jimnyc
04-17-2018, 05:29 PM
Some is cut off and the rest can be found at the link at the bottom.
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10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing
Western civilization has brought us stirring works of art and beautiful forms of music. It has brought us the concept of representative democracy in which every person is created equal and has equal rights before the law, which has freed countless people from the tyrannical regimes of unelected bureaucrats.
Inventors in the West have been responsible for the creation of the telephone, the discovery of electricity, the development of space travel, and incredible advances in medicine. Our modern technological culture would not exist without Western society, and the world would be a much darker and more impoverished place if Western thinkers had never transformed their dreams into reality.
...
10 - Gender Fluidity
Psychiatrist Paul McHugh, a university distinguished service professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine, has long maintained that transgenderism is primarily a psychological issue rather than a biological issue. He recommends that counseling be the primary treatment used to help individuals who are experiencing gender identity confusion.
McHugh is not alone. Many psychiatrists and other medical professionals believe that leaping to perform gender reassignment surgery is not the best course of action when dealing with the issue of gender confusion. These professionals do not hate or look down on transgender people; they simply do not believe that surgery is invariably the best option when dealing with this complicated problem.
Yet in today’s social environment, anyone who so much as suggests that transgender people may benefit from therapy is shot down as a bigot or oppressor. However, it can be argued that only an individual who is mentally disturbed would want to risk gender reassignment surgery.
...
9 - The Collapse Of The Family
For centuries untold, family units have served as the dominant formative force of the character of the next generation. In a healthy society, each family unit is informed and directed by general cultural trends. But in an unhealthy society, family units can break away and subsist on their own devices.
Sensing a threat to their power in the sovereign autonomy of the family unit, statist influences have enforced the mandatory education of children in government-run facilities. In these institutions, children are indoctrinated to transfer their perception of authority from their parents to the state. At school, children lose the freedoms and special treatment that they receive at home and are forced to ask permission to perform basic biological functions.
...
8 - The Rising Dominance Of Virtual Worlds
Robust civic engagement is a fundamental tenet of Western society. Citizens of Western countries must actively defend their rights to stem the relentless onslaught of tyranny that always looks for a new opening. Without the constant efforts of individuals seeking ever greater freedom and quality of life, the ingenious productivity which is the hallmark of Western culture would rapidly grind to a halt.
Yet more and more each year, people in Western nations are becoming disconnected from reality. Cloaked under the promise of keeping people connected, social media has torn us apart. Former hacker and Facebook president Sean Parker has revealed that this social media platform is designed to trap users in a “social-feedback validation loop” that relentlessly urges them to gain ever more likes and comments. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, has expressed his feelings of deep guilt for helping to create a system that is tearing society apart by ensnaring users in these dopamine-driven loops.
...
7 - Fusion With Technology
In 2017, former Google self-driving car developer Anthony Levandowski announced the formation of a religious organization called Way of the Future. This “church” praises artificial intelligence as a force superior to man that should be worshiped lest it destroys us.
Levandowski’s ultimate goal is to fuse human civilization with artificial intelligence. This is also the goal of Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil has predicted that an event called the “technological singularity” is fast approaching. He surmises that this event will occur when Moore’s law causes technology to outstrip human consciousness and triggers unfathomable changes in culture. It goes without saying that Western civilization would not survive this apocalyptic event.
...
6 - Mass Immigration From Undeveloped Countries
In March 2011, Muammar Gadhafi warned the world that Europe would be swarmed with migrants if his regime were to fall. This was no idle threat. Libya had long served as the gateway to Europe much in the same way as Mexico serves as the gateway to the United States. As a way of shoring up his country’s ability to fulfill this role in perpetuity, Gadhafi began taking steps to abandon the petrodollar and return Libya to a gold-backed currency.
In October 2011, Gadhafi was killed. Hillary Clinton expressed her fond remembrance of this incident with her infamously candid phrase, “We came, we saw, he died.” But Gadhafi didn’t simply die. He was brutally raped to death by a gang of crazed young men. Some of these men opted to sodomize Gadhafi with bayonets.
...
5 - Inequality Under The Law
When illegal immigrants commit crimes in the US, they are held to a different standard than US citizens. In 2015, a young woman named Kate Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by a man who was in the United States illegally. Jose Ines Garcia Zarate admitted to shooting Steinle. However, he was acquitted of murder and released from custody.
Zarate and his lawyer spun a fanciful and constantly shifting story. Originally, Zarate claimed that he had purposefully shot the gun at a sea lion and missed. Then he claimed that he had unexpectedly found the gun abandoned under the park bench where he was sitting and that it had fired accidentally as he picked it up. A federal warrant was issued for Zarate almost as soon as he was acquitted, and Zarate has filed a federal suit in response.
...
4 - Erasure Of History
It is said that history is written by the victors. Our perception of the past, and therefore our perception of the present, is molded by those forces which have eliminated opposing viewpoints by diplomatic or violent means. The easiest way to control a person or a group is to manipulate their perspective on reality from the very beginning with a view of history that benefits those in charge.
In recent years, there has been a growing call to erase historical landmarks that are inconvenient to modern sensibilities. In New Orleans, a famous statue of President Andrew Jackson is under siege. According to critics of the statue, the fact that Jackson was a slaveholder is offensive to modern-day minorities.
...
3 - Rising Financial Inequality
The city of San Francisco is a haven for America’s technocratic elite. Executives at Google and Facebook frequently rub shoulders with Senators and Congressmen at swanky restaurants in Fog City neighborhoods like Pacific Heights. But San Francisco is rapidly becoming a haven for a caste that represents the economic polar opposite of the tech elite: the homeless.
Why do the homeless flock to San Francisco? It isn’t the weather. Houston has better weather than San Francisco, but you don’t see endless flocks of impoverished people erecting tent cities on Houston’s sidewalks. The answer is that the same elites who live in multimillion-dollar mansions nestled in San Francisco’s iconic hills have enacted policies that draw the homeless to the poorer areas of the city like magnets.
...
2 - Drug Abuse
In the mid-1800s, the British Empire got China addicted to opium. Chinese goods like porcelain and tea were incredibly popular in Europe, and the Brits had nothing that they could trade for these hot commodities. So, this colonial power cooked up a scheme in which they would sell Indian opium at Chinese port towns, making a killing in the process and facilitating the addiction of thousands of Chinese people to a potentially fatal intoxicant.
Perhaps China is getting back at the West for this costly humiliation by flooding our shores with fentanyl. This designer drug was used predominantly by West Coast business elites until a few years ago when it suddenly became ubiquitous across the United States. Fentanyl is estimated to be 100 times more powerful than morphine, and the chances of overdosing on fentanyl are dangerously high.
...
1 - Nihilism
The quest for meaning has always dominated the Western psyche. In the Dark Ages, the concept of mors certa, hora incerta (“death is certain, its hour is uncertain”) encapsulated the obsession with death that sprang out of Christian theology.
Europe’s bleak social landscape caused average people, clergy, and aristocrats alike to look to the metaphysical for answers. A solution rang out loud and clear with the dawning of the Renaissance, in which thinkers from across the continent devised new ways to tap the essence of nature for the betterment of man.
Rest - http://listverse.com/2018/04/13/10-indications-that-western-society-is-collapsing/
---
10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing
Western civilization has brought us stirring works of art and beautiful forms of music. It has brought us the concept of representative democracy in which every person is created equal and has equal rights before the law, which has freed countless people from the tyrannical regimes of unelected bureaucrats.
Inventors in the West have been responsible for the creation of the telephone, the discovery of electricity, the development of space travel, and incredible advances in medicine. Our modern technological culture would not exist without Western society, and the world would be a much darker and more impoverished place if Western thinkers had never transformed their dreams into reality.
...
10 - Gender Fluidity
Psychiatrist Paul McHugh, a university distinguished service professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine, has long maintained that transgenderism is primarily a psychological issue rather than a biological issue. He recommends that counseling be the primary treatment used to help individuals who are experiencing gender identity confusion.
McHugh is not alone. Many psychiatrists and other medical professionals believe that leaping to perform gender reassignment surgery is not the best course of action when dealing with the issue of gender confusion. These professionals do not hate or look down on transgender people; they simply do not believe that surgery is invariably the best option when dealing with this complicated problem.
Yet in today’s social environment, anyone who so much as suggests that transgender people may benefit from therapy is shot down as a bigot or oppressor. However, it can be argued that only an individual who is mentally disturbed would want to risk gender reassignment surgery.
...
9 - The Collapse Of The Family
For centuries untold, family units have served as the dominant formative force of the character of the next generation. In a healthy society, each family unit is informed and directed by general cultural trends. But in an unhealthy society, family units can break away and subsist on their own devices.
Sensing a threat to their power in the sovereign autonomy of the family unit, statist influences have enforced the mandatory education of children in government-run facilities. In these institutions, children are indoctrinated to transfer their perception of authority from their parents to the state. At school, children lose the freedoms and special treatment that they receive at home and are forced to ask permission to perform basic biological functions.
...
8 - The Rising Dominance Of Virtual Worlds
Robust civic engagement is a fundamental tenet of Western society. Citizens of Western countries must actively defend their rights to stem the relentless onslaught of tyranny that always looks for a new opening. Without the constant efforts of individuals seeking ever greater freedom and quality of life, the ingenious productivity which is the hallmark of Western culture would rapidly grind to a halt.
Yet more and more each year, people in Western nations are becoming disconnected from reality. Cloaked under the promise of keeping people connected, social media has torn us apart. Former hacker and Facebook president Sean Parker has revealed that this social media platform is designed to trap users in a “social-feedback validation loop” that relentlessly urges them to gain ever more likes and comments. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president for user growth, has expressed his feelings of deep guilt for helping to create a system that is tearing society apart by ensnaring users in these dopamine-driven loops.
...
7 - Fusion With Technology
In 2017, former Google self-driving car developer Anthony Levandowski announced the formation of a religious organization called Way of the Future. This “church” praises artificial intelligence as a force superior to man that should be worshiped lest it destroys us.
Levandowski’s ultimate goal is to fuse human civilization with artificial intelligence. This is also the goal of Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil has predicted that an event called the “technological singularity” is fast approaching. He surmises that this event will occur when Moore’s law causes technology to outstrip human consciousness and triggers unfathomable changes in culture. It goes without saying that Western civilization would not survive this apocalyptic event.
...
6 - Mass Immigration From Undeveloped Countries
In March 2011, Muammar Gadhafi warned the world that Europe would be swarmed with migrants if his regime were to fall. This was no idle threat. Libya had long served as the gateway to Europe much in the same way as Mexico serves as the gateway to the United States. As a way of shoring up his country’s ability to fulfill this role in perpetuity, Gadhafi began taking steps to abandon the petrodollar and return Libya to a gold-backed currency.
In October 2011, Gadhafi was killed. Hillary Clinton expressed her fond remembrance of this incident with her infamously candid phrase, “We came, we saw, he died.” But Gadhafi didn’t simply die. He was brutally raped to death by a gang of crazed young men. Some of these men opted to sodomize Gadhafi with bayonets.
...
5 - Inequality Under The Law
When illegal immigrants commit crimes in the US, they are held to a different standard than US citizens. In 2015, a young woman named Kate Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by a man who was in the United States illegally. Jose Ines Garcia Zarate admitted to shooting Steinle. However, he was acquitted of murder and released from custody.
Zarate and his lawyer spun a fanciful and constantly shifting story. Originally, Zarate claimed that he had purposefully shot the gun at a sea lion and missed. Then he claimed that he had unexpectedly found the gun abandoned under the park bench where he was sitting and that it had fired accidentally as he picked it up. A federal warrant was issued for Zarate almost as soon as he was acquitted, and Zarate has filed a federal suit in response.
...
4 - Erasure Of History
It is said that history is written by the victors. Our perception of the past, and therefore our perception of the present, is molded by those forces which have eliminated opposing viewpoints by diplomatic or violent means. The easiest way to control a person or a group is to manipulate their perspective on reality from the very beginning with a view of history that benefits those in charge.
In recent years, there has been a growing call to erase historical landmarks that are inconvenient to modern sensibilities. In New Orleans, a famous statue of President Andrew Jackson is under siege. According to critics of the statue, the fact that Jackson was a slaveholder is offensive to modern-day minorities.
...
3 - Rising Financial Inequality
The city of San Francisco is a haven for America’s technocratic elite. Executives at Google and Facebook frequently rub shoulders with Senators and Congressmen at swanky restaurants in Fog City neighborhoods like Pacific Heights. But San Francisco is rapidly becoming a haven for a caste that represents the economic polar opposite of the tech elite: the homeless.
Why do the homeless flock to San Francisco? It isn’t the weather. Houston has better weather than San Francisco, but you don’t see endless flocks of impoverished people erecting tent cities on Houston’s sidewalks. The answer is that the same elites who live in multimillion-dollar mansions nestled in San Francisco’s iconic hills have enacted policies that draw the homeless to the poorer areas of the city like magnets.
...
2 - Drug Abuse
In the mid-1800s, the British Empire got China addicted to opium. Chinese goods like porcelain and tea were incredibly popular in Europe, and the Brits had nothing that they could trade for these hot commodities. So, this colonial power cooked up a scheme in which they would sell Indian opium at Chinese port towns, making a killing in the process and facilitating the addiction of thousands of Chinese people to a potentially fatal intoxicant.
Perhaps China is getting back at the West for this costly humiliation by flooding our shores with fentanyl. This designer drug was used predominantly by West Coast business elites until a few years ago when it suddenly became ubiquitous across the United States. Fentanyl is estimated to be 100 times more powerful than morphine, and the chances of overdosing on fentanyl are dangerously high.
...
1 - Nihilism
The quest for meaning has always dominated the Western psyche. In the Dark Ages, the concept of mors certa, hora incerta (“death is certain, its hour is uncertain”) encapsulated the obsession with death that sprang out of Christian theology.
Europe’s bleak social landscape caused average people, clergy, and aristocrats alike to look to the metaphysical for answers. A solution rang out loud and clear with the dawning of the Renaissance, in which thinkers from across the continent devised new ways to tap the essence of nature for the betterment of man.
Rest - http://listverse.com/2018/04/13/10-indications-that-western-society-is-collapsing/