Is the West better? - Regarding freedom/human rights/oligarchs

[biozeminadae1]

If the West would just stop being gay it would be pretty good.

 

[Raoul_Duke]

If the West would just stop being gay it would be pretty good.

Haha, good one.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Is it difficult living your life viewing things as either one or the other, with no gray areas or mixtures?

Please be patient with him, he has autism.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

I swear to god the concepts of "Justice" and "Equity" are the most retarded concepts us humans came up with.

 

[Trapitalism]

It's better in the west. At least for now. You're not gonna go to jail if you deadname someone or say something else that is deemed "hate speech". Trust me, any controlling elite would ideally like to carry out more severe punishments than merely banning their social media accounts or firing them from their jobs. The oppression isn't *as* bad as in Russia or (especially) China, but it's quite clear it's heading in that direction.

 

[Hellbound Hellhound]

@Not just a contrarian For some reason it's not letting me quote your post directly, so I'm having to do this.

Violence and injustice are generic issues you're throwing out which exist everywhere, and there isn't even a reason to believe that there's less "injustice" in developed Western liberaldemocracies than elsewhere. How do we even define injustice? What is unjust?

Justice is doing right by someone, treating them fairly, and recognizing their humanity. In the absence of strong, codified legal systems, it simply doesn't exist, and we can see clear examples of this all throughout history; most notably in the form of slavery and serfdom.

It is patently false to suggest that liberal democracies have comparative levels of injustice to autocratic or tribal societies; just look at their human rights records for comparison.

Credulity? My dude, if this is a jab at religion... religion gives us a sense of the sacred, it allows us to value what's around us.

Religion can also impose draconian restrictions upon the individual if it is not strongly bound by secular constraints, and we can definitely observe this in the country you cited as one of the places you'd prefer to live: Pakistan. Pakistan is most definitely not a "freer" society than Germany or the Netherlands; not if you're a minority, or someone with even slightly heterodox opinions.

No, that's the foundation of Common Law, it isn't the foundation of European judicial systems, for example, or those of most of the world. In fact, it's the whim of the state ("contained" and codified in constitutions and legal codes) that's the foundation of most Western judicial systems.

Except it's not based upon whim; it's based upon axiom and precedent. The state in Western societies cannot arbitrarily create laws which profoundly limit a person's rights without significant legal hurdles, and the same cannot be said for societies which don't have this legal apparatus. This was precisely my point to you; freedom is about much more than just how powerful the state is.

You won't get rid of authority that easily and I wouldn't even want to, but the authorities we have today are inorganic, unnatural, artificial. They are not the product of any real social or historical development but rather the practical application of some formulas conceived by some idiots three centuries ago. The state, especially the modern one, is an abstraction you're beaten and forced and taxed into pretending it's real when it isn't, on its own it's just papers, but these papers have physical enforcers. This is not a natural thing, this is not how human societies work.

Define "natural". Human societies have continually evolved since most of us were living as hunter gatherers, and there are plenty of things which once seemed normal to people which would now appall us, and vice versa. One of the main reasons the modern state evolved into being was because thinking people recognized how beneficial it would be to have clear limits imposed upon people in positions of authority, because in the absence of this clarity, tyranny prevails.

We didn't need laws and fines to not go around naked or not kill each other, it was social custom and pressure. It wasn't the state you needed to fear if you acted wrongly, but your fellow man, the punishment was the shame and the humiliation from the people you knew but the state has replaced itself to our neighbour as the enforcer of conduct (one that I can't even necessarily call good one), the abstraction has replaced the physical and that's one of my biggest beefs with the modern world: it's idealistic, by which I don't mean that it fantasises impossibile upheavals but literally that it makes you act according to ideas (the ones contained in the god-papers) rather than material life around you.

The crucial point you're missing is that under the modern state you decry, ordinary people have much more freedom. This brings us to the next point:

What kind of empowerment do you see here? How is cohercion by abstraction better than pressure by society?

Empowerment is having control over your own life, and the social pressure which exists in more parochial societies often profoundly limits this. If the state intervenes in order to prevent some individuals from limiting the freedom of other individuals, then the net result is more freedom for everyone.

 

[Homophobic white dog]

Justice is doing right by someone, treating them fairly, and recognizing their humanity. In the absence of strong, codified legal systems, it simply doesn't exist, and we can see clear examples of this all throughout history; most notably in the form of slavery and serfdom.

And everyone has his own definition of what is just. To a homeless person squatting in a man's fifth apartment, "justice" is letting him live there regardless of whether he formally owns the apartment or not, because he's homeless and from his point of view the owner has plenty of other apartments. From the point of view of the owner, "justice" is defending his rights over that property, even if that means kicking out a homeless person. If your standard of what is just and unjust is merely the law, then it is just to kick out the homeless because squatting and abusivism are illegal, but is it really? Does the homeless have no point at all? How much really worth is the deed of property over that apartment?

Slavery and serfdom weren't abolished because they were "unjust", you're full of ideology here, they were eliminated because 1) they had become inefficient relative to more modern methods of agriculture and manufacturing 2) the people who made use of these more modern means, by forcing the abolishment of these systems, would also abolish or fagocitate the slavemasters and feudal landowners who lived by them and owned the state until then. Between the southern slave owner and the northern industrialist it was a life or death battle to own the federal government, and when the southern slaveowner figured that he couldn't own it anymore, let alone compete with increasingly mechanized northern agriculture and foreign importations from barely-paid Indians... he made his own government.
Not that moralistic arguments weren't used to rationalize their abolition, but they could have never been enough compared to the material reality of the inefficiency of these practices, and if there would have been no material need to abolish it, if they wouldn't have been obsolete by then, the moralistic arguments would have been laughed at by everyone. They were just ideological tools.
We think of slavery and serfdom as unjust today only in hindsight, because we can afford not to have them in this rich, spoiled, developed world with tractors and factories, but if you would have lived in the 1st century you would consider owning people AND their labor a necessity, and nobody thought the practice itself immoral, at best they had rules on how to treat the slaves. The most moral person from the 1st century might have told you that it was all a bit morally icky, but as long as you don't whip them gratuitously and make them eat well, there isn't really a problem.
A feudal landowner in 15th century Europe would tell you that he was light years ahead of a slaveowner because he didn't own the people who lived on his little piece of land, he "only" bound them to it, and seized a part of their produce while allowing them to live their life.
All of this without counting that, in reality, the laws abolishing these practices replaced other laws that also enabled and regulated them. The state giveth, the state taketh away.

Absolute justice might exist, but we live in such conditions that we can't even see it with a telescope. Too many competing interests in which everyone is sort of right and sort of wrong.

Religion can also impose draconian restrictions upon the individual if it is not strongly bound by secular constraints, and we can definitely observe this in the country you cited as one of the places you'd prefer to live: Pakistan. Pakistan is most definitely not a "freer" society than Germany or the Netherlands; not if you're a minority, or someone with even slightly heterodox opinions.

No, it really can't, not on its own. The best it can do is threaten you with a bad time, but that's just it: a threat. Neither Hell nor negative karma and inferior reincarnations or both are empirically proveable, as tools of discipline they rely on fear of punishment, not on the punishment itself that's the fine, the prison sentence or whatever.
It is up to you to take the risk and see whether there's a Hell for you or not, and there's no certainties here, this is what faith is for. We can't say the same for a fine or worse if you aren't doing what the state says, if you're caught it's over and you're usually caught, you have to pay and more often than not the reason is entirely arbitrary. Where have I signed that I'd pay you a tax on my car?

By law, Pakistan like every state modeled after western patterns has no legislation allowing discrimination of religious minorities, what you see is at a societal level and it is in fact castal, not religious, tied to ritual purity. You go to a well for high caste people when you're low caste (yes, caste is also a factor in Pakistan, not just in India) you're pretty much asking for trouble. There's no law allowing caste discrimination, in fact it's prohibited, but it does happen because it's part of the culture.
And guess what, me not being able to enter a university because I'm not blessed with the gene therapy and the necessary papers (added bureaucratic element) is also ritual purity, except it's inorganic and state-promoted, not societal and the result of centuries of social development. I've seen banks sanificated because one woman, one, entered without a mask and the stupid passport, as if she was bringing cholera or worse. Obviously an unnecessary farce for sanitary reasons, but a tool of humiliation for the woman, "look at what you forced us to do", and an act of ritual cleansing because she had dared to step where only high caste people were allowed, her presence was polluting.
You're a fucking idiot if you think the state prevents this, when it's just as able to mimic this kind of behavior and it will. Like I said, its purpose is to destroy every natural human bond and replace it with the bondage of the citizen to the state. Legislation replaces custom, and it's ten times as ferocious.

Except it's not based upon whim; it's based upon axiom and precedent. The state in Western societies cannot arbitrarily create laws which profoundly limit a person's rights without significant legal hurdles, and the same cannot be said for societies which don't have this legal apparatus. This was precisely my point to you; freedom is about much more than just how powerful the state is.

Except it can, it all depends on how willing people are to endure arbitrary (if by this we mean anti-constitutional) legislation. If they don't act on their own, you can be sure that none of the organs devoted to the enforcement of constitutional limits will do anything, especially when, say, you raise their salaries to shut them up.
And how do you make people accept anti-constitutional legislation? By rationalizing it, by creating a state of exception, by mobilizing state-owned and de facto state-owned media telling people that "this is not like before, we need this and here's why". And once that's done, be sure that the government will not let go of its newfound power for anything in the world, not even at the formal end of the state of emergency.
You only need to engineer the right crisis.
Case in point: the last two years, but I can make the case for so many others, like 9/11 or any wartime period.

Define "natural". Human societies have continually evolved since most of us were living as hunter gatherers, and there are plenty of things which once seemed normal to people which would now appall us, and vice versa. One of the main reasons the modern state evolved into being was because thinking people recognized how beneficial it would be to have clear limits imposed upon people in positions of authority, because in the absence of this clarity, tyranny prevails.

The crucial point you're missing is that under the modern state you decry, ordinary people have much more freedom. This brings us to the next point:

Empowerment is having control over your own life, and the social pressure which exists in more parochial societies often profoundly limits this. If the state intervenes in order to prevent some individuals from limiting the freedom of other individuals, then the net result is more freedom for everyone.

You aren't explaining either how or why we accepted the need of a giant abstract nanny or how we're freer or empowered by it. You don't even bring examples to your arguments.

 

[Smolrolls]

I don't know where to put this, but a kiwi mentioned why Jews would let Muslims into say the United States if said Muslims want to kill them. Yet why do Jews have German surnames after Hitler tried to massacred them more than half a century ago?

Islam gave more tolerance, more prosperity to the Jews during the centuries before and during the Christian crusades. Only remember how Inquisition Spain treated the Jews after pushing the Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula. Just as how Germany was considered the European state that tolerated the Jews before world war 2, like a lighthouse amidst anti-semitism back in the day.

Jews live in the past, its what tied them together as a people, as a race, without a homeland amidst millennia's of racisms against them for killing the son of god, the sins of the father paid by sons. So they stick to their Talmud, their traditions, their rituals, and their oral stories passed down from generation to generation of how the evil white romans sacked their city of Jerusalem, driven them out from Israel, focused themselves against a powerful strawman known as the white man. A perfect "us vs them" dichotomy, like banding together to take down "the axis of darkness", "bringing down evil Hitler", kinda like every fiction story where the hero and his band of friends take down 1 evil villain, a band of rebels bringing down a tyrannical empire.

Oh and I asked a question here why whites hate themselves because sometimes it feels like their doing it for social justice points, at other times its suicidal because these whites genuninely hate themselves for being white. Here's the thing, the white people I've encountered who say that they hate themselves for being White...are jews.

 

[mr.moon1488]

Lol I think it's funny how many people itt white knight the nu-west as if it's somehow a bastion of freedom compared to non-western countries. I guarantee you that if you get drunk in a bar in China and say bad things about whinny the poo, your odds of having a really bad night are a lot lower than if you get drunk in a bar in the US and say nigger. If you're on this site, even not as a primarily political poster, chances are it's not because of censorship in nations like China, Russia, and Iran.

 

[Some Badger]

Here's the thing, the white people I've encountered who say that they hate themselves for being White...are jews.

It cannot be understated that the biggest bloc of anti-white whites are ashkenazi Jews. The hyper-left, secular reformist ones in particular are particularly snakish in that they’ll adopt a white western identity when it suits them (like living outside of the cities/suburbs), but the moment it’s no longer convenient to their interests, they jump back on the anti-white bandwagon.

 

[Hellbound Hellhound]

@Not just a contrarian It's not letting me quote you again, weird.

Anyway. . . .

And everyone has his own definition of what is just.

Which beautifully demonstrates my case for why codified legal standards are important, because in the absence of such standards, the only way to avoid such disputes is through violence. The fact that people disagree on what is just is not limited to Western countries; it is a truism which applies to all situations where two or more people are having a dispute, and I think you'll find that such disputes are often far more prolonged and bloody when said legal standards are absent.

Having a government provides a place where the buck stops, which allows disagreements to be ruled on with a reasonable guarantee of fairness. The alternative is a situation where only the powerful and socially well-connected get their way, which is the opposite of anything approaching justice for most people.

Slavery and serfdom weren't abolished because they were "unjust", you're full of ideology here, they were eliminated because 1) they had become inefficient relative to more modern methods of agriculture and manufacturing 2) the people who made use of these more modern means, by forcing the abolishment of these systems, would also abolish or fagocitate the slavemasters and feudal landowners who lived by them and owned the state until then. Between the southern slave owner and the northern industrialist it was a life or death battle to own the federal government, and when the southern slaveowner figured that he couldn't own it anymore, let alone compete with increasingly mechanized northern agriculture and foreign importations from barely-paid Indians... he made his own government.
Not that moralistic arguments weren't used to rationalize their abolition, but they could have never been enough compared to the material reality of the inefficiency of these practices, and if there would have been no material need to abolish it, if they wouldn't have been obsolete by then, the moralistic arguments would have been laughed at by everyone. They were just ideological tools.

People were making moral arguments against slavery and serfdom long before it was legally abolished, and it was these people who largely spearheaded the legal moves which made them illegal. The material reasons behind the decline of these practices in no way negates the moral arguments against them, especially since the moral considerations now form the bedrock of our legal institutions' opposition to examples of modern slavery.

Can governments be corrupted, or be somehow compromised or swayed by material circumstances to the detriment of the people? Of course they can, but this hardly supports the notion that moral standards ought to be irrelevant to the considerations of those in power; quite the opposite, actually. Going back to an earlier point: a legal system which is bound by axioms is better than a legal system which is driven solely by whim.

No, it really can't, not on its own. The best it can do is threaten you with a bad time, but that's just it: a threat. Neither Hell nor negative karma and inferior reincarnations or both are empirically proveable, as tools of discipline they rely on fear of punishment, not on the punishment itself that's the fine, the prison sentence or whatever.

I think you'll find that when a person in Pakistan is spending life on death row for "allegedly" insulting Islam, the threat to their life is more than just ethereal.

Where have I signed that I'd pay you a tax on my car?

This question demonstrates a complete ignorance of how social contracts work. By buying a car under a legal system which requires you to pay tax on it, you have already explicitly agreed to pay tax on it. No signed document is necessary, just as you don't need to sign a document to know that you must drive on the right side of the road.

Legislation replaces custom, and it's ten times as ferocious.

Except it's not. The state in Western countries will not kill you for saying something which is deemed by a particular group to be offensive or blasphemous; the state in Western countries will not kill or ostracize you for refusing to marry someone, or for choosing to freely associate with people from a group that your community disapproves of; the enforcers of parochial social customs, on the other hand, often will.

Except it can, it all depends on how willing people are to endure arbitrary (if by this we mean anti-constitutional) legislation. If they don't act on their own, you can be sure that none of the organs devoted to the enforcement of constitutional limits will do anything, especially when, say, you raise their salaries to shut them up.
And how do you make people accept anti-constitutional legislation? By rationalizing it, by creating a state of exception, by mobilizing state-owned and de facto state-owned media telling people that "this is not like before, we need this and here's why". And once that's done, be sure that the government will not let go of its newfound power for anything in the world, not even at the formal end of the state of emergency.
You only need to engineer the right crisis.
Case in point: the last two years, but I can make the case for so many others, like 9/11 or any wartime period.

So you've discovered that constitutional limitations upon governments are often flouted? And this is an argument for why such limitations should be abolished, how exactly? I have certainly never argued that requiring the law to operate within a set of established principles will lead to a perfect system, because no system will be perfect, but it is crucial here not to make perfect the enemy of the general good.

A constitution can only prescribe limits, but if you're able to notice the degree to which untrustworthy leaders are often willing to skirt around the legal limitations upon their power, then you must surely also be able to concede the argument for why these prescriptions are so critical.

The willingness of people to go along with arbitrary restrictions which contravene accepted legal standards is more an issue of apathy among the populace than it is an argument for why legal standards are unimportant, for if such legal standards were nonexistent, how is anyone to judge whether or not a restriction is truly justifiable?

You aren't explaining either how or why we accepted the need of a giant abstract nanny or how we're freer or empowered by it. You don't even bring examples to your arguments.

Except I already have explained this, and I have also provided examples. If you look to the rules which are imposed upon people by social customs in places like rural Afghanistan and Pakistan, the people in those communities enjoy far less freedom than people who live under Western governments.

 

[Toolbox]

Currently, the west is still better in freedom of expression, speech, generally not being instakilled for saying things against the government. Not that you won't still have a chance of it, but it's not near 100% like in China. But unless you are willing to fight for your freedoms to still exist, the west will turn into another China. They already bought into them economically for years. And we have had Marxists subverting our ideologies for decades. The best place to be in 40 years if nothing alters the course our governments are going is an off grid house in a 'third world' country that is just that because it is poor and undeveloped rather than being composed mostly of insane and violent individuals. So, not Pakistan. A country in the third world class with plenty of free land still existing would be a good choice.

 

[The Curmudgeon]

Warts and all, I prefer the West over the alternatives. Everywhere else in the world is either theocracy, authoritarianism, warzones, or failed states. Yes, I'm well aware that the West is facing a wave of self-destructive social change. However, I'll take flawed liberal democracy over Islam, communism, etc.

There are no greener pastures. Only wastelands. We need to prevent our own turf from becoming one of those wastelands.

 

[Homophobic white dog]

I'm also having issues quoting your post @Hellbound Hellhound

Which beautifully demonstrates my case for why codified legal standards are important, because in the absence of such standards, the only way to avoid such disputes is through violence. The fact that people disagree on what is just is not limited to Western countries; it is a truism which applies to all situations where two or more people are having a dispute, and I think you'll find that such disputes are often far more prolonged and bloody when said legal standards are absent.

Having a government provides a place where the buck stops, which allows disagreements to be ruled on with a reasonable guarantee of fairness. The alternative is a situation where only the powerful and socially well-connected get their way, which is the opposite of anything approaching justice for most people.

In reality it's the credible threat of violence by the state that creates situations such as those described in my example. Let's be honest, the owner of that apartment has nothing but a piece of paper, a deed, to prove his "ownership" of that home. That is also a legal fiction, a reified abstraction much like the state.

I will tell you what would happen without it: the squatters would keep squatting in the apartment, his deed would have no value, and he'd have no reasonable pretext to kick them out.
The state isn't a neutral mediator, ask yourself who has stakes in it and you'll understand who it favors.

People were making moral arguments against slavery and serfdom long before it was legally abolished, and it was these people who largely spearheaded the legal moves which made them illegal. The material reasons behind the decline of these practices in no way negates the moral arguments against them, especially since the moral considerations now form the bedrock of our legal institutions' opposition to examples of modern slavery.

Yeah, and they never mattered until we had the material means to get rid of the practice. Until then, moralizers kept crying about the poor chattel.
All of this for centuries.
Moral and legal arguments aren't worth anything on their own, they merely served to fuel the recognition of a new state of things that already factually existed.

I think you'll find that when a person in Pakistan is spending life on death row for "allegedly" insulting Islam, the threat to their life is more than just ethereal.

Pakistan's blasphemy laws, as modern laws rather than customs, are a product of the modern state, not of tradition. I could also say that they're conceived as an instruments of communal harmony considering that they also apply to insults towards Hinduism and Christianity, and Muslims have been punished for having insulted the sensibilities of Hindus and Christians.
All of this on paper, in practice they've mostly been used to settle personal scores between people, often between Muslims, taking advantage of one faux pas by either side.
Vigilantism - here's a case of action emerging from society rather than the state - happens towards (often falsely-accused) blasphemers, but they're people who are usually being investigated, that is people whose case has become famous exactly because they're the subject of the state's attention.
Without a modern state, the matter would remain between the two.
You don't know the half of these things, which are anyway manifestations of the issues of the modern state rather than of presumed backwards societies.

This question demonstrates a complete ignorance of how social contracts work. By buying a car under a legal system which requires you to pay tax on it, you have already explicitly agreed to pay tax on it. No signed document is necessary, just as you don't need to sign a document to know that you must drive on the right side of the road.

Social contracts don't exist, and you can't compare car taxes to basic street rules. You don't want to drive on the wrong side of the road not merely because you don't want your driving license revoked until the end of your days, but because you don't want to cause an accident that could result in your death.
If you drive on the wrong side of a highway, in that very moment the revocation of the driving license is the last thing you should worry about. The truck driving in your face, that's your primary concern. This is what happens if you drive on the wrong side of the road, state or not state.
What happens to you if you don't pay car taxes without the state? Are there even car taxes without it? Exactly.

Except it's not. The state in Western countries will not kill you for saying something which is deemed by a particular group to be offensive or blasphemous; the state in Western countries will not kill or ostracize you for refusing to marry someone, or for choosing to freely associate with people from a group that your community disapproves of; the enforcers of parochial social customs, on the other hand, often will.

We have blasphemy laws in Italy, you don't get prison sentences but you get fines for swearing in public (in theory, never been fined for that), which also happen in shitholes like Pakistan. Of course it's also a matter of enforcement.
You're losing sight of the argument here, my criticism of the West and praise of the East isn't that the West is liberal and the East authoritarian or theocratic or whatever, just that the Western state, being built on a more solid social infrastructure, is more able to enforce its laws, at least those it prioritizes, unlike the Eastern one. My "praise" of the East is not of the state's ideology, but of its dysfunctionality, one that limits its influence over public life.
Shari'a or liberalism it makes no difference, like I said blasphemy laws are issues because they're laws of a modern state, not because they're illiberal. Your issue here is equating the modern state with secularism and laicism when it can be just as modern founded on religious principles, it's all about how functional it is, how able it is to enforce its laws.
You might not get killed for cursing Christ here, but you can get killed for just as petty reasons, like "divulging state secrets" that the public probably has a right to know.
It makes no difference.

So you've discovered that constitutional limitations upon governments are often flouted? And this is an argument for why such limitations should be abolished, how exactly? I have certainly never argued that requiring the law to operate within a set of established principles will lead to a perfect system, because no system will be perfect, but it is crucial here not to make perfect the enemy of the general good.

A constitution can only prescribe limits, but if you're able to notice the degree to which untrustworthy leaders are often willing to skirt around the legal limitations upon their power, then you must surely also be able to concede the argument for why these prescriptions are so critical.

The willingness of people to go along with arbitrary restrictions which contravene accepted legal standards is more an issue of apathy among the populace than it is an argument for why legal standards are unimportant, for if such legal standards were nonexistent, how is anyone to judge whether or not a restriction is truly justifiable?

It's an argument against the concept of law, my dude. Not merely against constitutional safeguards, that would obviously only worsen the situation by removing even the pretense of separation of powers that a state has over a developed and "civil" society. That we're choking in laws and regulations that we have never chosen is my point.

Apathy is distinctive of developed societies if you haven't realized it, and when there isn't apathy we have the whole set ranging from the Hitlerjugend to party membership. The bad part of extreme willingness to enforce modern legality is the complete identification of the people with the state ideology. That's how we have totalitarianism. The classic kind.

 

[Smolrolls]

Asians just want your money, no matter how nice they look. At the end of the day, its their clan over your family, their family over you.

China might invade Taiwan, Russia's invading Ukraine, Africa is Africa, South America, beside a few small countries, isn't any better.

 

[ARghEAT]

Lol I think it's funny how many people itt white knight the nu-west as if it's somehow a bastion of freedom compared to non-western countries. I guarantee you that if you get drunk in a bar in China and say bad things about whinny the poo, your odds of having a really bad night are a lot lower than if you get drunk in a bar in the US and say nigger. If you're on this site, even not as a primarily political poster, chances are it's not because of censorship in nations like China, Russia, and Iran.

"ree i can't say nigger in a bar because people might beat me up"
You also can't (read: shouldn't) go around calling people cunts to their faces for the same reason. On the other hand, talk shit in China and you might disappear for a while. Some woman uploaded a video of her splashing ink on a poster of Xi on Twitter (while calling him a tyrant, etc. etc.) and was forcibly sent to a mental hospital for over a year. Even better: believe in a certain religious movement (Falun Gong)? You get sent to jail and have your organs harvested.

 

[Mayor Adam West]

The West. While the Christian character of the West has been rapidly fading in recent years, we still has some of that greatness left over...

How long this lasts is what keeps me up at night. If the West is to survive and be great again, it must return to God. Otherwise we will be no better off than Russia or China...

 

[Some Badger]

The West. While the Christian character of the West has been rapidly fading in recent years, we still has some of that greatness left over...

How long this lasts is what keeps me up at night. If the West is to survive and be great again, it must return to God. Otherwise we will be no better off than Russia or China...

When the Soviet Union fell, there was a renewed interest in religion among the Russian people. Whether because there was no longer a government that actively discouraged religiosity or the actual statistics of the religious were skewed in Soviet demographic information, the majority of the Russian Federation’s population identified themselves as Orthodox. I think the crushing poverty and economic stagnation seen under Yeltsin contributed to this as well. Convincing yourself that there’s no life after death and your actions don’t matter is an extremely self-destructive worldview when you’re struggling to feed yourself and your family.

If there is a religious revival in my lifetime, it’s not gonna happen unless we see a major financial collapse in the West, or even just the United States for that matter, given the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency being questioned by Russia, India, etc.

I’m kind of torn, really. I think it’s entirely possible that the West can have a literal Come to Jesus moment if it excises the tumor that is globohomo, but that’s a massive ‘if’ and there’s no guarantee that a religious revival would emerge from a loss of global hegemony either.

 

[Mayor Adam West]

When the Soviet Union fell, there was a renewed interest in religion among the Russian people. Whether because there was no longer a government that actively discouraged religiosity or the actual statistics of the religious were skewed in Soviet demographic information, the majority of the Russian Federation’s population identified themselves as Orthodox. I think the crushing poverty and economic stagnation seen under Yeltsin contributed to this as well. Convincing yourself that there’s no life after death and your actions don’t matter is an extremely self-destructive worldview when you’re struggling to feed yourself and your family.

If there is a religious revival in my lifetime, it’s not gonna happen unless we see a major financial collapse in the West, or even just the United States for that matter, given the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency being questioned by Russia, India, etc.

I’m kind of torn, really. I think it’s entirely possible that the West can have a literal Come to Jesus moment if it excises the tumor that is globohomo, but that’s a massive ‘if’ and there’s no guarantee that a religious revival would emerge from a loss of global hegemony either.

If Russia is so Christian then why do they have the highest abortion rate in the world? And if Putin is so Christian then why doesn't he do something about it? I'm not saying that the West is much better in that regard but Christianity in Russia seems to be as weak as a cultural institution as it is in the West, if not more so.

But on everything else I agree with you. When people don't live for God they live for something else. Right now most people are living for pleasure or comfort. When those go away people will freak out. Hopefully they turn back to God. If they don't then it will be disastrous.

 

[Pokemonquistador2]

Environment shapes psychology and politics. The reason the West is a Clown World run by Leftists and Neocons is because we have a wealth and technological bubble that protects us from the consequences of our brain dead social engineering. Policies that promote low native birth rates, troonism, and immigration from Third World Countries are policies that will soon result in a country that's vastly different from the decadent, mechanized utopia that put all of said policies into place. Then we'll all have to live in the Hard Times that the Weak men helped to create. The West won't get better until the Weak Men are all gone, but by then, it probably won't be the West anymore...