Will the US experience a violent upheaval in 2020? (2012) • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by brightball » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:48 PM UTC

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

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…

> 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 basically the Old Testament IMO. Same mistakes over and over, separated by a couple of generations once one generation gets comfortable.

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

#122

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:50 PM UTC

What I am most worried about the global decline of liberal democracy and the rise of rise of autocratic ethno-religious nationalism. For example:

Turkey and Erdogan with Islam,

Poland and Duda with Catholicism

Russia and Putin with Russian Orthodox

India and Modi with Hinduism

US and Trump with White Evangelical Christianity

It seems the old liberal democratic order is under severe strain.

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

#123

Post by bproven » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:51 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #93

kaitai wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best educated voter -- any voter in fact -- can also run for office and transform the party. I dislike the rhetoric you're using that implies the parties are outside and beyond the reach of "normal" citizens. Of course they are institutions with substantial inertia and aims of their own. But as the elections of people as diverse as Cori Bush and Madison Cawthorne and Marjorie Taylor Greene show, it is certainly s…

they are increasingly beyond the reach of normal citizens. If your views do not align 100% with either party, you are increasingly marginalized. See the treatment of Donald Trump (a republican outsider, and not a traditional conservative by any means, but not a democrat in principle either) by the Republican party. For the past four years, republicans have refused to pass bills due to not matching ideological purity…

i would have replaced Trump with Ron Paul (remember him?) as a Republican/Libertarian with strong support via grassroots and youth (that wanted real change) that the party did not want and did everything they could to destroy or co-opt.

When we saw the same thing being done to Sanders by the Democratic party (almost an exact mirror of what happended to Paul) it was a strong hint as to what is really going on. Neither party is"better" in this regard...

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

#124

Post by strombofulous » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #112

Izkata wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda fits the current US situation too: The political violence isn't as new as a lot of people seem to believe - it started years ago, on college/university campuses. While that early violence was done by the students, several times people got videos of their professors in the crowd helping to coordinate. Once that became normalized it spilled off campus and grew into what we're seeing now.

Ahhh yes. Look at all the university students and professors who just stormed the capitol building in full tactical gear. Really everything bad is all the left's fault. Somehow.

This is such a ridiculously uncharitable interpretation of what the person you're replying to said. It makes me feel like I'm on twitter

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

#125

Post by yourapostasy » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:53 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #68

inglor_cz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We are much less violent than 50 years ago" I would say that the population is, on average, much older and has more to lose. Fortysomethings do not regularly engage in street chaos. This is even more visible in Europe, even in formerly violent places like the Balkans or Northern Ireland. Once the share of the young hotheads in the population drops, you have much smaller probability of really serious riots.

The drop in violence is enormous and visible in crime rates across basically any age demographic you look at. It’s not just a function of an aging society. It also doesn’t seem obviously correlated with policing, since it exists across cities with radically different policing regimes. A lot of people think it has to do with environmental factors, and specifically lead.

> A lot of people think it has to do with environmental factors, and specifically lead.

Ironically, we are studying whether lead caused cohesion problems for the Roman Empire [1] [2], so it isn't as if we didn't suspect lead before to cause civilization-scale problems. And while the modern drop in blood lead levels is big in the developed world [3], it is still orders of magnitude greater than pre-industrial levels.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2019/11/29/ar...

[2] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...

[3] https://www.who.int/docstore/bulletin/pdf/2000/issue9/bu0686...

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

#126

Post by jonhohle » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

kaitai wrote: post #88

anewaccount2021 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best educated voter -- any voter in fact -- can also run for office and transform the party. I dislike the rhetoric you're using that implies the parties are outside and beyond the reach of "normal" citizens. Of course they are institutions with substantial inertia and aims of their own. But as the elections of people as diverse as Cori Bush and Madison Cawthorne and Marjorie Taylor Greene show, it is certainly s…

Have you been involved in a party’s political process? I participated in a primary caucus for a small district and was disgusted by the leadership and how the event was run. No one was heard, whatever the moderator wanted was how the vote turned out, regardless of how the group actually voted. All of the leadership was among the most smarmy, slimy people I’ve ever been in a room with.

If you want to run for office, not only do you have to spend time with these narcissistic, power drunk politicians at the local level, you have to get them to support you.

This meeting was on the extreme local level for a community of maybe 35k people. I can’t even imagine what the county level, or national level would be like.

Maybe others have had a better experience, but this disillusioned me from any participation in politics and politicians in general.

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

#127

Post by alisonatwork » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #119

tathougies wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they are increasingly beyond the reach of normal citizens. If your views do not align 100% with either party, you are increasingly marginalized. See the treatment of Donald Trump (a republican outsider, and not a traditional conservative by any means, but not a democrat in principle either) by the Republican party. For the past four years, republicans have refused to pass bills due to not matching ideological purity…

> Honestly, after seeing both how the GOP and Democrats treated Trump, Sanders, and Gabbard, I find myself supportive of all three of them despite them having a very different views. I simply like that they're not either party. This seems absurd. If your political reasoning puts you in a situation where Trump and Sanders are both options for you then your system is broken - they are antithetical to each other in styl…

I don't think this is too difficult to understand. It's anti-establishment versus establishment, populist versus elite, that sort of axis.

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

#128

Post by Der_Einzige » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #43

iguy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These examples are of technical education. German rocket scientists, and British blast-furnace wizards (to France). These things are important of course but seem orthogonal to political institutional memory. Scholars deeply steeped in Bismark's thoughts & mistakes, or in English constitutional law, didn't make these jumps.

> or in English constitutional law Carl Schmitt did in fact made the jump, and he's one of the most read constitutional law writers in the last century. Not sure if Max Weber would have done the same, most probably not (he was really versed in English constitutional law, his "Economy and Society" has lots of quotes to Maitland's "History of English Law"), but he didn't strike me as a fervent supporter of democracy ri…

Not just mentor, he was her boyfriend!!!

And an ironic situation, given his nazi ties and her jewishness...

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

#129

Post by vladTheInhaler » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

strombofulous wrote: post #124

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh yes. Look at all the university students and professors who just stormed the capitol building in full tactical gear. Really everything bad is all the left's fault. Somehow.

This is such a ridiculously uncharitable interpretation of what the person you're replying to said. It makes me feel like I'm on twitter

Alright, why don't you start by explaining what you think they mean by "what we're seeing now", or by "violence done by the students", and how those things are causally linked?

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

#130

Post by leereeves » Sun, Jan 10, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #57

leereeves wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 2020 might also qualify on that count. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates...in 2020 > New Orleans-based data consultant Jeff Asher studied crime rates in more than 50 cities and says the crime spikes aren't just happening in big cities. With the numbers of homicides spiking in many places, Asher expects the final statistics for 2020 to tell a startlingly grim story. > "We're going to see, historically, the…

Is that really unprecedented? In 2016 Chicago had 60% more homicides than in 2015. Short-term spikes in statistics with small denominators can be expected. In 2015 Baltimore had 63% more homicides than in 2014.

Sure, but the increase in the murder rate in 2020 wasn't a spike in a single city, it was a spike nationwide.