Innate… superiority? There are zero ways to interpret this that are okay if you have a sliver of moral integrity in you.
I think democracies are innately superior, including morally, to autocracies. I think market-based economic systems are innately competitive against--and in their capacity to empower individual production, morally superior to--command economies.
This is a discussion that will never be improved by system proponents proclaiming theirs as superior, and bringing dangerously connotated terms like innate to the table is only making it worse.
Of course not. But one of its fundamental advantages is its ability to build alliances and accept immigrants. Historically, those have been strengths of republics. That’s “innate” to the structure of the society.
> the world's largest democracy is in south Asia
India is a great example of Western culture hybridising with a local culture to produce a sum that’s greater than its parts. The British were dicks, particularly in India, and I’m not arguing that colonisation is okay. But I think it’s fair to say that a unified, democratic India very much flows from its exposure to Western systems of law and government. (India had indigenous democratic city-states. But in the south and never at scale.)
Western thought and culture has been adopted and shaped by advances globally; including for ex. Russia; which is hardly in 'the west' geographically.
Is Russia innately democratic?
Immigrants and white people are unrelated categories.
Okay, so your argument is that "the west" can only mean something "innate"?
>Some common definitions of the west are white people
Well hold on. I thought "the west" could only mean something "innate"? What makes makes the US "innately" white? The US is 30% non-white, after all.
Karp said the west is innately superior. JumpCrisscross suggested this was acceptable because democracies are innately superior to autocracies. But western countries are not innately democratic. And democracy is not innately western. Superiority is not innate if its basis is not innate.
> What makes makes the US "innately" white?
People who define the west as white people do not consider all Americans part of the west. And I said it was a common definition. Not good.
Even if the democracy commits mass genocide? I think the most dangerous societies/systems/governments are those filled by people who think they or their system are innately superior ( especially morally ) as it gives them moral cover to commit all kinds of evil.
Then again, Socrates and Plato thought democracies were innately inferior...
History certainly hasn't shown democracies to be innately morally superior.
And no amount of „admit you like being privileged“ changes that.
This is the problem. Western culture isn't just white. Hell, the term 'white' is really a New World race. In the Old World, Europeans were enslaving each other and being enslaved by e.g. the Mamluks and Ottomans.
> “As Samuel Huntington has written, the rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion ... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’
“He continued: ‘Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.’”
Yikes..
https://bsky.app/profile/leahmcelrath.bsky.social/post/3lheu...
It's also an essential one--sovereignty depends on it. That will be true as long as international relations are anarchic.
The west, as a culture, absorbs what is useful and discards the not useful.