Where the current Islamic State crisis is concerned and the kidnapping of all those poor girls in Nigeria - I think it is the sheer scale of the horror that stops people from starting threads. If you look at the political threads on here they are all concerned with what the government or oposition has done, hasn't done, should do or shouldn't do - none of which, despite the shock/horror expressed by some posters is really going to bring the world crashing down around our ears.
Faced with the kind of nightmare happening in Iraq, Nigeria and even Gaza, however, we are overwhelmed and ultimately voiceless because what can we possibly say that would help anyone or even alleviate our own horror? Blaming America, Islam, Israel, or Russia is ultimately pointless, because the causes of these conflicts are so convoluted and stretch so far back into history that they have taken on a momentum of their own quite ouside any considerations of right or wrong or whose fault it is.
I think our belief in the permanence of our own civilisation has been shaken to the core. Nothing lasts forever: the Roman Empire collapsed, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the British Empire collapsed and so did the Soviet Union. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Western Democracy will also collapse. It probably won't be in my life time, It may be in my grandchildren's and it may be that the system which overruns it is islam - Sharia Law.
If so, then that system won't last either - at least not in its present state -because no system can endure wthout evolving and Sharia Law is still stuck in the days of the Reformation and the Inquisition. It simply does not have the flexibility to cope with the the modern technological and scientific age.
