4 ms·

I can't speak for Bangladesh. Also, I won't argue against colonialism apologists on this thread.

by senthil_rajasek 4y ago

rayiner 4y ago
[flagged]
- senthil_rajasek 4y ago
  @dang this sarcastic comment is a racist trope, "Britons were running around the forest worshiping trees when Indians had indoor plumbing." Could you please address this?
  - Wildgoose 4y ago
    I'm English/British and I don't recognise this as racist, just another acknowledgement of facts you don't want to address.
    - senthil_rajasek 4y ago
      Imagine explaining why genocide or slavery or misogyny is bad to every internet comment! Which is why I don't engage with colonialism apologists. There is plenty of literature to educate yourselves on that.
  - dang 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to address it, but if I'm reading you and rayiner correctly, you're both trying to make an anticolonial point. He's saying something about India being older and therefore more culturally mature, or something. No? Admittedly the comment should have been less snarky but that's a different issue.
    - senthil_rajasek 4y ago
      Thanks for flagging the rayiner comment. rayiner's original comment was defending colonialism. "If it wasn’t for British colonialism, both of us would be subsistence farmers right now instead of on HN." If you read his subsequent comment "forest/indoor plumbing" it is definitely sarcastic and comes off racist. Further down he switches to India being older but does not consider that ancient Indian history is whitewashed in today's world in most western cultures.
- arunix 4y ago
  The early Britons were much more sophisticated than many people realize. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170410-why-i-lived-like-a-prehistoric-briton https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170410-why-i-lived-like... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_of_Brodgar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_of_Brodgar
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Fair enough, but at this time (5,000 years ago) other places were building cities with centrally planned sanitation and drainage systems. The earliest written script in the British isles dates to the Roman era, two thousand years after Harappan proto-writing. The Bronze Age came to Britain 500 years later than in India. Reducing colonialism to a simple morality narrative relies on the objectively false assumption that civilizations are all developing at the same time along the same trajectory. If the Romans had never colonized Britain, Britain probably wouldn’t have been in any position to colonize India by the 1700s. And all of us would probably still be subsistence farmers.
    - senthil_rajasek 4y ago
      This is such a niche take. I live in the U.S, how many high school graduates would even know about the Harappan civilization? Hell, I have difficulty finding a midwesterner who can name 2 cities in the Indian subcontinent with the correct pronunciation.
brhsagain 4y ago
In the spirit of hacking the site guidelines: I feel like writing a comment to declare that you're leaving the argument has to be anti-intellectual-curiosity in some nonzero way.
mst 4y ago
Pointing out the existence of the side effect of triggering/accelerating industrialisation is in no way apologism for all the awful things that were inflicted on the countries in question (being English, I've spent a fair amount of time digging in to what we did and every time you think you've found the worst there turns out to be yet another layer of even more awful underneath.) As an analogy: I grew up in NW England during the troubles, and the nearest big city was Manchester. After the IRA blew up the city centre, the rebuilt version was much much nicer and attracted substantially more commerce. That can be true without in any way having any interest in defending the IRA's explosive terrorism and extrajudicial murders (possibly my favourite exchange on twitter was Gerry Adams posting about feeling like the grinch going around his house turning off all the christmas lights before he went to bed and somebody replying "surely you know somebody who can fit a timer.")

I can't speak for Bangladesh. Also, I won't argue against colonialism apologists on this thread.

rayiner 4y ago

[flagged]

senthil_rajasek 4y ago
@dang this sarcastic comment is a racist trope, "Britons were running around the forest worshiping trees when Indians had indoor plumbing." Could you please address this?
- Wildgoose 4y ago
  I'm English/British and I don't recognise this as racist, just another acknowledgement of facts you don't want to address.
  - senthil_rajasek 4y ago
    Imagine explaining why genocide or slavery or misogyny is bad to every internet comment! Which is why I don't engage with colonialism apologists. There is plenty of literature to educate yourselves on that.
- dang 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to address it, but if I'm reading you and rayiner correctly, you're both trying to make an anticolonial point. He's saying something about India being older and therefore more culturally mature, or something. No? Admittedly the comment should have been less snarky but that's a different issue.
  - senthil_rajasek 4y ago
    Thanks for flagging the rayiner comment. rayiner's original comment was defending colonialism. "If it wasn’t for British colonialism, both of us would be subsistence farmers right now instead of on HN." If you read his subsequent comment "forest/indoor plumbing" it is definitely sarcastic and comes off racist. Further down he switches to India being older but does not consider that ancient Indian history is whitewashed in today's world in most western cultures.
arunix 4y ago
The early Britons were much more sophisticated than many people realize. See e.g. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170410-why-i-lived-like-a-prehistoric-briton https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170410-why-i-lived-like... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_of_Brodgar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ness_of_Brodgar
- rayiner 4y ago
  Fair enough, but at this time (5,000 years ago) other places were building cities with centrally planned sanitation and drainage systems. The earliest written script in the British isles dates to the Roman era, two thousand years after Harappan proto-writing. The Bronze Age came to Britain 500 years later than in India. Reducing colonialism to a simple morality narrative relies on the objectively false assumption that civilizations are all developing at the same time along the same trajectory. If the Romans had never colonized Britain, Britain probably wouldn’t have been in any position to colonize India by the 1700s. And all of us would probably still be subsistence farmers.
  - senthil_rajasek 4y ago
    This is such a niche take. I live in the U.S, how many high school graduates would even know about the Harappan civilization? Hell, I have difficulty finding a midwesterner who can name 2 cities in the Indian subcontinent with the correct pronunciation.

brhsagain 4y ago

In the spirit of hacking the site guidelines: I feel like writing a comment to declare that you're leaving the argument has to be anti-intellectual-curiosity in some nonzero way.

mst 4y ago

Pointing out the existence of the side effect of triggering/accelerating industrialisation is in no way apologism for all the awful things that were inflicted on the countries in question (being English, I've spent a fair amount of time digging in to what we did and every time you think you've found the worst there turns out to be yet another layer of even more awful underneath.) As an analogy: I grew up in NW England during the troubles, and the nearest big city was Manchester. After the IRA blew up the city centre, the rebuilt version was much much nicer and attracted substantially more commerce. That can be true without in any way having any interest in defending the IRA's explosive terrorism and extrajudicial murders (possibly my favourite exchange on twitter was Gerry Adams posting about feeling like the grinch going around his house turning off all the christmas lights before he went to bed and somebody replying "surely you know somebody who can fit a timer.")