II. Polities that better mitigated them or relegated them to at least temporary irrelevance fared better. Such depended upon the moral values of the leaders.

4. People who have little knowledge of the previous Crisis are least likely to fear the next one.

That of course explains why those who lived through the previous Crisis will do almost anything to stop the next one. The first generation to not know a Crisis is more likely to make a bluff that others call -- or call the bluff.

5. Idealist leaders generally are more appropriate top leaders of a nation through the worst part of a Crisis Era than are Reactive leaders.

Such is the conclusion of Strauss and Howe... that the Churchillian, Lincolnesque, or even Bismarckian leader does far better than a cynical, amoral, unprincipled Reactive. Adolf Hitler, who idolized Frederick the Great, should have seen in Churchill the same tendencies as his hero and shuddered. But even if the Reactive leaders aren't quite so evil as the worst, they tend to muddle things because they can't formulate grand principles and fall to the more ruthless Reactives. Thus one can recognize the tragedies of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg (Austria), Daladier (France), Beck (Poland), Benes and Jan Masaryk (Czechoslovakia), and Teleki (Hungary), people far better than the fascists and Nazis who carved up their countries.
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