“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.”

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      28 days ago

      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.

        • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          27 days ago

          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.

            • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
              23·
              27 days ago

              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.