BF2S Forums Race relations thread

(disclaimer: not knocking the above, or diminishing classic american slavery)

Worry not, many slaves and children of slaves live on in America's new spirit of slavery: the prison-industrial complex. People living outside of incarceration are also less free than the American dream, owing to financial burden.

how very mature.

you change from "slavery was 100s of years ago, get over it" and then, when confronted with the actual son of a slave, the living link, "go back to africa".

grow up, little boy.

also, quite a few have gone back to africa. it's called liberia.

for a person that denigrates the field of history so much, you really have a shoddy grasp of basic historical premises.

even on a scientific level, how do you suppose one could empirically support that claim?

we know that colonialism, slavery, empire, etc, extracted measurable billions of wealth from the 'third world'. we purposefully and forcefully de-industrialized india, for example. for you to turn around and say 'a british indian born in the UK today is better off than their peers in bangladesh, though' is just so fucking funny. well ... errm, yeah, but if we never went there in the first place, maybe it wouldn't be so? make u think!

and how much potentially better off could the son of slave be if he was actually granted the equal rights and opportunity that were promised to him by the abolition of slavery, the promise of reconstruction, etc.? make u think.

or if he was paid restitution for the centuries of unpaid labour undertaken by his parents and forefathers?

it's honestly like talking to a child half the time.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 02:57:09)

how do you know? india had a more advanced industrial society in terms of its textiles than britain when we turned up, you fucking mong. that's why we purposefully wrecked half of it so that the mill-owners in lancashire could compete and eventually monopolise the trade. the mass-produced tat made by fingerless children in first industrial revolution-era manchester didn't have a patch on indian handicraft and fine exports, not for decades.

read a book, as ever.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/ … iamson.pdf

While India produced about 25 percent of world industrial output in 1750, this figure had fallen to only 2 percent by 1900.

dilbert: "india would still be medieval without us!"

i really don't think you're mentally equipped for this 'theory of history' stuff. you don't have the conceptual framework. it's simply impossible to say whether or not india would be more or less developed than us at this juncture, if we never colonised them. it's impossible to say whether they would have stayed static politically or undergone revolutions due to the internal dynamics of their society, etc.

simply how the fuck can you know! and don't appeal to some 'innate racial characteristics' either, you fucking idiot.

and, in the long view, why is it even so laudable and desirable to 'advance' from a stage of self-sufficiency to acquisitive capitalism? would it have been better if india went global capitalist first, and colonised us, or took someone else's patch of land and resources? why?

even napoleon recognised that all of his greatness was only made possible because the chinese dragon in the east was sleeping. we should be counting our lucky stars, in the provincial peninsular backwater of europe, that the great middle kingdom of china never 'advanced from medieval thinking' and decided to use the world as their resources lode.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 03:23:25)

starving in a mudhut? india was a major industrial player in 1750 and was on the path of development.

we set them back to the medieval standards of living in the ensuing 200 years of colonisation; or, being charitable, we contributed a big part of it, whilst the development of the world market and geopolitical advances elsewhere 'passively' contributed to it. we extracted their national wealth and pooled it in the City of London.

you simply don't have one iota of a clue what you're talking about. it's embarrassing seeing you tee off on these subjects which you've clearly nary read a single paper in. just a bundle of racial prejudices and some vague sense that we are 'no. 1 civ ever'.  what little history you have read is quite clearly eurocentric in the extreme. do you think nothing at all was happening in the far east, south asia, the middle-east, etc, whilst henry VIII was knocking off his wives?

you're out of your depth. a grown man. grow the fuck up!

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 03:27:53)

there is a nuanced historical literature on it, yes, with persuasive and well-researched arguments on many sides. are you familiar with historiography about the british raj or are you just good at finding wikipedia links? you do know that submitting wikipedia links as a 'citation' would get you kicked off a year-one humanities course ... right? this isn't 'knowledge', dilbert.

the point being that india was certainly and demonstratively capable of industrial society before the british arrived, regardless of your interpretation for its precipitous decline between the 18th and 19th centuries. indian nationalists will blame it all on the conquerors; the conquerors will claim that india would never have schools, railways, etc, without our having been there. the truth is obviously somewhere in the middle of that, and in many shades of nuance.

you saying that india would still be medieval is arrant nonsense. 100% claptrap. next.

ditto with africa. the idea that slavery was for their 'improvement' and they should be thankful or go back to africa is just ahistorical, and furthermore ethically bankrupt, NONSENSE.

I'm sure the average indian was unaffected by wealth transfer ...

er, this describes your average british person for most of the history of the british colonies and empire, dumkopf. your average peon didn't even get suffrage until 1918. for most of the 'glorious' history of our 'rich and industrialised' nation, the mass of our people lived in rural poverty and ignorance, or, later, massive ghettos in the cities without working sanitation and where disease and crime were rife. it's amazing how much you talk about 'indians in mud huts' and neglect the sheer, well, neglected status of 95% of brits during our 'world no. 1' phase. you are a mong.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 04:06:32)

counterfactual history is fun in the pub, dilbert, especially if it supports your little racial hunches, but it's ultimately a totally untestable and unprovable hypothesis. it's not 'real' history. you can't write papers about it or conduct research. we simply. do not. know. and any confident assertion on your part is just a statement of your presentiments and prejudices.

living in a hut surrounded by sticks to keep the lions out as they swatted away tsetse flies.

do you think this is how the majority of nigerians live today? i know you're bad at history but are you really this ignorant of the world around you?

yes, africa has more tropical illnesses, adverse weather, etc, which definitely affects its economic output and possibility of development (i should add that your own lifestyle and emissions are actively making it worse). but i think you're forgetting that europe itself was blighted by plagues from the far/middle east and nearly extinguished several times in the early modern era, as well as suffering numerous famines and periods of declining economic activity.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 04:13:15)

wow, you must be the first person to ever realise that india was ruled by a muslim dynasty from without the area of the indus valley!

amazing what you learn after 10 minutes on a wikipedia, isn't it?

it's HONESTLY like talking to a very small child.

Well thats how they would be living today.

HOW do you know? it's a totally unprovable hypothesis. their development has been sidetracked and attenuated by being squatted on by european imperial rulers, who extracted their wealth and resources for their capitalist metropolitan centres and home markets/industries. in the case of many african nations to this day, their development is still entirely beholden to the power of international capital; that's what 'neocolonialism' is, another very well-studied field in history. the development of nigeria, for e.g., today is totally inseparable from the question of the influence of multinational oil companies who similarly are diverting its national wealth and exerting a massive influence on its domestic politics.

like HOW can you tell how far they would have developed or what political direction(s) they would have taken, if that didn't occur? you are historically illiterate.

you're really not a very smart guy. it never ceases to amaze me.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 06:13:23)

dilbert really thinks that every race has its innate talents and 'natural place' in a hierarchy, like it's evolution manifest or something. blacks and browns have a 'natural' habitat in quaint little mud huts; only the white man learned to harness fire and steam! even over 1000 years they'd never figure it out. that's really the sort of presumption that sits behind his nonsense talk that 'india would remain medieval'. he thinks it's the racially destined 'limit' to their civilisation.

nevermind that some of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of the 20th/21st century have been indian. that the latest generation of chess grandmasters are indian. these people simply couldn't figure out indoor plumbing or a combi boiler if you gave them 500 years!

you don't really know what you're talking about with how our colonial societies worked. francophone africa and indochina were westernised a great deal. you can still go to saigon today and it looks like a little paris in the old quarter. the french aggressively promoted an idea of 'frenchness' and accessible citizenship if you only learned the language and 'frenchified' yourself. it's part of their republican ideal. ironically a lot of the big communist leaders were very well-educated in paris (and less so in london). ho chi minh worked and studied in london and paris. gandhi was thoroughly english in his education and mannerisms.

ditto, there were educational frameworks and civil service careers in place for people from the west indies, india, etc, to make it in the british imperial machine. the main thing was that they remained segregated and hit a glass ceiling: an indian or a jamaican could become a model english gentleman, have their civil service training in london, etc, but would inevitably be posted out to the periphery for their job. they were never allowed 'in' to the metropolitan centre and real top echelons because of the strict racial hierarchies in place.

true that we were generally less, well, communist about it than the soviets. i think that's because of the close alliance between capitalism+democracy in the modern era. you could say that america tried to modernise and 'westernise' latin america in the cold war era ... just their way of doing it was to install right-wing dictators and fund deathsquads. the chief goal was to preserve the propertied class and the vested interests, not to promote a genuine development of society. i don't know if you could claim the latter in 100% good faith for the soviets, but a socialist post-colonial society is a helluva lot better than a capitalist one that's ensnared in neo-colonial economic relations with the previous rulers.

At least William the Conqueror didn't decree black people to be lesser humans like some of my nation's founders.

uhmmm william the conqueror literally committed a mass genocide in the north. the normans very much worked hard to subjugate first the southern anglo-saxons and then, more repressively, the more norse/danish-adjacent communities in the north. the economic division between north/south is much more recent than the norman conquest, but you could argue that was the beginning of a long cultural divide that has never really been healed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-03 09:00:27)

Anyway, I went to a park dedication as a guest of the NAACP. It was pretty easy to find me sitting in the crowd watching the ceremony with the other black people. Some good career stuff came out of that park event that I went to on a whim that I can't get into.

The interesting part is that in this crowd of black people watching the event was made up of lawyers, doctors, CEOs, and teachers. Collectively tens of millions of dollars of wealth at least watching some speeches given by the mayor, and other notables there to impress them the rich blacks.

Really eye-opening experience. People may roll their eyes at the NAACP and other famous 'identity politics' advocacy groups'. They may think that politicians pander to them because they are afraid of being called racist. That's only part of it. The other part is the fact that these organizations are run and staffed by rich and successful people who have their hands in other significant organizations. The NAACP is an advocacy group but also a great way to network, organize, and protect wealth. Well kept secret.

Sorry but I can't take seriously a forum owned by this guy

Twitter will be owned by Morgan Stanley soon dw.