[tonycavanagh]

re :Other forum-posters were incensed that I could not see the true evil stalking the world today—the United States of America, with the mendacious madman George W. Bush at the center of this expansionist evil empire, dispatching the U.S. Marine Corps to steal oil from innocent nations, subjugate them, and to slaughter babies there.

I read the story and found it laughable at best, but I am a firm supporter of the current war.

But the future he described just stretched my credibility too much

[Son Of The Godfather]

This is a long read, but a very interesting one.

I have no difficulty envisioning the possible future mapped out by the author.

[Cheburashka]

But the future he described just stretched my credibility too much
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The last 75 years of the 19th Century were a time of great progress in Europe.
I wonder what you would have said if I had met you in 1900 and said:

By 1925 all the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe will have collapsed into chaos and small successor states, riven by nationalism and petty jealousies.
That by 1950 well over half of the Jews in Europe will be massacred in a period of less than 10 years.
That one of the European great powers in a span of less than 25 years would massacre over 30 million of it's own citizens in an attempt to remake its social structure. And that these dead would be in addition to the deaths of millions of its own citizens in a great war.
By the end of the Century Europe will fall from the preeminent civilized continent into a shell that will not be able to admit to itself its own irrelevance in the 21st Century.

From the perspective of 1900 all these would seem impossible. Yet they all happened.
The future will be stranger that we imagine. It is likely to be stranger than we CAN imagine.