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sitchensis posted:The world of tomorrow will look a lot like the world of today, except with more technology and less civil rights. for the sake of this thread are we ignoring climate change and super bugs and poo poo? I feel like those are going to contribute a lot to the fall of western civilization over the coming decades.
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Aug 13, 2017 21:30
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Doorknob Slobber posted:for the sake of this thread are we ignoring climate change and super bugs and poo poo? I feel like those are going to contribute a lot to the fall of western civilization over the coming decades. Yeah, there is already a thread for Climate change horror. I think that will do us in, in the end (unless we put in a massive effort very, very soon), but let's leave it out for the sake of this thought experiment. I guess you could also say that stable, interconnected polities are the basis for combatting climate change and if western civ falls apart, we won't be able to combat it as effectively (China/India notwithstanding).
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Aug 13, 2017 21:39
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I liked part 1 but part 2 with the hair metal was lamer.
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Aug 14, 2017 00:12
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Sneakster posted:They weren't betrayed by the left, they were stomped on by the capitalist class. Normal people do not join militias or communes. Women and children at the edge of survival aren't the ones spending thousands on guns. Poor people didn't overwhelmingly support sanders and Trump was a reformist outsider candidate who beat the both the republican and democratic establishment to get elected.
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Aug 14, 2017 02:24
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Handwringing about American decline has been a regular feature of American society since WWII. It's never been materially true though and is usually a product of either incomplete information or of the political cycle. "Moral decline" tends to be something people argue whenever the current party in power doesn't match their views (for example, ITT people are arguing that the supposed decline is because of capitalism and income inequality while during the Obama years people argued it was because America didn't have a strong enough military and growth wasn't high enough) and is impossible to quantify so I usually ignore it when assessing the "declinist" narrative. In fact, now that I think about it the nineties seemed to be the only point in time since the 1920's that Americans genuinely believed that they were in ascent even though American power has been increasing in an absolute sense since 1945 while any potential competitor flounders.
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Aug 14, 2017 02:44
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A lot of the stuff mentioned in OP is a product of the crisis of the 1970s and the victory of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and is not a product of the last 17 years. It's always seemed weird to me how little people talk about the events of the 1970s, considering how important they were. Like people talk about the 1930s, and about Trump and company destroying the "postwar order", but the postwar order ended in 1973
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Aug 14, 2017 02:48
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asdf32 posted:In general there is always going to be a bullet-point list of what seem to be almost insurmountable problems (name a time period in the past that was actually 'better'). The issue now is the potential death spiral of dysfunction, distrust, polarization and ideology that's choking off the system's ability to correct. I think that we're in the middle of one of those corrections right now. Corrections occur when the center cannot hold anymore and something shocks the system like the election of Donald Trump. We won't truly know if I'm right or not for a while yet, but one of the reasons Trump happened is because the political process in the USA had been stagnating for a while now (since 2000 I think, but possible since earlier) and people had been treating politics like a formality wherein the office of the Royal Presidency was designated by the powers that be that doesn't really affect them and that they don't really have any influence over anyway. Then Trump happened and delivered a mortal blow to the fantasy that you don't need to care about what happens in Washington. Right now we're in the middle of an ideological blowback against a President that I'm not sure has any precedent in the 20th century or onward. To the point where people have actually lost their minds. In some ways it's similar to the Tea Party but far, far larger, and I think that it's going to have a measurable (and, in my opinion, positive) impact on politics for the decades to come. You already have seen an immediate impact of his election across other Western democracies of right-populist candidates almost instantaneously becoming unpalatable. Trump might have ended up inadvertently saving the USA from political stagnation. icantfindaname posted:A lot of the stuff mentioned in OP is a product of the crisis of the 1970s and the victory of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and is not a product of the last 17 years. It's always seemed weird to me how little people talk about the events of the 1970s, considering how important they were. Like people talk about the 1930s, and about Trump and company destroying the "postwar order", but the postwar order ended in 1973 Yeah I really think people should spend more time looking at the 1960's and especially 1970's to understand what's going on now. That's a far better historical comparison than ancient empires. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 02:58
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Earth isn't a scripted plot, there is no reason America should downfall via a bunch of cutesy rhymes with Rome specifically. It's not like the only two empires in world history are Rome then the us and they are going to match up for some reason.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:08
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Fojar38 posted:Handwringing about American decline has been a regular feature of American society since WWII. It's never been materially true though and is usually a product of either incomplete information or of the political cycle. Right it's not in material decline. What's remarkable is to watch the left and the right both pretend they're under constant siege. Social welfare decline was a bullet point in the OP yet social welfare hasn't really declined anywhere ever but has generally increased in the western world steadily for decades including in the U.S. But..there are real underlying indicators of democratic sustainability that are in decline. Current levels of polarization, ideology and distrust are probably unsustainable. Fojar38 posted:I think that we're in the middle of one of those corrections right now. Corrections occur when the center cannot hold anymore and something shocks the system like the election of Donald Trump. We won't truly know if I'm right or not for a while yet, but one of the reasons Trump happened is because the political process in the USA had been stagnating for a while now (since 2000 I think, but possible since earlier) and people had been treating politics like a formality wherein the office of the Royal Presidency was designated by the powers that be that doesn't really affect them and that they don't really have any influence over anyway. Then Trump happened and delivered a mortal blow to the fantasy that you don't need to care about what happens in Washington. This is the optimistic view which I probably share in the long run. But its governance that's going to steer us out of this problem and when is faith in government and and democratic political process (compromise) going to return? It's harder now to imagine a world where the opposition isn't tweeting about the illegitimacy and/or calling for the jailing of the opposition. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 03:13
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asdf32 posted:Right it's not in material decline. What's remarkable is to watch the left and the right both pretend they're under constant siege. Social welfare decline was a bullet point in the OP yet social welfare hasn't really declined anywhere ever but has generally increased in the western world steadily for decades including in the U.S. Relative social welfare has declined however in the form of increased income inequality and stagnation of social mobility. Also, automation will make some of that decline far more permanent and harder to ignore.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:17
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GDP is up up up, but that doesn't match the experience of real people, who have seen their real wages stagnating or reversing. The only think that keeps pushing life expectancy and other metrics up is technological progress bringing the marginal costs (cost per unit) down, because the benefits of increases in productivity have only filtered up.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:21
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rudatron posted:GDP is up up up, but that doesn't match the experience of real people, who have seen their real wages stagnating or reversing. The only think that keeps pushing life expectancy and other metrics up is technological progress bringing the marginal costs (cost per unit) down, because the benefits of increases in productivity have only filtered up. In western civilization or in America?
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Aug 14, 2017 03:22
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asdf32 posted:social welfare hasn't really declined anywhere ever but has generally increased in the western world steadily for decades including in the U.S. Bull loving poo poo. Welfare's been slashed in the US for two decades now.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:23
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The crisis of legitimacy is a direct consequence of politicians kicking this can down the road, because it easier for them to do that. That crisis of legitimacy lead to Donald Trump, but it won't stop there. Even if Trump is impeached or whatever, the underlying factors that enabled it are still there. Predictably, upper class liberals are interpreting this as some kind of unprecedented, unpredictable event, either the result of some collective madness, or an indicment of the intelligence/moral-purity of the American public - but actually, it's simply the logical consequence of discrete, goverment policy and ideology, for the past couple of decades.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:27
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asdf32 posted:This is the optimistic view which I probably share in the long run. But its governance that's going to steer us out of this problem and when is faith in government and and democratic political process (compromise) going to return? It's harder now to imagine a world where the opposition isn't tweeting about the illegitimacy and/or calling for the jailing of the opposition. Faith in the democratic political process is hard to quantify. Nobody has tried to violently overthrow the government and nobody with any influence has called for it. Democratic institutions have so far done an excellent job checking the abilities of an unpopular President to forward his agenda (this is by design.) Advocacy for the removal of Trump has called for legal, constitutional means of doing so (impeachment.) Congressional Republicans have shown greater willingness to compromise with Democrats this year than they have at any point in the Obama years (though still not enough.) This is the correction I'm talking about. It's just not something that happens immediately, it's a process that takes years. Something really 'ought to be done about the electoral college though. That one system has resulted in two Presidents in the past 17 years who lost the popular vote.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:27
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WampaLord posted:Bull loving poo poo. Welfare's been slashed in the US for two decades now.  http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/02/heres-why-bernie-sanders-doesnt-say-much-about-welfare-reform/
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Aug 14, 2017 03:27
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OH MY GOD THE PRINCELY SUM OF FOUR THOUSAND AMERICAN DOLLARS???? Poverty is solved forever!!
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Aug 14, 2017 03:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:In western civilization or in America?
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Aug 14, 2017 03:29
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asdf32 posted:
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Aug 14, 2017 03:32
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I feel it important to point out that expenditure on a thing does not actually translate to better provision of a thing to the end recipient, which is very noticeable in American healthcare spending compared with the rest of the world. Also noticeable in the UK with the government's laughably bad deficit despite massive public service cuts.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:32
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rudatron posted:Across the west in general, but tbe United States is the center of the West right now, and you're kidding yourself if you don't see that. The EU has its own problems, specific to it, but there's a lot of cross over. England was the center of western civilization and its fall as an empire seems to not have destroyed western civilization
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Aug 14, 2017 03:33
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loving lmao at trying to use a chart showing that average spending on the poor is only $12,000 per capita and trying to claim welfare has gotten better.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:35
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England's fall as an empire was due to two colossal shocks to the international system mere decades apart at a time when England actually had realistic competitors within "The West", and even then it wasn't KO'd until the late 50's. And even at it's height, the British Empire was never even close to being as strong as the United States is now. The US is so strong that the word "empire" inadequately describes it. Someone recently suggested that it's more like China's status in East Asia during the Ming dynasty and that's probably a better comparison. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 03:36
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Fojar38 posted:England's fall as an empire was due to two colossal shocks to the international system mere decades apart at a time when England actually had realistic competitors within "The West", and even then it wasn't KO'd until the late 50's. America is the world capital of America thinking its more important than it is
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Aug 14, 2017 03:38
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It was a fait accompli as soon as decolonialization took off, world wars or not.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:38
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rudatron posted:GDP is up up up, but that doesn't match the experience of real people, who have seen their real wages stagnating or reversing. The only think that keeps pushing life expectancy and other metrics up is technological progress bringing the marginal costs (cost per unit) down, because the benefits of increases in productivity have only filtered up. Life expectancy in the US is starting to level out, mostly because in wealthier states it rising, while in poorer states it is actually starting to fall: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/08/u-s-life-expectancy-varies-by-more-than-20-years-from-county-to-county/
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Aug 14, 2017 03:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:America is the world capital of America thinking its more important than it is In my experience most Americans perpetually understate America's status, actually. American power is ironically more respected by America's adversaries than it is by Americans themselves.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:40
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Fojar38 posted:Faith in the democratic political process is hard to quantify. Nobody has tried to violently overthrow the government and nobody with any influence has called for it. Democratic institutions have so far done an excellent job checking the abilities of an unpopular President to forward his agenda (this is by design.) Advocacy for the removal of Trump has called for legal, constitutional means of doing so (impeachment.) Congressional Republicans have shown greater willingness to compromise with Democrats this year than they have at any point in the Obama years (though still not enough.) I agree that so far institutions have done a great job in general checking Trump but the simple fact that people are advocating lawful impeachment doesn't mean much. Firing comey was lawful yet I think it fundamentally undermined our republic. Turkey just lawfully voted for constitutional reform that undermines their democratic future. Far more about the success of state and society rides on convention and culture than law which is more subjective and contradictory and fragile than most people realize WampaLord posted:loving lmao at trying to use a chart showing that average spending on the poor is only $12,000 per capita and trying to claim welfare has gotten better. Umm what?
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Aug 14, 2017 03:44
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asdf32 posted:
Wait... is that adjusted for inflation? Because $4,000 in 1982 is roughly $11, 800 in 2017. So in that case welfare spending would have gone up to match inflation only with no additional increases.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:45
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asdf32 posted:Umm what? Pembroke Fuse posted:Wait... is that adjusted for inflation? Because $4,000 in 1982 is roughly $11, 800 in 2017. So in that case welfare spending would have gone up to match inflation only with no additional increases. My point exactly.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:45
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American adversaries are well aware of US technological and global logistical supremacy, but building and maintaining such a system has a cost to it, and the US real economy hasn't advanced comparably to match. Remember the narrative of how Reagan'a Star Wars was supposed to bankrupt the USSR? Well, turns out is also bankrupting the US as well - its just taking longer.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:47
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rudatron posted:American adversaries are well aware of US technological and global logistical supremacy, but building and maintaining such a system has a cost to it, and the US real economy hasn't advanced comparably to match. It's also all the pork-barrel military spending that went with it. See F-35, that catamaran they built for the Navy and then dry-docked because it rotted out in a year and other random crap that gets shelved after a short stint in the real world.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:52
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Pembroke Fuse posted:Wait... is that adjusted for inflation? Because $4,000 in 1982 is roughly $11, 800 in 2017. So in that case welfare spending would have gone up to match inflation only with no additional increases. Yes. That's what "2014 dollars" means.
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Aug 14, 2017 03:56
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Pembroke Fuse posted:Wait... is that adjusted for inflation? Because $4,000 in 1982 is roughly $11, 800 in 2017. So in that case welfare spending would have gone up to match inflation only with no additional increases. Yes it is. The plot is clearly labeled "in 2014 dollars." WampaLord posted:My point exactly. Lol, what point?
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Aug 14, 2017 03:58
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asdf32 posted:Yes. That's what "2014 dollars" means. I missed that. I retract my point. However, it's still basically poverty line or below poverty line spending.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:01
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silence_kit posted:Lol, what point? To claim that $12,000 being spent on the average poor person is enough welfare is a loving joke. Keep in mind that's just "spending" and not cash money actually given to the poor. Part of this whole argument is that one of "the signs of the fall" is extravagant welfare spending, but we don't have that here.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:07
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asdf32 posted:I agree that so far institutions have done a great job in general checking Trump but the simple fact that people are advocating lawful impeachment doesn't mean much. Firing comey was lawful yet I think it fundamentally undermined our republic. Turkey just lawfully voted for constitutional reform that undermines their democratic future. Far more about the success of state and society rides on convention and culture than law which is more subjective and contradictory and fragile than most people realize I can't help but feel like this is a misreading of the situation though. Did Trump get elected because Americans distrusted American institutions or because Americans distrusted the people running them? The only political figures in recent memory who have resulted in anything resembling passion among the electorate are Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. Everyone else people either straight up haven't heard of (I have a close friend who is very politically aware and he cannot name the speaker of the house off the top of his head) or if they have heard of them they treat them as aloof suits. Pembroke Fuse posted:It's also all the pork-barrel military spending that went with it. See F-35, that catamaran they built for the Navy and then dry-docked because it rotted out in a year and other random crap that gets shelved after a short stint in the real world. I, too, get all of my information on the performance of military technology from GBS threads rudatron posted:American adversaries are well aware of US technological and global logistical supremacy, but building and maintaining such a system has a cost to it, and the US real economy hasn't advanced comparably to match. The US economy is nearly quadruple the size it was in 1990 and even with meh growth still adds a Switzerland to its economy every year. And that's GDP. In national wealth the US has more wealth than Japan, China, the UK, Germany, France, and Italy put together. The problem here is not aggregate wealth or whether or not the US can afford its global role. It can. The problem is how that wealth is distributed and its effect on politics. Fojar38 fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Aug 14, 2017 |
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Aug 14, 2017 04:26
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rudatron posted:The crisis of legitimacy is a direct consequence of politicians kicking this can down the road, because it easier for them to do that. That crisis of legitimacy lead to Donald Trump, but it won't stop there. Even if Trump is impeached or whatever, the underlying factors that enabled it are still there. Voters do in-fact have agency and can be held accountable for their decisions. Being angry and voting for Donald Trump arn't necessarily the same thing.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:27
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Fojar38 posted:I, too, get all of my information on the performance of military technology from GBS threads There is a thread about someone who worked as a defence contractor right here in D&D. I do also nip out to GIP or whatever it's called these days. Also, the F-35 is really expensive, as were some of the recent Navy projects that didn't really bear fruit.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:38
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Pembroke Fuse posted:There is a thread about someone who worked as a defence contractor right here in D&D. I do also nip out to GIP or whatever it's called these days. Also, the F-35 is really expensive, as were some of the recent Navy projects that didn't really bear fruit. The F-35 was absurdly expensive and also unnecessarily expensive. But the idea that it was a trillion dollars for no returns and the plane can't fly in the rain or whatever the current meme is is not true.
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Aug 14, 2017 04:40
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