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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)

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The behavior that helped the most educated succeed was being informed. It’s not surprising that they maintain that pattern and in so doing, parrot mainstream media. Most people have limited experience in managing information that they consider authoritative which turns out to be wrong. I think the best example of authoritative misinformation for 2020 is Anthony Fauci’s guidance that masks don’t help until they do. I’…

You raise a great point. Trust in authorities is a very powerful mental shortcut. You don’t have to research anything. Go with the mainstream and you’ll always be right. Until that shortcut goes horribly wrong.

It's not a shortcut. It's the only way to form opinions outside of your expertise fields, because you simply don't have the time to personally research everything.

That's why it's very important to have a healthy dose of skepticism when receiving info from people who we trust, because we chose the gatekeepers based on our opinions which implicitly selects for our own biases.

For example I don't actually know that the election wasn't stolen. It's an opinion that I hold due to choosing to trust a specific gatekeeper (main stream media) and a lack of hard evidence from the other side. If hard evidence were to be presented, the I would have to reexamine my beliefs even if they go against everything I believed in previously.

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

#182
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"education, it shifts people to the left, as analytical thinking starts undoing idealism." True; college students are noted for their lack of idealism. Conversely right leaning occupations such as veterans, oil rig workers and farmers always have their head in the clouds with high minded idealistic notions that don't work in the real world.

> Conversely right leaning occupations such as veterans, oil rig workers and farmers always have their head in the clouds with high minded idealistic notions that don't work in the real world. Is this a joke?

> Is this a joke?

Yes, I think it was a joke.

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

#183

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…

Fighting against "globalism" could have been something people like Bernie used before Trump too. Ironically anarchist and antifa groups have always tried to burn down cities where globalists meet, G7 etc. They might have different explanations but in the end it's fight for the capital.

Corbyn for instance, very much left wing, opposed EU because of all the globalist bankers and buerocrats in Brussels controlling the society, cheap labor bringing down wages.

If you're a bit older or have better knowledge, then trumps policies are far more similar to someone like Sanders if they really wanted to team up. (I'm not talking about his speech and the way of saying things)

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

#184

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.

Judging by the unanimous and immediate technocrat and media response to the capitol riot I would wager the rich are very concerned about it. I agree noone wealthy seemed all that concerned about the riots before that

There was no way to spin it off as marketing either, why would they be concerned.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discourse is narrower than you'd like; that doesn't mean it's "gone". When someone makes extraordinary claims like "Discourse is gone," that is a red flag that they are not viewing the situation objectively.

Precisely demonstrating my point: a hyper-sensitivity and censorious attitude against any advocacy for unmitigated debate.

You are calling my disagreement a "censorious attitude." Sorry, but I am allowed to disagree with you.

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

#186

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…

West Virginians with masters degrees make about twice as much as those with high school diplomas. Either things are not so bad for people with humanities degrees, or they're not as large a share of education as you think.

https://www.wvhepc.edu/resources/data-and-publication-center...

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

#187
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"education, it shifts people to the left, as analytical thinking starts undoing idealism." True; college students are noted for their lack of idealism. Conversely right leaning occupations such as veterans, oil rig workers and farmers always have their head in the clouds with high minded idealistic notions that don't work in the real world.

> Conversely right leaning occupations such as veterans, oil rig workers and farmers always have their head in the clouds with high minded idealistic notions that don't work in the real world. Is this a joke?

> Is this a joke?

Yes. The person I was replying to seemed to assume that college was where people are disabused of idealism. My response was satirical.

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

#188
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 significa…

Good education system does not neatly translate to, say, economic success. Italy has top-class university system, much older than Columbus, and yet the country seems to be stuck in stagnation for last 20 years and the talented fresh graduates of those top schools move abroad.

> Good education system does not neatly translate to, say, economic success.

If you think anyone said that, you should probably talk less and read more. Because it doesn't appear you're competent in either.

Education is necessary but not sufficient.

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

#189

This Turchin fellow seems to have missed the boat by about 20 years. The book "Generations: The History of America's Future" by Strauss and Howe was published in 1991 and predicted exactly the same thing. It was a bestseller at the time. It's so well known that it's notable on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... It predicted a "crisis of 2020" caused by a number of factors inclu…

Fascinating! I hadn’t heard of this before. The closest I’ve found in the same vein is a 1994 article by Edward Luttwak who predicted another wave of fascism in the western world driven by economic decline of the middle class:

“It is only mildly amusing that nowadays the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one. Thus at the present time the core of Republican/Tory beliefs is a perfect non-sequitur. And what does the moderate Left have to offer? Only more redistribution, more public assistance, and particularist concern for particular groups that can claim victim status, from the sublime peak of elderly, handicapped, black lesbians down to the merely poor.”

Link to article here. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n07/edward-luttwak/why-f...

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

#190
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

God, this is true, but most HN posters can't see it for some reason.

Princeton already proved America is an oligarchy with a paper that was released a few years back, showing that when the rich wanted a certain policy implemented, it was passed into law at any almost 80% rate, compared with the "average voter" wanting a policy made into law at about a 50% rate.

Here's that article:

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Now here's what's super telling, or at least should be... if you Google "princeton oligarchy study america" or some combination, the very first fucking result you'll find will be a Vox article saying its wrong. Because the ultra-rich need to perpetuate the myth that your voice matters. Google needs you to be stupid enough to believe that.

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