[doctorzlo]

I was raised in what you call the "morally degenerate" present society and I would never go out and take advantage of the genuine legitimate grievances of certain protesters in order to riot and loot and destroy. I know plenty of others who were raised in this "moral degeneracy" and feel the same way. It's not about corporal punishment in schools (I assume you meant this rather than capital punishment...), nor is it about rockers or goths or punks, or about having lots of sex. Nor do I think that Chinese families are a model we should strive to emulate, having good Chinese friends myself and knowing how irrationally harsh their parents have been with them.

At the same time, having gone through the Australian public school system, I think I've seen some of the worst this country has to offer. It begins with parents who don't teach their children basic human decency, and continues with schools which are too indifferent to actually enforce their own policies about drug use or violence or abusive behaviour (whether towards teachers or students) and punish these seriously (it doesn't have to involve beating a kid with a stick to make him learn to behave himself - suspension or expulsion or even a police complaint would be just fine). This is, to SOME extent, about moral collapse - that is failing to TEACH and ENFORCE morality - it's not about people's fashion statements (goths and the like) or disposing of antiquated and violent methods (corporal punishment in schools). It is also, in my view, a consequence of the Western world's wholesale adoption of consumerism as the ultimate end in life and rabid radical individualism, to the point where people have been robbed of community or nation and care only about themselves (the two trends, of course, are interlinked).