61–67 of 67 posts
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Adopting democracy, free markets, and property rights doesn't mean you also have to adopt wearing jeans, generic pop music, car-based infrastructure and everything else.
It seemingly doesn't. Yet that's exactly what happens. With jeans, coke, and pop usually there first, long before democracy.
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For me that's the most frustrating thing about the Westernization of the world. Your own culture is always invisible to you. You can only see it in contrast to something else. If everything becomes the same, then we lose the ability to even see those things, let alone think about them.
That's a great sentiment, the same that is behind conservation in general. Most people, however, don't enjoy being poor and western is the only culture with a proven track record of basic material prosperity.
Want? Really? We want a solution to the fundamental problem of life, that is, doing something effective about feeling alone. Or, one step deeper, we seek security from the anxiety from our realization that alone we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society. Only four solutions have been found effective, love of spouse, love of God, membership in a group, and one more not recommended. Paraphrased from…
Fromm's book is a classic, highly respected.
Sorry you didn't like it.
You would do well to think again.
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Western culture has relative "material prosperity" because our ancestors invaded all the other places on earth and fucked them up. See: Africa, the Middle East. In places we didn't invade such as Mongolia and Japan, they're actually doing quite well. Before you look down on the rest of the planet, consider that Europe is one of the best places to survive on earth. It's temperate, it's fertile, it rains a lot, it's ge…
In places we didn't invade such as Mongolia and Japan, they're actually doing quite well. Americans occupied Japan for years, not to mention first destroying her military, and razing a few cities with fire bombs and then nukes. Mongolia's GDP (PPP) per capita is less than $10k. On average, a Mongolian is four times poorer than a French. The same is true for Russia which has immense natural resources, dwarfing those o…
Actually, the Americans were on the border of _running out of targets_ in WWII Japan because they had already destroyed all the cities.
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> You're espousing an ultra-modern perspective, one that can only happen from an entire life lived in the presence of ultra-modern technology. Okay, so? Not sure what you're trying to get at here.
The person I was replying to didn't seem to understand how people could think of technology, namely televisions, as an alien force that shouldn't be trusted. And indeed it shouldn't be trusted, until it becomes ubiquitous. High technology emerged in the fifties. It took over fifty years for it to suffuse our lives to the point where we could trust it. I grew up with technology. Most of the kids I grew up with didn't.…
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That's a great sentiment, the same that is behind conservation in general. Most people, however, don't enjoy being poor and western is the only culture with a proven track record of basic material prosperity.
Alternatively, the Deep State in the US and the US-dominated parts of the planet means you're all going to live in America-lite with Disney's IP rules and Monsanto's food. You can keep the cookoo clocks and quaint costumes.
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Alternatively, the Deep State in the US and the US-dominated parts of the planet means you're all going to live in America-lite with Disney's IP rules and Monsanto's food. You can keep the cookoo clocks and quaint costumes.
I've heard of the "Deep State" with respect to Turkey and Erdogan, but never in the American context. Can you elaborate a little on what you mean by that?