Will the 2020s be better?

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Will the 2020s be a better decade than the 2010s?


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I think that WWIII is implausible at this point because the world is too beneficially inter-connected. Economic nationalism is a meme.

(Although, to be fair, they said that about the increasingly globalized society of the 1910s, and look how that turned out)

Nah, WWIII is implausible because it wouldn't be "non-atomic" and no one wants their capital city turned into a crater. Might as well ask that world wars be decided by a Dimensional Merge showdown between magical ponies as rehash the warfare of a century ago in terms of modern geopolitics.
 
Nah, WWIII is implausible because it wouldn't be "non-atomic" and no one wants their capital city turned into a crater. Might as well ask that world wars be decided by a Dimensional Merge showdown between magical ponies as rehash the warfare of a century ago in terms of modern geopolitics.
Try telling that to the FringeTubers who think a false flag nuke is going to hit Seattle on November 3rd this year because movies and the Seattle Seadogs say it is.
 
2 more months to go..... just 2 more months.

I of course hope the 20s will be better and I of course know things won't change overnight, but I am nevertheless so ready for the 2010s to be over with.
 
If there was anything that I would like to bet being right on, it's that the 2020's are going to be unbelievably awful.

Think of all the shit that has been normalized in the past 10 years alone. 2009 felt so fucking tame in comparison even with the recession.

-troon kids and the right to cut off kids dicks or pump them full of hormones
-a complete inversion of the natural world. The more broken and "oppressed" a person is, the more society values them
-laws against telling the bearded man in a dress it isn't a real woman
-the rise and complete normalization of sjw talking points in general
-first world countries normalizing the insane idea that there are no borders, and that the entire third world is encouraged to move in
-progressive lynch mobs successfully making wrongthink political opinion a life destroying offence
-the sterilization and centralization of the internet

too tired to think of more for now. might add more later, but you get the idea
 
If there was anything that I would like to bet being right on, it's that the 2020's are going to be unbelievably awful.

Think of all the shit that has been normalized in the past 10 years alone. 2009 felt so fucking tame in comparison even with the recession.

-troon kids and the right to cut off kids dicks or pump them full of hormones
-a complete inversion of the natural world. The more broken and "oppressed" a person is, the more society values them
-laws against telling the bearded man in a dress it isn't a real woman
-the rise and complete normalization of sjw talking points in general
-first world countries normalizing the insane idea that there are no borders, and that the entire third world is encouraged to move in
-progressive lynch mobs successfully making wrongthink political opinion a life destroying offence
-the sterilization and centralization of the internet

too tired to think of more for now. might add more later, but you get the idea
Doubtful, most likely the 2020s and early 2030s are going to be defined by a massive backlash to the current cultural zeitgeist.

That's how it's worked since the 60s.

Trans kids in particular are a ticking timebomb that when it goes off next decade will severely damage if not outright destroy the modern gay movement.
 
Doubtful, most likely the 2020s and early 2030s are going to be defined by a massive backlash to the current cultural zeitgeist.

That's how it's worked since the 60s.

Trans kids in particular are a ticking timebomb that when it goes off next decade will severely damage if not outright destroy the modern gay movement.
I can certainly see it happing come the mid-2020s, but for the foreseeable future? Not so much.
 
If there was anything that I would like to bet being right on, it's that the 2020's are going to be unbelievably awful.

Think of all the shit that has been normalized in the past 10 years alone. 2009 felt so fucking tame in comparison even with the recession.

-troon kids and the right to cut off kids dicks or pump them full of hormones
-a complete inversion of the natural world. The more broken and "oppressed" a person is, the more society values them
-laws against telling the bearded man in a dress it isn't a real woman
-the rise and complete normalization of sjw talking points in general
-first world countries normalizing the insane idea that there are no borders, and that the entire third world is encouraged to move in
-progressive lynch mobs successfully making wrongthink political opinion a life destroying offence
-the sterilization and centralization of the internet

too tired to think of more for now. might add more later, but you get the idea

That's the way it's been for the 2010s, doesn't mean it will continue for the 2020s.

You are right though that the 2010s turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, it's insane the shit that has happened over the last ten years, it's especially surreal for me personally because the last decade has felt like it's gone by so fast, it's enough to make my head spin.
 
Well... I can see the likelihood of a 2nd American Civil war is highly unlikely, despite what the Doomsayers claim. If the studies of (American) Conservative families out breeding the Liberal families are to be believed, the US will start to swing back, although I am curious what the political climate will be like when Trump leaves office (be it in 2020 or 2024)

Across the pond, they will still be pushing back Brexit and if we aren't all in super prison for our dangerous thoughts, it will still be an issue in 10 years when we are contemplating what the 2030s will be like. Elsewhere, I think Islamic ideals will become more widespread throughout Europe, as discussing otherwise will have more and more "hate speech" laws passed. Legal protections for Shiara (sp?) Law will become more widespread as well, at least I think so.

Across the opposite pond, Asia will continue to grow as a mix of technological super powers (I want a damn Gundam, Japan!) And communist hold out countries such as China, although I see N Korea becoming more China like as opposed to the horror stories we are told now (not that China is great, but it is supposed to be better than N Korea). With luck, we may even see an official end to the Korean War, instead of the armistice they have now.

Russia will release a photo of Putin wrestling an elephant with his shirt off or something to that effect. Maybe juggling rhinos.

And if no one kills me, I will keep going to work, cooking myself dinner, and shitposting and having interesting interactions with my fellow Kiwis
 
Doubtful, most likely the 2020s and early 2030s are going to be defined by a massive backlash to the current cultural zeitgeist.

That's how it's worked since the 60s.

Trans kids in particular are a ticking timebomb that when it goes off next decade will severely damage if not outright destroy the modern gay movement.

This sentiment of "there's gonna be a backlash and everything will revert to normal" is one that is quite frankly ahistorical and points to a complete, willful ignorance of history. Progress doesn't get "rolled back" it merely gets halted.

Many people here seem to think that progress works like this, especially as it comes to societal norms and culture

progress1.png


When in actuality it works more like this:

progress2.png


There is a backlash yes, but barring massive wars and sustained, wholesale violent pushback progress is only temporarily halted at the current level its at, before inevitably jumping forward again. These forward pushes are spurred on by greater education and dissemination of information (the printing press, radio, television, the internet) that coincides with leaps forward in technology. You see once you learn something you can't unlearn it, and in much the same way once information reaches the mainstream it can only be suppressed through authoritarianism and violence (The Nazis burned books containing information about trans people). You essentially have to attempt to remove information and rewrite history, because if people forget the progress they've made up until that point and educational information is erased they'll be easily led into moving into the direction you want them to go, even backwards.

What many people perceive as a pendulum swinging back and forth is more like the freewheel in a bike or an engine.

800px-Roue_libre_cliquet.svg.png
Culture, progress, technology moves forward, and can only be paused, not moved BACKWARDS. What you perceive as a "swing back" is really just a temporary halt. Sure there are leftward and rightward pushes, but things never really go "backwards" per se. The pendulum swings back and forth, but what happens if you move the entire pendulum in one direction? This is why even though much has been said about Gen Z becoming more conservative, the TYPE of conservative that they're becoming is quite different from past versions. Many zoomers don't view gender like boomers do, and a lot of them are way more accepting of trans people than the old religious right ever was. They think different economically too, largely abandoning the "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can be rich!!!!" thinking of old. They realize that the differences between the left and the right can be more succinctly codified by looking at the Haves and the Have Nots.

Hell, look at the outlooks of people in this very threads. The only people who were really looking forward to the future were those that were financially well off. Everyone else here seems to be dreading it. This is the divide that will characterize the next few years. What moves progress is the simple act of people learning how fucked their situation is and realizing it DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. Combine this with greater access to information, education, and better living standards and inevitably progress marches forward. The only people who think it doesn't have a vested interest in it not going that way, such as the odd /pol/ larper who fetishizes a time period he wasn't even alive for.

Basically, if you hate how things are now, you're gonna REALLY hate the next few years.
 
This sentiment of "there's gonna be a backlash and everything will revert to normal" is one that is quite frankly ahistorical and points to a complete, willful ignorance of history. Progress doesn't get "rolled back" it merely gets halted.

Many people here seem to think that progress works like this, especially as it comes to societal norms and culture

View attachment 999765

When in actuality it works more like this:

View attachment 999767

There is a backlash yes, but barring massive wars and sustained, wholesale violent pushback progress is only temporarily halted at the current level its at, before inevitably jumping forward again. These forward pushes are spurred on by greater education and dissemination of information (the printing press, radio, television, the internet) that coincides with leaps forward in technology. You see once you learn something you can't unlearn it, and in much the same way once information reaches the mainstream it can only be suppressed through authoritarianism and violence (The Nazis burned books containing information about trans people). You essentially have to attempt to remove information and rewrite history, because if people forget the progress they've made up until that point and educational information is erased they'll be easily led into moving into the direction you want them to go, even backwards.

What many people perceive as a pendulum swinging back and forth is more like the freewheel in a bike or an engine.

View attachment 999772
Culture, progress, technology moves forward, and can only be paused, not moved BACKWARDS. What you perceive as a "swing back" is really just a temporary halt. Sure there are leftward and rightward pushes, but things never really go "backwards" per se. The pendulum swings back and forth, but what happens if you move the entire pendulum in one direction? This is why even though much has been said about Gen Z becoming more conservative, the TYPE of conservative that they're becoming is quite different from past versions. Many zoomers don't view gender like boomers do, and a lot of them are way more accepting of trans people than the old religious right ever was. They think different economically too, largely abandoning the "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can be rich!!!!" thinking of old. They realize that the differences between the left and the right can be more succinctly codified by looking at the Haves and the Have Nots.

Hell, look at the outlooks of people in this very threads. The only people who were really looking forward to the future were those that were financially well off. Everyone else here seems to be dreading it. This is the divide that will characterize the next few years. What moves progress is the simple act of people learning how fucked their situation is and realizing it DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. Combine this with greater access to information, education, and better living standards and inevitably progress marches forward. The only people who think it doesn't have a vested interest in it not going that way, such as the odd /pol/ larper who fetishizes a time period he wasn't even alive for.

Basically, if you hate how things are now, you're gonna REALLY hate the next few years.

Fuck, even by the standards of Whig history, this is fucking stupid. I know you're a troll, but this is dumb even by your standards.

The Zoomers aren't conservative like the Boomers, but they trend to the right of the Millennials. They're still left-leaning, but the Millennial generation veered straight into communism, anarchism, and moral authoritarianism. When it comes to trending rightward of the Millennials, the bar is pretty fucking low.

Most of the "woke" Zoomers who buy into the "gender is whatever you want it to be" nonsense are older Zoomers who overlap with the later end of the Millennials. I know this because I'm one of those late Millennials and I have a life outside of the internet. The core of the Zoomer generation trends more in a liberal or center-left direction as opposed to the far-left direction of the Millennials.

They honestly remind me of Generation X in the 90's, more liberal overall but also more individualist and concerned with their personal lives more than politics. Don't even get me started on the Alpha Generation. They're at the same age right now that the Millennials were at the height of the Religious Right's hysteria.

Remember when you said major disasters such as war and violence cause major backlash and pushback? You're partly right, and the same applies to economic disasters too. The Millennial Left came about as a backlash following the chaos of the Great Recession.

If society was constantly progressing leftward, then why did the New Left of the 70's get squashed by the Religious Right in the 80's? Even accounting for the rise of the internet that happened in the 90's and 2000's, the rise of the Woke Left did not happen overnight. The Religious Right was in its death throes by the time the Great Recession began in earnest, but the Woke Left didn't fully coalesce into anything coherent until the Occupy protests in 2011-2012 at the earliest.

Part of why the SJW Left became a thing and was able to gain traction outside of college campuses and the punk subculture was because a lot of Millennials were burned by the Recession and spent most of their childhood and teen years living in the shadow of the Religious Right and the blunders of the Bush Administration. They rebelled and the chaos of the recession helped strengthen them, just as the Vietnam War did for the New Left of the 1960's and 1970's.

You're a useful idiot, Ashy. Those neoliberal corporations that you and all your Anarcho-Communist friends claim to hate are playing you like a damn fiddle. You think you're a grand revolutionary and that the future will be nothing but genderqueer commie punk bullshit, but you're in for a rude awakening when your cause dies out and a new flash in the pan cause becomes the big thing in leftist circles.

Even if things trend leftward economically, the woke culture and social justice bullshit will die out and a new zeitgeist ends up taking its place. Nobody likes a moral guardian. We didn't like them when they were redneck fundies and Boomer church ladies in the 80's and 90's and we don't like the punk chuds and pretentious dangerhairs that are the moral guardians of today.

Also, I find your grasp of history to be very poor at best. The Nazis did burn books, but I guarantee you they didn't burn books about trans people. The transgender community wasn't really a thing in 1930's Germany, even at the height of the Weimar-era libertine antics. There were transgender individuals, but they were few and far between and were often closeted. Any books on trans people that would've been around for the Nazi book burning rallies would've likely been scientific documents or early medical textbooks that discussed gender dysphoria.

The Nazis didn't like psychoanalysis but it wasn't because of any of the gender woo that the Millennial Left likes to spout. That shit didn't even exist in the 1930's. Even the concept of gender dysphoria as a condition was probably unknown outside of academic research circles.

The concept that someone doesn't need to have gender dysphoria to be transgender is very much a concept of the 21st Century. It's little more than pretentious nonsense with no grounding in reality.

The Soviet Union and Maoist China also persecuted LGBT people too. Even Vladimir Lenin wouldn't take too kindly to the Millennial Left's fetish for all things "queer"

Those "sodomy laws" that Lenin struck down dealt with prostitution, not homosexuality (in old-time legal jargon, "sodomy" was a vague term for illegal or taboo sex)

Those laws were struck down because Lenin was a whoremonger and a sex pest (and Lenin was a petulant edgelord with a hateboner for religion. He just wore a newsboy cap instead of a fedora) and the Bolsheviks still violently hunted down and murdered queer people, painting them as "decadent bourgeois" and associating them with the Tsarist aristocracy (Felix Yuspov was a Russian noble who supported the Tsars and condemned the Bolsheviks, and was also a bisexual libertine)

All Anarchists Are Bastards. Commie Punks Fuck Off.
 
This sentiment of "there's gonna be a backlash and everything will revert to normal" is one that is quite frankly ahistorical and points to a complete, willful ignorance of history. Progress doesn't get "rolled back" it merely gets halted.

Many people here seem to think that progress works like this, especially as it comes to societal norms and culture

View attachment 999765

When in actuality it works more like this:

View attachment 999767

There is a backlash yes, but barring massive wars and sustained, wholesale violent pushback progress is only temporarily halted at the current level its at, before inevitably jumping forward again. These forward pushes are spurred on by greater education and dissemination of information (the printing press, radio, television, the internet) that coincides with leaps forward in technology. You see once you learn something you can't unlearn it, and in much the same way once information reaches the mainstream it can only be suppressed through authoritarianism and violence (The Nazis burned books containing information about trans people). You essentially have to attempt to remove information and rewrite history, because if people forget the progress they've made up until that point and educational information is erased they'll be easily led into moving into the direction you want them to go, even backwards.

What many people perceive as a pendulum swinging back and forth is more like the freewheel in a bike or an engine.

View attachment 999772
Culture, progress, technology moves forward, and can only be paused, not moved BACKWARDS. What you perceive as a "swing back" is really just a temporary halt. Sure there are leftward and rightward pushes, but things never really go "backwards" per se. The pendulum swings back and forth, but what happens if you move the entire pendulum in one direction? This is why even though much has been said about Gen Z becoming more conservative, the TYPE of conservative that they're becoming is quite different from past versions. Many zoomers don't view gender like boomers do, and a lot of them are way more accepting of trans people than the old religious right ever was. They think different economically too, largely abandoning the "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can be rich!!!!" thinking of old. They realize that the differences between the left and the right can be more succinctly codified by looking at the Haves and the Have Nots.

Hell, look at the outlooks of people in this very threads. The only people who were really looking forward to the future were those that were financially well off. Everyone else here seems to be dreading it. This is the divide that will characterize the next few years. What moves progress is the simple act of people learning how fucked their situation is and realizing it DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY. Combine this with greater access to information, education, and better living standards and inevitably progress marches forward. The only people who think it doesn't have a vested interest in it not going that way, such as the odd /pol/ larper who fetishizes a time period he wasn't even alive for.

Basically, if you hate how things are now, you're gonna REALLY hate the next few years.
I don't think it is a good thing, but I don't think this is wrong either.
 
As far as the political situation in America, I doubt much is ever going to get better. And I think it's been that way, regardless of Donald Trump. The last hope we had for an ideal America died in 1968, and it was buried at Kent State in 1970. It just hasn't been clear.

But we've had our Marcomannic Wars. Pax Romana has end. The Empire is falling.
 
As far as the political situation in America, I doubt much is ever going to get better. And I think it's been that way, regardless of Donald Trump. The last hope we had for an ideal America died in 1968, and it was buried at Kent State in 1970. It just hasn't been clear.

But we've had our Marcomannic Wars. Pax Romana has end. The Empire is falling.

Trickle-down economics didn't help either and was just America shooting itself in the foot. Letting growth go unregulated like that just means the rich get a lot richer. I think that's one part of why people are so fucked over right now. Greedy assholes using lowered regulations to make huge profit.

And I really don't care if any of you are right wingers that think near-zero regulations are good, money is fairly evil and the worst people are always influenced by it.
 
I don't think it is a good thing, but I don't think this is wrong either.
That's not really true. Things have gone back, and forth countless times through history. If you're talking about technology, sure that mostly makes forward advancements because you seldom ever "lose" things. The few confirmed examples I can think of where tech was "lost" would likely be "true" Damascus Steel, or Roman concrete. Culture changes constantly, and it does move "back," and "forth" all of the time. Rome alone went through many cultural declines, and peaks. (The most notable decline perhaps being the state of Roman culture prior to Caesar, and greatest peak being after their rebellion against the Etruscans)

The decline, and revival of culture has however been observed many times throughout history. With Polybius's theory of Anacylosis possibly being the earliest example.
 
That's not really true. Things have gone back, and forth countless times through history. If you're talking about technology, sure that mostly makes forward advancements because you seldom ever "lose" things. The few confirmed examples I can think of where tech was "lost" would likely be "true" Damascus Steel, or Roman concrete. Culture changes constantly, and it does move "back," and "forth" all of the time. Rome alone went through many cultural declines, and peaks. (The most notable decline perhaps being the state of Roman culture prior to Caesar, and greatest peak being after their rebellion against the Etruscans)

The decline, and revival of culture has however been observed many times throughout history. With Polybius's theory of Anacylosis possibly being the earliest example.
Things can go back, but after a certain point only after giant collapses that wipe out civilizations.

And for the last 400 or so years? Things have trended from the enlightenment to liberalism to communism to... whatever the hell you want to call the current year. I don't think Ashy is wrong in pointing that out (though personally I think it was less inevitable as he claims it is and more because the Anglosphere championed these ideas for all these centuries).
 
Can you expound a bit on what you're referring to?
Don't get me wrong. Lyndon Johnson wasn't absolutely terrible. He was simultaneously the best and worst person for his position. He expanded upon much of the Kennedy administration's goals such as Civil Rights, but he also gave back a lot of formerly lost power to the wrong people and established the current position of the Military Industrial Complex. I think because he allowed these things to occur, whether it had been because of his more... venal tendencies, or something else, he made the expansion to full military involvement in Eisenhower's policy of support for the South Vietnamese government in the Second Indochina War, and the resulting political uproar quite inevitable.

And 1968, I think, is really the most convenient source point for when we talk of the death of America. Because a lot of the final, at least political hope for a better future died that year. Just as well, many of the era's greatest tragedies defined that 'death' of America. The assassination of RFK, the worst year for casualties in Viet Nam, the Chicago Police Riots, et cetera. The Nixon administration was sort of the aftermath of all that, and Kissinger put the 'nail in the coffin' with his... rather vile influence, such as with the carpet bombing of Cambodia. But the 1970 Kent State shooting is generally better remembered, although far from the nastiest thing to happen during that time, so I like to say it was buried there.

It's a lot of old politics, but almost nothing has really gotten significantly better since then, so I use it as a sort of analogy to say, "We have to start thinking about what we're going to do as a civilization of human beings, and beyond what we are as a nation of Americans."
 
What's amusing about this thread is that people (not counting Ashy, who's just trying to be provocative) are simultaneously complaining about the embrace of conservative trickle-down economics and an inexorable shift towards communism. It's impossible for people on this site to even have a meaningful discussion about the future because they don't agree on the course the present is taking either.
 
What's amusing about this thread is that people (not counting Ashy, who's just trying to be provocative) are simultaneously complaining about the embrace of conservative trickle-down economics and an inexorable shift towards communism. It's impossible for people on this site to even have a meaningful discussion about the future because they don't agree on the course the present is taking either.

I think the problem at hand (at least the way that I see it) is that the corporations and the bigwigs at the top have gotten extremely powerful thanks to trickle-down economics, while a significant portion of the Millennial generation and the social media woke-scolds have leaned full into communism, anarchism, and "Democratic Socialism" (not Social Democracy) that is filtered through an intersectional identity politics lens.

The real kicker is that the same corporate bigwigs that have too much power thanks to decades of trickle-down economics have also been spending the better part of this decade bending over backwards to appease the very loud vocal minority on social media (the same ones who hate capitalism) because they think the loudest voice in the room is the majority and so the media and the culture have gone to shit as a result.

So, we're in a weird situation where the 2010's West is dominated by corporatism on the economic level and left-wing identity politics on the social/cultural level. It's the closest we've gotten to the "Worst of Both Worlds" without going into full-on totalitarianism.

That being said, given how this year has been turning out, I think 2019-2020 are going to be the major turning point for the SJW cultural zeitgeist, the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn.
 
I think it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. Shit seems crazy right now but not crazy enough yet. I'm hoping here in bongland that the inevitable further delays of Brexit and gradual increase of displays of incompetency by politicians will eventually get people to RISE UP but either way I'll be emigrating because fuck it.
 
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