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Originally Posted by Bel
-Human induced Global warming. Using sperious Scientific evidence lay guilt upon industrialized nations in an effort to curb productivity.
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India and China are in far worse shape than the West cause the West actually cared about the environment, so I'll give grudging respect to the tree huggers in that respect. Go take a trip to Bangalore or Beijing, it's disgusting.
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-Induce ideologies that are in fact at the core Communism. Modern Western State welfare, public healthcare etc are very much Communistic in there very nature.
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Not communistic, just centralized and government is becoming more and more responsible for everything. The conservatives in America are becoming more fascist and the liberals in America are becoming more socialist. I have little sympathy for people that rue this, cause they're the bastards that vote and they accept the partisan hackery that is spouted out by the politicians they support. You reap what you sow.
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-Destruction of Western family values. Replaced with more and more bureaucracy/legislation. Removal of individual responsibility.
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You cannot in one point go glum about our country being more government-controlled and in the next go glum about the destruction of family values. Family values are instilled by
FAMILY, not government. So if you have an issue with that on kids you see, take it up with their parents. If your kids grow up terrible, it's your fault cause you were their mother or father and you were responsible for bringing them up right. School and culture are secondary influences to the influence parents should have.
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-Changing economic structure. Our Grandfathers families existed on one wage, today's require two resulting in declines in working marriages and birth rates. Workers children today are being raised by Government employees or strangers. Capitalism = evil, Socialism/liberalism = good.
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Certain forms of capitalism and socialism are evil, and certain forms of capitalism and socialism are good. I always at the end of the day believe we are responsible for their own fates. While it's true it seems that more people work today to be stuck in place as opposed to moving up the social ladder, that's just how the world works.
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-Free trade, force western companies to compete with companies operating under lower morals/laws. (virtual use of slave labour etc) resulting in loss of jobs.
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What's going on is a kind of global arbitrage. As wages here go down, wages in India or China for example (are supposed to) go up. As the world is becoming more mechanized, you need less people to do the same production. It's just how it is.
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-Decline in Western Nationalism.
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Looking around me I disagree. It goes in cycles, sometimes the left goes up and the right goes down, and then in the next cycle that reverses itself.
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-Guilt for being Western, other cultures are often given priority over local Western cultures.
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Who's guilty? I have Chinese and Vietnamese friends and I work with Japanese and Indians in my job and I respect all of them and I've taken a liking to soccer and rugby, but at the end of the day I still prefer barbecue and fried chicken and watch auto racing and basketball. Knowing of other people's existance and respecting them is not guilt or giving them priority.
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-Decline of Christianity, rise of Atheism. (I'm an atheist myself but I recognise that the West was built largely on Christian values and morals.)
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Again, go blame parents. Although when I was in college, I can tell you a lot of Christians there that were raised atheist or agnostic.
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-Multicultralism. Not only allow other tribes to settle peacefully upon lands once earmarked for your children and your childrens children but also allow there cultures to overide existing ones.
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What are we supposed to do, go Slobodan Milosevic on them? I agree that it pisses me off that damn Yankees are moving down from the Northeast and I have to put up with them raising my taxes to account for them coming here and seeing the Red Sox bumper sticker on their car, but again, they bought the property and that's it.
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-The age of man-shame. Child molestation, family violence etc. Corrosponds with the rise of feminism.
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Dude, seriously.
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There are others and obviously I could of gone a lot more in-depth but I just wanted to get the ball rolling.
Am I paranoid?
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Partly. You raise some good points I'll admit. But you completely ignore the most vital point: that our country lives beyond its means with the money it has and the long-term consequences of that. There's no greater future potential knife to our heart and Britain's than that.
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Is the decline of the West natural progression or is something more sinister involved?
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It's natural. Remember a thing called the British Empire?
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Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, held in London on June 22, 1897, was one of the grandest fetes the world has ever seen: 46,000 troops and 11 colonial prime ministers arrived from the four corners of the earth to pay homage to their sovereign. The event was as much a celebration of Victoria's 60 years on the throne as it was of Britain's superpower status. In 1897, Queen Victoria ruled over a quarter of the world's population and a fifth of its territory, all connected by the latest marvel of British technology, the telegraph, and patrolled by the Royal Navy, which was larger than the next two navies put together. "The world took note," says the historian Karl Meyer. The New York Times gushed: "We are a part ... of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet'."
An 8-year-old boy, Arnold Toynbee, who became a great historian, watched the parade while sitting on his uncle's shoulders. "I remember the atmosphere," he later wrote. "It was: well, here we are on the top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there—forever! There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people."
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Was the United States surpassing it in the early-to-mid-20th century sinister on America's part?
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Heck do you even believe that the west is declining?
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No. Just the East is becoming relevant for the first time since before colonialism.