Thanks for the more informed comment to my "50% trollish" take :) Agree, the colonial empires did unimaginable horrors, you're probably right on this, probably

Thanks for the more informed comment to my "50% trollish" take :) Agree, the colonial empires did unimaginable horrors, you're probably right on this, probably they should never be praised. ...my bad for ignoring the part of their history that happened outside Europe. Maybe the word "empire" is a bad one to use, too many bloody connotations for non-europeans. But there is to be said that the industrial revolution and its consequences would likely not have happened without the colonial empires. And, as much as we want to consider our society the consequence of the French Revolution and the independence war and all those etc., I think our true culture we live in (not the one we imagine when we go to theatre or read some lofty philosophy) that brought us the current comforts, including the laptops we type from, is the (incredibly bloody) product of industrial revolution and industrial capitalism that was fuelled by imperialism. There's where we come from, and it just is, guild / shame etc. are practically useless with respect to a past longer than a lifetime, water under the bridge etc. We just need to be wise enough to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And honest enough to take ownership of the true foundations of our society. And to use the fruits of the spilled blood as much/best as we can and make them plentiful to all - the only thing to do about spilled blood is to make bloody sure it wasn't spilled for nothing! And: > reduced the power of the elites, and forced them to content -and deal with- their own population ...that's another issues. I'd rather have whatever elite crops up at the top of an empire fan out and dilute their exploatation as much as possible. Modern informational society will make it much harder for far off acts of bloody exploitation to go ignored and unnoticed anyway, with a globalist culture of social responsibility, call it a "global-PC-2.0" (hopefully less ridiculous than the 1.0 version of "political correctness") in lack of a better word. These are the challenges I care about: (1) how to create a "globalism 2.0" that economically works (maybe the whole dystribute-everything and crypto things can be put to good use here) for the best and also produces "global culture" (the 90's brought some mildly successful examples of this), and (2) how to create some "global-PC-2.0" or "distributed global eco social responsibility" (this will need some true innovation, and it will need truly un-censorable and anonymous communication infrastructure too as a substrate to work on - think "global channels that could broadcast live and no nation state have the power to shut them down even if they discover it breaks their (local) laws").