Truth Teller: I think you know considerably more about it than I do, so you could be right. There was talk over war in the east for over one hundred years though. Any thoughts on that?
On a long enough time line, virtually anything is possible, perhaps even more so if some people believe it/want it (at which point it might become self-reinforcing). If, as you say, the origins go back to 1906 or 1912, why not then? (I am partially playing devil's advocate with you here, and partially saying that I actually don't know the specifics and am asking you why.) To use some other examples, both China and Russia had several failed revolutions. The final revolutions seem inevitable in retrospect, but was it simply a case of throwing enough darts at a dart board and eventually hitting a bull's eye, or was it actually more in each case? This relates to my point about looking for your keys. You do find them eventually, but there's a lot going on under the surface at the time.
Under what circumstances can we actually set up a falsifiable argument regarding world history, since everything is judged primarily with relation to itself in retrospect? What I mean by that is that a theory such as that proposed in the OP should have fairly good predictive power down to a fairly narrow set of conditions (one of them being a particular time frame, say within a decade of other conditions coming into existence). There must be a null hypothesis such that if certain conditions exist and a particular outcome still fails to obtain, then the theory is proven false. That people had been talking about war in the east for so long seems to me a bit like they were throwing darts at a dartboard until they hit the bull's eye and then saying, "Aha!" when they were eventually proven correct.
People talk about unforeseen circumstances for why there wasn't war sooner (e.g. French Revolution/Napoleon, 1848 Revolutions, etc.), but that's a bit like the hedge fund manager who takes credit when the fund does well during the good years but then writes to his investors, "Due to a five sigma event..." Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made a career talking about this kind of thinking.
I should add that I do feel at some gut level that Lizard is right and that something is brewing. A lot of people do. Yet if I really believed that, maybe I would actually lay down a bet of some kind by going long or short particular investments. It might be laziness/fear on my part that I haven't, or it might just be that it's really hard to predict these things specifically, which is part of the problem. Bubbles of one form or another (and we could call this a peace bubble) don't/can't last forever, yet timing is, of course, everything.
On a long enough time line, virtually anything is possible, perhaps even more so if some people believe it/want it (at which point it might become self-reinforcing). If, as you say, the origins go back to 1906 or 1912, why not then? (I am partially playing devil's advocate with you here, and partially saying that I actually don't know the specifics and am asking you why.) To use some other examples, both China and Russia had several failed revolutions. The final revolutions seem inevitable in retrospect, but was it simply a case of throwing enough darts at a dart board and eventually hitting a bull's eye, or was it actually more in each case? This relates to my point about looking for your keys. You do find them eventually, but there's a lot going on under the surface at the time.
Under what circumstances can we actually set up a falsifiable argument regarding world history, since everything is judged primarily with relation to itself in retrospect? What I mean by that is that a theory such as that proposed in the OP should have fairly good predictive power down to a fairly narrow set of conditions (one of them being a particular time frame, say within a decade of other conditions coming into existence). There must be a null hypothesis such that if certain conditions exist and a particular outcome still fails to obtain, then the theory is proven false. That people had been talking about war in the east for so long seems to me a bit like they were throwing darts at a dartboard until they hit the bull's eye and then saying, "Aha!" when they were eventually proven correct.
People talk about unforeseen circumstances for why there wasn't war sooner (e.g. French Revolution/Napoleon, 1848 Revolutions, etc.), but that's a bit like the hedge fund manager who takes credit when the fund does well during the good years but then writes to his investors, "Due to a five sigma event..." Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made a career talking about this kind of thinking.
I should add that I do feel at some gut level that Lizard is right and that something is brewing. A lot of people do. Yet if I really believed that, maybe I would actually lay down a bet of some kind by going long or short particular investments. It might be laziness/fear on my part that I haven't, or it might just be that it's really hard to predict these things specifically, which is part of the problem. Bubbles of one form or another (and we could call this a peace bubble) don't/can't last forever, yet timing is, of course, everything.