Except that a libertarian-ish mega-Unraveling would be quite compatible with expanded civil rights. I would think what the 2T youth will reject is regulation, not rights...so, kinda the opposite. But I might be wrong.Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough
Perhaps you're not thinking about it thoroughly. If, for example, the full agenda of the gay rights movement is implemented, there will be massive discrimination against people of faith. Thereby leading to a libertarian, civil-rights oriented (Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment) rebellion against the pro-gay establishment.
Or if that does not happen, it may be abortion that is the defining issue - again, based on the civil rights of the unborn child.
If your mentality can be taken as typical of Millenials (which it may or may not), then you can see how you would be left in the same position as the GIs were vis a vis the Boomers over Viet Nam. Or more accurately according to this thread - King George vis a vis the American colonists...
Last edited by JustPassingThrough; 05-02-2009 at 10:18 AM.
So much to say about this...
I fear that you're letting your own political beliefs color this interpretation. I'm trying explicitly *not* to do that (I favor more economic regulation -- a lot more -- but stated that I can easily envision the next 2T partially as a backlash against that way of thinking). Historically, the mega-trend (if I may use that clichéd phrase) is toward more and more inclusion of previously marginalized groups (racial minorities, religious minorities, non-heterosexuals), and 2Ts especially don't tend to undo that (indeed, the last 2T brought a lot of then- and now-outcast lifestyles, including homosexuality, "swinging", recreational drug use, interracial marriage) out of the shadows and in some cases into the mainstream. On the contrary, youth-led 2T backlashes are against the established political and cultural ruling class (in this country, historically white men). That may bode ill for white men of my generation and my economic philosophy, should we triumph in this 4T and morph into the ruling class of tomorrow, but given the trends of past 2Ts, I don't see how the rebellion could possibly manifest as one against historical social outcasts like homosexuals...at least not with the Prophet youths (I *could* imagine an implicitly anti-gay trend among midlife Artists akin to the white flight / "law and order" / "silent majority" Nixonian backlash against urban minorities in the 1960s and '70s).
I'm actually enjoying your contribution to this current discussion quite a bit, so am curious to hear your response to what I'm about to write. It seems to me that no matter how far the pro-gay cause advances in this 4T and 1T, gays will still be outnumbered and not a dominant part of the ruling class by the next 2T. The flaw in your argument about the "gay agenda" targeting "people of faith" should be obvious: I'm awfully curious which mainstream elements of the pro-gay movement you perceive as intending to marginalize people of faith. Last I heard, a lot of gays are religious and their main cause right now is to enter into the most historically civil/religious/pro-family arrangement, the institution of marriage. They don't seek to ghettoize or harm the majority, they seek to be treated as equal and perhaps become a part of a new, broader mainstream. While I doubt that you intend this, what you're implying recalls the argument that blacks who sought integration in the 1930s were seeking to subjugate whites (and believe it or not, a lot of demagogical Southern politicians used that fallacious argument as recently as the 1960s, but it's a very old one).
I don't think that you're a bigot -- from what I can tell you're a pretty typical circa-2009 American conservative -- but your characterization of the gay rights movement and its goals seems a bit uninformed, and in any case, I challenge you or anyone else to find a major example of a 2T youth rebellion *against* the outcasts, minorities, or disadvantaged. If you're arguing that the gay rights cause will be part of the overall Millennial ruling class package against which Prophet youths rebel, I would merely point out that the GIs started to accept integration during the first half of the 1T, between Truman's integrating the military in 1947 to the Democratic Convention in 1948 (the same year that California struck down its miscegenation laws) and Brown v. Board in 1954. Though blacks were broadly (if distantly) included in the GI mainstream, they were not targeted for backlash in the 2T the way the GI white male New Deal ruling class was. I think that gays, like blacks, will be largely exempt from idealistic youthful criticism in the next 2T, and may even advance further as a result of it.
I doubt it (this issue seems like one that has already lost a lot of its fire and will be more or less irrelevant to future generations), but it certainly seems more possible (as part of a broad backlash against by-then "old-school" Millennial Civic liberalism) than a youth backlash against the by-then-only-recently-enfranchised gay rights movement.
Finally something I agree with. Our kids will hit us in ways we Millennials don't see coming. Just as New Deal liberalism seemed stodgy and socially repressed to Boomers, Obama-ism or whatever political consensus comes out of this 4T may seem prissy and overregulated to the Prophet kids of 2045.
It's pretty hilarious that you would make that statement given what follows it. Nevertheless, if you look at (and understand) what the OP was suggesting, you can see that what I'm saying is reasonable. I think I'm correct that the Libertarian part of the political compass axis should align with the anti-authority axis. If so, we are entering a period of Left/Libertarianism, which will be followed by a challenge to the "Left" part by a conservative movement.
You are a good, obedient, well programmed Boomer robot. And I don't (entirely) mean that as an insult here. It's arguably your lot in life. That's why, if the book is correct, the next 2T will involve you being challenged in areas that are incomprehensible to you. Just as it was unthinkable on the part of GIs that youths would resist serving in war, after they had so obediently and unthinkingly done the bidding of their Prophet masters (i.e. FDR).I'm trying explicitly *not* to do that (I favor more economic regulation -- a lot more -- but stated that I can easily envision the next 2T partially as a backlash against that way of thinking). Historically, the mega-trend (if I may use that clichéd phrase) is toward more and more inclusion of previously marginalized groups (racial minorities, religious minorities, non-heterosexuals), and 2Ts especially don't tend to undo that (indeed, the last 2T brought a lot of then- and now-outcast lifestyles, including homosexuality, "swinging", recreational drug use, interracial marriage) out of the shadows and in some cases into the mainstream. On the contrary, youth-led 2T backlashes are against the established political and cultural ruling class (in this country, historically white men). That may bode ill for white men of my generation and my economic philosophy, should we triumph in this 4T and morph into the ruling class of tomorrow, but given the trends of past 2Ts, I don't see how the rebellion could possibly manifest as one against historical social outcasts like homosexuals...at least not with the Prophet youths (I *could* imagine an implicitly anti-gay trend among midlife Artists akin to the white flight / "law and order" / "silent majority" Nixonian backlash against urban minorities in the 1960s and '70s).
It's not complicated. If it is written into law that "discrimination" against homosexuals is forbidden (which it already has been in several places and may well be at the federal level), there will have been a clear marker placed that if/when any conflict arises between a person of faith's beliefs and the desires of gays, the person of faith is on the wrong side of the law. It is an outright criminalization of religious belief.I'm actually enjoying your contribution to this current discussion quite a bit, so am curious to hear your response to what I'm about to write. It seems to me that no matter how far the pro-gay cause advances in this 4T and 1T, gays will still be outnumbered and not a dominant part of the ruling class by the next 2T. The flaw in your argument about the "gay agenda" targeting "people of faith" should be obvious: I'm awfully curious which mainstream elements of the pro-gay movement you perceive as intending to marginalize people of faith. Last I heard, a lot of gays are religious and their main cause right now is to enter into the most historically civil/religious/pro-family arrangement, the institution of marriage. They don't seek to ghettoize or harm the majority, they seek to be treated as equal and perhaps become a part of a new, broader mainstream.
The recent Miss USA pageant is an early, mild example. A more significant recent example: when the MA supreme court ordered gay marriage upon the state, the immediate result was to make it illegal to refuse giving an adoptive child to a gay couple. The Catholic Church was forced to choose between following its conscience and following the law. The result is that they had to stop providing adoption services.
The Obama Administration has recently reversed the "conscience clause" for medical staff, meaning that any individual or hospital who refuses to participate in performing or providing referral for an abortion could be in danger of being fired or shut down, respectively.
Obama has also signalled his desire (maybe it's now been passed?) to greatly reduce the charitable giving deduction, which is as direct of an assault on church funding as you could possibly enact.
The problem is that the debate on these issues is being driven by the hard left, with no room for compromise, and that means they are not even taking into consideration the legal impact on religious freedom. They just don't care. The discussion is not even being had. Unless that course is moderated, the seeds of the next 4T are already being sown. As of now, the people have stood against the onslaught in state after state. There is no question that Iowa voters will reverse the recent ruling there at the first opportunity.
But if it goes the way you think it will, it is almost inevitable that the next 2T will involve Christians, not out of rebellion but out of duty to their faith, being pushed into civil disobedience. The next Kent State will then be aimed at Christians. Of course, that starts to look a lot like the end times prophesied in the Bible, in which case maybe no one will get much of a chance to find out if these cyclical theories hold.
Last edited by JustPassingThrough; 05-02-2009 at 01:26 PM.
I'd think the new Prophets will be more like Rag, Arkham, and Ska, on the libertarian left, more then anything else. With "Science of Complex Systems" being the new "Natural Law". Thus the next culture wars will essentially be between the defenders of "Order" (the old Liberalism of this saeculum) and the supporters of "Complex Systems Science" claiming that such complex rules are not needed.
But as rules become simplified it will start to leave many floundering and disoriented and will start to look for some "trusted authority" to guide them, be it political, religious, or technocratic. These authorities become institutionalized and start increasing the complexity and precision of the rules, and thus the cycle continues
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
I think it's well established that discrimination law isn't about personal beliefs, it's about actions against others. Nothing in the law prevents you from believing that homosexuality is a sin (or that being black is the "mark of Cain", as some Mormons still do, or that eating shellfish is against God, as many Orthodox Jews still do), but in a fair and just society, you cannot treat someone poorly because of your personal beliefs. If you could, there would be nothing from preventing sexist behavior or sexual harrassment in the workplace because a man's religious beliefs state that women are inferior. Your argument here is a dangerous one and I believe that even the four devout conservatives on the Supreme Court would be troubled by the reasoning behind it given the multiple precedents of discrimination law going back many, many years.
In any case, there's nothing in U.S. history to suggest that the end of separate marriage statuses for gays will be any more deleterious to the constitutionally protected practice of Christianity than the end of segregation jeopardized the civil rights of the many hardliners who at the time held racial segregation as a key tenet of their religious philosophy. They were allowed to keep believing whatever they chose to after Brown v. Board and Loving v. Virginia, but could no longer stand in the way of legal progress. In other words, believe what you believe, but your beliefs can't interfere with someone else's legal rights once those rights are established.
This brings me to a simple retort: if you don't like an aspect of the law, don't go into a business requiring you to enforce said aspect. If you're against legal access to birth control, why are you a pharmacist post-Griswold? And if you know your beliefs prevent you from following adoption laws, get out of the adoption business! Things change, and you can either change with them or risk sacrificing your place in the free market to someone who will change with them. Given their traditional resistance to funding for PBS and the NEA, I thought conservatives were in favor of the free market culling out the weak and promoting survival of the fittest.
The problem with the "conscience clause" is that it's one-sided: the pharmacist denying the birth control or the doctor refusing the abortion gets to abstain from doing his/her job while the patient is being prevented from exercising his/her legal rights. Again, if the practitioner is so adamant in his/her beliefs and so adamant about opposing the law, why is s/he choosing to be in this line of work?
I hate to return to these metaphors, but the parallels are painfully apt: if the law never changed and people were never compelled to follow it, there would be nothing preventing someone from saying in 2009 that "my conscience won't allow me to free these slaves" or "my conscience won't allow me to let my wife vote". Get real, people!
Like several of our major Founding Fathers, I'm an agnostic Unitarian Universalist, so I'd rather not discuss this "end times" talk, but I could definitely imagine a lot of committed Christians protesting the (possibly seen in a future context as) overregulated secularism of the 1T. Considering the visibility of people of faith in the Missionary 2T (heck, it's called the Missionary Awakening!), that would hardly be without precedent. I'm just saying that regardless what they are protesting against (and a lot of the ideas being discussed today could be fodder for future Prophet attack), it's not likely that the 2T would bring about a reversal in civil rights expansion.
Last edited by 1990; 05-02-2009 at 02:19 PM.
Actually if I'm reading the chart right, the next Awakening will be like the First Great Awakening.
The Consciousness & Puritan Awakenings match well with the emphasis on simplicity. I've been to a few of these Jesus Movement Churches where "dressing up" is far from enforced and the focus on having a personal connection with Jesus matches the Puritan wants of personal study of the bible. Televangelism urging people to have their personal connection to Jesus matches the same tendency in Puritans to spread education and enlightenment so people could read the bible for themselves
So I expect a great movement in people actually becoming interested in sermons again instead of sleeping through them. Also I expect the sermons to mean something again.
However before all of that happens, we're gonna have a recreation of the Salem Witch Trials somewhere towards the end of this 4T. Who will the victims be? If we look at the SWTs the Nomads (Caviliers) really didn't fare well, so Xers should probably be watching their backs... At least Arthur Miller prepared us for that.
And if we're entering the "Glorious Revolution" period again the only real fighting that was done was against "inferior" Native Americans threatening the colonists. Granted it was a life or death struggle, but the Native Americans were severely disadvantaged in terms of technology. However overall, there will be a relatively bloodless but much needed change in government. Hmm... kinda looks familiar. We're fighting a relatively comparably "inferior" force in the middle east... and as for the government... should we start calling Obama, President of Orange? :P
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
New Salem Witch Trials? Maybe targeting people suspected of working in the past at AIG. ("If he floats, he took a bonus!")However before all of that happens, we're gonna have a recreation of the Salem Witch Trials somewhere towards the end of this 4T. Who will the victims be? If we look at the SWTs the Nomads (Caviliers) really didn't fare well, so Xers should probably be watching their backs... At least Arthur Miller prepared us for that.
And if we're entering the "Glorious Revolution" period again the only real fighting that was done was against "inferior" Native Americans threatening the colonists. Granted it was a life or death struggle, but the Native Americans were severely disadvantaged in terms of technology. However overall, there will be a relatively bloodless but much needed change in government. Hmm... kinda looks familiar. We're fighting a relatively comparably "inferior" force in the middle east... and as for the government... should we start calling Obama, President of Orange? :P
~Chas'88
I really wish I was more familiar with the Glorious Revolution 4T. Again and again I've heard the idea of a mega-saeculum, that this 4T is somehow linked to or reminiscent of that in the late 17th century, and yet the resources are horribly scarce. (Probably because American history is typically taught only as far back as the Founders since, as we all know, *nothing* happened in North America between 1492 and 1776!)
Here is my thinking starting with the Puritan Awakening.
The Puritans were not unlike the Boomers in many ways. They were fierce critics of the legitimacy of "authority", with the authority being that of the Monarchy and the Church of England. The Glorious brought this to completion with the Glorious Revolution and the supremacy of Parliament.
with the legitimacy of Authority vanquished the Awakeners brought the necessity of the Old Rules and the "stogy" elders defending them into question (Ben Franklin famously called Cotton Mather a "bore"). Many, inspired by Newtonian physics, religious motivations, or both declared that society operated too by "natural laws", that people could rule themselves without complex rules. The Republican Generation brought this to completion in the American Revolution.
The Transcendentals, disoriented by the lack of rules to guide them, searched for some authority or principle to guide them. For many it was a Personal God (in contrast to the Deist God of the Enlightenment), for others it was The Nation as expressed in the deification of the Founders. For a growing number of secular urban elites and middle class it was the novel faith of Science, Technology, and Progress. The Gilded Generation brought this to completion during the Civil War and the Gilded Age.
The Missionaries' faith in these Authorities and Principles lead them to create a complex system of rules around these Authorities and Principles to channel society towards Utopia. The contrast to the Awakeners is stark. The GIs brought this to completion during the Depression and WW2 as the generation that thought one could build one's way to Utopia.
The Boomers, like the Puritans before them, attacked the legitimacy of Authority, in this case it was Science, Technology, Progress, Organized Religion, and Nationalism. The Millennials will bring this to completion
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
What does this mean? Can you go into more detail?
LOL!!!!!!!
Edit: WTF? the capitalized letters keep getting uncapitalized...
Last edited by Odin; 05-02-2009 at 02:59 PM.
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_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
No, no. I understand that. I'm curious as to why you think this will act as a natural law replacement for the new Prophets.
And there you have it. Read your own words and think about them.
What exactly is "free market" about the government telling people they can't enter a particular profession because of their beliefs? Why should a pharmacist be prevented from acting according to his/her conscience? The free market answer to that scenario is supposed to be that another pharmacy will spring up that has no such reservations, and out-compete the one who won't dispense, for example, the morning after pill.Given their traditional resistance to funding for PBS and the NEA, I thought conservatives were in favor of the free market culling out the weak and promoting survival of the fittest.
In a free society, they can go to a place that will provide the service. In an unfree society, people will be prevented from doing a particular kind of business if they don't run it the way the government tells them to.The problem with the "conscience clause" is that it's one-sided: the pharmacist denying the birth control or the doctor refusing the abortion gets to abstain from doing his/her job while the patient is being prevented from exercising his/her legal rights.
Again, there is the attitude that will get you where I've told you you're going.Again, if the practitioner is so adamant in his/her beliefs and so adamant about opposing the law, why is s/he choosing to be in this line of work?
What you are talking about is giving special privileges to one group (gays) at the expense of the civil rights of another (people of faith), even though you are apparently incapable of seeing it. Right now, marriage (under law) is a special privilege, like getting a driver's license.I'm just saying that regardless what they are protesting against (and a lot of the ideas being discussed today could be fodder for future Prophet attack), it's not likely that the 2T would bring about a reversal in civil rights expansion.
The libertarians have a very good point, which is that the real answer is to sever the governmental involvement in marriage altogether. Unfortunately, almost no one is likely to go for it, since the tax breaks and so forth are too attractive. And so we head for a collision.
LOL!!!!!!!!!New Salem Witch Trials? Maybe targeting people suspected of working in the past at AIG. ("If he floats, he took a bonus!")
I really wish I was more familiar with the Glorious Revolution 4T. Again and again I've heard the idea of a mega-saeculum, that this 4T is somehow linked to or reminiscent of that in the late 17th century, and yet the resources are horribly scarce. (Probably because American history is typically taught only as far back as the Founders since, as we all know, *nothing* happened in North America between 1492 and 1776!)
Actually, I thought that it would be quite easy to see. A lot of Milliennials that I've run into who are unaware of Generational Theory have this persona of thinking that anyone that opposes Multiculturalism and Racial Equality as "bad" and that groups that oppose these much needed reforms need to be "suppressed". Luckily with the election of Obama, this occurred without any need for a "Witch Trials".
Now, if Obama were to "fail" and it looked like the revitalized Right might just take back control, and Leftie Boomers got neurotically desperate I could see them taking advantage of this Millennial mindset to "weed out" the "unfaithful".
Also, the Witch Trials only ended when a true a new-money fringe group rich frontiersman well known for killing Indians & having lived on the edge/frontier of society was appointed governor of Massachusetts. From his behavior he seems to have been a Nomad, but I'm not familiar enough with that period of history to say for sure. However he reminds me of an Eisenhower & Washington-like figure.
So we should all be hoping that Obama is a glorious and triumphant sucess. Because I for one would rather not go down that path, but if it's necessary... I'll be sure to make frequent visits to Wien--maybe even buy an apartment there or perhaps a little out of the way cabin in the mountains somewhere... Afterall, the first to go in the Witch Hunts were those odd eccentrics who didn't agree with the group mindset--and large group mindset scares Individualistic Independents like me.
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 05-02-2009 at 03:57 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
When I look at this chart, it seems to me that the Libertarian/Authoritarian axis of the Political Compass should match up with the Challenge to Authority/Deference to Authority axis. I can see why he has it the way he does, but I'm not sure it makes sense. If you take that chart and apply his 45 degree per turning shift, it looks like this:
Current Saeculum
1T: Right -> Authoritarian Right
2T: Authoritarian Right -> Authoritarian
3T: Authoritarian -> Authoritarian Left
4T: Authoritarian Left -> Left
Next Saeculum
1T: Left -> Libertarian Left
2T: Libertarian Left -> Libertarian
3T: Libertarian -> Libertarian Right
4T: Libertarian Right -> Right
That would make FDR a Right-winger. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me when you look at it mapped out.
Last edited by JustPassingThrough; 05-02-2009 at 04:10 PM.
If The Beggar's Opera is a sample of such a life, then I think I just might enjoy it...Also we have to take into consideration Pirates of the Caribbean being a foreshadow in behavior as well.
"Lucy Lockit: Come sweet lass, let's banish sorrow 'till tommorrow,
Come sweet lass, let's take a charming glass,
Wine can clear the vapors of despair
And make us light as air and drink will banish care.
(aside to the audience) Soon I will be rid of the hypocritical strumpet!"
Another favorite scene of mine:
"A Maid is like the golden ore
Which hath Guineas intrinsical in't
Whose worth is never known before
It is tried and is impressed at the mint.
A Wife is like a guinea in Gold
Stamped with the name of her spouse.
Now here, now there, is bought or is sold
And is current in every house."
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 05-02-2009 at 04:22 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
In answer to your question that I put in bold, the entire point is that if my beliefs cause me to infringe on your legally protected rights, my beliefs have to take a back seat in a nation of laws. I can either choose to leave the business since I find it unconscionable to follow the laws of my trade, or I can suck it up and do what I'm being paid to do. Because of the First Amendment, I can say anything I want to about it, but in the end, I've got to either do my job or leave it.
Let's take the gay marriage/abortion/birth control culture wars aspect of this debate out of the equation for a second. What if you came to a steakhouse wanting to order a big, juicy steak, and your server was a militant vegan (and perhaps a Hindu) who refused to serve cow meat? I don't know about you, but my attitude would be "either serve me the freaking steak or get out of the steakhouse business!" As a paying customer, you have the right to buy and consume that steak, and it's supposed to be the waiter's job to give it to you. What we're talking about -- using religion to infringe on someone else's legal rights -- is the same thing as the so-called "conscience clause".
Anyway, this is all off-topic...but I think it's an enormously important back-and-forth you and I have had here, since it typifies how irreconcilably different modern liberal and conservative worldviews are.
Continuing on the previous - To me it makes more sense if you look at each turning this way, using 90 degree shifts:
1T: Authoritarian -> Left
2T: Left -> Libertarian
3T: Libertarian -> Right
4T: Right -> Authoritarian
Then look at each saeculum:
Revolutionary: Left -> Libertarian
Civil War: Libertarian -> Right
WWII: Right -> Authoritarian
Current: Authoritarian -> Left
Next: Left -> Libertarian
That ends you up in the same place, but it seems more appropriate to what we know of history.
Of course, there is a problem with this whole thing, namely that it does not have the same grounding in physical reality that the S&H theory has - the saeculum being the length of a human life, and the turning being the length of a generation. Is there a real world explanation for why there would be a four-variation cycle to "saecula" (if that's a word)?
Last edited by JustPassingThrough; 05-02-2009 at 05:00 PM.
Read that sentence again and count your lucky stars that this isn't the previous 4T!
That example makes no sense, on a variety of levels.
I don't know what an "Oligarphic High" (oligarchic?) is, and I'm sure scared to see a "Macaroni Unraveling" (sounds pretty messy), but there are certain things about this comparison to the Glorious Revolution Saeculum that, even with my frustratingly limited knowledge of the 17th century, click for me. For one, the post-WWII Recovery/High is very probably the grandest 1T on this continent of all time, and winning the war, with ensuing achievements like NATO and the UN, certainly seems as proud and transformative an event, from a superpower standpoint, as colonizing Jamestown was for the British.
The Puritan Awakening/English Civil War, from what little I know of it, was as impactful in its time as the Consciousness Revolution, and planted cultural seeds, especially in New England, that informed the development of the next 2T and the Enlightenment. As for the post-English Civil War 3T, the war with Holland and British takeover of New York almost seems to echo the Soviet collapse and end of the Cold War.
And finally, to second Chas '88's assertion earlier, the sporadic but seemingly never-ending series of small-scale "Indian wars" before the Glorious Revolution reminds me of our entanglements in the Middle East -- not full-scale, concentrated war, but battles waged against technologically inferior powers that carry over from the end of the 3T.
So, since it should be quite a few years before the aforementioned AIG witch trials start, what happens next?
Last edited by 1990; 05-02-2009 at 05:15 PM.
Oh I know. It's just I like it here in Wien & I can speak enough German to survive here. If things ever get really messy in America then I wouldn't mind a retreat to Wien.Read that sentence again and count your lucky stars that this isn't the previous 4T!
As for surviving the previous 4T, I would have been fine until 1938 and the Anschluss. However even then I still would have been fine because I can prove that I have German ancestry (granted Irish, English, Scot-Irish, Welsh, etc. are also mixed in) tracing back to Swiss who moved to Heidelberg, Alsace-Lorrainers, and Krefelders (near Duesseldorf). So I would have been "spared" due to my ancestry, if I had wanted to be. However I think like the Von Trapps I would've taken the first train out of town if I had lived during the last 4T.
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
Branching off on American High = Merrie England idea.
So I guess Rod Serling was our William Shakespeare in equivalency. Rod I usually consider to be Silentesque, but he was born on the GI side of the cusp & his influence on Television seems to be of a similar vein to Shakespeare's influence to Theatre, since Drama in this form was a relatively new concept in England at the time. Medieval morality plays had been popular for the longest time, but Shakespeare & other playwrights (including good ol' Ben Jonson) were pioneers in the new form of Drama.
Sorry, that thought just popped into my head out of nowhere... but maybe perhaps it just came from... The Twilight Zone...
~Chas'88
Last edited by Chas'88; 05-02-2009 at 05:39 PM.
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
And speaking of witch trials -
All right. We had a terrorism suspect waterboarded 183 times in one month because his interrogators knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that two things were true: that he, and everybody else in Guantanamo, was a big-time terrorist. Every correspondence I ever had with even a moderate Republican referred to "the terrorists in Guantanamo" as if that had already been proven of them. No drivers, clerks, or people turned in for the money by bounty-hunters or personal enemies. Terrorists, every last one of them.
They also 'knew beyond the shadow of a doubt" that there are a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Therefore they also knew their suspect must certainly know of this - all they had to do was get it out of him.
Fast-backward 400 years to the interrogators who knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were witches and that the suspects in custody were witches. They also knew, down to the last detail of the picnic supper at the coven meetings, what witches did and who was presiding. Therefore if they didn't confess, the truth could be gotten out of them by torture. Hence the overwhelming evidence of a vast conspiracy of female devil-worshipers seeking to do harm to everybody else and doing such things as kissing the devil's rear end - they confessed to it! Under torture! The very details the Inquisitorial Handbook so carefully outlined! See? Absolutely proven.
People - have four hundred years taught us nothing?
How to spot a shill, by John Michael Greer: "What you watch for is (a) a brand new commenter who (b) has nothing to say about the topic under discussion but (c) trots out a smoothly written opinion piece that (d) hits all the standard talking points currently being used by a specific political or corporate interest, while (e) avoiding any other points anyone else has made on that subject."
"If the shoe fits..." The Grey Badger.
