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Un-peace in the Middle East comes as much from (IMO, inevitable) mismanagement by the British Empire ( and later the US ) as anything. Of course, the primary th
by ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Un-peace in the Middle East comes as much from (IMO, inevitable) mismanagement by the British Empire ( and later the US ) as anything. Of course, the primary thing is the failure of the Ottoman Empire, with the death-blow by the Kemalists in 1920-1922.
There's literally a book - "A Peace To End All Peace" ( ISBN-13: 978-0805088090 )dedicated to numbing your brain with a thousand blows to show this.
Technology seems to be at odds with many people's sense of what is human and with human identity. It's a story as old as that of Captain Ned Ludd. I saw this very closely in my most recent gig. I put a (very crude) machine learning element into the flagship product and the reaction was a lot fear. Geez, I was just trying to keep operators from breaking (expensive) things. Again, though, the incentives were not with that. But the perception was "they're takin' 'er jerbs."
- webmaven 10y agoThe French are also to blame, and the Germans exploited the British and French mismanagement with considerable glee (as did the USSR WRT the US' mismanagement in the region for a while, and vice versa).
- ArkyBeagle 10y agoThis is true. I suffer from English-language bias and France did not persist in the Middle East post-WWII ( many holdings ended in the 20s-30s ) , so it's easier to forget. Plus, France's colonies in Africa were much more of their empire, and of course, the Indochina .... thing...
- TeMPOraL 10y agoCome to think of it, one could probably go with the blame back to Adam and Eve. So maybe instead of asking which particular subsets of previous generations screwed things up, we should ask ourselves why do we allow the effects of that to continue? One of my wild dreams is that one day nations and societies suddenly look back at the history of harm they did to one another and say, "So what? Fuck it, it's in the past, we have no obligation to perpetuate it."
- webmaven 10y agoI read it more as identifying which cultures were to blame, rather than which people (or there descendants). Because being able to do so is the first step toward figuring out which aspects of those cultures need to be debugged. However, please don't mistake my position as one of moral relativism, or that I am advocating postmodern deconstruction.
- tim333 10y agoCultural debugging is an interesting idea.