this is dissected on snopes.com.

some of the most important points:
"Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University is not the source of any of the statistics or the text attributed to him."

the guy was an author but it is not likely he wrote the quote, the books "The Fall of the Athenian Republic" or "The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic" are not listed in the library of congress.

the county murder rates are wrong, it is closer to:
Gore: 6.5
Bush: 4.1

given that gore voters live in highly urbanized areas while it is not uncommon for some bush voters to live in areas where people per mile is less than 1, the murder rate is obviously going to be higher in crowded areas.

Thanks for such a great post, quite insightful. Those with strong math backgrounds will understand that stats can be used to show or support any position.

As for the figure on counties won, it is absolutely irrelevent to voting, both in terms of actual voters and in terms of the electoral college. As for square miles, also totally irrelevent. Number of states, irrelevent outside electoral counts which are based on population. Murder rate, irrelevent. What your Professor Olson leaves out is the well known detail that Gore won the highly concentrated urban areas with the first rings of the suburbs, and Bush won the outer suburbs all the way out to to include most all rural America. This is what the above figures represent. It is easy to then figure square miles of land and it's not beyond common sense to say that 85% of murders occer in the city and more urban areas. Olson also leaves out the actual number of People voting for Gore/ Bush, of which Gore won by several percentage points. Why was this figure left out?

To then speculate and generalize that urban folks all live in government housing and are dependent upon gov't is just bad logic. She also fails to qualify her statement about who pays taxes by prefacing it with 'property'. Hmm, who owns more property and therefor pays taxes on it, rural folks with large spreads or city folks house-sharing? I live in the city and I pay taxes, but I must be an anomaly??

Her last conclusion, however may ring most true, ironically. She implies that those voting for Bush are stuck somewhere between apathy and complacency, while those voting for Gore are already into living in full gov't dependency. But she then fails to continue with her own reasoning. Specifically, that of these last 40%, a good majority have in fact moved through bondage and into spiritual faith. If you have ever spent any time with the homeless population you would find them to be quite spiritually adept. There is yet another entire community moved also into courage. These are the folks the right likes to call unpatriotic, yes the anti-war crowd, they are anything but apathetic or complacent. That is why they are called progressives, they are the leading edge of cultural evolution and, when the time is ripe, will lead us into the Revolution. Let's all say Amen!

I made no coclusions at all. This is an email floating on the net.

I think the Scottish prof is more in tune with mobocracy, rather than a republic with constraints to deal with falls and rises--in this nation at least. Moreover, Britain seems to have lasted much longer as a democracyof sorts.

During the debt crisis of the 1980s, the IMF, backed by the Reagan and Bush administrations, forced most of the third world to downsize public employment, devalue currencies and open their domestic markets to imports. The results everywhere were an explosion of urban poverty and sharp fall-offs in public services.

But if everyone just got married and found Jesus, everything would be fine.

I finally realized why it is that things that zap across the net in email forwards have been squicking me. They fall into the mailboxes of people who see them with no commentary. The "neocons" and those that list towards that side in their ideological sympathies, tend to like that. They can state some case and have it believed without question. They're into authority and think it should not BE questioned, after all. To be fair, I've seen this done by more liberal sorts as well, and I STILL don't like it. I try to help people understand that email forwards are not a two way communication. For some reason it's often hard to actually send an email back to whoever sent it to me, which usually ends up being someone I don't know at all since folks who know me know I squick on forwarding.

Anyway. The trouble with the civilization cycle theory is that if one looks one can see prevailing elements of ALL these stages at any given 'phase' in this 'cycle'. I am assuming he's trying to make the tired point that welfare has destroyed our great land. Sigh. Look, I live in a bad part of San Francisco. I see people abuse welfare. I see them use it. It's a safety net and as that it works and saves lives, takes people into independence who want to get there. If they don't, all the checks in the world won't change that. It still doesn't mean that I would choose to take the net away and put everyone into a "overwork or undereat" mode. It's not fair, but that doesn't matter, because people can't expect fairness. It's the fact that it is compassionate that's the key.

When we lose our touch with those less fortunate than ourselves and become unwilling to help them, that's just another slippery-slopeslide into decadence, every bit as much of one as things like overindulgences of the urban poor - the oversex/overdrugging/overfeeding that the anti-welfare people are constantly harping on, telling us that this is good enough reason for people to starve, that it's always someone else causing the whole problem.One can easily find excuses to think that the failures of poor people all MUST be their own faults, and since tone will hate having their emotional strings pulled by seeing them suffer, it becomes convenient to think "If s/he's starving, it's her own damn fault, so what if I want to spend millions of dollars on a yacht. I earned that right!" Think like this long enough and we become people who are so cold we are much more like machines instead of people. Though I do understand the frustration, it's only a short distance from this to the generation that thinks of it in even less compassionate terms: "So just obliterate ALL the creeps! They're...ethnic, or druggies, or they have AIDS - Can't we just exterminate them and be done with it?". It disturbs me that I have seen lots of this talk on messageboards lately, by people half my age who have no family members who lived during the 1940s anywhere around them, who might have had some dark but enlightening stories to tell about this kind of thinking and what comes of it.

I agree about being compassionate towards the poor whether or not their economic state is their own fault or by chance. However, i believe that compassion should be up to the indivicual and not the government. If you have the money to buy a million dollar yacht, buy yourself the next size down and give the rest to the poor. That is more compassionate than having the government pick your pocket and give your money away for you.

I think Islam will spread across the world, because the West is hypocritical about how it destroys people, the environment and the world. I think the so-called middle class who are racist hypocrites, support the elites, until the evils of the elite comes around and gets them. Look at how jobs, white collar jobs are exported around to third world countries. Now, and only now the middle class are complaining because the elites they voted for are now using illegal immigrants ( the same people the Republicans scapegoat) as cheap labor. I live on Long Island which is close enough to New York city, so I hate the fake Republicans who have silver spoons in their mouths and never fought in a war and the poor bigot who vote for them because they think it will keep minoriites in line, woman and make them feel more elitist and more confident that they have someone to pick on, but evil comes around and now the elites will destroy the middle class with high taxes, and they will pull your children to fight enemies that were once our allies. I hate the Democrats, because being black, they have a Communist agenda, where one has to submit to giving all your information and privacy to the state to get meager wages and benefits. There are a predatory group of poor who steal, rob, rape and lie----but ironically, the courts and society allow them to get light sentences and they are allowed to be criminal. The police are known drug dealers, but people ignore this fact and they are not punished, neither are white collar criminals. And the Republicans, who do no believe in freedom, but slavery, low wages and more money for the rich, are just as evil as gang members and welfare scum (the latter whom scapegoats the rich and blame them for all the ills in society, the Republicans do the same, yet isn't it gang warfare when they send poor kids to fight over oil) I never will vote for self-righteous Republicans who use religion, marriage, and old-fashioned phony values to justify their aggression, wars, evils and white collar crime---and racism. The Democrats basically enforce modern slavery by a communist system that rewards criminals and drug dealers then blames the rich, but because of defeatist mentality, the poor are still not able to rise, and become victims of corrupt politicians. I think both parties are probably working together to undermine the poor to stay on top, because both parties steal tax money for either jails, bad medical care, welfare, corporate and ghetto, and wars. Social Security will be used up by 2019. I think another religion will take over soon. bloocatgirl@yahoo.com