🚀 go-pugleaf

Though I am sometimes sympathetic to Jyrki's civil liberties arguments,
I must object to the pernicious nonsense he posted, viz:

"I don't know if "Western democracies" are an example to look up to in
any respect - sad to say, it seems that only if want to find out how
to kill and plunder people and nature over religious or ideological
reasons, or how to turn any good religion, idea or issue into
violenece, destruction and unhappiness to people should you go and
learn the ways of "Western democracies". "

The best response I've yet seen to this kind of self-aggrandizing left-wing
cant is that of William J. Bennett in "Devaluing of America-The Fight for
Our Culture and Our Children", p.174:

"Finally, and probably most difficult for the critics of Western
culture to acknowledge, the West is good. The West is not all good, to
be sure.  There are great blots on its record, volumes of injustices,
sins, omissions, and errors. Still, the West has produced the world's
most just and effective system of government: representative
democracy. As Professor Lino Graglia has written, in the story of
inhumanity and misery that is its history, in the totality of its
acts, the Western achievement stands high. it has set the moral,
political, economic, and social standards for the rest of the world
and has led the rest of the world toward an appreciation of individual
liberty, equality, human rights, and the inviolability of conscience.
Since the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, one
wonders if the only people who cannot clearly see the virtues of
Western civilization today are some of our professors at our leading
universities."

David