Found in 3 comments on Hacker News
garyjob · 2019-05-31 · Original thread
That is generally how disruptions happen isn't it? This is a great book that talks about the previous cycle when it occurred.

By the way, I am currently using this engine to track the progress of the US/China trade war

dosy · 2019-03-19 · Original thread
This goes right to the heart of the division we see today. The "endless state of war" Orwell warned about in 1984, is not just wars between nations, or proxy wars ~ we see it in the democratic systems as wars between factions of the population.

The system has an incentive to never produce a victor, only to prolong the conflict.

Much fighting in these wars occurs in social and traditional media, centered around "battleground topics", the OP being a clear example.

The OP is an example of a message in the battleground topic of "Islam vs the West" (aside: which is actually historically incorrect since Islam really can be said to be closer to the West than separate from it, one reason is that Islam revived Europe / Western civilization around the Mediterranean 1000 years ago [1]).

The OP article supports for the Islam side, one of many such articles. There are also many articles supporting the West side of this battleground topic.

The system will not permit there to be a conclusion to the argument, it is actually motivated to promote both sides, because this constant state of conflict is stabilizing to the democratic systems.

[1]: read this book,

gbhn · 2014-10-09 · Original thread
You might enjoy the book "Why the West Rules -- For Now" (

One of the main premises is that the impact of societies on other societies ("ruling" in the vernacular of the book, as this impact has often been military and brutal in the time scale the book covers) has a lot to do with the kind of social organization they are able to use. There's amplifiers to this of course -- you can either mobilize a huge number of people to build a pyramid, or mobilize a huge number of people to invent cranes and bulldozers and let a few people build the pyramid. But the bottom line, according to Morris, is that this kind of social goal-oriented organization is a key metric of a society's impact.

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