I've posted a long comment on Roissy's blog detailing many trends I interpret as decline for America and the West.
LINK
I also engage in some subsequent conversations mostly related to this post.
I intend to break up this long comment into smaller, more detailed blog entries and will use this post as the "table of contents" for that effort.
I also intend to create a list of indicators of American and Western Decline and welcome community input to sharpen the accuracy of this list, including dissenting opinions.
I'll link all these goodies from this post as I develop them.
I'm just a dude who's got a certain level of understanding trying his best within his own limitations to figure out what the *bleep* is going on, why and what should be done to deal with that. I think most other folks are in a similar boat. I don't pretend to have all the answers. Please enlighten me if you think I'm full of it.
Eventually I'd like to explore creating a community site that allows more decentralized collaboration (i.e. get's me out of the middle). I like to err on the side of free speech and letting everyone's contributions speak for themselves, good or bad, although perhaps enabling some tools to allow individuals to filter out those they find extremely time-wasting without preventing others from listening to their messages.
Moving
10 years ago
Posts
SF, I followed you here from Roissy's because I think you make a lot of sense. That said, I'll echo some of the other commenters there and recommend you watch the unorthodox capitalization. For some reason, unstable whackos really seem to like odd capitalization, and it's a shame to lose credibility over something so minor.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion.
ReplyDeleteWhen I created that comment I was foolishly thinking that:
1) Bolding might help some people that had non-standard readers capture the emphasis,
2) It would be ease the reading of such a massive post by being less visually monotonous.
I'm not going to bold anymore but I do kinda like the occasional all caps word or phrase for emphasis. Do you think this has the same crackpot vibe?
Italics for emphasis come off as classier and more sophisticated, but the occasional all-caps word shouldn't hurt. Less is more, though.
ReplyDeleteIn the above post you've got, "I'm just a Dude," which looks more like a typo, and "indicators of American and Western Decline," which rings my crackpot bell. Capitalizing portentous phrases like "Western Decline" tends to look strange.
Thanks for the feedback.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the Dude thing is me using my casual voice.
I'm still a bit new to writing these sort of essays so I've got some room to improve my style, punctuation and grammar. I plan to look at a book or two over the next few months towards this end.