Quote - Well, concerning the imminent collapse of civilization, thousands upon thousands of self-appointed "prophets" throughout all of history would agree, except in regard to their own times and their own cultures. A few were right, the vast majority were wrong. History is replete with Chicken Littles screaming the sky is falling and the end of the world -- or at least as they know it; and occasionally -- as one might statistically expect -- they are right.

History is replete with prophets who said "peace, peace", when there was no peace.  Or at least they knew it, and frequently -- they were wrong.

Many of those soothing (It's always been this way......so no need for concern.  Go back to sleep.)  prophets had a lot to say just prior to WWI and WWII.  Not to mention just prior to many other similar events of the more distant past.

It's recently been claimed that over all of recorded human history, there has been 20 years of cumulative "true world peace".  Personally, I tend to doubt that figure.  The "chicken littles" of today have good cause.  The "chcken littles" who took Hitler at his word, before that man had actually moved -- Winston Churchill foolishly believed that Hitler actually meant the things that he had said in Mein Kampf -- i.e. -- that Hitler wasn't just kidding around -- some of us likewise foolishly believe that the leaders of nations like Iran actually mean the things that they are saying that they are going to do to us today.  And that they will be only too happy to carry their words out at the first opportunity.

Those "chicken littles" of the early 20th century were disbelieved at the time by the soothing prophets of peace (of course).

Statistically speaking, I wonder who was right.......?

Quote - Perhaps you will be one of them. On your death bed perhaps you can let me know.

Boy, the places where Freudian analysis could go with that one..........

Quote - And really, Xeno, on the rest of it, you insist on missing much of my point.

Nope.  I just insist on responding to you various points, and pointing out the flaws in them.

Quote - That all these things happen today I don't contest.

Good.

Quote - Much of my point was that much of what happened in yesteryears was simply never documented and the information never disseminated, either because they were not considered crimes or because those who documented and disseminated such things were nonexistent or in such short supply. We simply don't know how many abortions there were when it was only midwives and pregnant women performing them. We don't have a very good idea how many people were killed in the streets either. We don't know how many kids were abducted or sexually abused.

Oh, there were always bad times.  Frequently brought on by people's behavior as a culture......cultures which were comprised of individuals, making individual cultural choices in keeping with their times.  Choices which brought about certain results.  Which takes us back to the examples that we have from history as to the places where certain types of accepted cultural mores will take us........because we have the pattern, oft repeated, of others who've tried the same sorts of social experiments which we are bent on trying today.  From which we expect to see different results than they did -- which someone has called the definition of insanity.

As for "not knowing"......in the Old West (one of the periods to which you refer) -- there wasn't nearly as much internecine warfare as the Saturday Matinee westerns would tend to lead someone to believe.  It depends upon your sources for your history, I suppose.

However, it's easy to suggest that there was a whole lotta child abductin', etc. goin' on that we didn't know about.  Because making such a completely unfounded suggestion represents an attempt to mitigate the guilt of the current era, by implying that "it was always like that -- we just didn't know about it".

When did a high school student shoot up his school a couple of generations ago?  And why was it OK for kids to ride their bicycles down to the creek in 1955, but not today?

Quote - Of course, we can guess, and historians can infer, but the fact is that there was simply not the ubiquity of law enforcement or news media or scholars or researchers or institutions which kept track of all these various statistics -- or at least certainly not even remotely on the scale that we have today.

True -- you are engaging in guessing.  That's correct.

But once again: you are attempting to dodge around my point by first obliquely admitting to it: and then speaking wonderingly of why others can't grasp your logic.  Now that's funny.

Yep, bad things happened "back then" as a result of the paths that people chose to follow "back then".  And while no modern statistician was there at the time to analyze things to a .001% sample (snort), and do so just as accurately as they do today ()........yet the results of their choices remain for us to read in the ruins.

BTW - as a side note on statistical matters: there has yet to be a presidential election since (and including) 1980 where the polls favored the Republican candidate.  The Democrat was always supposed to win -- every single time.  Including in 2004.

Quote - As far as having TV way back then, too, I said several decades, and then, it was 3 channels, no internet, and in a social culture in which most "national" news was almost exclusively about Washington and major metropolitan areas, and many parts of the country strove mightily (as some still do) to keep their crimes and "weird goings on" under wraps for fear it would give their community a bad reputation.

Uh......so what's different today?  Beyond the existence of the internet?  And the addition of some cable news channels?  Big steps, I'll acknowledge.  But people had ready access to information back then, too.

Quote - And as far as 410 A.D. goes, and whoever the original owners of Greek and Roman civilization were (who, based on your argument, apparently must have lived for hundreds of years, i.e., not being dead yet), I'll read a little bit more if you will ... but Rome went through a lot of upheavals, up, down, and sideways, and though it was once widely accepted among historians like Gibbons -- whose work is now well over 200 years old -- that 410 was the "official" date of the "fall" -- more recent scholarship suggests that particular take on things is very much an oversimplification ...

Where the part about "thinking that the original owners of the Greek and Roman civilizations lived for hundreds of years" came from escapes me.  The "original owners" refers to a society, a culture.  Not to individual human beings. :rolleyes:

Yep.  It's simplified.  As I mentioned earlier: it was a simple matter for the Roman women to grasp.  Vestiges continued after 410.  Vestiges always do.  But there was a cultural / historical process which led up to 410.  And we're doing an excellent job of mimicking that process today.

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