Reply To: Suggestions of how discussions might be framed

  • Charles Rykken

    Organizer
    April 18, 2023 at 8:29 pm

    One more small thing that I wrote someone in an email a few years ago about journalism. I see myself as a philosophical journalist.

    “it seems to me that a deep sense of intuition would be of great importance in finding important stories hidden beneath a jumble of disinformation or near total lack of information. That same deep intuition could, with not that great an effort be expanded in time to make likely predictions not a major leap. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union the CIA , well known for its relationship to truth telling, said no one saw it coming. This wiki article says differently.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_collapse_of_the_Soviet_Union

    I did not see any prominent journalists on the list of early predictors of that collapse. One of the reasons I am interested in this is because I have been told I have the personality of a journalist and I predicted the collapse of not only the Soviet Union but all communist states within about twenty years. I made that prediction in 1967 when I was nineteen years old. It was my primary argument against George Kennan’s policy of containment (the domino theory being associated with the idea of containment). At the time no communist state had collapsed. My reasoning was that the ideas of human engineering and the blank slate were pure bullshit and that the resulting internal corruption that would result from refusing to accept that basic reality would eventually make communist governments unable to function. The black market economy would become a de facto shadow government that would make collapse inevitable. Andrei Amalrik published his prediction in 1970 choosing 1984 as the year of collapse. My prediction was 1987.”

    This is not a coincidence. I predicted in 1994 that the Republicans would choose a total lunatic for president in about twenty years. Here is what I said about that in the same email.

    “Another example is of people who predicted that the Republican Party would choose a clear lunatic as their nominee for president. Dan Greaney of “The Simpsons” predicted a Trump presidency in 2000 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/simpsons-writer-who-predicted-trump-876295/. In 1994, the House of Representatives chose Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey as the public face of the Republican Party in the U. S. House. I had seen an increasing number of lunatics rise to positions of high power in Republican administrations. James Watt, the Interior Secretary under Reagan, is a case in point of a total looney toons holding a cabinet level office.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/06/30/the-watt-controversy/d591699b-3bc2-46d2-9059-fb5d2513c3da/

    I saw the progressively greater presence of lunatics in the Republican Party as very dark news for the U. S. When Gingrich and Armey were elected by a majority of Republicans in the people’s house it was clear as day to me that within twenty or so years, any Republicans who had a shred of sanity would be thrown out of the party. The lunatics had taken over the asylum and they would eventually choose one of their own as the standard bearer. Do you know of anyone in the ranks of journalism who reacted to the election of Gingrich and Armey with a prediction of a lunatic Republican President? I can already hear the purview argument in reply. When a building uses shoddy materials and design in constructing a building, that is often seen as a newsworthy piece of information. Why isn’t the construction of a lunatic ideology with the potentially disastrous consequences for the entire planet even more newsworthy?”

    My intuition has been a steady and reliable guide. Unfortunately, it tells me very unpleasant truths.