Mathematician Predicts Wave of Violence In 2020
ananyo writes "In a feature that recalls Asimov's Foundation series and 'psychohistory', Nature profiles mathematician Peter Turchin, who says he can see meaningful cycles in history. Worryingly, Turchin predicts a wave of violence in the United States in 2020. Quoting from the piece: 'To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator-prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analyzed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. 'I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,' he adds."
We recently discussed similar research into predicting violence in the short term.
We already know the world ends on December 21, 2012, so why is he speculating about a future that won't even happen?
Obligatory xkcd.
This is the stupidest made up bullshit I've ever heard. At 50 year intervals, the sample size is like 3 or something. That's well within the range of coincidence! Since people going totally apeshit doesn't happen for no reason, I'd say it's more reason based than some natural recurring phenomenon based on time.
It will happen.
If you're vague enough about your predictions... you won't be wrong often.
Let's see:
1. "Extrajudicial" killing of US citizens
2. Use of drones against US citizens
3. Cameras recording activities
4. Government snooping into private conversations
Good damn thing there is a 2nd Amendment.
And if I flipped ten heads in a row the next one must surely be tails right? Right?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Is this when we overthrow our lords and masters?
While I agree that the sample size is small, there is certainly reason to think that if the political discourse continues as it is now, in eight years we could be in for that talk to start manifesting itself physically.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Lets prove'em wrong boys!
Uh duh, the Aztecs already did this, the world is ending in 2012.
determines the likelihood of violent crime. There's probably a peak (a baby boom) in that statistic in 2020.
Easy, no mathematician required.
I wonder if this cycle follows the wave of economic depressions? It would make sense that people with less to lose who are hit by the recession and see others making more money from it might become restless
FTA: "For example, it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent."
Why do articles like this act as though "violent acts" were the essential force, and "corruption" some kind of indicator symptom? I submit that the latter is the cause and the former the resulting symptom.
The article includes this viewpoint, but you have to get all the way to the very last paragraph to see it -- "But perhaps revolution is the best, if not the only, remedy for severe social stresses. Gintis points out that he is old enough to have taken part in the most recent period of turbulence in the United States, which helped to secure civil rights for women and black people. Elites have been known to give power back to the majority, he says, but only under duress, to help restore order after a period of turmoil. “I'm not afraid of uprisings,” he says. “That's why we are where we are.”"
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The peak will reach that of the 1860s before it begins to calm down a bit. We only do violence for 'humanitarian' reasons.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Politics and divisions between people are not the cause of war. (Politics is how we operate as a society and it can be good or bad. If politics turns from good to bad and then to war, the cause of war is what caused the change from good to bad politics).
Similarly, the differences between groups, say Sunni and Shi'ite to let Americans off the hook, does not _cause_ the fighting between them. They live together side by side in other countries and they live together side by side in the same country before and after the fighting.
The root cause of war is having fewer resources per person this year than last year. How we move from less money to war is done politically and part of the politics is finding a group to place blame on, but the underlying cause is not politics or divisions between groups.
(For folks who think divisions between people should go away, consider there are 950 different Christian religions and 700 different Islamic ones. None of them, not a single one, was created by non-believers or dis-believers. All 1600 religions were created by true believers. Belief is not a solution).
I don't care. I live in a mountainous region of Europe, where tanks and helicopters are useless. I've got enough ammo for two zombie apocalypses. Worst case is no Slashdot.
You are full of shit and hatred. There are over 2 million muslims in the USA who have been here for over 2 decades who haven't been "biding their time" to do anything. I have over a dozen muslim friends, their families came over here to get away from the B.S. at home and to live a happy non-violent life in a prosperous country. they excel in business and academics, asian people tend to be funny that way (there is a racial stereotype for you, and it's a useful generalization)
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that Islam is evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticism them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that Islam is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Let me break it down for you. Christians are white therefore it is perfectly politically correct to demonize them. Contrast this with muslims. I'm not trying to conflate your viewpoint with racism and I wish there were a better explanation because I do not consider myself a racist but that's the explanation occam's razor leads me to.
I have a hard time believing a "Mathematician" is making predictions based on such a limited sample size. This is kind of like the Gambler's Fallacy. Past occurrences are not really indicative of future patterns. This is the same for gambling, stock performance, whatever.
You mean all those Muslims who, much like the Minutemen and colonists, have risen up and overthrown oppressive regimes in many middle eastern countries?
"Thinks he sees"? Doesn't that strongly suggest that we're dealing with a lunatic here?
Of course, psychohistory doesn't work if you publish the results -- so all of this is bullshit. This implies that the psychohistorical result is actually not violence in 2020, but something else that they're trying to steer us towards. Maybe this is also why we're not supposed to be aware that psychohistory exists.
Back to the Prime Radiant, guys.
Get off my lawn.
Why those Mayors discuss feeding their city's poor but are silent on starvation in Africa. Come off it people, you fight battles you can win. I'm sure they'd love to spread tolerance throughout the world, but their Mayors, not God-Kings.
Speaking of religion, have you ever actually read the Christian Bible? You can do all sorts of things to people you don't like and it's A-OK. And don't forget, blacks weren't people until the last 1970, so says Mitt Romney (or at least his religion). Every religion that's existed for any length of time has terrible things in it's dogma.
We're not pretending Islam is just fine. But we're rationalists. Give people enough food, shelter and some discretionary income for hobbies and they mellow out. Ever wonder why terrorists don't send deep cover moles over here? It's because give them a taste of good life and they stop being psychotic extremists. The challenge is giving that life to everybody. Not just the vague promise that you might have a chance at it that economic conservatives and 'libertarians' favor, but the real thing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
People who have options don't get violent. Not in mass anyway (yes, chemical imbalances will result in the occasional horror story like that Batman shooting). That's why Canadians are so well behaved. They feel secure in their well being thanks to an extensive safety net and healthcare system. Systemic violence is an outgrowth of poverty. The single most enlightening moment of my life was when I realized that every war ever fought was over money in one form or another.
e.g. the American South wasn't fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to oppress blacks. Blacks were oppressed not for the economic benefit (immigrants where cheaper and disposable) but because it gave poor white southerns someone to look down on and kept them from asking questions like, how come I barely make it through the winter while that guy sips mint juleps? Don't take my word for it, google Karl Rove and the Southern Strategy.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You mean all those Muslims who, much like the Minutemen and colonists, have risen up and overthrown oppressive regimes in many middle eastern countries?
Ha ha ha .. tell that to the non-Muslims in those countries. They were actually a lot better off under the "oppressive regimes"
If the current trend of inequal distribution of wealth continues then yes, we will see increased violence. It's a formula that's a old as civilzation itself. Poverty is and always has been the root cause of most crime, including violent crime. (Some of it is due to crazy. You will always have jealousy, rich people shoplifting for thrills, adultery, etc)
Whatever your political creed or economic philosophy, you must recognize that gross wealth inequality /always/ leads to bad things. It's a common theme of all civilizations world wide throughout all recorded history. It's the destroyer of nations. It's the murder of kings. It's the ruin of the most mighty military forces. It's the trigger of violent, bloody revolution where the innocent and the guilty both suffer alike.
Our country used to recognize this function but in the last few decades it's been ignored wholesale. The rich are getting very very rich and have somehow convinced everyone that they "deserve" it while our nation stumbles with infective public programs and crumbling infrastructure. Wealth redistribution used to be a clear, stated goal of our government and now, somehow that idea is taboo and evil.
Linear time is useless to predict cyclic anything where modern human society is involved. Ten years of innovation today (and its effects on society) is greater than thirty years of innovation two hundred years ago. The scale just isn't linear. Nothing has a significant long term stable frequency.
If you are a cicada, you have reasonable grounds to disagree. Sadly, you can't talk and aren't real big in the innovation space.
We really ought to have some violence and riots over what the feds are trying to do to ruin the internet.
Moreover, it was a unique peak in US history.
This guy's model needs an overhaul -- either that or its intend use is useless for phenomena that are really interesting.
Seastead this.
And what makes you an authority on the matter? Fuck, you don't even have the balls to post with an account.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
at its outmost...
Let me break it down for you. Christians are white therefore it is perfectly politically correct to demonize them. Contrast this with muslims. I'm not trying to conflate your viewpoint with racism and I wish there were a better explanation because I do not consider myself a racist but that's the explanation occam's razor leads me to.
Well, that can't be right. My family is Baptist and Negro.
That reminds me of all those moronic polls falsely claiming crime is dropping --- as long as they refuse to prosecute the millions upon millions of crimes perpetrated by the banksters, of course the dramatically rising criminal rate will appear to be falling. . .
As a historian with a lot of statistical study under my belt, call me skeptical. I don't see how we're able to make the leap from his observations to cycles at work in wildly variant institutions and cultures. This sounds an awful lot like the wide-eyed promise of cliometrics to revolutionize history starting in the 1950s.
In the mid-twentieth century, cliometrics (ah, look how much it reads like cliodynamics!) was going to save us all from the loosey-goosey styles of history that just weren't as good as honest-to-gosh social science. (This is why many mid-twentieth century universities placed history in their social science faculties rather than humanities where it was categorized in older university systems.) Certainly, learning how to handle large data sets and tackle questions of change over time with accurate analysis has been good, but stats wasn't the smoking gun to solve historical debates. Look how hard some of the great works of cliometrics crashed and burned when they tried to assert a grand rule of human behaviour: just two examples off of the top of my head, the Tilly's "The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930" which tried to unify the study of European revolutions over a century or Theda Skocpol's "States and Social Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China" which claimed that you could come up with a universalizing analysis of authoritarian state collapse. Both are interesting and ambitious books but ultimately unconvincing as they attempted to assert a general rule-set for history.
Now we're told that cliodynamics is going to solve the problem. Again, as the original article notes, most trained historians are skeptical. It's not just that we like futzing around with old documents, it's that we're aware of the weaknesses in ongoing research, holes in observations and the biases in the data. You want to point to huge amounts of populist violence in the U.S. circa 1920 as proof that it was a high in a fifty year cycle? I and other historians can point to stunning outbreaks a decade earlier related to the anarchist movements and a decade later with the unrest regarding the Great Depression. It's not so much cherry-picking counter examples: it's the wrongheaded concept of seeing people as pawns of historical forces. Asimov was fun to read, I'll grant you, but I'd hope that people can see that human agency has an awful lot more to do with historical change than the rules of psychohistory.
Stop looking for general rules of what's going to come next and consider, instead, clear-sighted analysis of how we've come to where we are and what that tells us about problems we've had and continue to experience.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Im not sure if I should laugh at this or what? You start your sycophantic rant with "Asperger little faggot" and then end it with "Homosexuals are being legally harassed.....some people have a conscience..." Did I really just read this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
1888: Jack the Ripper active
1913: The eve of the First World War
1938: Hitler annexes Austria
1963: Kennedy assassinated
1988: The Lockerbie bombing
It's 2013 we need to worry about, sheeple!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The publication of this article by some way reminds me of the Terminator: the publication of some possible future events make that events happen, or alter them in some way
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
Has anyone else noticed that the two world wars are completely absent in this "cycles of violence" graph?
We were hardly any better 100 years ago, and there are no lack of Westerners who wouldn't mind seeing homosexuals shoved back in the closet.
And what is with these Aspergers accusations?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All I've got to say is that you are stupid fucking moron. God your family must absolutely fucking hate you.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The guy isn't a mathematician, he's an ecologist. And I find it hard to believe that by 2020, social acceptance of domestic violence (say) rises again to mid-20th century levels. The reporter's suggestion that the precise moment in time of the Egyptian revolution was predictable is likely based on a misunderstanding of Turchin's work.
By the way, the field isn't as new as the article suggests. Steven Pinker's recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, collects quite a bit of quantitative research in this area, most of which does not support the existence of stable cycles.
The muslims in the west are just biding their time until they are strong enough to act like muslims in the middle east.
Heh.
One wonders why the Mayors of Chicago and Boston go off on fundamentalist Christian Chick-Fil-A, which voices opposition to gay marriage, but are silent against fundamentalist Islam extermination of gays themselves.
Probably because the Christians won't kill 'em.
Just ask Theo Van Gogh.
Oh, wait. You can't. Muzzies actually KILLED him.
Wonder if the Piss Christ artist has the balls to do a Shit Koran?
Yeah, we know the answer to that, don't we.
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that Islam is evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticism them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that Islam is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Let me rephrase that to make ti a bit more on-topic:
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that humans are evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticize them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that humanity is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Point being: people are greedy and violent and abuse power structures. The degree to which this happens in a given society seems to go in cyclic 2-generational waves, and this mathematician has found a way to model it. The rhetoric in this thread ascribing human faults to specific people groups (faith based or ethic based) and pointing out specific failings inside these groups is totally beside the point. If there were no non-white muslims living in the US, there'd be someone else, and the rhetoric would be almost identical. Eventually, the overall level of societal dissatisfaction with the way these issues are resolved by "peaceable" means will come to a head, and people will look to physical solutions. This will carry on until there is a majority formed who share strong core societal values that they then shove down the throats of everyone else, at which point "peace" returns and "everyone" is happy.
They say history repeats itself, and in this case they (and this mathematician) appear to be spot-on.
What these models don't factor in especially well though, is population density. I'd like to see this guy do a slightly more complex model that ties in the affects of density on the level and duration of the violence.
With the slowly churning unrest in lower classes these days, it seems quite possible that it will end up going somewhere.
It's too bad it's unlikely that a revolution could come of it, in the us at least. It's equally too bad that I would probably disagree with whomever would end up in charge, were that to happen.
Hari seldon would be jealous.
Cliodynamics is viewed with deep scepticism by most academic historians, who tend to see history as a complex stew of chance, individual foibles and one-of-a-kind situations that no broad-brush 'science of history' will ever capture.....Most think that phenomena such as political instability should be understood by constructing detailed narratives of what actually happened — always looking for patterns and regularities, but never forgetting that each outbreak emerged from a particular time and place.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You basically slander a billion people and when cornered on it try to shut up your opponents with being autistic homosexuals, before explaining how bad it is for homosexuals. You're a loud mouthed halfwit
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Frankly you're showing more signs of Aspergers than anyone else here.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There are over 2 million muslims in the USA who have been here for over 2 decades who haven't been "biding their time" to do anything.
Explain Dearborn, MI please.
You are partially correct... in that they haven't been biding their time... It appears they are actively persecuting every person that does not conform to their beliefs.
Obvious FUDster is obvious.
Take your meds.
His model doesn't predict wars, but domestic violence. The ca. 1870 spike involves the large numbers of lynchings of African Americans and race riots during Reconstruction.
There was a dip in violence in 1940-1945???
...
-Kevin
except they'd be far more effective doing many, many small one-off acts of violence, so why isn't that happening? oh yeah, because you're pushing boogeymen bullshit.
Biorhythms
Dear Coward: you don't consider yourself a racist yet you claim "Christians are white"? I _suspect_ you are a racist, but I _know_ you are an ignorant SOB.
you don't have to steal from them, you just never let them have anything in the first place. I guess you can call that 'stealing', but it's not stealing in the traditional sense, so it's too difficult an idea for people to understand. This is why R Money and Billy G have billions and 46% of the rest of us don't make enough money to be worth taxing...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
meanwhile there are people down south without them. People who depend on a medical outreach program Modeled after Iran.
Yes, I know I have it relatively good. But I also know there is virtually no safety net for me and I can slip into third world poverty. I know that kind of poverty exists and is tolerated in America. Did you?
But another way, just because things could be worse doesn't mean they SHOULDN'T be better.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why is no one taking a serious look at the REAL problem our human civilization is facing: the rise of Antisocial Personality Disorder. Generations of human beings raised without loyalty and unconditional love develop into people that cannot genuinely express those qualities.
They manipulate everyone around them like objects for their own gain and the entire world is now run by these people with an incurable lack of conscience. Until we as a civilization address this very real problem, society itself will continue to breed anti-society until its demise.
As I skim through these responses, I can already see the violence ensuing, primitive minds that will never evolve.
Cliodynamics seems to be the new, trending name for... Cliology [see the afterward of the hard cover edition of "In the Country of the Blind" by Michael Flynn which originally appeared as a two part article 'Introduction to Psychohistory' in Analog magazine in 1988] and "Cycles Research" founded by economist Edward R. Dewey http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/ Also a book by Dewey "Cycles, The Mysterious Forces that Trigger Events..." and some of the papers presented in the Journal of World Systems Research archives such as this one from 1995: "The Next World War: World-System Cycles and Trends" http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol1/v1_n6.php
Dewey was of the belief that the cycles he uncovered had a 'rational cause'...
Good thing that there is a second amendment, but remember the pre-emptive police and FEMA tactics during Katrina in New Orleans against honest, gun owning households.
Knock, knock. Hello we're FEMA/police [1/2 minute of polite conversation] "Do you have guns" as if making sure you're adequately prepared for self defense. Dumb, honest homeowner: "Yes"
CRAAAASH, armed invasion and personal injury follows. No sh|t.
Sounds like the Kondratiev cycle, which is about the economy rather than social unrest, but it's also about 50 years.
It would still be a good idea to get guns off the street. There's a number of ways to do that:
-turn the underground drug market into an above-board, regulated market (with broad social programs to help people off their addictions).
-take a serious look at just what sort of weapons *are* constitutionally supported.
It's not likely for such measures to *increase* drug/gun related violence.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Because as things get closer to home they become more important.
For example, my child cutting himself on some broken glass is more important to me than an African child starving to death. In fact it's more important to me than hundreds of African children starving to death. Sure that sounds terrible (and probably is). But I will drop everything and take my kid to the hospital/doctor to get some stitches, I won't drop everything when I see something on TV about someone overseas starving.
To be even more extreme, my kid going to the swimming pool is more important to me than a thousand African kids starving to death. After all I spend more of my time and money taking him there, than I do on helping starving Africans.
Similarly mayors of chicago and boston are more likely to care about statement from a company that operates in their jurisdictions than actions of foreigners who do not.
Moreover, it was a unique peak in US history.
The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, WW1, WW2...these were all unforeseeable, unmodelable events, right?
A data set full of black swans is still a data set.
it was Reagan who began ignoring the lessons of the Great Depression
Odd then it was Reagan who prevented a similar collapse just as we were on the edge from Carter - liberal revisionism knows no shame, and seeks to hoodwink a younger generation.
No, in truth it was in fact regulation that caused the great depression.
The younger readers out there, do not be fooled again - read the WHOLE truth rather than be fed the small twisted portion those who would impose a liberal tyranny upon you insist is the "truth". Break the cycle of poverty and misery than liberals impose upon us all every three generations or so, now at last with the internet it's easy to research the entire story on anything and not listen to any one interest group.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Can't we skip the "BRANG IT ON!" stage and go straight to the "Mission Accomplished!" endgame?
Seems like doing so would save a lot of time (among other valuable resources).
Strauss-Howe predicts we entrered a "Crisis" turning in 2008, and turnings typically last roughly 20 years. There are four turnings in a cycle, so a Crisis comes around roughly every 80 years.
For reference, the other Crises in US history were the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/WW2 (yes, the short length of the Civil War is an acknowledged anomaly, and there is much debate on why it happened).
This PKDick's short story plays with the paradoxes of going to the future (and coming back) instead of going the past. Politics wanted to know if what they choose would be for good, send a time traveler to the future to know that and something that wouldnt ever happen happens because of doing that travel. There was about physical things, but with just information things can become weird fast.
Both being able to change the future and knowing it is a not a good thing, could end being not able to change it or what you knew was wrong (because you changed your own future actions based on that knowledge). In the story, something totally out of the map could happen to fix that conflict. Thats why in Foundation people of Terminus shouldnt don't know about psychohistory.
I have not posted anonymously in this thread.
50 years is two generation to two generation and a half. That is time where one inherit and build something, then second generation profit from it but do not build upon and "stay on the laurel of the previous generation", and 3rd generation is left out and end in violence. I am not saying that guy is right, jsut saying there could very well be human societal reason to expect violence every 2 generation.
Long answer : back in 1942 there was such things as an official war against germany. No matter how your governement , there is no such a things as a recognized war against a *word* (war agaisnt drug, war agaisnt terrorism) just like the made up "illegal fighter". The simple truth is that terrorism is a judicial problem (aka non military) but your governement saw the occasion to use new toy in real theater instead of training zone/firing range.
So we are speaking of assassination(the correct word in absence of due process) of citizen from your (or other) country.
*Shrug* . I don't expect that to change any time soon. Your military right now is probably creaming in their pants just as the amount of data they got about their toy used and potential advance.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
History repeats itself, but it's not reproducible. That's why it's not a science. Turchin is doing good work on developing an analytical tool, though, for anyone with the historical insight to use it. As a sanity check on the historical record, if nothing else. Not there yet, but something useful may emerge.
I am the Great and Powerful OZ! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
I dont really see anything at that page other than the city of Derborn not liking out-of-town asshats stirring up trouble and dealing fairly heavy handed with them. Really, what do you think the news would be if a group of Arab teens got sick of these people committing blaspheme against their religion on the street and beat them up?
"American Spring"
It'll happen unless the direction we're going changes dramatically. Banks and big corporations need to be reigned in. Government needs to stop snooping on it's citizens and eroding away their civil and basic human rights. Neo-conservatives and Dominionists are actively trying to destroy the Middle Class in the U.S., leaving only the poor working-class (with no way out of it) and the rich (who get richer on the backs of the poor), and a societal structure similar to feudalism. There is already unrest all over the world, and the powers-that-be in the U.S. are scared shitless of those two little words: American Spring.
I read The Fourth Turning back in the '90s. This book by two historians also espouses a cyclical view of history. Their hypothesis is that these cycles are driven by the given generational makeup of a country at any given time.
What I find interesting about this mathematician's predictions is that they pretty closely match Strauss and Howe's.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
The analysis is "most" accurate when it is not noticed.
Given the small sample of people who probably will read this article and come to their own conclusions.
And the smaller sample still of elite people in places of power to act on the information, it will probably come to pass and the events will play out as predicted.
It does make some interesting observations, that violent people or people of action tend to be the points where new elite form - the leaders, however they don't seem to survive the revolution very often. We have a way of retiring presidents for example, other countries are less lenient.
That they try to eliminate bias in the samples used to study the cycles is encouraging, and anonymizing the data sets helps too. The sample sizes seem to span about 2000 - 4000 years or 20 per millennium.
people get pissed enough to do something about it.
Can't wait.
Be seeing you...
It's the percentage of population that matters. Islam spreads primarily though violence. The borders of Islam are bloody. When Muslims are one to two percent of the population, you see sporadic violence and terror. When Muslims are five to ten percent of the population, full scale war sets in, as we see in as in Thailand and the Philippines, and the beginnings of which we are seeing in France.
In the cardinal summer
From the man fields
A numerologist bursts out
The future becomes history
Seen ahead like Seldon
The decennium two times
In the western land
Violence and strife reigns
Another man will come
A crown of shock
Ancient secrets confounding him
Therefore, aliens
1. Sanhedrin 59a: "Murdering Goyim is like killing a wild animal."
2. Abodah Zara 26b: "Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed."
3. Sanhedrin 59a: "A goy (Gentile) who pries into The Law (Talmud) is guilty of death."
4. Yebhamoth 11b: "Sexual intercourse with a little girl is permitted if she is three years of age."
5. Schabouth Hag. 6d: "Jews may swear falsely by use of subterfuge wording."
6. Hilkkoth Akum X1: "Do not save Goyim in danger of death."
7. Hilkkoth Akum X1: "Show no mercy to the Goyim."
8. Choschen Hamm 388, 15: "If it can be proven that someone has given the money of Israelites to the Goyim, a way must be found after prudent consideration to wipe him off the face of the earth."
9. Choschen Hamm 266,1: "A Jew may keep anything he finds which belongs to the Akum (Gentile). For he who returns lost property (to Gentiles) sins against the Law by increasing the power of the transgressors of the Law. It is praiseworthy, however, to return lost property if it is done to honor the name of God, namely, if by so doing, Christians will praise the Jews and look upon them as honorable people."
10. Szaaloth-Utszabot, The Book of Jore Dia 17: "A Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks if our books contain anything against them."
11. Baba Necia 114, 6: "The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts."
12. Simeon Haddarsen, fol. 56-D: "When the Messiah comes every Jew will have 2800 slaves."
13. Nidrasch Talpioth, p. 225-L: "Jehovah created the non-Jew in human form so that the Jew would not have to be served by beasts. The non-Jew is consequently an animal in human form, and condemned to serve the Jew day and night."
14. Aboda Sarah 37a: "A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated."
16. Gad. Shas. 2:2: "A Jew may violate but not marry a non-Jewish girl."
17. Tosefta. Aboda Zara B, 5: "If a goy kills a goy or a Jew, he is responsible; but if a Jew kills a goy, he is NOT responsible."
18. Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 388: "It is permitted to kill a Jewish denunciator everywhere. It is permitted to kill him even before he denounces."
19. Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 348: "All property of other nations belongs to the Jewish nation, which, consequently, is entitled to seize upon it without any scruples."
20. Tosefta, Abda Zara VIII, 5: "How to interpret the word 'robbery.' A goy is forbidden to steal, rob, or take women slaves, etc., from a goy or from a Jew. But a Jew is NOT forbidden to do all this to a goy."
21. Seph. Jp., 92, 1: "God has given the Jews power over the possessions and blood of all nations."
22. Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 156: "When a Jew has a Gentile in his clutches, another Jew may go to the same Gentile, lend him money and in turn deceive him, so that the Gentile shall be ruined. For the property of a Gentile, according to our law, belongs to no one, and the first Jew that passes has full right to seize it."
23. Schulchan Aruch, Johre Deah, 122: "A Jew is forbidden to drink from a glass of wine which a Gentile has touched, because the touch has made the wine unclean."
24. Nedarim 23b: "He who desires that none of his vows made during the year be valid, let him stand at the beginning of the year and declare, 'Every vow which I may make in the future shall be null'. His vows are then invalid."
****
From http://www.waylanderskeep.com/2009/12/jewish-talmud-quotes/
You can clearly see what they think of you all (yes, non-jews are Goy/Goyim and Gentiles from above), and quoted straight from their own belief systems (their talmud).
Think about that.
The US populace is majority christian nation and they caused hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilizans, and their president said "God told me to invade Iraq". Truly a bloody religion.
From TFA
This same mathematical pattern occurs when you look at earthquakes (and many, many other things). It doesn't help you predict them one little bit, so has no practical value.
Its all well and good spotting cycles. A few years ago, someone claimed to have found a 26 million year cycle in mass extinctions, and attributed it to an invisible stellar companion of the Sun disturbing the Oort cloud when it past perihelion (he called it 'Nemesis', because if you are proposing a hypothesis which is going to be greeted with scepticism by the scientific community, its always best to give it a needlessly melodramatic name...). It turns out, there is no statistically significant pattern in mass extinctions, and despite numerous infrared surveys of the sky, no death star lurking at the edge of our solar system.
I am gon' pop a cap in yo azz!
First there will be the Disco 2021, then the raise of religion after an entertainer speaks about it around orange trees in Florida, then know as Pensionstan. After the 2020 riots, a neo-disco fever catches on as the LA club scene seeks a new customer base after the violent demise of the previous one. The neo-disco brings back some of the happiness lost during the disappointments of the 2019. Weapon rooms are introduced at churches, re-modeled after the weapon rooms of the European churches in the middle ages and the clubs follow suit. War deserters are hunted down all across the nation, with a single city in a mountainous and hard environment holding up the last refuge for the naysayers. Instead of joking about social security, John Steward tells jokes about citizenry security. Mormon extremistas, as they are called, are considering a mass murder in a trailer park after a bitter disappointment in the presidential elections.
Everybody knows http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3026449&cid=40882075
s/Muslims/citizens/
There, FTFY.
I dare you to put yourself into the world circa 1912 and whisper to yourself what you just said.
Don't catch polio, or smallpox, or diphtheria.
I know a lot about gays (in fact I am gay). You don't have the right to call anyone a "faggot". Using hate speech in the exact way the homophobic mainstream does is not "co-opting" or "taking the bite out of the word". You're just a sexist and a homophobe.
He's got all of three datapoints, and completely glosses over the problem that 1820 is inside his measuring range, without any such peak. It's right there inside his diagram.
Next: Civil war, great war, Vietnam/cold war. There are completely different primary causes for each of the points he describes, and they're only tenuously linked to each other. While you can probably plot the chain of events linking WW1 to WW2 and thence to the cold war culminating in the civil rights movement and Vietnam, that involves some heavy cherrypicking of dates. And as for civil war and WW1, those were in completely separate theaters.
Now consider the likelihood of three similar events making a pattern by chance. Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Look at the degrees of freedom: A pattern isn't established by the first or second events, but by one single third event that happens to be as many years from the second as the second from the first. Three is the bare minimum to even define a pattern. And that's exactly how many data points he has.
You're oversimplifying slightly. Non-Muslims are often better off under westernist (muslim) governments, but they're often so much better off that you can see why islamists hate them. I think of Islamists as equivalent to the uneducated racist masses who support nationalist parties in the west - they see foreigners as the source of their problems. Islamists have much more justification for thinking this, though, and not just because of the carpet bombing and military occupation a lot of them have been subjected to, but because most of these West friendly governments were instated by the West (US) and are working against the interests of either half their own people or all of them. "Muslims" are not all the same, either. In the mid East there are Sunnis and Shias, two main tribes who hate each other, and when regimes change, generally it's not just non-Muslims up against the wall, the Shia government and population get it in the neck too. I'm not condoning any of it, but don't portray all Muslims /Islamists as unreasonable savages just because you can't be bothered to learn the nuances of their history and politics.
Just saying.
One association that has not been noticed: the really bad periods in crime are the same as periods of Republican Party ascendance. Of course, it isn't immediately obvious if this is correlation or causality, and if it is causality, it is not clear which causes which.
To think of this as long-term preditor and prey cycles does make one wonder about what the underlying dynamic really is. These periods of Republican ascendance are characterized by the large cash flows in the economy being redirected to insiders close to the political order. The Civil War period was as much as anything the start of major redistribution: bankrupting slave holders (good), some land reform to free blacks (very minor in the big picture), the enriching of many private cos. that supplied the war (e.g. DuPont, and a questionable way to get rich), and dirty insider land deals (what the general public calls "building the railroads").
You're oversimplifying slightly. Non-Muslims are often better off under westernist (muslim) governments, but they're often so much better off that you can see why islamists hate them. I think of Islamists as equivalent to the uneducated racist masses who support nationalist parties in the west - they see foreigners as the source of their problems. Islamists have much more justification for thinking this, though, and not just because of the carpet bombing and military occupation a lot of them have been subjected to, but because most of these West friendly governments were instated by the West (US) and are working against the interests of either half their own people or all of them. "Muslims" are not all the same, either. In the mid East there are Sunnis and Shias, two main tribes who hate each other, and when regimes change, generally it's not just non-Muslims up against the wall, the Shia government and population get it in the neck too. I'm not condoning any of it, but don't portray all Muslims /Islamists as unreasonable savages just because you can't be bothered to learn the nuances of their history and politics.
Your theory (Muslims cannot be blamed because they were oppressed previously and naturally are going to be violent) breaks down on several grounds. First of all there are great examples of people being oppressed and not seeking revenge. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela spring to mind - the latter's "truth and reconciliation" showing the extent to which forgiveness can go. I expect you will argue that Muslims are culturally inferior to all of these - follow their own reasoning that they cannot be held to the same standards as the rest of humanity: "they made us do it by burning the Quran", or "she made us kill her by marrying a non Muslim", or "they wore a non-Muslim religious symbol in the open". Personally I don't think appeasing their lack of control will improve it in any way.
Secondly you totally ignore the facts that Muslims oppress the minorities in countries where they have not been ruled by others - and have done so historically. Look at Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. The latter was ruled by Britain before, but this was a brief window on non-Oppression for Hindus in Pakistan, which occurred before and still does today. Maybe again you might feel that we cannot expect Muslims to "get over" British rule in the same way that India, South Africa, and many other countries have without lashing out at others. My feeling is that since they oppress elsewhere and have done s through history, they would still be ding so in India now if they were not overthrown by the British, or someone else.
Name one place where Muslims have the upper hand where they don't oppress or restrict non-Muslims.
did you just do it again chrisq? Or is this Chrisq? You all will never know because Chrisq is a turd.
Wow,
how clever you are! Because you can call someone who does not follow the "PC" line a turd I am going to change my opinion and suddenly believe that all the Pakistani Hindus and Egyptian Coptic Christians must have killed each other and burnt each other's houses down to make Muslims look bad. I'm going to believe that those rich Western-educated students who flew planes into the world trade centre were doing it because of their poverty and ignorance. I am going to decide that when Muslim imams say that it is a religious duty to kill non-muslims, and throw acid in the face of women who don't wear the hijab it must have got lost in translation - they must have really been saying "come round for coffee after the service".
I'm glad that there are intellectual giants like you to show me the error of my ways.
GP is not a liar: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
Bush was (and is) a religious nutbar, and Christianity has a long, long history of religiously-inspired violence that recurs as waves of violently-inclined clergy come to power and preach in favor of same. This in no way excuses the fact that Islam is far more violent at the moment, though.
Religion is bunk. Violent, dangerous bunk. And fucktards like Bush are living proof of it.
You mean this great American experiment of constitutionally guaranteed republican governance at both the federal and state levels, right?
Because this is not a democracy, and it has never been one. Even the (somewhat) democratic method used to elect representatives is made less so by various distortions like giving states equal weight without significant regard to population; the electoral college; the political parties themselves; and of course interference from other entities ranging from PACs to SCOTUS.
But hey... if swooning over the word "democratic" makes you feel good, by all means. It's not like it makes any difference.
that by 2050 things would go back up again then, too bad that's just a little too late for me unless i get some serious mods into my corpse
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I'm not saying none of them can be blamed, I'm saying don't tar them all with the same brush. Islam is diverse. Yes, there are a lot of regimes, organisations and individuals that are mad if not downright evil, but in the same countries there are often a lot of normal people who are just trying to live their lives. Just because someone is a Muslim doesn't mean they'll be stoning people to death every five minutes - you hear about the worst stuff in the news because it's the worst stuff. The Muslims living in the West are not all plotting to destroy it... again, a lot of them are just trying to get on with their lives and be nice to people (as the Qu'ran tells them to be).
What I was saying about the Sunnis and Shia are that these guys are oppressing the shit out of each other, they're not just picking on non-Muslims. That said, I'm with you in thinking that on the whole Islam is a shitty, messed up, medieval religion that's horribly sexist, partisan, xenophobic and frighteningly expansionist and has next to zero respect for human life, particularly that of non-Muslims. You're dead right, I can't give you an example of a Muslim government who hasn't oppressed and murdered non-Muslims. I would say the current Turkish government, but they're not there yet in terms of equal rights, and the Armenian genocide wasn't all that long ago. I was just having a knee-jerk reaction against what I perceived to be unreasonable prejudice against all Muslims in your comment and others I've read on Slashdot, and trying to get you to see it from the point of view of some Middle Eastern states, which is seeing non-Muslims and Westerners as the enemy because that's all they've ever been to them.
I can't argue against the facts of it, cos factually you're 100% right.
Perhaps the author has read Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas but does not want to reveal the real source of his theory.
But I predict that nobody will consider that. Everyone knows that Astology is incompatable with the mechanist materialist paradigm, and is therefore bunk.
Nobody will consider astrology.
He better check his fact.
What more unbiased site could there be than libertarian answers?
What more expert location could you go to find such an answer?
Also noted, you lack the intelligence to even provide a link responding to the article.
Therefore the article stands as correct and you simply a tool.
Who wants to read the views of those moronic bozo..?
Well I have to admit I'm really not sure who reads your posts. "Those moronic bozo"... You are sure making a great case for why humanity should listen to your random output!
Poor old kendall just doesn't get the whole reality has a liberal bias thing
You misspelled Libertarian.
Like all liberals, you cannot see that which history teaches you - repeatedly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
2012 plus two terms of a Republican president...
Yeah, that ought to just about do it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
2020 will be about eight more years of seeing the little guy get screwed bringing on more civil unrest an the attempt to declare martial law. This also is a good timing for an attempt to create a new world order with a single world government. All in all it looks to me like I'd start placing bets on the United States breaking up and becoming a new set of countries with their own local interests at heart.
Saw a note today about Texas, the only state that has it in their state constitution that they have the right to cede form the united states and whether or not they have a good chance of going it on their own. Might be a good place to live if half of what I read is true.
(love the lockword for this one, "phosgene".)
I wouldn't consider this proof. I followed the link & read..."George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician"
Problems I see...
1) This is hearsay. Typically not valid for a proof.
2) Possible or likely hidden agenda. Remember, politicians, Palestinian or otherwise, can and will lie to achieve their goals.
sr
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
...writing ABOUT for the last eight years, at least since one of my diagrams was STOLEN along my notes? I already applied it, actually! It is no mystery, but I would call it more physical economics (!) than psychohistory... Danilo J Bonsignore
The difficultly with predicting human history using math is even if you are able to model the various variables with any accuracy, modeling to what rate and how humans will adapt to the pressure that those changes bring, I would suggest is exponentatioally even more difficult. In Azimov's tale, they sort of get away with it by using a gigantic sample size of human civilization. Today, we haven't been around much longer than barely 3000 years, and have nothing like accurate records for anything but maybe 100 years. Which in caluclating these sorts of things is pretty slim.
I mean you can take some pretty basic principles of what causes war, strife, and violence and find a window as it relates to current values, but if Humans change those values as a result of those impending situations, well the calculation changes.
Things like: Increased population prediction is pretty easy to do, and frankly difficult for humans to change in a short term, The saturation of arable land by said population, land productivity and for production, Oil depletion, you could even get into religious propagation, and things like that. However I think the big 3 are: Land, Food, Oil.
Sooner or later population pressures are going to be an issue, closely assoicated with that the production of food on limited land, for an ever growing population is not sustainable and eventually a threshold will be reached, but it will cause conflict. Closely assoicated with that, is Oil, which is the cheap energy we use to have the farm production we currently enjoy, also the fertilizer that is used. Fresh water is the other piece of the puzzle, where population pressures and food production pressures are going to come into play. If you ascribe to climate change, this is the biggest problem, the reduction of freshwater, and the result that will have on food production, specifically in irrigation which has already destroyed sensitive areas.
So there is all that. Which really is already enough of a hughe shitstorm to try and deal with all at once, however there is another more political issue with Oil. Global trade is pretty much run on cheap oil. You might be able to power personal cars and things with solar etc... however things like super carriers, tankers, places, etc... cannot realistically be powered in this way, and nothing in the near future is going to change that (unless you are proliferating nuclear powered ships). Most predictions I think would have oil running out before a solution for this I think. Also other than the riches that global trade has brough certain contries (China, USA, etc...), the other thing that does not run on renewable fuels are armies. Tanks, planes, ships, etc... all run on oil. Do you see this changing before Oil runs out? Which means those "stratigic reserves" that countries have will become every more valuable.
I guess what I am getting at here, at somepoint a large powerful country is going to do the math and figure out, if they are going to expand, and aquire more resources for any forseeable future, there will never be a better time to do it, because once the oil is scarce, it will be MUCH harder to do. If you have a huge army that runs on oil, and that oil is about to become obsolete, so is your army, and with that your power, so you might as well use it while you can, as it isn't like anybody will be really able to retaliate after a certain point anyway.... With the exception of nukes. There you have it.
Anyway probable rantings of a lunitic, but some pretty basic presumptions. However if we are able to adapt, then we can avoid. However some of these things I believe are a mathmatically certaintly, while the adaptation is a political/cultual thing, which I think is what is going to cause the conflict in the first place. As there are going to be a LOT of people that will not want to adapt, many with religious reasons for that, which will likely make it even more volitile.
Actually, 47.28462943298517% of all statistics are just made up
What is the standard deviation of that percentage?
+/- 36.76918475928347589
With a p-value of 0.5 for the whole study.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]