A warning: it's common for Epsilon Theory to start articles with a few quotes from other media. Feel free to skim over that to get to the meat of the article, which I think contains a good...
A warning: it's common for Epsilon Theory to start articles with a few quotes from other media. Feel free to skim over that to get to the meat of the article, which I think contains a good analysis of US political division these days.
Seems pretty spot-on to me, though I do somewhat question his certainty that this is going to end up in a major conflict. Forgetting MAD for a moment - our economies are hopelessly intertwined in...
Seems pretty spot-on to me, though I do somewhat question his certainty that this is going to end up in a major conflict. Forgetting MAD for a moment - our economies are hopelessly intertwined in real-time now, and that's an utterly new phenomenon. The same goes for the communication revolution. Those are wildcards in this equation. I'd go so far as to say anyone who thinks they know the effect of those major developments is fooling themselves. This is something new, and we have no idea what will happen, even if it will be a good change or a bad one.
I've been listening to Stephen Fry's "Great Leap Years" podcast lately, and was listening to the third episode today, which includes talking about the invention of the telegraph and how much it...
I've been listening to Stephen Fry's "Great Leap Years" podcast lately, and was listening to the third episode today, which includes talking about the invention of the telegraph and how much it changed the spread of information.
He mentions that in 1841, when President Harrison suddenly died, it took one hundred and ten days for the news of his death to make it to Los Angeles. That's absolutely insane to think about. A single piece of news—and about the most important news possible—and it took almost 4 months for anyone on the opposite side of the country to find out. Now, not even 200 years later, a huge portion of the entire world would probably know news of that magnitude within minutes.
The article establishes we're now bimodally distributed in regards to liberalism and conservatism. The article then goes on to state that this is a self-sustaining issue, citing several examples....
The article establishes we're now bimodally distributed in regards to liberalism and conservatism.
The bottom line is this. In a two-party system with high-peaked bimodal electorate preferences:
There is no winning centrist politician.
There are no stable centrist policies.
The article then goes on to state that this is a self-sustaining issue, citing several examples.
It doesn’t just get better over time. It is a widening gyre. It gets worse over time, as more and more extremist candidates, full of passionate intensity, strut and fret their hour upon the stage.
It took the Romans about four centuries to officially exhaust themselves, at least in the West, with a few headfakes of resurgence along the way.
Has this happened before in American history? Hard to say for sure (how dare the Pew Research Center not be active in the 1850s!), but I think yes, first in the decade-plus lead-up to the Civil War over the bimodally distributed issue of slavery, and again in the decade-plus lead-up to World War II over the bimodally distributed issue of the Great Depression.
The article then concludes that these issues were only resolved with war / conflict, and that it is expected that is where our current divide is leading now. Are there any history buffs out there who can think of similar situations in the past where there was a bimodally distributed issue like this that did not end in war? The author also states they are making guesses on the issues in the past that were bimodal due to lack of scientifically rigorous research, so I wonder if the author's premise that bimodal division leads to war is flawed.
This is a fairly new concept for me, and while the author seems to be stating that this is generally accepted, I am unfamiliar with the concept and would like to see if anyone knows of counter-examples. Perhaps I just really hope that the author isn't correct in assuming this can only be resolved through violence, as I do not want to live through something as horrific as the civil war, or WWII.
I see that at the moment the liberals and conservatives are roughly equal in number. Is it possible this divide could be resolved by one side or the other growing in numbers and becoming the new center, with the original opponent being reduced so much as to be irrelevant?
A warning: it's common for Epsilon Theory to start articles with a few quotes from other media. Feel free to skim over that to get to the meat of the article, which I think contains a good analysis of US political division these days.
Seems pretty spot-on to me, though I do somewhat question his certainty that this is going to end up in a major conflict. Forgetting MAD for a moment - our economies are hopelessly intertwined in real-time now, and that's an utterly new phenomenon. The same goes for the communication revolution. Those are wildcards in this equation. I'd go so far as to say anyone who thinks they know the effect of those major developments is fooling themselves. This is something new, and we have no idea what will happen, even if it will be a good change or a bad one.
Nietzsche: "The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw."
I've been listening to Stephen Fry's "Great Leap Years" podcast lately, and was listening to the third episode today, which includes talking about the invention of the telegraph and how much it changed the spread of information.
He mentions that in 1841, when President Harrison suddenly died, it took one hundred and ten days for the news of his death to make it to Los Angeles. That's absolutely insane to think about. A single piece of news—and about the most important news possible—and it took almost 4 months for anyone on the opposite side of the country to find out. Now, not even 200 years later, a huge portion of the entire world would probably know news of that magnitude within minutes.
The article establishes we're now bimodally distributed in regards to liberalism and conservatism.
The article then goes on to state that this is a self-sustaining issue, citing several examples.
The article then concludes that these issues were only resolved with war / conflict, and that it is expected that is where our current divide is leading now. Are there any history buffs out there who can think of similar situations in the past where there was a bimodally distributed issue like this that did not end in war? The author also states they are making guesses on the issues in the past that were bimodal due to lack of scientifically rigorous research, so I wonder if the author's premise that bimodal division leads to war is flawed.
This is a fairly new concept for me, and while the author seems to be stating that this is generally accepted, I am unfamiliar with the concept and would like to see if anyone knows of counter-examples. Perhaps I just really hope that the author isn't correct in assuming this can only be resolved through violence, as I do not want to live through something as horrific as the civil war, or WWII.
I see that at the moment the liberals and conservatives are roughly equal in number. Is it possible this divide could be resolved by one side or the other growing in numbers and becoming the new center, with the original opponent being reduced so much as to be irrelevant?
Damn I though this was about the book by Chinua Achebe.
Also an all-time classic album by The Roots