{"id":20295,"date":"2015-04-09T23:21:28","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T03:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=20295"},"modified":"2015-04-09T23:25:43","modified_gmt":"2015-04-10T03:25:43","slug":"the-rhymes-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2015\/04\/09\/the-rhymes-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rhymes of History"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Twain is <a title=\"Good Reads attrinbution of the reputed quote\" href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/quotes\/5382-history-doesn-t-repeat-itself-but-it-does-rhyme\" target=\"_blank\">reputed<\/a> to have said<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cHistory doesn&#8217;t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Whether or not Mark Twain said this doesn&#8217;t matter.\u00a0 It is the takeoff point of this post.<\/p>\n<p>I am going to give you the rhyme pattern, and I&#8217;d like you comment on the places in history where you can detect that pattern or even some significant parts of the pattern.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A less powerful societal entity (A) demands that a more powerful entity (B) stops committing a perceived offense against the the less powerful entity (A).<\/li>\n<li>The more powerful entity (B) refuses to talk to the less powerful one (A) about their demands.<\/li>\n<li>The less powerful entity (A) commits an escalating series of stealthy violent acts against the powerful one (B) until they get some attention to their grievance.<\/li>\n<li>Eventually, the more powerful entity (B) decides that the pain is great enough that it would just be better to resolve (A)&#8217;s grievance against (B).<\/li>\n<li>(A) gets their grievance resolved, and they become powerful themselves.<\/li>\n<li>(A) looks back at how they achieved their goals and resolves never to allow a lesser power to\u00a0 use the technique against them that they used against (B).<\/li>\n<li>Along comes an entity (C) that is less powerful than (A) and has a grievance against (A).<\/li>\n<li>(C) starts to use the tactic against (A) that (A) used successfully against (B).<\/li>\n<li>With (A)&#8217;s resolve based on its historic memory it is\u00a0 even more intransigent against (C) than (B) was against (A).\u00a0 They even tell (C) that there is nothing (C) can do to get them to change their mind.<\/li>\n<li>(C) takes this as a challenge for themselves to find something so horrible to do against (A), that (A) will finally agree to address the grievance.<\/li>\n<li>An escalating series of violent acts are performed by (A) on (C) in retaliation for the escalating attacks of (C) on (A).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are only a few inevitable outcomes from this battle.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>(A) finally gives in and tries to resolve its issues with (C).<\/li>\n<li>(A) annihilates (C)<\/li>\n<li>(C) annihilates (A)<\/li>\n<li>(A) and (C) mutually destruct.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Let the contest begin.\u00a0 The winner is me, if I can get enough of you to participate to build a long enough list.\u00a0 At some point we might be able to measure which outcome produces the most happy people, the fewest deaths, and the fewest guilty consciences.\u00a0 If you have other measures of success, I would be glad to hear them.\u00a0 Even in scenarios 2 and 3, one side is silenced and the other side is left with a blot on their history that will haunt them (or at least their descendants) forever.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, another winner would be the powerful entity that sees the rhyme emerging, and decides to cut to the resolution phase, and skip the pain of delaying the inevitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Twain is reputed to have said \u201cHistory doesn&#8217;t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.\u201d Whether or not Mark Twain said this doesn&#8217;t matter.\u00a0 It is the takeoff point of this post. I am going to give you the rhyme pattern, and I&#8217;d like you comment on the places in history where you can detect [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20295"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20298,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20295\/revisions\/20298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}