MeisterEckhart wrote on Mar 24^th, 2022 at 4:08pm:


The article was written by authors located in a Singapore academic institution, as can be seen by the web address.

thegreatdivide wrote on Mar 24^th, 2022 at 5:55pm:



Get back to us when the merit of Chinese who are NOT CCP members is recognised and celebrated.

It will never happen while the CCP is in control.

Merit = CCP.

Frank wrote on Mar 24^th, 2022 at 6:10pm:


The point is government can adopt different models eg the highly successful meritocratic AND authoritarian Singaporean model itself. 

Now, you ought not be making a song and dance about the Chinese model, when it has the support of >90% of the people. 

The issue for government is how to put a roof over everyone's head, and how to ensure everyone has access to above poverty employment.

Free market competition alone cannot achieve it, because the least competitive are condemned to poverty (since there is no defined minimum, beyond government-funded  poverty level welfare, in free markets).

And as for international affairs, as you I know I commend  Doc Evatt's plan to achieve international law (to save us from endless conventional wars in the age of MAD) via an ICJ backed by an UNSC without the vetoes. 

In the last fortnight alone, we have another several $trillion  in property losses, unnecessary deaths and social upheaval,  and global increase in poverty (as prices go through the roof), courtesy of your preferred  'sovereign rights' ideology - which allows Russia to decide to go to war because there is no international law to prevent Putin from doing so.

And Biden is watching on from his armchair spouting useless verbosity, while Ukraine is being demolished. 

Don't shoot me, I'm just the messenger explaining why we still have these insane endless wars.

But I understand why you WANT to shoot me, given I am sheeting the blame home to your delusional 'sovereign individual rights ' ideology.

Ouch.

Frank wrote on Mar 25^th, 2022 at 1:16pm:


A court merely adjudicates law, that's correct.

But a police force prosecutes the law.

In international terms,  prosecution of law requires  an international 'police' force ie a UNSC ...with 99% of the world's military force.

The permanent UNSC members would be tasked with upholding the law as determined by the ICJ, dedicated to the principles enshrined in the UNUDHR. 

Quote:


Nevertheless the Chinese are getting on with their own affairs, achieving common prosperity at the fastest rate in history.   

War on the West

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6305259781001#sp=show-clips


Also

War on the West is a brutal assault on our values
Many of us sensed that something was wrong. We wondered why one-sided arguments kept being made and why unfair claims levelled. Only now do we see the scale of what is being attempted.
By DOUGLAS MURRAY
In recent years it has become clear that there is a war going on: a war on the West. This is not like earlier wars, where armies clash and victors are declared. It is a cultural war, and it is being waged remorselessly against all the roots of the Western tradition and against everything good that the Western tradition has produced.
At first, this was hard to discern. Many of us sensed that something was wrong. We wondered why one-sided arguments kept being made and why unfair claims kept being levelled. But we did not realise the full scale of what was being attempted. Not least because even the language of ideas was corrupted. Words no longer meant what they had until recently meant. People began to talk of “equality”, but they did not seem to care about equal rights. They talked of “anti-racism”, but they sounded deeply racist. They spoke of “justice”, but they seemed to mean “revenge”.
It is only in recent years, when the fruits of this movement have come into plain sight, that its scale has become clear. There is an assault going on against everything to do with the Western world – its past, present and future. Part of that process is that we have become locked in a cycle of unending punishment. With no serious effort at (or even consideration for) its alleviation.
Of course, countries and states have the right to change. Over time a certain amount of change is inevitable. But there seemed something loaded in what was going on: something unbalanced and off-kilter. The arguments were being made not out of love for the countries in question but out of a barely disguised loathing for them. In the eyes of many people, not least within their own populations, these countries appeared to have done something wrong. Something for which they must atone. The West was the problem. The dissolving of the West was a solution.
At the same time, it had become unacceptable to talk about any other society in a remotely similar way. Despite the unimaginable abuses perpetrated in our own time by the Communist Party of China, almost nobody speaks of China with an iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against the West from inside the West. Western consumers still buy their clothes cheap from China. There is no widespread attempt at a boycott. “Made in China” is not a badge of shame. Terrible things go on in that country right now, and still it is treated as normal. Authors who refuse to allow their books to be translated into Hebrew are thrilled to see them appear in China.
Because in the developed West some different standard applies. With regard to women’s rights and sexual-minority rights, and in particular when it came to the issue of racism, everything was presented as though it had never been worse at the point at which it had never been better. Nobody could deny the scourge of racism – a scourge that is to be found in some form throughout recorded history.
Yet, in recent decades, the situation in Western countries in regard to racial equality has been better than ever. Our societies have made an effort to get “beyond race”, led by the example of some remarkable men and women of every racial background, but most notably by some extraordinary black Americans.
A war on everything
It was not inevitable that Western societies would develop, or even aspire to, the tradition of racial tolerance that we have. It was not inevitable that we would end up living in societies that justly regard racism as among the most abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and women made the case, fought for that situation and claimed their rights. In recent years, it has come to sound as though that fight never happened. In recent years, I have come to think of racial issues in the West as being like a pendulum that has swung past the point of correction and into overcorrection. As though if the pendulum stays in a slight overcorrection for long enough, then equality can be more firmly established.
Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted.
By now, it is clear that however well-intentioned such a belief may have been, it was wildly misguided. Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades. In the place of colour blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted. Like all societies in history, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used.

In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead. The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of “dead white males”, to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language. Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilisation has met with sustained hostility, ridicule and even violence.
Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues. In Australia, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, whose board is chaired by former prime minister John Howard, has tried to find universities to partner with so students can study Western civilisation. They have had great trouble finding any universities willing to work with them. And that tells us something about the speed of this great shift. Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilisation was commonplace. Today it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.
In 1969, the BBC ran Sir Kenneth Clark’s extraordinary documentary series Civilisation. It aimed to give a unified history of Western civilisation, and it did so, informing the understanding of millions of viewers around the world. In 2018, the BBC tried to follow this up. Civilisations (with an emphasis on the s) was a hodgepodge creation of three historians, trying desperately to make sure that they didn’t sound as if they were saying the West was better than anywhere else and giving a sort of world history that made nothing very clear. In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame people.
Of course, some swing of the pendulum is inevitable and may even be desirable. There certainly have been times in the past when the history of the West has been taught as though it is a story of unabashed good. Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea. However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn’t become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme answers. If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.
Through the spin cycle
Critics of Western civilisation do provide alternatives. They venerate every culture so long as it is not Western. For instance, all native thought and cultural expression are to be celebrated, just so long as that native culture is not Western. Two major problems come from celebrating all non-Western cultures. The first is that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past. A habit that some foreign powers encourage. After all, if the West is so preoccupied with denigrating itself, what time could it find to look at the rest of the world?
But the other major problem is that it leads to a form of parochial internationalism, where Westerners mistakenly presume that aspects of the Western inheritance are common aspirations across the rest of the globe. From Australia to Canada and America and throughout Europe, a new generation has imbibed the idea that aspects of the Western tradition (such as “human rights”) are a historical and global norm that have been rolled out everywhere. In time, it has come to seem that the Western tradition that evolved these norms has uniquely failed to live up to them and that non-Western “Indigenous” cultures are (among much else) purer and more enlightened than Western culture can ever be.
These views are taught in universities and schools across the Western world. And their results can be seen in almost every major cultural and political institution Everything from art, mathematics, and music to gardening, sport, and food has been put through the same spin cycle. There are many curiosities in all this. Not the least of them is that while the West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these things – including the development of individual rights, religious liberty, and pluralism – are held against it.

Frank wrote on Apr 30^th, 2022 at 1:07pm:


Dear Frank, I already commented on this erroneous ideological formulation, which is the basis of  his entire "war on the West" thesis.

As a matter of fact, all "rights" are delusional, only desires are real; hence "equal rights" are also impossible.  But tolerable equality is achievable.   

Show us some concerns re achievement of a tolerable degree of equality and inequality,  and then Western institutions will  be able to cease warring among themselves.