DU POLL - Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020? [View all]

[RKP5637]

... depending on what 2016 ushers in ... an established trend might well be seen. ... so, I added a poll to this article. My take is eventually the shit is going to hit the fan as more people feel financially repressed and underrepresented. Also, eventually, many R's IMO will realize they've been fucked over for profits by their masters. ... that they've been taken for suckers.

http://news.yahoo.com/us-really-experience-violent-upheaval-2020-162332158.html

Circa 1870, the North fought the South in the Civil War. Half a century later, around 1920, worker unrest, racial tensions and anti-Communist sentiment caused another nationwide upsurge of violence. Then, 50 years later, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement triggered a third peak in violent political, social and racial conflict. Fifty years after that will be 2020. If history continues to repeat itself, we can expect a violent upheaval in the United States in a few years.

It sounds like pseudoscience, but it's a published theory. "My model suggests that the next [peak in violence] will be worse than the one in 1970 because demographic variables such as wages, standards of living and a number of measures of intra-elite confrontation are all much worse this time," said Peter Turchin, an ecologist, evolutionary biologist and mathematician at the University of Connecticut.

Turchin has led the development of a field of study called "cliodynamics," in which scientists attempt to find meaningful patterns in history. The endeavor flies in the face of the traditional study of history, which assumes the countless variables interacting within a society lead to chaotic fluctuations in outcomes like violence and social unrest. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher of science at CUNY-Lehman College, said most historians believe that "the factors at play are so many and so variable that there is little reason to expect quasi-regular cycles, or a unified theory to explain them."

But we might not be so lucky this time around. If Turchin's model is right, then the current polarization and inequality in American society will come to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice how the discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's really unprecedented for the last 100 years. So basically by all measures, there are social pressures for instability that are much worse than 50 years ago."

12 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Yes
	2 (17%)
	No
	3 (25%)
	Possibly
	3 (25%)
	Too early to tell
	0 (0%)
	Never
	2 (17%)
	Too much populace control exists in the US
	2 (17%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
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