So, I guess what this means is if you have ETH, and the game forks in the future, you're at an unfortunate likelihood of becoming, ahem...forked yourself just by the odds of which tine you ended up on. Is that right? In other words, any forking (sorry, having trouble with my fingers trying to autocorrect :) ) is just as likely to be in your favor as against it, you have no control over the forking, so basically as a wise consumer holding ETH you'd...just really super discourage anyone getting any crazy ideas like forking into their head ever again. Is that it? Is this how a conservative democracy starts?
Any blocks created before the fork are on both forks. Therefore, any coins minted before the fork are on both forks. If you had 1 ETH before ETC broke off, you ended up with 1 ETH and 1 ETC. Think of it like a stock split. If you had 1 share of AAPL and held it through four 2:1 stock splits, you now hold 8 shares of AAPL (2x4). The question is which fork gets used/valued the most. Most people who held ETH sold their ETC shortly after the fork. There's no reason they can't both be successful, it's just devoting the same amount of energy to both forks can roughly be presumed to produce half the results on each one.