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Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

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Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#71

Post by AniseAbyss »

inglor_cz wrote: post #2

Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…

Yeah we have fascists in Germany again. People forget. And who the fuck really reads history books anyways?

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#72

Post by eloff »

anewaccount2021 wrote: post #66
74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. That's why education is the most important pillar of democracy…

This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one pa…

Public education in the US is awful and lags nearly the entire developed world.

Humanities degrees are not terribly useful, but boiling all education down to humanities degrees is a blatant strawman that signals a lot about your willingness to have a nuanced discussion.

I think it's fairly self evident that investment in the future is what improves the future and education is probably the most important and significant such investment.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#73

Post by dehrmann »

rho4 wrote: post #61

I feel like an important often missed variable is what part of the population is actually not having enough food & shelter or not able to support their family.

Also work and leisure. Covid hit both of those. Bored, unemployed people are more likely to protest, and protesters are more likely to riot.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#74

Post by klyrs »

anewaccount2021 wrote: post #66
74d-fe6-2c6 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. That's why education is the most important pillar of democracy…

This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one pa…

Bush II's "No Child Left Behind" was replaced by Obama's "Race to the Top" was followed by DeVos's "invisible hand." The common thread in all of these education policies is that schools that are doing well get rewarded; schools that are underperforming get the same, or reduced funding, or get closed.

To get better educated voters, you need better education for poorest performing students -- not more investment in the high performers. Additionally, poor kids can't focus on school for various reasons ranging from malnutrition to working multiple part-time jobs to keep their family afloat. Addressing poverty on a systemic level will be necessary to raise our baseline of education.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#75

Post by anewaccount2021 »

paganel wrote: post #40
inglor_cz wrote: post #2

Turchin's two main ideas are intriguing. a) 50 years is enough for "institutional memory" to go out of the window. This may change with longevity breakthroughs, but 50 years is currently enough for a complete generation exchange, so the new leaders have no memory of the previous upheaval and will make the same mistakes again. Or at least the same kind of mistakes, details are always different. b) elite overproduction…

>at the 25+ crowd with fresh degrees, tons of debt and not-precisely-excellent earning opportunities There are numerous studies and theories saying that late 19th-early 20th century revolutions wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been coordinated by educated people who hadn't found a stable job (mostly as government employees, not that many private white-collar jobs back then). The Russian revolution definitely wou…

All of the Bolsheviks were well-read. Even their token thug, Stalin, was probably reading political theory at what we would describe as a doctoral level. While Lenin did not respect Stalin as an intellectual peer, we do know that he spent a great deal of time pouring over dense political tomes. No TV, radio, internet...people read books to entertain themselves.

But, to put a fine point on it, the Russian Revolution happened without Lenin or Trotsky. The Bolsheviks overthrew the February Revolution in a coup.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#77

Post by SantalBlush »

wwweston wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samuel Huntington observed 'convulsions' every 60 years in American history: > American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in t…

I feel like there's an important data point overlooked in the 1860s?

Not to mention the labor upheavals of the early 20th century.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#78

Post by anewaccount2021 »

klyrs wrote: post #74
anewaccount2021 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one pa…

Bush II's "No Child Left Behind" was replaced by Obama's "Race to the Top" was followed by DeVos's "invisible hand." The common thread in all of these education policies is that schools that are doing well get rewarded; schools that are underperforming get the same, or reduced funding, or get closed. To get better educated voters, you need better education for poorest performing students -- not more investment in the…

Once again - the best educated voter still only has two choices, and neither of these represent the poor.

Do people on HN really think the very rich or the very poor were at all bothered by the Capitol riots? Government is irrelevant to both groups, in different ways.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#79

Post by tifadg1 »

justinzollars wrote: post #63

I recommend reading William Strauss and Neil Howe's book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny [1]. The book introduces the idea of generational cycles [2] According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes) and I couldn't put it down when I read it over the summer. Several peop…

> After reading the book, it was really no surprise to me when the capital was overrun with rioters.

May it be possible you formed a bias? Take extreme examples of preppers or religious nuts - if something happened tomorrow, they'd be the first to say "I've been telling you for years". Does that mean they were right all along or rather that given a long enough time frame anything can happen?

> unaddressed underlying conditions: extreme wealth inequality, pandemic, desperation, hunger and feeling like one has no personal stake.

on the flip side, no revolution since and including arab uprising was successful, and unlike us, they're actually prepared to sacrifice themselves for their ideals.

Re: Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012)

#80

Post by marcusverus »

dehrmann wrote: post #70
throw0101a wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samuel Huntington observed 'convulsions' every 60 years in American history: > American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in t…

How was the the revolutionary period "moral convulsion?" Political, sure, but not moral.

The widespread adoption of the civil libertarian ethos (under the guise of unalienable rights, endowed by a creator) might be the greatest moral convulsion in human history.
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