These type of articles are really more of an advertisement for how worthless a PhD in the humanities is. The author clearly has no understanding of power politics (Which is going to be kind of jarring for them as we head back into playing that game from the weird 80ish year deviation we've had under American world hegemony). Further, there's no AB testing here. The comparison is some utopia where nobody bothers the natives, no violence happens internally to the colonized area and it's kumbaya's all around. This was not the reality in any place I am aware of. The reality was, if it wasn't the British, it was going to be somebody worse and if it wasn't going to be somebody worse it was because the area was so rife with internal violence or economically worthless that nobody wanted to get involved. This is true with very few exceptions.
This makes me sad because my taxes have been funding the moronification of otherwise intelligent people for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. We don't need more people that set unrealistic and/or incorrect initial constraints on the argument in order for their political view to come out as correct. We need people that can actually solve problems, which requires critical thinking, which is obviously not present here by way of chosen comparison state.
Seems like the first thing one needs to do before criticizing something is to have a solid philosophical basis for doing so. Therefore, we should just open this dusty cupboard labeled “moral ideas philosophers agree about and…” oh my god…
These sort of comments are exactly why books/reviews of books/articles on the evils of the British Empire needs to be more widely disseminated. A condoning of historical atrocities which literally killed billions and impoverished billions more should never be swept under the rug as "if it wasn't the British, it was going to be somebody worse". Colonial apologists always operationalize "whataboutism" to explain away any and every atrocity.
G. K. Chesterton in his Illustrated London News column on September 18, 1909 wrote;
Suppose an Indian said: “I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.” Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him.
I had never heard of colonial apologists but you've dressed up the stereotype quite nicely.
If my great grandfather took your great grandfather bicycle I get to tell you that it was because your great grandfather was a poor cyclist. You in turn get to disagree with me. We might debate but it wont change that I have the bicycle now and I'm not giving it back.
And then we can confuse the example for the subject. The point of the exercise was to get along. We are building a model for future application. I'm struggling to resist the urge to provide some modern examples.
What is this making people liable for their own debts you speak of? Surely this only applies to the peasants and even then rarely? Punishments wont convince you you've done something wrong. You have to tell right from wrong all by yourself while others get to set the wrong example.
This makes me sad because my taxes have been funding the moronification of otherwise intelligent people for decades to the tune of billions of dollars. We don't need more people that set unrealistic and/or incorrect initial constraints on the argument in order for their political view to come out as correct. We need people that can actually solve problems, which requires critical thinking, which is obviously not present here by way of chosen comparison state.