Off here, I do not know. COVID really ruined everything when I look at the timeline. There are also structural issues relating to Economy that end up being a maw translating effervescence into money numbers but we're not ready for that conversation yet

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5547458&forum_id=2#47791500)

There are reasons to be afraid that largely have to do with technological progress but culturally we're still "stuck" due to issues that have to do with circulation and economic capture and from what I'm hearing it seems like the geniuses at the top have no better ideas than war to generate the "lived time" necessary to cause a burst of transference that might pass for fake creation. There are also a bunch of demands from anal retentives and the rabble following them to keep things legible even when those demands for legibility (+the general consumer mindset towards culture; this _product_ must serve me. even when they have price tags on them, cultural items are not products) are outright responsible for the stagnancy

We're stuck in a spot where politically the left seems to be pushing for outright collapse out of arch-feminine "boredom" (which is really a problem of interiority, not exteriority) and faux-concern for their charges and the right is getting increasingly boorish & savage and losing a generation and a half worth of carefully curated cultural sophistication in the process, the socio-political war is causing so much tension that it's dangerous and increasingly no-win as a proposition to comment on much of anything of import. Easier to twiddle about video games and "some book I read a year ago" than it is to really go at it with a scalpel and stitches like in the past; nobody wants to be scapegoated for talking about taboo subjects that were popular in the eras that I see as the most similar parallels to our own (they managed to get past those eras)

https://youtu.be/XLYqTZKEpvs?si=AwfkhcbSJdHRGK0u

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5547458&forum_id=2#47791528)

the first big fertility shock in the US actually came during the 1930's, when rates plunged relative to the past, before stabilizing and then exploding after WWII:

https://staticweb.usafacts.org/media/images/the-us-fertility-.width-1000.format-webp.webpquality-70.webp

the suicidality of the post-WWI era was brainshocked back into a kind of false normalcy via the experience of WWII (experience rather than merely victory, since the loser nations also saw a fertility boom). if you look at interwar literature, a lot of the most notable stuff came from guys like DH Lawrence or James Joyce who were obsessed with the death and decay of traditional social orders.

i suspect that this is because WWI left people too much room for introspection, while WWII re-introduced a much more basal and comprehensible two-sided battle between the western and soviet blocs. this new mission already corroded and became dull by the 1970's, and the post-9/11 attempt to switch it out with a fight against 'islamofascism' became a complete joke by 2005.

we now have a growing population of older adults with one or zero living children, which radically circumscribes the psychological 'space' that the average person subconsciously assigns to the future.

this allowed for the dissolution of a true national identity, which facilitated the era of mass-immigration, which further corroded the social basis of the US a 'nation,' which reinforced the role of capital as the thing beyond which nothing can reach, which leads us back around to a certain elite hope that a big event such as a war could shock everyone back into a kind of post-WWII perception of a shared and necessary destiny.

but it's not going to work.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5547458&forum_id=2#47791583)

Good paragraph. The loser nations probably saw a boom uniquely due to American and Soviet funded reconstruction and an immense drop in cost of living due to all of the depopulated space freed up to inhabit for cheap and build easy-to-maintain low maintenance jobs on---construction, repair, the economic sectors associated with "settling" don't require much quality in human capital or intellectual organization to build up in

Re joyce, lawrence, hemingway: in times of stagnation and widespread trauma, the muses speak of subjects of death and decay and finality. Some may not like it but culture and art come regardless of popular tastes

On your last point, I tend to agree, which is why I've been against the idea via both direct escalation in the Ukraine theater and in whatever Israel was trying to drag us into. We have many domestic problems relating to the kulturkampf/social war that can't be swept under the rug like that, we need a Reconstruction of sorts imo, and another war would just weigh disproportionately on an already flagging white middle and lower classes, and for no real gain. Moral dimensions of these conflicts aside it's become obvious that only a certain segment of the population really makes our armed forces as competent as they are, and our government has been apparently outright warring against this population segment for a long while. What are the incentives? Even if there were concessions, so much damage has been done it's hard to see any trade off in posture as a real benefit for the demographic situation

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5547458&forum_id=2#47791596)

There are alternatives that would fill the same need and I think Trump winning even if he didn't start a war would be a good one. Bouncing around but engagement in politics via the internet has been a disaster imo, Internet should still be a niche thing and would be much more effective for its purposes if maybe 3/4ths of the people on it were shunted back to Facebook and the web was allowed to "breathe" and stay fallow for a while

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5547458&forum_id=2#47791537)