cultures "catching up with"a Western ideal?

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I was listening to a debate about the treatment of the palestinian people on youtube. A person was complaning about the Arabs with what you would expect, people who support their parties are fools because they are anti gay, theocratic etc.

but anyway one point was, he said "just because they haven't caught up with us yet in progressing socially does not mean they should be treated so badly"

But that made me think that the person who said that, believes that every culture, is on an inevitable path to all of them accepting western liberal/secular values, and we just need to wait for them to catch up?

What if they never "catch up" and fall in line with western social liberalism and always stay bigoted by his standard, does that mean he would not support them. At what point do you just accept that they (and anyone) has different values to us and just leave them to it.

Moving to Western values? I certainly hope not!

Do you mean greed, selfishness, consumerism, filth on TV and a high divorce rate among the few people who even bother getting married?

There are a lot of Chinese in Australia. They work hard. Their children are mostly well behaved and study hard in school. Their teenagers dress and act respectably. They have strong family ties.

Why should they want to be like us?

they said it was cause we had the Enlightenment and civil rights and everything. but they are less materialistic and selfish. maybe one day there will be a perfect group with all the good and no bad. till then we have to comprimise.

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In my view, the Internet - www - is becoming a major factor in very, very slowly changing medieval values.

The only way culture changes, in a way, is when medieval politicians (associated with non-profit, tax-exempt temples, mosques, and churches) literally retire or die off and then are replaced by slightly less right wing extremists. That often takes about thirty years (for a new idea to blossom).

Sooner or later, many non-profit, tax-exempt religions adopt the use of cars - although some religions - still prefer horses.

http://www.beliefnet.com/

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At the same time, there are forces in place - such as the country of China - which censors the internet/www so as to preserve Chinese politics.

That is a clear signal that China does not want to catch up with a Western ideal at all.

Also, some non-profit religions, even today, are still ruthless and have set themselves against all western democracies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pe ... s_heretics
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/galileo/

And not wanting to "catch up" with a western "ideal" is not a bad thing, either. Rightly so, said western ideal is one of those things that can come across as being too good to be true, in a charming but deceptive way. I'm disillusioned and somewhat put off by how the west can be prone to persecuting people in certain ways because they are shy/loners/chronically single, something some Aspies may be vulnerable to. One reason for that is the individualism found especially in western societies fosters and encourages a "me me me" attitude. The sorts of persecution of certain types of people one would find in the west shows that we are actually the ones with the catching up to do, when we've deceived ourselves we are ahead in human development. We think we are free countries when in fact we're not. I'm disillusioned by how certain western countries are seen as ideal when they are not the sort of societies I personally would want to live in, or since I'm in it already I find aspects of it horrendously difficult.

One thing I'm reminded of is how the USA got all the people behind the Iron Curtain to think that life in the West was a garden of roses, because of all the flashy TV shows beamed into their countries that featured Americans as a godlike race of tall, tanned, rich people with perfect teeth and hair and who were able to perform amazing feats with Western technology. (Anybody remember The Six Million Dollar Man? Stuff like that was everywhere on American TV in the 70s, and we actually broadcast it into the Soviet Bloc as propaganda.)

After we achieved our goal of overthrowing the Soviet empire, we basically abandoned them, and they got to see the ugly side of our culture up close-vulture capitalists and semi-corrupt bureaucrats who only took bribes from rich people. A politician can bribe a cop in the US, but the little guy can't get him to "forget" a $200 ticket with a $100 bill. In fact, the little guy will be arrested if he tries it.

At least in the USSR the cop didn't care where his money came from. It's that way in most third world countries-cops in Argentina take bribes daily, and Mexican cops were famous for "$40 shakedowns" before they were replaced by drug gangs who just shoot white people. American cops only take bribes from the rich, politicians only take bribes from the rich, the little guy doesn't have enough money to interest them, so greedy are they, so he gets "anti-bribery" laws enforced against him.

Anyway, after they discovered that America wasn't so great after all, they felt duped, and decided that nothing was true, so they might as well listen to Russian news because it was just as full of lies as American news, but at least Russian news is Russian. Nationalism trumped all other loyalties.

Today, we broadcast American pop music to Iran, and the Iranians don't bother jamming it! They jam the BBC but not rap from the USA. A TRUE ideologue is not swayed by pop culture. I can't help thinking that the Muslims and the Chinese know about Western values, and they consciously reject them. China has relatively few dissidents. America has more. American values aren't that great when you get up close. All about me and all about stuff.

Americans did not stand in line 4 hours a day to get their necessaries. And they weren't covered in sh*t because in America the plumbing works.

ruveyvn

Suffice it to say that when the gates of the Berlin Wall were finally opened, East Berliners didn't head to West Berlin's well-stocked supermarkets to stock up on food. No, they headed to Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's premier retail corridor, comparable to Union Square in San Francisco or any other shopping district in a major world city, to stock up on Western luxuries. This is a FACT, and well documented in histories of the period.

Yes, under communism people waited in long lines for basic necessities. But it seems to me that many people had expectations that could not be met. They expected the shelves to be full immediately. In fact, shortages of basic goods continued, at least in Russia, for many years, and still today rural folk grow much of their own food. Sadly, famine has been a permanent part of the Russian landscape. The failings are political, and societal, and were not eliminated by the fall of communism.

The people who suffered least after the Wall came down were those who had lived behind it the shortest amount of time-Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles. In the latter three countries I just mentioned, there were active resistance movements that had to be crushed by the Red Army to get rid of them, and in Poland the Russians never did succeed in getting rid of Solidarity.