It’s getting crazy here in the UK - you can be arrested for putting out misleading information, sharing videos or making an observation (depends which group you are upsetting). Elon Musk made a remark saying that we are heading for civil war and there are calls for his extradition and trial - good luck with that:
There are now calls to ban X here in the UK
Like many countries in The West our economies are failing and this leads to social unrest. There may be something in this book. It is 80 years since WW2:
The more we/I see of Elon, the creepier he seems… While I used to like, even promote the evolutional Tesla, of late it’s more a loathing of his involvement…
I read “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” by Neil Howe. (Library.) The author traces generational collective personalities that he claims follow a consistent pattern for centuries. He may be right but he doesn’t bring hard data. His names for the generations seem Jungian in inspiration which seemed a little woo-woo to me.
I prefer the statistician, Peter Turchin, since he brings reams of hard data from original sources that are centuries old. Turchin came to a similar conclusion – basically that there’s a bad moon on the rise. He pinpointed 2020 as a crisis year (in a book that I read in 2017). Uncannily accurate.
The world economy and the large societies that dominate it have tremendous weight and momentum. It’s not as easy to change direction as these authors predict. Still, it pays to realize that massive changes have happened in the past and could happen again.
I agree that the world doesn’t run on train tracks like Howe seems to postulate. But history does rhyme a bit at times. Cycles of economic collapse followed by societal collapse and war have happened over and over again. An interesting book written by an ex-Chancellor here in the UK is War and Gold:
I suspect that when it is believed that the United States is weak, like in the aftermath of a civil war or during a cataclysmic financial ruin, that there will be many that remember things like this and will be less than sympathetic to the United States led western powers.
Qazulight (I am betting my life that will not happen for another 20 years.)
I have a friend who read this some years ago and tried to get me interested. I did some cursory research, including flipping through the book he lent me, and my takeaway was that it’s a pile of rubbish. Oh sure, there are “generations” and different generations find themselves with different priorities, often (usually) based on world events at the time. Those who lived through the Great Depression were surely formed differently than those who came of age in the Roaring 20’s. Likewise the Vietnam era student likely had a different world view than those who grew up during Disco, which came only a few years later.
But none of that is “predictable”. World events don’t happen on a nicely formatted timeline and never will. There are too many unpredictables (unless you believe in Asimov’s “Gaia”) between earthquakes, droughts, famine, meteors from the Ort cloud, war, peace, and technology revolutions from farming to automobiles to microprocessors.
For some reason it appears many people are unable to accept randomness in things. Mrs. Goofy came home last night from a gaggle with girlfriends yapping about how this Presidential race was all a set-up, and the Democrats had all these clever moves planned out in advance. Another seemingly intelligent friend “knows” that the FBI let the shooter in Pennsylvania go because of “benign neglect” instead of simple incompetence or perhaps an overloaded work schedule. How did they “plan” this? She can’t say. But for a bit of randomness an ear graze is a head shot, and the world is different.
As Forest Gump said “It happens.” I would write the pregenerator of that phase except the Nanny filter wouldn’t allow it, but that’s often the best explanation. Often it’s the only explanation.
Wendy, End Times has a publication date of 2023. Did you make a mistake on when you read it? I’ve done that in my reading diary. Or maybe you read a very ARC of it.
The book was already 4 yrs old, and nothing had happened by then. However, what caused the crisis was not what was predicted. What caused the crisis was the deliberate undermining of the US population’s belief in itself. Macro effects deliberately caused by one political group. I thought when the 2016 election was over, there might be problems if a lot of what was proposed was put into law. Which is what happened. It happened because the US Supreme Court became unbalanced, with political idiology being used to impose religious beliefs as law. The macro-economic effect begins at the micro level, with individuals making choices based on many states choosing to impose religious law on their populations. Which caused significant numbers of medical doctors to leave those states. PLUS, future doctors are also choosing to NOT practice in those states–for the same reasons. In addition, workers in other fields are choosing to avoid working in those states because they could be substantially impacted by those laws which do not comport with their own beliefs. Thus, a macro effect that is currently in progress. When the US Supreme Court reverses its decision(s), and an essentially uniform law is in force for all (regardless of state of residence), ONLY THEN will the “free to travel” proclamation of the US Constitution actually come back into being law.
As it happens, I finished rewatching my DVD set of “I Claudius” this evening.
As Claudius put his plan into motion, in the last episode, he said “let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out”.
According to Graves, Claudius wanted Nero to be emperor, because he was so corrupt and perverted, that the people would rise up, overthrow the corrupt empire, and restore the republic. Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Claudius was old, outlived all his contemporaries, and was the only one who still believed in the republic. Everyone else was so used to the functioning of the empire, and emperors, that they never rejected it, so it slowly spiraled into the mud.
So, what of Shiny-land? Will the corruption and nonsense reach a crescendo, and the people reject it? Or will the mob simply let it all happen while they watch the circuses?
Yup. I first came across Howe’s work in the book published in 1993 titled 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? cowritten with William Strauss and some kid in a college dorm somewhere in North Carolina (***). The “bit” of the book was that it was an attempt at a generational biography of Generation X, those born between 1964 and 1980, written of course by two boomers who of course thought they had insights only those NOT in the target generation could tease out of the cultural zeitgeist to better explain how economics and politics were turning out for that generation.
*** The bit within the bit of the book was that they had attempted to land a publishing deal and found no takers. After having spent several months crafting the material, they decided they might as well “publish” it somehow to get their ideas out so they decided to upload it to a realtime discussion board on CompuServe (remember, this was early 1993, the Internet didn’t exist…). As they began pushing each chapter up to the public board over several evenings, a college student somewhere in North Carolina (Duke?) began reading it and critiquing it in real time back to them on the channel. They captured the upload sessions including the student’s comments / rebuttals / elaborations and realized those elements added something not present in the original material so they incorporated that feedback into the book and THAT found a publisher.
I will say that book was phenomenally entertaining and – as an earlier Xer, a sub-group they termed the “Atari generation” for having come of age in the Atari wave of video games versus the Nintendo age 15 years later – the book included dozens of references to pop culture that made me pump my fist or laugh out loud in agreement. However, there was no “science” involved in their analysis. The best way to characterize the approach is that it is like a Dennis Miller rant – a consistent amount of cynisim wrapped with lots of culttural references for humor / hipness with slightly less snark and a more gentle sense of bemusement – in prose form.
I think the same modus operandi has been used for other book projects by the two, either writing together or independently.
I’m in the UK and no one but the illiberal elite has taken any notice of him. I’m sure he’s not responsible for one brick that has been thrown or one fire started. I have not seen one bit of evidence to suggest that he is responsible for anything that has gone on. Mobs are not marching down that street shouting Elon Musk’. They are usually chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’. while waving weapons.
Here’s a policeman asking ‘the mob’ nicely if they wouldn’t mind leaving their weapons in the mosque
All Musk has done is said that Britain is heading for civil war - just his view on things. Stating an opinion or view on something is rapidly becoming a crime these days.
Interesting. What I’ve seen in the press here (USA) is rioting by non-Muslims misinformed about the kid who killed those girls, the misinformation that he is a Muslim illegal immigrant, which he is not.
Civil war between Muslim and non-Muslims?
No misinformation on X?
