> The US is probably being the 'most honest' by simply saying we won't implement them. In China and India they would simply misreport their emissions and not pay the tax.
Uhm, is there some data backing up your claim that we are honest and that China and India are dishonest. I mean, we really should think twice about accusing other countries of dishonesty after our whole weapons of mass destruction invasion debacle, various wars, regime changes, our "intelligence" services, rendition, Vietnam...
This wasn't really an accusation that China / India are less moral, only that they will game the system differently than the US will. I mean... I put 'most honest' in quotes to imply the US is not really honest. No state actor is honest or moral, they all act in their own national interests.f
For all the instances you reference, you think India or China don't have an equivalent moral failing? Cultural revolution? Great leap forward? Tienanmen square? Great firewall?
As for India, go look up "most polluted city in the world." The top 5 are located in India and 9 of the top 10 are in India. Do you expect them to implement carbon taxes when they can't even clean up their own air?
The whole point of this thread is that we need a technology solution with the underlying reasoning that political solutions have been and will remain untenable.
No, that's a common misconception. The majority of people with Dravidian heritage now live in Southern India but there's no "literal" meaning where Dravidian means Southern India. There's ample archaeological and linguistic evidence that Dravidian populations and languages were endemic as far north as what is now geographically Iran.
Eh, no. Genetic stuides show that South Asians are descendants of two major ancestral components, one restricted to South Asia (Ancestral South Indian) and the other component (Ancestral North Indian) more closely related to those in Central Asia, West Asia and Europe.
Sure, the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory is too simplistic but nevertheless, there is a clear dicotomy.
N.B. Ancestral South Indian and Ancestral North Indian are testing used in genetic studies to sidestep the use of loaded/controversial terms like Aryan and Dravidian.
Disclaimer, I'll not a geneticist. And I've seen, read, or come across various studies supporting opposite viewpoints. Given that, it is non trivial to decide what is the ultimate truth and the truth we decide to pick depends on our own biases. And I don't think this question is settled and may never be settled.
My personal take, for what it's worth, there was no mass scale migration and North and South Indians are the same people. However, there was a lot on influx/migrations/invasions in North from rest of Asia and farther, which led to genetic mixing and the deviations that we see.
No. Just people who were willing to tolerate things being done to other people that they didn't care about. Sometimes even people they did care about. People forget that the 45 year old Tom Jefferson took a 14 year old child, Sally Hemmings to France as his sex slave. He fathered 6 children with her and did not free them. That's right. He kept those 6 children as slaves. Was he sociopath? Or just a product of a toxic culture that enabled him to commit such actions and still sleep well?
> were the Nazis and the Soviets to unite they would have canned the Americans a few times over
Something about that analogy is off. In case we forgot, in the 1800s, the British were the guys advocating and initiating ethnic cleansing of "inferior races" via engineered famines. Various parts of British occupied East India lost a third or more of their population. It was only that regions good fortune of having virulent tropical diseases that kept the British out. The indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand, and other places were not so lucky. The world might have been a better place if the Marathas and the Tipus of the world had united to prevent the subsequent genocides and massive loss and waste of human potential in South Asia.
I'm not disagreeing, it's the first I've heard of it really.
There's plenty there to suggest capitalism was working as intended... extracting all the wealth created by others labour, leaving too little for good infrastructure.
Churchill: Personally, I am not greatly concerned about Russian development in China. I would rather have them develop in that way down south into India. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
Churchill: I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
> I don't see details to indicate famine was engineered for ethnic cleansing
We have to be careful to view this from the broad system level perspective. We have individuals like Churchill who expressed a clear racial belief system. A belief system where they believed, and even directly stated it was their manifest destiny to extinguish inferior races. In their positions of power, through intentional actions (and alleged inactions), they caused large numbers of their prey/victims to die. Should we attribute that to "capitalism was working as intended" or should we actually call a spade a spade and recognize that these men had agency and did these things consciously or at best sub-consciously to achieve lebensraum for their preferred race.
You said in the 1800s that their was engineering of famines in order to carry out ethnic cleansing.
So neither "it was maybe subconscious", nor Churchill fits in there.
FWIW those quotes to me sound more like "I'm not going to apologise for what I consider natural selection". Perhaps it's the lack of context, could you cite the works those quotes are from?
There's a World of difference between being unapologetic that your "race" has won-out genetically and "we're going to systematically wipe out humans who lack what we consider to be ideal characteristics".
> Your example, while certainly a good one, is from 1943, rather late considering the empire would start shrinking and decolonizing in 45.
Again, as mentioned, I gave the 1943 example to point out how recent such colonial actions and attempts at ethnic cleansing were. There are people alive today who suffered through that.
There's ample examples of other genocides via famine performed by the English against ethnic groups they were subjugating at the time. For one closer to home, lets look at the English activity behind the Irish famine.
"The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people"
"Famine is an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population"
As usual, such individuals used all manner of tools to justify the genocide of any ethnic group they deemed "inferior". In this case, the Irish. It is telling that one of the major tools was that precise instrument of religion with Trevelyan even describing the famine and subsequent mass death as an instrument of God.
I'm not sure it really works to consider the Irish, my own recent ancestors, as ethnically differentiated from the British. The Tudors were seemingly descended from Irish Scots who conquered Gwynedd in the first millennium CE, for example. But I that doesn't matter, it's what the controlling forces at the time thought.
I'm not well versed in the Potato Famine but I understood it was primarily about rich landlords and wealthy Britons caring naught for any poor people. Confounded with "Catholic vs Protestant" tribalism.
Though Trevelyan appeared to believe strictly in hands-off pure Capitalism and didn't seemingly worry about religious affiliation ("Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.") which was a proxy for being "English" vs Irish.
We've switched to a different sort of evil perpetrated for different reasons on different people in a different time; the natural conclusion is that you erred in your initial claim and so are trying to bolster your conclusion with other information?
If you want to say British controlling powers have been involved in genocides, motivated at least in part by racial or xenophobic hate, then you'll get no opposition from me. But 'multiple generations coordinating to create conditions in which a famine can kill' as a mode of ethnic cleansing? I'm not seeing it in the argument you're making.
> Didn't the British empire ban slaves and slavery on English soil at the start of the 19th century?
Depends on your meaning and what dates. The British did NOT ban slavery "at the start of the 19th century" (meaning 1800s). They banned only the buying of slaves using English vessels and even then it was nominally enforced. In 1833, the English compensated approximately 3000 slavers for "loss of business assets" (yes, that's right, they compensated the slavers, not the slaves) including the ancestors of David Cameron, the Bazalgettes and other wealthy families.
Almost instantly after the passing of the 1833 act, the British used indentured labour to replace slavery. Indentured labour was found to be equivalently cruel. The historical record shows death rates as high or higher than the slavery period for indentured labourers brought from South Asia to the West Indies and South East Asia. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/dec/12/thefor...
1835 "To finance the compensation (for slave owners), the British government had to take on a £15 million loan (40% of its budget) with banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore. The money was not paid back until 2015."
> yes, that's right, they compensated the slavers, not the slaves
That seems fair: the slave-owners had undertaken obligations that by the standards, mores & laws of the time were normal, ethical & legal; changing mores & laws nullified those obligations, and hence they were compensated.
You'll find that it's a lot easier to change someone's mind if you say, 'I want you to do something which is right, and I'll pay you to do it!' than if you say, 'I want you to do something which is right, and I'll punish you for doing it!' What's more important in your mind: freeing slaves or punishing slaveholders?
Of course you compensate the slavers. You want them to buy in to the process. That way you don't have to fight a war with them over it. That's just pragmatism in politics.
It's stuff like this that reveals why some organizations like the NAACP are successful and others are not.
You'll find all the colleges have an outreach programme where they send the undergrads around to various schools to encourage the kids to apply.
I'm not sure the dons themselves can do much about it, it seems like they only get to see a small sample of the total pool of applicants. I only met a couple of them when I was applying, and after I got in it didn't look like they had a full view.
As for data, it's not obvious what data would tell you whether they did or didn't try.
> I'm pretty sure it's always been very normal in Thai society.
It is unclear which "it's" you are referring to. Group sex dealmaking or using group sex for bonding business partners as per the original article? I don't think that is normal in Thailand or any Asian society for that matter.
As for the history of prostitution in Thailand. That's a well covered subject. You're points are somewhat accurate but OP's point appears to be different than what you are addressing. I thought he/she was implying that the Vietnam war had overarching societal and economic consequences, one of which was the availability of vulnerable exploitable migrant and rural women in Thai cities.
The location of Thailand plays a key role in the success of the sex trafficking industry. It is close to war-torn Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. China and Vietnam are also nearby. Various waterways along with porous borders also facilitate trafficking.
If the point that was being made was that the Vietnam war had huge side effects, including enabling horrific sex trafficking and exploitation, then yes, I would agree.
Sorry, I just meant the sexual service industry in general.
> The location of Thailand plays a key role in the success of the sex trafficking industry. It is close to war-torn Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. China and Vietnam are also nearby. Various waterways along with porous borders also facilitate trafficking.
I know lol, I live here and have travelled to all of those countries dozens of times. Regardless of whatever you have read, 99% of the prostitutes are Thai women and are working by their own choice, at least as much as any bricklayer or garbageman in Ameria has chosen their line of work. Any other nationalities should be a footnote.
"Trafficking" and "Slavery" in this case are ideologically-loaded euphemisms. There is the sex industry and there is economic (and often illegal) migration. There isn't really a super unique and exploitative sex trafficking industry.
I have never seen a large movement by the Thai middle class to fight "sex trafficking." That's not because Thai people are evil or ignorant, it's just because it's not a big problem that really exists. No one is going to risk enslaving women for sex work when (a) there is a surplus of women perfectly willing to do the job without being enslaved and (b) normal men don't get off on the thought of having sex with slaves.
> OLPC did, and that had a lot of credible backing and resources
OLPC had massive resources but it had such an arrogant "leader/founder", Nick Negroponte that it was doomed to failure. I can't believe this guy still suggests that journalists should describe him as the father of the netbook and tablet computing now.
OLPC did for Netbooks what Raspberry Pi did for Single Board Computers, essentially creating a new & much larger market for devices that existed, but had been priced much higher before either of those entrants had entered the market.
I don't think this upstart will see much success though, as the price point is out of reach for most locals. Refurbishing laptops en masse for less than half the cost would likely get more powerful hardware into the hands of notably more people as compared to buying new hardware from an ODM.
Are you kidding me? First of all, the OLPC did not create the netbook market, capitalism did. Secondly this is a great project because he probably plans on trying to locally source the construction of the laptops.
Why do you say xxx countries? It is not as if we don't have this type of thing happening in our own country.