Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "FRANCE 24 English"
channel.
-
8
-
5
-
4
-
4
-
3
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
2
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
@hamzasyed I appreciate the amount of thought you are putting into this conversation. You certainly have some good knowledge and you're pretty smart. I would argue myself that there is a difference between perception and reality among the regular people that live in western democracies. Democracy, defined as decisions made based on a majority agreement, is as old as humanity most likely. It probably was invented in Africa because that's where we all come from. Most westerners firmly believe though that democracy was invented in Greece because that's what we were all told in middle school. And for most westerners, embracing democracy means embracing western civilization and accepting that western civilization is the culmination of political, economic, and until recently, technological progress.
What you've described in your second point is the cleavage between western humanitarian idealists and western ideological pragmatists. Both groups are western chauvinists but the second group has a stronger grip on foreign policy within the strongest western countries. And even when one of the former gets into power in the U.S. or the U.K., they usually morph into the latter. That certainly was the case with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which is why many of their early supporters view them as sellouts. Western democracies absolutely install and support friendly dictators as long as they are useful. Once their usefulness ends, however, we're very quick to criticize their nondemocratic structure and to undermine their regimes in order to placate our more idealistic domestic populace.
My point is that regardless of actual practices, the assumption that liberal democracy is both a superior political and fundamentally western system is ubiquitous in the minds of most westerners. And whether or not the liberal democratic missionaries that insist that other countries move towards adherence to this model are actually white supremacists, they are almost to a man (or woman) western chauvinists. Considering that western civilization is usually viewed as white (though certainly there are non-white influences) both by most people within western civilization and most of those outside of it, it's certainly understandable for non-westerners feeling this pressure to view it as white supremacy. It's also a usefully brutal criticism for those wanting to undermine the whole concept, which I suspect is the reason the panelist dropped the term.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
It's during these kinds of crises that we see the weakness of our system of provincial quasi-sovereignty. This is exactly the time that we need a full-court press national response. It would help if we had a leader that had an interest in the welfare of the country's citizens rather than a tycoon whose primary interest is in the vacancy rate of his hotels, but alas….
Nobody in America prepared for the virus as we watched it tear through East Asia and Italy: not the Governors, not the President, not Congress, and not me. We are all responsible for failing to prepare for what was obviously coming, and we all got caught. The difference between the President and about half of the state governors is that once the virus hit their citizens, many of these governors swung into action, listened to the doctors and scientists, and shut everything down in order to halt the spread. What the President did was downplay the disease, flinch noticeably at every effort to combat or control the virus, attack reporters who pointed out his obvious lies, give himself rave reviews on his performance , blame everyone he could think of (except himself) for why bad things were happening, and push to stop the efforts to deal with the problem while the United States is still the country with the most known cases and deaths.
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1
-
1