oh, wait, we almost forgot

you're the one who can't discern between the acts of consenting adults and the rape of children and animals

hope your neighbors don't have kids - or pets - you sound dangerous

I didn't make it up. It's in any biology textbook. Not sure where you are going.

Again, you need to be more clear. How does what "I" do effect the abstract topic we are discussing?

fxashun;

i would think that the fact that slavery, genocide and female oppression are not part of todays society illustrates an improvement in societies morality.

extramarital sex is hardly new, children out of wedlock hardly new, families decaying with time and parents neglecting their children hardly new. a society of poor, uneducated, unprepared, married monoganous couples is not going to decline any slower.

slavery, female oppression, genocide IS an immoral society. and one that existed centuries ago. we have IMPROVED since then.

you hypocrite. how often have you argued that the behaviour of other animals does not relate to humans ?

sure, society changes. america in the 1890s did not have a problem with islamic extremism. the 1950s did not have a problem with internet porn. but these societies still had their problems. my point is that there has been continuous and repetitious predictions of "societies inevitable decline" for as long as we have had society. overall though, society has been slowly improving. there are ups and downs, sure, but it has hardly been the inevitable decline into the abyss that the doomsayers have been claiming for hundreds of years.

Actually variations of them are well ingrained into MANY more societies than they should be. They aren't gone. And I didn't mean they don't exist, just that they aren't part of the criteria that the OP considered.

And in the past there were safety nets to catch the fall-out. Families were larger, closer nit, and many generations deep. The growing number of social dropouts, prisoners, homeless, etc show that in the U.S. society, those safety nets are failing us. Those things may not be new, but we are not in the social position to be able to absorb those failures any more. When a young lady's life turns for the worse and she has no parents, cousins, siblings to turn to, the government is hardly a reliable safety net for the average single mother.

In those ways yes, but again those aspects are separate from the topics discussed in the OP. If you are drowning, and you are saved from that life threatening situation, that doesn't mean you can't still starve to death.

I don't know? How many? "Herding" works in many human social systems too. Many of them older than ours. And unlike in the cases where I assume you are referring, herding is THE way the species lives, not just some disordered offshoot. There's a difference between justifying a defective situation by pointing out other defective animals. In this case "herding" is an evolved instinct practiced by many species.
Pointing out albino individual animals in other species doesn't mean that albinism in humans isn't a disorder.

We've had plenty of wars and conflicts to make up for the lack of Islamic Extremism. Internet porn is new, but visual porn is as old as drawing on a wall, and is it a problem? Some aspects of society have been improving, but we have others that are falling on it's face. Our manufacturing base, our intellectual property superiority, even companies that have been bedrocks of our economy are moving most of their labor overseas or simply going out of business. But those aren't in the OP.

Promiscuity ends up creating broken families and more promiscuity. And even if a father does pay child support, that in turn weakens any family that he might have or form later. Again lessening familial iintegrity and creating more promiscuity.

A decrease in fidelity leads to broken families and is caused by promiscuity.

A decrease in moral fortitude leads to infidelity and promiscuity.

If you consider the family the bedrock of society which is the ultimate social safety net, and I do, then you can see that a decline in "family values" will eventually cause a decline in a society as a whole. Most kids are born out of wedlock. Even among married couples, you have many of them divorcing, leaving the family in the lurch. Single parents can support raising a child, but is that parent really raising that child or is the child care worker doing most of the work? In our economy, two parents working can hardly provide a comfortable stable environment, how can a single parent do it and still spend the time with a child that it needs? But we'll see, all we have is time. $4 gas, rising food costs, limited affordable housing, backlash against welfare are all conspiring to put the pinch on families. We'll see what social safety net comes up next to save us and keep our society "improving" as you see it.

you have limited your argument to saying lets look at this OP not think outside the parameters of the research.

but that makes it a circular argument. the OP discusses marriage, separation, births outside marriage, etc. the rates of these are changing. then you define social decay as changes in these items. so all you are saying is that an increase in the divorce rate means we have more divorces. this does not mean society is decaying, just that we are having mroe divorces.

if you want to then link increased divorces to social decay, you have to look outside this article. and when you do that, things are not all bad.

and you do realise that issues like the price of gas, quality parent time, housing are not in this OP ? so you should not bring them up, unless you agree that it is reasonable to talk about things not in the OP. which of course it is. so if it is reasonable to talk about gas prices and quality parent time, why is it unreasonable to talk about slavery, institutionalised sexism and genocide ?

But there were other criteria as well. Not just divorce.

I didn't discuss them. Just pointing out that they exist. That's why they are at the end of the post. And those are more pressing to the average U.S. family than slavery, genocide, or female oppression. Because honestly, slavery and genocide never effected White people negatively in the U.S. And "female oppression" didn't stop this country from becoming a world powerhouse.

that women voted to stop acting like thuggish colonials and give people their freedom ?

Nawww, you nancies just let it slip through your bloody fingers you did!