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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Periodic craziness
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HCH
Shipmate
# 14313
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Posted
I made a list:
1947-56: McCarthyism
1972-74: Watergate
1985-87: Iran-Contra
1996-99: Clinton impeachment
2016-17: Trump scandals
Does this seem to be a pattern in which the U.S. produces disturbances every so often? Have I missed some? Does McCarthyism belong on the list? Does this happen in other countries? (I haven't heard of a sequence of major scandals in, say, Denmark.)
Posts: 1540 | From: Illinois, USA | Registered: Nov 2008
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Aijalon
Shipmate
# 18777
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
I made a list:
1947-56: McCarthyism
1972-74: Watergate
1985-87: Iran-Contra
1996-99: Clinton impeachment
2016-17: Trump scandals
Does this seem to be a pattern in which the U.S. produces disturbances every so often? Have I missed some? Does McCarthyism belong on the list? Does this happen in other countries? (I haven't heard of a sequence of major scandals in, say, Denmark.)
I would add to that list
hanging chad scandal
WMD Bush lied people died
Fast and Furious
Clinton Bengazi/emails
Yes, the scandals are status quo, and we cannot seem to get enough of them.
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God gave you free will so you could give it back.
Posts: 200 | From: Kansas City | Registered: May 2017
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Og, King of Bashan
Ship's giant Amorite
# 9562
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
(I haven't heard of a sequence of major scandals in, say, Denmark.)
While it is obviously fiction, the constant presence of just-under-the-surface political corruption throughout the Nordic Noir genre would suggest that it's a running obsession even in Scandinavia.
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"I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?" ― Walker Percy
Posts: 3259 | From: Denver, Colorado, USA | Registered: May 2005
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Ohher
Shipmate
# 18607
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Posted
I think your North American list starts much further back, as of February 1692 with the Salem Witch trials.
Europe had its own witch crazes, and there was, of course, Tulip Mania in the Netherlands, though I'm not even sure of the century for that one.
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From the Land of the Native American Brave and the Home of the Buy-One-Get-One-Free
Posts: 374 | From: New Hampshire, USA | Registered: Jun 2016
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Pangolin Guerre
Shipmate
# 18686
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Posted
Tulip Mania doesn't conform to OP, as Tulip Mania was just market speculation run amok, not a collective madness of a political sort. 1636-37, btw.
Posts: 758 | From: 30 arpents de neige | Registered: Nov 2016
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Lyda*Rose
Ship's broken porthole
# 4544
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Posted
Tulip Mania is the earliest economic bubble I can think of. It's definitely up there with the 1929s stock market, the dot.com bubble, and the U.S. mortgage bubble.
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"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG... thank you. Thank you for my life." ~from Joe Vs the Volcano
Posts: 21377 | From: CA | Registered: May 2003
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Pigwidgeon
Ship's Owl
# 10192
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ohher:
I think your North American list starts much further back, as of February 1692 with the Salem Witch trials.
But those witch trials weren't as bigly as the one Trump's undergoing now.
quote:
"This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!"
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
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"...that is generally a matter for Pigwidgeon, several other consenting adults, a bottle of cheap Gin and the odd giraffe."
~Tortuf
Posts: 9835 | From: Hogwarts | Registered: Aug 2005
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wabale
Shipmate
# 18715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
Does this seem to be a pattern in which the U.S. produces disturbances every so often?
I’m not sure I can see a pattern in this, HCH, beyond saying that sometimes there are disturbances that last for a few years - and sometimes, for longer periods, there are no disturbances, and America is disturbance-free. Perhaps disturbances in the United States just seem more spectacular than anyone else’s.
I still have got no further in my reading of ‘The Fourth Turning’ than when I reported my thoughts in the thread of that name, in April. Discussion on that topic immediately stopped: I suspect shipmates read my thoughts and promptly lost the will to live. (So please don’t stop finding more examples of bizarre craziness - which I actually believe support my own theory of History anyway.)
What happened in the past is so complicated that finding some sort of pattern in it comes as a great relief. I enjoyed Arnold Toynbee’s ‘Study of History’, at least the precis version with pictures, and he does indeed find patterns. But there are possibly hundreds of other ways of finding patterns in History. Personally I don’t find any over-arching pattern of History, and the lists provided above confirm my theory.
Posts: 74 | From: Essex, United Kingdom | Registered: Jan 2017
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Mere Nick
Shipmate
# 11827
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Posted
My list would be:
Eve listens to a snake - June 16, 2017.
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"Well that's it, boys. I've been redeemed. The preacher's done warshed away all my sins and transgressions. It's the straight and narrow from here on out, and heaven everlasting's my reward."
Delmar O'Donnell
Posts: 2797 | From: West Carolina | Registered: Sep 2006
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
I made a list:
Does this seem to be a pattern in which the U.S. produces disturbances every so often? Have I missed some?
I wouldn't call it periodic. That would imply that there's regularity about them. Also, disturbances is a rather general word: you could classify just about anything as a disturbance. (The Bill Clinton impeachment, the Iran-Contra affair and McCarthyism don't seem to me to have much in common beyond the involvement of national politicians.)
You may be right that Denmark is relatively stable politically speaking - I'm not sure I'd know. On the other hand, I suspect one could produce a similar list for the UK or France given that the criteria for inclusion seem vague.
[ 16. June 2017, 20:11: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Hedgehog
Ship's Shortstop
# 14125
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Posted
A perusal of Mackay's 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds can give a bit of historical perspective. Or, at least, suggest that all ages can identify periods of what they would classify as "madness."
I do rather like this quote:
quote:
"We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
Our trouble is that we have just so many follies to choose from these days!
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"We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it."--Pope Francis, Laudato Si'
Posts: 2740 | From: Delaware, USA | Registered: Sep 2008
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
Bouts of collective madness do seem to recur, though I agree, not at fixed intervals, and at different times in different places. There was one in France in 1968. Obviously, there was one in the summer of 1914. There was one in much of Europe in 1848. China had one in 1966. The US had one in 1973-4. Apart from 1914, obviously, all those I remember well. We've had one which has been running since the autumn of 2015, and had a slow fuse one for much of the 70s.
I've no idea what causes them, nor why so many potential crises don't produce one and yet some crises do. If I knew how to bring them to an end, I think I'd feel morally obliged to take up politics. Unfortunately they seem just to happen. I suspect one could find a philosophical or theological explanation, but whether it would necessarily be anything other than nonsense, I don't know.
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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson
Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008
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simontoad
Ship's Amphibian
# 18096
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Posted
How about the Civil War and unrest related to the Civil Rights movement. The US is a melting pot, and every so often someone forgets to stir.
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Human
Posts: 1571 | From: Romsey, Vic, AU | Registered: May 2014
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stonespring
Shipmate
# 15530
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Posted
Something is different in what has been going on since the Clinton scandals/impeachment of the 90s. First on the Right, then on the Left we have seen the generation of media and activist groups that portray the opposing side as being in a constant state of scandal. The clickbait business model of many websites has only exacerbated this. If your Facebook feed isn't full of links to articles with headlines like "You WON'T BELIEVE what evil thing the Republicans/Democrats/Tories/Corbynistas have done now!" you are very lucky indeed. Yes, Trump is a huge threat to our Democracy and needs to be taken seriously. But the descent into a constant state of paranoia and feeling of besiegement by the opposite side has been going on for decades, and reached a tipping point in the 90s in my opinion.
Posts: 1537 | Registered: Mar 2010
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I wouldn't call it periodic. That would imply that there's regularity about them. Also, disturbances is a rather general word: you could classify just about anything as a disturbance. (The Bill Clinton impeachment, the Iran-Contra affair and McCarthyism don't seem to me to have much in common beyond the involvement of national politicians.)
You may be right that Denmark is relatively stable politically speaking - I'm not sure I'd know. On the other hand, I suspect one could produce a similar list for the UK or France given that the criteria for inclusion seem vague.
This.
Historicist schemes are always subjective and arbitrary.
You could do the same with church history, the "disturbance" of the Reformation, the quincentenary of which we are remembering this year, being preceded and followed by a huge list of other "disturbances" which, at random, could include the Christological controversies of the early church, the Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Crusades, the various Inquisitions, the eighteenth century revivals, and so on.
And then there's the Bolshevik putsch, the centenary of which we are also remembering this year, and which was preceded and followed by a number of "disturbances' in Russian history.
[ 17. June 2017, 07:27: Message edited by: Kaplan Corday ]
Posts: 3355 | Registered: Jan 2011
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wabale
Shipmate
# 18715
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mere Nick:
My list would be:
Eve listens to a snake - June 16, 2017.
Thanks for that, Mere Nick. I will use it from now on as my working definition of History, updating it daily.
Posts: 74 | From: Essex, United Kingdom | Registered: Jan 2017
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
... You could do the same with church history, the "disturbance" of the Reformation, the quincentenary of which we are remembering this year, being preceded and followed by a huge list of other "disturbances" which, at random, could include the Christological controversies of the early church, the Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries, the Crusades, the various Inquisitions, the eighteenth century revivals, and so on.
And then there's the Bolshevik putsch, the centenary of which we are also remembering this year, and which was preceded and followed by a number of "disturbances' in Russian history.
I'm not at all sure all of those are all the same sort of thing. Some 'disturbances' are more major sea changes in the flow of history, than 'periodic craziness' like France in 1968, Watergate and what the Anglophone parts of the world are experiencing at the moment. And the outbreak of war in 1939, terrible though its causes and consequences were, wasn't a 'periodic craziness' in the way the outbreak in 1914 was.
Of course the consequences of the civilised world going batsh*t crazy in the summer of 1914 have been tragic, permanent and almost entirely detrimental. The war wasn't over by Christmas. However, both the 1968 batsh*ttery in France and the batch*ttery over Watergate seem to have had next to no permanent effect at all, to have turned out to have been disruptive storms in teacups.
We don't yet know whether the present craziness will somehow come - or be brought to - an end and if so how, or whether it will carry on swirling out of control. Obviously I hope the former.
But it does beg both questions. First, does this emanate from some underlying craziness of us as a species, or are there other reasons? And second, what if anything, works to mitigate the effects?
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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson
Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008
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