IS IT GETTING MEAN AROUND HERE??

That does not explain it, because a good mind can quickly sift through the crappola. The Bad education, which is not even really education anymore but is rather indoctrination and worker training does better to explain what we see, and till about 10 years ago that was my answer. But there is some more fundamental failure. We are watching people give up on intelligence as being an aid in life, we are watching logic and its result science being degraded, we are watching a kind of hopeless purposeful ignorance in a lot of people now. And a huge emptiness, a lack of there being any there there when we talk about their inner life. And a profound lack of shame in their situation and lack of production as a human being, or for ******* over other people, the next generation being example #1.

This is big, and this sucks.

I have not figured out yet what is going on, but whatever it is is strongly connected to why this civilization is ending.

Nobody believed that Rome could fall, even the Germanic soldiers and kings who besieged it were shocked when it happened. The thing had dominated this part of the world for so long... Everybody thought it was eternal. Long after its fall, people were still trying to reconstruct it: Charlemagne for instance.

Maybe you are right that these things cannot be predicted, and that the doomsday preachers always get it wrong. But western civilization as we know it WILL end. In any case, it is changing quite fast. Democracy in particular doesn't mean much anymore.

I don't agree that western civilization is ending. How would it end?

Why doesn't democracy mean much anymore? The state of democracy looks healthy to me.

Since the end of the Cold War, the assumption among most political theorists has been that as nations develop economically, they will also become more democratic—especially if a vibrant middle class takes root. This assumption underlies the expansion of the European Union and much of American foreign policy, bolstered by such examples as South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and even to some extent Russia. Where democratization has failed or retreated, aberrant conditions take the blame: Islamism, authoritarian Chinese influence, or perhaps the rise of local autocrats. But what if the failures of democracy are not exceptions? In this thought-provoking study of democratization, Joshua Kurlantzick proposes that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the past two decades, is not just a series of exceptions. Instead, it reflects a new and disturbing trend: democracy in worldwide decline. The author investigates the state of democracy in a variety of countries, why the middle class has turned against democracy in some cases, and whether the decline in global democratization is reversible.

Hi Osso. I'll probably end up just posting less here, and more elsewhere... You'll be the only one to notice. :-)

Also, whenever you need a short break from one board, one of the other ones is sure to have something going on. If you switch your primary attention from one board to another as your interest wanders, you can ultimately stay interested in all the boards over a longer period of time.

A2k members post a lot less in summer months when they spend more time enjoying their lives outdoors. We get these predictions of doom for the site almost every year when it happens.

I was pointing out your insult, when you said that FF would appreciate romance threads, presumably because she's a woman. That is intellectually shallow, sexist and extremely insulting.

Yup, that's as intellectually shallow as you can get.

feminists are enslaving us all, poor me, poor me,

I imagine I'll be here for as long as people want to graffiti themselves in a language nobody they know understands.

Quote:

Hawkeye's regular pronouncements on the end of A2k is where the use of Chicken Little originally came from.

But, in the almost 11 years I've been here, I've never made such pronouncements until now.

I really feel like the bottom has fallen out of this place, on all fronts. I've mentioned the decline in the discussion threads, but even in many of the trivia and game threads, I've seen a marked slow-down in responses, much more noticeable than anything I can recall in the past, and it seems like these days we barely have any "community" participation in birthday threads, or get well threads, to express positive feelings or support for each other.

I miss the way A2K used to be, I used to enjoy coming here. I really can't say that these days. And, judging by how many have left here, or barely post any more, I'm not the only one.