YouTube

this tbh

I fucking hate that video, it's such a perfect display of typical, weasel-y Hollywood progressivism.

A good country is where are low prices.

OT: I don't particularly see anything factually incorrect with the video. It probably is the case that countries like the US and Britain (and probably France) are the most important countries historically by virtue of their influence, and their positive impact on the world politically, institutionally, culturally and economically is difficult to understate. . .

We are also responsible for some of the greatest atrocities in history. The British rule over both India and Palestine was a disaster, although the extent to which the British Raj is directly responsible for the former is debatable. The racism seen in the European colonies in Africa was also obviously abhorrent, although not at all unexpected if you understand even the slightest degree of human nature and its parochial leanings. America has tarnished its record with things like Abu Ghraib, pulling out of Iraq and leaving a power vacuum, having a mental health crisis precipitated by the "greatest" conservative president ever, it's foreign policy in South America under Roosevelt etc.

But you know who else has done abhorrent things? Literally everybody. The problem is that you don't get to ship slaves across the ocean when you don't have a culture or an economy advanced enough for the construction of ships to survive transatlantic haulage. Yet Africans still sold slaves and dominated one another--the ethnic divisions continue to today--but it rarely gets talked about. Why? Because it's much more dramatic to have the advanced white man come over in his ship and whisk away a few helpless niggers who will be forced into servitude. The Native Americans were actually really fucking wasteful, chopping down more trees and killing more buffalos than they could consume. Why is it never mentioned? Because when you don't have a culture or an economy geared towards the production of advanced materials like swords or flintlocks, your ability to kill things is rather undermined.

And just look at the horrible things we see in the Middle East, which are readily talked about but never quite put up to the same moral standard we Westerners are and why? Islamo-Arabic societies are not as culturally or economically advanced as us; they don't have the same capacity as us.

The fact that we've done a lot of horrible things that need to be recognised and corrected is an unfortunate offshoot of our superiority. We only manage to make such fuck-ups because we've advanced so far ahead of everybody else in the first place. On this account, despite our mistakes . . . Yes, the United Kingdom and our brother-in-arms the United States are a force for good in the world.

Do you know how widespread slavery is nowadays? I don't give a fuck what standards you want to hold the U.S. too by itself, but to deny that it is a couple of centuries ahead of most of the rest of the world in this regard is factually wrong.

I don't think I have denied that, though. My point was that I'm just far too cynical to consider it anything more than a source of shame, because we had to abolish it in the first place. In order to abolish something, it has to be in effect first. The fact that slavery was ever a thing--and still is--what, I'm supposed to be happy about that?

Just because my country does it in a more subtle and socially acceptable way now?

My point was that I'm just far too cynical to consider it anything more than a source of shame, because we had to abolish it in the first place.

That's like saying Stahl shouldn't be proud of discovering oxidation because we were stupid enough to have phlogiston theory in the first place. Most of the systemic errors human beings have made and corrected can be boiled down to informational deficits. If you want it to be a source of shame, fine, but it's entirely on you for comparing it to a totally unrealistic counterfactual.

Just because my country does it in a more subtle and socially acceptable way now?

Uh, where?

America has the highest level of healthcare and tertiary education in the world.

Dat GDP is nice too.

Quote from: Metty Christmas on December 18, 2015, 03:07:22 PM

OT: I don't particularly see anything factually incorrect with the video. It probably is the case that countries like the US and Britain (and probably France) are the most important countries historically by virtue of their influence

Yeah

Let's just forget Rome, the HRE, or the Mongols. Britain is fine, but the US? A nation that's gone from top dog to wavering in less than 80 years?

The hell are you on about? The US is important and played a big factor in a lot of things, but to say it's one of the most important in the HISTORY? That's just silly.

I'm not forgetting them.

I'm talking post-Enlightenment, which I should've made clear but you should not have assumed what time-frame I was operating with.

Why not? As far as they were concerned, black people weren't people. I don't think it's unfair to say that they didn't know race was not a substantial factor in human variation, and it's  not apart from the general barbarity of the time even towards people of our own race and nationalities. I don't know why you're asking me if adults don't know how to treat one another. . . You said yourself, humans are inherently "evil". A statement I agree with, to an extent.

So, okay, hold on a second--are you saying people need to be taught not to be racist?

Because I can tell you right now--I didn't need to be taught that.

It's ideological bullshit to compare slavery to the selling of one's labour for a wage, especially when there are literally fantastic reasons why we ought to prefer a system in which capital employs labour, as opposed to vice versa.

See, a better point would've been to bring up how slavery is fundamentally involuntary, whereas our system is not. But our system is only "voluntary" insofar as your own desire to live comfortably.

If you don't want to die rotting in the streets, you have to work. You have to.

It's against all your autonomy, but you have to do it. To live.

Not to make society better through your work--but to extend your own life.
They have your whole livelihood on the line. That's what makes it slavery.