Personally I doubt this thread is leading to a flame war. It's been a spirited discussion about politics certainly but people in general are attacking the politics and not the forum member who raised the argument - this is how it should be conducted.
There is no way that you can have freedom of speech on a forum if the forum does not allow people to voice their opinion - however if anyone wants to exercise their free speech they should damned well take full responsibility for what they say and the effects it has.
Now that that rant is over, I'll go on to other things.
Cpl. Kalkwarf mentioned the notion of the end of the world because of all the things happening in the world today. Frankly, I see the media causing this more than any real world thing. Earthquakes, riots, volcanoes, cults, ethnic wars and so on ad nauseum, have occurred ever since humans started to compete with each other for resources. 200 years ago, it would take 3-6 months for the news to travel from one continent to another, 500 years ago it could take a full year. At that time only the most important news was transmitted and everything else (such as a minor earthquake in Australia) was ignored as having no relevance in other countries.
These days someone in Denmark farts too loudly while on the toilet and the nextdoor neighbour has posted it to Twitter, Facebook, My Space, their own blog and the local news. Then Little Johnny Internet-boy in Antartica is reading about it 15 minutes later.
It isn't that more events are occurring, it's simply that more are being reported and what's worse, every time something does happen the media in an effort to make it more sensational, drags up every other example of such a thing happening - even when it bears no relevance to the current event.
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