In other settings, I say that the national organization has neglected the programs and the culture for 75 years.

You are confirming the statement. They are both badly neglected.

More important context are current BSA youth and incoming generations of BSA Scout parents.

To them, SA = sexual assault.

I am a human, and I wrote that.

I wrote that piece, and I am human. BTW, AI checkers are garbage. Even though your stat is heavily in my favor, I urge you not to use that stuff.

It is not rage bait. It's good-faith commentary on how a movement has become lost.

Thanks for the reply. Um. In this particular text, I tend do disagree.

I wrote this. I am a human.

I am confident you invested greatly in the program in good faith.

It's hard to learn of problems with something we deeply invested in. I've been there. It took me years to work through this struggle and come to these positions.

But I find there's an excellent case that BSA can do much better. And it must, or it's going to collapse within 10 years.

The good thing is "do better" is right in front of us. It means catching up with international peers, adopting lessons learned from and norms in our own society, and eliminating irrational deviations from longstanding notions of what Scouting is.

On the one hand you're right, on the other hand all these complaints people are talking about really do feel like from the 1970s and that's not the reality of today

This is all great, and it's even better when it's done in the context of properly age-banded programs.

Many times, the high schooler wants to do different things than the 6th grader. And even when they do the same activity, approaches will be different.

All age bands deserve age-level programming.

Today's reality is that 90% of BSA's high schoolers are stuck in its middle-school program. They aren't getting age-level programming.

BSA has never strongly denied this. Instead, it acts as if handing the reins of its middle-school program to high schoolers constitutes age-level programming for high schoolers. It does not.

It even further muddies the water, recommending mixed-age patrols. Yes, for real, your freshly crossed-over 10 year old is supposed to be in the same patrol as a 17 yo high-school senior. That is weird. But BSA thinks it's appropriate.

To be clear, I think cross-age-band interactions can have value, but they must be optional, and they must never displace age-level programming. I have separately proposed a new position called Guide. It is a position of responsibility where any youth may elect to help with any younger program. This is a service role, not supervision, not displacing younger youth from owning their program. This replaces Den Chief, Instructor, Junior Asst. Scoutmaster, and Troop Guide.

But importantly, and to reemphasize, Guide must be OPTIONAL. Scouting in no way depends on cross-age-band interactions. They are a value add when they work well. But the BSA view on these interactions resembles a fetish and lacks a rational basis.

The 2020 drop was 1/3 LDS pullout, 1/3 pandemic.

The spring membership numbers reveal this. Mid-spring is when the lapsed members from the prior year finally get dropped. Spring 2020 was before the pandemic had any real effect on membership (main recruiting is in the fall), so that is when LDS's withdrawal became apparent.

Then spring 2021 is when we see drops and poor recruiting during the pandemic.

Since then, membership has been largely flat, possibly declining modestly (hard to read precisely).

That text reads like AI output, where I commonly see two short sentences that describe a dichotomy in the “This is not… This is…” pattern.

Therefore, that these sentences don’t describe the situation great could be due to poorly vetted copy-paste of AI text.

LibreOffice using AI against Microslop/anything related to it doesn't feel very Libreoffice of it to me.

I know that this pattern is used by AI but it only said this is, one time not two times and then continued with It is rather than the pattern that you mention. An AI would've probably used "This" second time instead of "It" most likely given that its probably really trained on it.

I mean, we do use "this is" in a sentence atleast once like they did.

How else do you want them to write this point :/

I don't think that Libreoffice team is using AI to write their messages.