The only problem there is, they aren't going to go away on their own...........

@Dhiltong They are dying a natural death, and at some level they know it. That's why they are reacting so violently. In a few years whites will be a minority in America, and by the end of the century Christianity will no longer be the largest religion (it already represents a mere third of the people on earth). Fundamentalism is losing more and more adherents with each generation, and the ones that remain are less strident.

It's hard to keep this in mind with what's happening in American and elsewhere right now but hyper-conservatism is unsustainable. It's choking to death in its own excrement.

Sadly, it may lead us down one more rabbit-trail into one more dystopian box-canyon to exact its final pound of flesh from humanity. It will not die easily. But die it will. Hopefully it won't take a lot of bystanders along with it.

@mordant unfortunetly I think your dead wrong, the world is getting less intel agent and enlightened not more.
In the 1960’s a full 40% of Americans identified as atheist or agnostic, now less than 15%
At the beginning of the century, it was generally accepted that the world was round, evolution was true etc etc
Now, flat earthers, climate deniers,
In the past 100 years more nations have regressed into secularism than have come out of it
Europ is battening this as well with countries like Poland electing anti imagination Christian Right wing governments
Look at Iran, 60 years ago it was a free progressive society, today it is one of the most repressive regimes in the world
Women’s rights in the US are about to be taken back 50 to 100yrs
Schools in Birmingham England have stoped teaching science and evolution to be colturally sensative
While Canada looks good now with the progressive Justin Trudeau, we just finished 16 years of conservative governance, mr Trudeau will need a 16 year term to undo the damage rought by mr Harper and he is not going to get it,
The next Canadian government will likely be conservative and undo any progress made under liberal leadership
And this is the people making these decisions, it is the people who voted liberal in the last federal election that are so upset by liberal policy (honestly it’s pretty conservative) but still to liberal for the liberals who voted for it

In movies the good guys usually win, reality is not the movies, often the bad guys win, often good ideas are ignored and the shittiest worst thing imaginable is what actually comes to pass

We need to fight every day for the freedom we enjoy, we need to fight for education, equal rights etc etc. the forces of darkness don’t stop fighting when we win, they keep going, believe it or not there exists a large contingent of white men out there trying to pass laws so women and non whites can't vote.

All the freedoms we the people have fought for in the past, there is a contingent of rich powerful people trying to take those freedoms away, and so many of us have stopped fighting because we think we won years ago.

Sorry it’s getting darker, we are not on the up swing we are in the counter swing, it could get a lot darker befor it starts to get better

@TiernanMcCann That things appear ‘darker’ today than in the recent past is a recognition that we’re passing through a blip in history, when measured in decades and centuries. If you take the time to measure and observe trends over many centuries and over all continents, you cannot ignore the steady tendency, as has been described by many, including Steven Pinker, in his landmark book, ‘The Better Angels of Out Nature.’ We have, on the whole, progressed. We are beoming less violent with each generation. And when it comes to white men, we / they represent a small minority on this planet, and we’d better accept this fact, and learn to deal with it.

@TiernanMcCann I'd like a citation on "40% of Americans identified as atheist or agnostic in the 1960s". Never saw that figure before. It certainly wasn't my experience of the '60s.

Also note that I said we could well be heading for a dystopian interlude. This could, conceivably, last decades and cause untold human suffering and death.

That doesn't change the fact that authoritarianism isn't a sustainable strategy. The "thousand year reich" lasted about a decade, and at great cost and struggle even then.

No, we didn't and never will definitively and finally "win" our freedoms, it will always be a struggle against dysfunctional ideas because those ideas are part of the human condition. But there's a reason that, for example, American Christian fundamentalists are terrified right now. Why they will stop at nothing, make any compromise or rationalization they need to, to save themselves. That's desperation. And while the short term outcomes are ugly, I still have long-term optimism. How bad the short term will be is largely up to those of us who know better, and how hard we fight for what's right.