“It has been dubbed Britain’s ‘most woke’ roundabout because drivers must give priority to pedestrians, then cyclists, and then other cars and lorries before continuing on themselves. Locals have pointed out the priority for cyclists and pedestrians is unnecessary as only cars and lorries regularly use the Boundary Way route.”
Facile and lazy. In reality, the norms and practices in “third world” countries are pretty comparable no matter who, if anyone, colonized them. It’s just a question of development. Not everything in the world is the responsibility of big bad white man.
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Chill, bro
If anyone’s “fucking” taking things personally here, then it’s not me.
The argument I was responding to is an obviously ahistorical attempt to blame almost literally everything on “Victorians”. That’s dumb for exactly the reasons you just outlined.
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About “fucked” this and “fucked up” that, personally I just see it as laziness and weak language skills. Always reaching for the bazooka because hunting for the scalpel is too hard. But it’s probably a bit generational too.
On empire, it’s the story of humanity. Every nation in the world has been either the author or the subject of imperialism, and it’s usually nonstop back-and-forth. Sure, the European empires were the first to cross seas, but why should that change anything fundamentally?
Personally I find it interesting to observe the relative fates of those countries that choose to dwell on their imperial victim status, and those that don’t. Look at the different outcomes of Algeria and South Korea, for example.
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As you say, Algeria sat on natural resources. It also had a “better” experience of empire than Korea, which was absolutely brutalized by Nazi-adjacent Japanese, leaving it (IIRC) the 2nd poorest country in the whole world. Korea has no natural resources, as doesn’t Japan, possibly the world’s least colonized country. The different trajectories of these three countries suggests very clearly to me that degree of empire-suffering - at the hands of “white” people or otherwise - is not the determinant factor in human development. Nor are material resources. It is something else. But anyway, none of this is falsifiable, neither of us is going to convince the other and nobody else is reading, so let’s call it a day there.
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Just popping in to say that others are reading and I found your exchange interesting. Have a good day!
It was all worth it, then. Thanks.
Yes all third world countries are the same /s. Not at all a reductive viewpoint.
Techno fascists have set our world on an unsustainable path and it is past Colonial powers that started that. So, revisionism aside, those “big bad” technology and industry obsessed empires will be attributed most of the blame and they better fix it or we won’t be here much longer.
That, or China will have to fix it since Western countries have been thumb twiddling for decades (despite being the source of the problem). Either way it will be ugly once past colonial powers lose their shine and history reflects an honest assessment of them. “Great” Britain is already a shadow of its former self. More will follow that march into relative obscurity as the rest of the world fixes the mess they created.
The cultural, economic and environmental impact of the Colonial era is much more profound than most know (largely because its ignored in most Western curriculums). You may not recognize issues if you’re white or man, but that can be remedied by going outside and speaking to people that don’t look or talk like you.