dagblog - Comments for "The Asymmetrical Revolution "

If you are not worried, you

Anonymous — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 06:28:12 +0000

In reply to The Asymmetrical Revolution

If you are not worried, you don't understand what's going on. The American government is rife with fraud and financial crime. From the FBI, CIA to the founding families, the treasury is looted, Ft.Knox is empty and Wall Street is full of derivitives with no underlying value, and flash trading between computers.

What passes for commerce is selling paper back and forth and weapons systems to state enemies. The rule of law is gone, the crimes are huge and no one is even investigated let alone indicted and tried and convicted.

The prisons are full of drug users, who were arrested for using drugs, but are now in prisons where drugs are cheaper than on the street. Every prisoner costs the tax payers 35,000 dollars per year in incarceration costs, not to mention lost tax revenue. Drugs are illegal, because the CIA needs a blackmarket to jack up prices so they can launder drug money and sell dope.

This is the 21st century trembling towards collapse. Manipulated, prostituted, buggered, raped and mugged, lying in a gutter remains what is left of the middle class. Poverty is the new black, and there is room enough for everyone except the oligarchy. 1 in 5 children live in poverty in what was once the world's richest country.

Foreclosure fraud, perjury and outright theft are now the hallmarks of our banking system. Washington D.C. is a cruel impotent joke, meant only to distract and destroy America. The constitution, the founding document and highest law of the land is merely 4400 words, while the Obama Healthcare bill is over 2,000 PAGES long. We are all criminals because the laws are so verbose, so technical and so lawyerly crafted as to make them impossible to understand let alone obey.

The masses are sated with not bread and circuses but foodstamps and American Idol. When the power grid goes down, the darkness will be complete. A nation that cannot even feed itself, will starve in darkness. Change or die, the future is waiting if you have the temerity to merely flex your fingertips and grasp that which is just beyond your reach. Or you can die in darkness.

I think because of the pill,

David Seaton — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:26:34 +0000

In reply to "The Spanish film director

I think because of the pill, women controlled the physical consequences of sex for the first time in history. This was liberating. Also abortion became more widely available too. Now obviously the chances of what Almodovar calls a "broken heart" grow with the multitude of opportunities. Are women more vulnerable to having their hearts broken than men? That's not for me as a man to say, or perhaps even to speculate about.

However, if I had a young daughter today I would probably tell her what my granny would have told my mom long ago, "men only want one thing, honey" and if I had a son I would tell him, "if you can listen to her talk long enough you can bed practically any woman in the world"... and I would be often wrong on both counts... but right often enough for it to be serviceable advice.

"The Spanish film director

EmmaZahn — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:17:28 +0000

In reply to It could be gender... I had a

"The Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar says that those were times when the only bad thing you could get from making love was a broken heart."

Yeah, maybe not gender but definitely a difference in consequences for the sexes.

at least we're not battling

David Seaton — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:17:03 +0000

In reply to First of all, I don't think

at least we're not battling the Plague

That will be next year's story to keep people's minds off of downward social moblity

It could be gender... I had a

David Seaton — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:14:18 +0000

In reply to What is that saying about the

It could be gender... I had a wonderful time myself. The Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar says that those were times when the only bad thing you could get from making love was a broken heart. I am glad to have been young then.

I think we are looking at

David Seaton — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:10:26 +0000

In reply to That's a very good point,

I think we are looking at what may possibly be something totally new and outside American cultural reference: a long period, stretching far into the future of low or near zero growth in any way relevant to the way the majority live, with rather frozen social mobility... Where every new generation lives a little worse than the one before.... then you could see some real violence.

If you don't think Americans are capable of social violence, and the American government ready to employ as much brutality against Americans as against Iraqis (or Panamanians or Filipinos), for example, to repress it, than I think you should study the history of the American labor movement.

Things have been quiet for a long, long time. Credit driven consumer capitalism and the Cold War created an artificial calm that has lasted so long that people have come to see it as normal.... Stay tuned.

Clarification:I don't blame

David Seaton — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:57:32 +0000

In reply to I very much second that. The

Clarification:

I don't blame the crisis on the working poor, you might say that I am more concerned on how it affects them than how it affects wealthier people who were just having a flutter on the housing market.

Another thing that is important to note also. There are a lot of people who are in fact working poor or who are about to become working poor, but who are not yet conscious of this fact. When and if they catch onto their true condition we might see some changes in the way things are done in the USA.

Trying to keep people so excited about everything (terrorism, immigration, POTUS's birth certificate) except their true condition is one of the major roles of the media today.

What is that saying about the

EmmaZahn — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:04:11 +0000

In reply to The Asymmetrical Revolution

What is that saying about the 60s? that if you remember them, you weren't there? Maybe that was the 70s. I certainly remember the 60s better but not exactly like you, David. And I certainly have very few fond memories of so-called free love and the sexual revolution which often turned out to be more like what is described in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Maybe it is a gender thing but I doubt it.

So Larkin was 42 when he first got laid?

Funny how I did not have to google Larkin to know that. It is a consequence of the major paradigm shift I experienced when I learned that the author of 'This be the verse' was the same age as my father. :)

Not yet!Agreed, you can take

acanuck — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 23:44:25 +0000

In reply to First of all, I don't think

Not yet!

Agreed, you can take historic parallels only so far. America isn't pre-war Germany. And my fervent wish is that David is totally wrong, because if the U.S. goes off the rails a lot of other countries (specifically mine) are going to be in the crapper.

But there are object lessons to draw from Weimar. One is how the corporatist elite fooled themselves into thinking they could ride the tiger of extremism, or keep it on a short leash. They failed. Another is that a civilized society that developed over centuries can be thrust back into barbarity in the relative blink of an eye. It happened.

History doesn't fore-ordain anything -- not that the U.S. follows the German path into totalitarianism, slaughter and genocide, but also not that any of those things are impossible. I'd love to believe that's true but it's not. When society's institutions fail, you're thrown back on the resilience and character of the population. Americans are going to be tested. You obviously have faith they'll pass the test; I hope you're right.

First of all, I don't think

DF — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 22:49:00 +0000

In reply to I think you're reading too

First of all, I don't think I'm reading too much into Seaton's doomsaying. The record there is thick enough that I don't have to exaggerate it unless, of course, this somehow represents a departure from previous posts. If it does, it's not really apparent. And as for specifics, he's provided them himself: He thinks the present moment is exactly analogous to Weimar Germany - to the point that he actually parrots the same shit Beck says about this, replete with innumerate hand-flailing about imminent hyperinflation and all - and that everyone (read: the current middle-class) around the globe will be living in the equivalent of Brazilian favelas just outside of lavish gated communities for our plutocratic overlords.

That's all straight from stuff he has written consistently and recently. As for this post, all he said was "violence" so there's no really solid way to know what he meant. I'm guessing that he'll be typically absent when it comes to responding to critiques of his work, so I'm not expecting clarification on that point.

As for Weimar, I don't think it holds water at all. Almost nothing about present-day America is similar to Weimar Germany. It was a parliamentary democratic republic founded in the wake of WWI. It didn't last twenty years. Germany was under the heavy burden of reparations at the time. They lacked a modern central banking system, which wouldn't even arrive in the US until the Depression. They experienced one of the most significant hyperinflation events in recorded economic history.

None of this is true about the US. Our republic is over 200 years old. The debts we're burdened by are our own, but they aren't even close to historical highs. We have a modern central banking system that, while flawed, is capable of responses that Weimar Germany just didn't have in their toolbox. We're fighting deflation, not inflation. And there are far more differences. We have a huge land-mass that Germany didn't. We're not centered in the middle of Europe. We have the Internet. So many things are different that it's hard for me to understand why people who aren't Glenn Beck and Peter Schiff (and they both have very sound, self-interested reasons for scaring people with the boogieman of Weimar hyperinflation) actually think the parallel is sound.

Just about the only thing that is similar is some of the rhetoric, but the reason for this is Ed Bernays' theory of propaganda, much loved and praied by Goebbels, is loved even more by modern American marketers.

And while the American Crazy party has more support than I'd like, they can really only count on about 20%. A great majority of the new-breed of supposed right-wing superstars are faltering as we speak.

I think recent American history has much more to say about what's happening and where we're headed than does a brief period of German history from the last century. I also think people get hung up on the atrocities that followed. None of that stuff was even a necessary consequence of the shift that occurred in Germany, which is always the implication of the Weimar analogy - namely that we're on the verge of becoming full-blown Nazi Germany, Round Two - whether it's made explicit or not.

If we want to look at a troubling period in the history of a foreign country for clues about what is happening in America, I think you'd find much stronger parallels in examining Japan's lost decade than Germany's Weimar Republic.

As for optimism.. at least we're not battling the Plague!