[AdamB]

If you care to read it is accessible.

This is the modern world Newfie. Isn't there a BoobTube video we can watch symmarizing the highlights for the youngsters around here? I mean...reading? Do they even teach that in schools anymore in between participation exercises and handing out awards for showing up?

[Newfie]

I have been reading about the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. The presentation is disjointed but it reminds me a lot of our current situation.

In this late period Constantinople because even more obsessively concerned with dogmatic religious matters such as the exact nature of God and the wording of the Nicean Creed. Or at least that was the acknowledged focal point of dispute, from this vantage it sounds more like they were in a nasty internal battle for control of what was left. Like 2 tots fighting over a rag doll, they pulled it apart. In the meantime the Turks and Mongols had grander visions and were securing their ascendant empires. It is a case where the internal fighting was so intense the outside threa, common enemy, failed to unite them.

Today we have the aged political dynasties fightg over who controls what while there are outside forces which will destroy us all and these idiots can't quit squabbling.

Our outside enemies may be different; oil depletion, climate change, water, etc. But they are very real and being ignored over petty personal power grabs.

That is unlikely to end well

[AdamB]

Today we have the aged political dynasties fightg over who controls what while there are outside forces which will destroy us all and these idiots can't quit squabbling.

Don't see outside forces being America's problem Newfie. Strikes me that the internal forces might be quite sufficient all on their own.

Our outside enemies may be different; oil depletion, climate change, water, etc. But they are very real and being ignored over petty personal power grabs.

And political nonsense, reverse partisanship, the rule of law beginning to take a beating because of the deteriorating credibility and confidence in the Supreme Court, and on and on.

That is unlikely to end well

We all die Newfie. It NEVER ends well.

[C8]

Our outside enemies may be different; oil depletion, climate change, water, etc. But they are very real and being ignored over petty personal power grabs.

The reality is that democracy has a fatal flaw seldom taught in our schools- it exacerbates internal conflict. At some point, all democracies collapse from internal strife. Often, the first sign is when a democracy is forced to retreat from the holdings of its empire.

[Newfie]

Interesting thought.

How many democratic empires have their been?

[Plantagenet]

The reality is that democracy has a fatal flaw seldom taught in our schools- it exacerbates internal conflict.

Thats not a fatal flaw.......that is a strength. By having open debate and contention over political issues, democracies allow all sides of every issue to be explored and debated and fought over and then resolved.

It is dictatorships that have an innate fatal flaw. Countries like Russia under the dictator Putin or China under Xi or Germany under the Nazis are totally under the control of their great dictator, and when that dictator goes crazy, or even just makes a bad policy decision, there is no way for the system to correct it. People in Russia who are smart and brave and honest enough to oppose the Ukraine war, for example, are being arrested and harassed and beaten and jailed by Putin's toadies to suppress their views and opinions. The result is a country utterly ruled by the wishes of one lone madman....a country forced to pursue Putin's crazy policies without debate or discussion or dissent until crazy Putin leads Russia to disaster.




Consider crazy Putin's war in Ukraine and its effects on Russia. Already Putin has created an economic schism with Europe and instead turned his country into essentially a colony of China. Russia is now selling its coal, oil and other commodities to China at steep discounts to the actual world price for these items.....thats exactly what a colony does. A colony supplies cheap natural resources to its colonial masters, just as Russia is doing for China.

Cheers!

[AdamB]

The reality is that democracy has a fatal flaw seldom taught in our schools- it exacerbates internal conflict.

Thats not a fatal flaw.......that is a strength. By having open debate and contention over political issues, democracies allow all sides of every issue to be explored and debated and fought over and then resolved.

You mean, like abortion? Our democracy says it is illegal. Then our democracy says it is jim dandy fine. Then our democracy says here, it is okey-dokey. You take a step across an invisible line to over there, and you go to jail. How dare you be impregnated by your brother, now take it through gestation and raise like the object of a rapist's lust that it is.

Resolved is it?