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Thread: Comparing Colonial Cultures

  1. #31
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    "Hillary's America" is a motion picture D'Souza has produced.

    It touches on the little known post Colonial politics of Andrew Jackson employed to his personal benefits, "...he would send out surveyors to value "American Indian" land some 3 months before the army would come in, and he would approach investors..." That is the type of personal value it seems Hillary Clinton has employed while at the state department. "She took kind of the local level corruption we are used to, Tammany Hall, The Daily Racket of Chicago, and took it to the level of renting out American foreign policy."

    Here is the radio interview on the tube where I found this:


    Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZNHmjUUAX8

    (Time encoding in this URL Aragorn )

    Elen: Using the video encoding feature on the forum causes the time queue parameter to be lost. That is why I left it as a simple link with that message to Aragorn. I'm going to put another link with the time parameter right here.

    Notice the &t=15m parameter at the end of the URL? That is what permits me to link to 15m into the clip. That is lost with the embedded video feature.
    Last edited by lcam88, 15th July 2016 at 00:08. Reason: Embedding video

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  3. #32
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    I'm just now getting time to catch up here. Some of these posts get lengthy so I didn't pop back in until I had some time to spare.

    Quote Originally posted by lcam88 View Post
    If colonisers/conquistadors arrived with enough force to overcome the natives' resistance or inertial thresholds, they would have been in a position to redefine the social equilibrium (culture). That is why, modwiz, I think it is important to understand what muslims represent in context of European culture today. That is can be reasonably understood that the majority of muslims are radicals, it can be understood that they represent a force to be reckoned with in terms of them being something capable of overcoming resistance/inertial thresholds of the native culture.
    That's a great point and I agree completely that this is going to result in a "bad" (terrible, really) cultural shift in Europe if allowed to continue.

    So now in order for me to say this I'm in a similar position to your own, when you suggest that superior British culture is why British colonies were successes while the Iberian colonies (and yes I use this term for brevity to refer to the colonial period, ie the one relevant to what we are talking about ) were failures. But even though I can say loosely that fundamentalist Islamic culture is going to be a "bad" influence on Europe ("bad" is not something measurable, so this is just a way of speaking, an example of language being imprecise again), I'm going to have to back this up using something concrete.

    So what I would point to in this case is the fact that the increase in immigration from certain Middle-Eastern countries into Europe correlates perfectly with increases in sexual assaults on women in countries like Sweden. This can be easily explained by the fact that these immigrants are coming from countries where women are still very oppressed and don't necessarily have protection under their law from these acts of violence. The laws said to be enforced in the areas of Syria and Iraq controlled by ISIS are a perfect example of these kinds of laws. In many parts of the Islamic world, daughters are executed by their own fathers for violating certain rules in their religion. Examples of honor killings in various countries can be found on this Wikipedia page.

    So we could find more and more examples of this kind of thing and build a case that all of this Muslim immigration is going to result in serious problems with violent crime in Europe. What happens when the Muslim populations eventually become either a very large minority or even a majority (because of the fact that they happen to create a lot more babies than Europeans) is up in the air, but it's hard to imagine a scenario that would not involve a movement toward Islamic governments like you see in the Middle East. That is just what this particular population can be expected to want since that culture is ingrained in them just like British culture was ingrained in many American colonists.

    Anyway this is a good example of how we can redefine "culture" as something that can be measured (like crime rates) in order to really make our ideas specific and testable. I completely understand how people think this kind of thing is knit-picking and trivial but I can't stress enough that it's not. The saying "the devil is in the details" (sounds like something the Catholic Church would say, doesn't it?) is absolutely right.

    bsbray, there is no sliding scale. Neutrality is simple a point where almost any culture finds themselves indifferent with. I'll try for that point again: Water is good to drink. Absolutely simple proposition.
    This is another big philosophical debate that goes back thousands of years and may be better to just avoid altogether. What is good for one person is not necessarily good for someone else. We could reference the honor killings above as a perfect example. For millions of Muslims, honor killings are apparently a pretty good thing. They are so committed to the idea that this is a "good" thing to do, that fathers actually kill their own daughters over it. Now obviously you and I would not see this as something good. So "good" is another one of these vague words that can't be used as a universal standard to measure something with, because it varies wildly.

    By saying you need another variable, are you saying you there are higher instructions do define various interactions?
    Yes. In historical studies, the "atom" we deal with is the single instance of interaction between people, like everything that happened when your family bought its first car (where it happened, when, how it happened, how much money was exchanged and how, why someone felt buying a car was necessary, etc.). It would be great if we could recreate the past in a laboratory but we of course we can't. The best we can hope for is video, or reliable eyewitness accounts, or some other documentation or form of evidence to attest to what happened, that then has to be interpreted.

    Starting from that single interaction and all of its data, when you "zoom out" to large-scale interactions between people, like on the scale of a country, we should (hopefully) now have an overwhelming amount of data, everything from demographics compiled from censuses to autobiographies and private journals to records of business transactions. If you have a hypothesis about something that you really want to test out, to see if it's really valid or not, you look at all of this wealth of information for a given place and time (and of course the further you go back the less of a "wealth" it is, but for the colonial period there is still a lot) and try to find something that could prove or disprove or modify the line of thinking.

    I think appealing to rigidness of definitions or arbitrary criteria would make the discussion more about how to define those criteria than about the issue at hand.
    Not at all, because it doesn't matter how you define the problem as long as you are expressing your same basic idea and can now support it with data. I'll post something here soon that will give you an example of this and dive into the heart of the situation in the Americas from an economic point of view, in terms of which colonies were worth the most to their European owners and why. This will give us a window into how these colonies actually differed from each other in significant ways, without having to get abstract or fuzzy about it. You'll see what I mean.

    I don't think you mean to use complex and elaborate definitions to avoid admission that Brazil (for example) is a failure. So I'm not going to invoke the Simplicity vs Complexity philosophical position yet.
    I know Brazil has lots of problems. I hear about them all the time from my girlfriend who says she doesn't want to live there anymore. But we also both agree that Brazil is better with some things and the US is better with some things. For example, the Brazilian government paid for her brother to study medicine in New Zealand for a couple of years or so. If you pass academic contests in Brazil the government will pay for your education in ways that the US government does not, including paying Brazilians to go to universities overseas and then bring what they've learned back to Brazil. Our education system here doesn't have any opportunities like this, and instead just puts millions of students tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they're even 30 years old.

    No I can't. It would complicate my view

    I haven't ever lived there so I really don't have much reference to say. Politics in Argentina is about conservation of political powers within the establishment. Chile deviated from that norm once and so CIA, during one of Kissingers deals, had to intervene using their assets... :/
    But they are both better places to live than most of the rest of the world. If they're in the top half of the world's living standards (which they definitely are according to the Human Development Index) then I don't understand why you'd want to call them failures anyway. I think you may be trying to cram a square peg into a round hole on this one. I'm sure Chile and Argentina have had their problems but they are not "failures" of countries when you look at the rest of the world.

    Perhaps the two criteria I suggested for determining success or failure of a colony need be expanded? Suggestions?
    I thought about it. The only value I can see in judging a country as a "success" or "failure" is in how it impact's someone's self-esteem, for as much as they identify themselves with the country they live in. Other than that, judging a country in this way doesn't change how many people are getting fed or anything else. I don't find it a very useful thing to try to define, and yes, trying to define it is very difficult anyway.

    It's because it really is a judgment call. If you are going to make a judgment like this then you get to set the standards for how you will render your verdict I guess, but what you said above is that you really want to understand why your country is in the situation that it is. That's probably a more meaningful and worthwhile way of approaching the problem.

    These are the distillations of plausible answers to the questions people often ask: Why is brazil still a third world country with all of its national resources and all the resourcefulness of the people?
    You hit on all the questions that people have been arguing about for years and years.

    I'm sure it's complex but the US and Europe have a vested interest in not seeing new global superpowers like China or India, or Russia or Brazil. Weaponized economics seems to be the preferred way of keeping people down from what I've seen, and everything else evolves from that, since so much depends upon money and the Federal Reserve and IMF have a heavy hand in that.

    I think referencing CIA operations that have obviously happened to shape politics, even if they are still happening, is a flawed thread of rational because fundamentally, much like economics, the weaknesses inherent in cultural values held since colonisation obviously make the CIA's job much easier. The fact that CIA can spread there wings here is a symptom of the real problem.
    That may be true, but there aren't many countries that the CIA hasn't been able to infiltrate when it really wants to. And it developed out of the US, and we (general population) didn't have any say in it, either. They're crafty like that.

    I am ignoring it only because if cultural values gave any importance to a minimum standard of povery they would put up a welfare or dole system, something the US and Australia have done. So the role economics plays in social stability is actually cultural values of a society effecting social stability. I'm saying that economics is a symptom and not the cause.
    Economics also determines whether or not these countries are able to afford these kinds of programs in the first place, and if they can't afford them then no amount of culture is going to change that, no matter if they're British or Portuguese. The system in the US is unsustainable and is eroding our work ethic as larger and larger numbers of single moms literally just pop out babies and get paid welfare money for it by the government, while the kids grow up without dads or any sense of direction in life in general. This will probably be the single biggest legacy of our welfare system. Incidentally this explains why a lot of people vote democrat here, because the democrats are mostly the ones promising more and more "free" stuff.

    The context of the narrow thesis I was concluding: Introducing complexity in cultural and social values for the purpose of identifying corrupt elements is also a way to subvert critical attention from aspects that are considered valuable.

    Yes. And I'll suggest a test where my conclusion is incorrect: Does adding complexity introduce a meaningful way to advance understanding and solving of an impasse? My view is that more often then not, it doesn't.
    Well we'll look start to actually look into this specific issue next and see whether this is the case this time. I'll dig up some stuff and post below.

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  5. #33
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    I'll just write this post up as a running commentary as I search for this data, because this stuff is probably mostly in old books and I don't know what I'll be able to find online. I'm also not going to take the time to write it up properly or any of that because there is no need here.

    I do remember reading that the Caribbean colonies were the most profitable for Britain, not the mainland colonies on continental North America. This is very important for a number of reasons. The English Caribbean colonies are more similar in several ways to the most profitable Spanish and Portuguese colonies, for making heavy and particularly brutal use of slavery and also for growing the same kinds of labor-intensive crops like sugar cane.

    Because the Caribbean colonies were more valuable economically, they were also more valuable to Europe politically. At the end of the Seven Years War, when France lost Canada, they managed to negotiate ownership of some valuable land in the Caribbean, and this was more important for them to bargain for than the whole territory of French Canada.

    Because the mainland colonies were worth less, they got saw less economic activity in general, and had to be more self-sufficient. This is where you will begin to see how economics shines light on how these colonies developed into very different countries. The Caribbean continued to see direct European control a lot longer than the vast areas of land that became self-sufficient and broke away on the continents (Brazil being an exception to this, at least partly because of the way the Portuguese royals fled Europe to South America in order to escape Napoleon). Some Caribbean islands are still directly controlled by European powers to this day, despite heavy US involvement trying to break these links in its early years.


    I really am having trouble finding primary source information for all of this (the subject is too broad and obscure for most of the Internet I guess), but for what it's worth, here's a French Colonial History guy from reddit explaining the same situation:

    For the 18th century you'd be hard-pressed to choose anything better than some of the sugar islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Jamaica, etc.) due to the value of sugar at this time, its addictive nature and its growing consumption in Europe. When after the Seven Year's War the French had to choose between French Canada and the tiny sugar island of Martinique and Guadeloupe, they chose the latter if that helps illustrate their importance!
    https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistoria...xq&sh=94f5147d


    Still looking and not finding much of anything online here. I'd probably have to take a trip to the university library and I won't be doing that this evening. But I can tell you what I remember, though it's mostly relevant to the US. The thirteen colonies were definitely valuable, but not as valuable as colonies closer to the equator. Most slaves were pouring into the Caribbean and Brazil. I think something like 8-12 million slaves were imported into Brazil alone. They were worked hard, worked to death really, and then just replaced. In North America, because of the weaker local economy, slaves were not brought in on the same scale, and those who did come were generally treated better and allowed to have families, since making babies domestically was cheaper than paying for a boat ride from Africa. In the Caribbean and Brazil this was not the case: it was more profitable to just bring them from Africa and work them to death. So there was an enormous amount of exploitation in Brazil and the Caribbean that the thirteen colonies did not see at this point in history. This is all during the infancy of all of these colonies.

    The relatively weaker economies in the thirteen colonies is also at least partly why the British crown allowed persecuted religious minorities (Protestants with good work ethic as modwiz has commented on) to establish colonies like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. These colonies proved pivotal in our revolution and also produced a lot of political philosophy against monarchy, in favor of equality and in favor of more economic self-reliance. The British didn't mind the small headache produced by giving these people large amounts of land in America because the British considered the land fairly worthless and it got the Protestants out of their hair back in Britain. Notice that this doesn't have to do so much with British culture itself, so much as it does with British attitude towards the North American colonies, and towards Protestants like Puritans and Quakers.

    Europe was much more invested in the Caribbean and other tropical areas, and the local populations in these areas continued to be heavily exploited and abused by the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The Dutch were also involved but from what I've read, the Dutch were relatively fair to local populations, though "relatively" may still be pretty cruel by modern standards. I've also heard from my girlfriend that the Jesuits in Brazil also attempted to convert the local natives and were teaching them to read and write, which the colonial government there frowned heavily upon (traditionally they had just been killed off or made into slaves and worked to death).

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  7. #34
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    Thanks for the most thoughtful replies bsbray. I'm going to jump right into it.

    Quote Originally posted by bsbray
    bsbray, there is no sliding scale. Neutrality is simple a point where almost any culture finds themselves indifferent with. I'll try for that point again: Water is good to drink. Absolutely simple proposition.
    This is another big philosophical debate that goes back thousands of years and may be better to just avoid altogether. What is good for one person is not necessarily good for someone else. We could reference the honor killings above as a perfect example. For millions of Muslims, honor killings are apparently a pretty good thing. They are so committed to the idea that this is a "good" thing to do, that fathers actually kill their own daughters over it. Now obviously you and I would not see this as something good. So "good" is another one of these vague words that can't be used as a universal standard to measure something with, because it varies wildly.
    The key in what I was saying about Neutrality is in the underlined part.

    Name another culture where a father articulating the killing of his daughter is considered a good thing.

    I understand that you are trying to be culture-centric in your evaluations and that is where the complexity in these contemplations lie. You want to accept cultures for what they offer without applying your arbitrary standard of judging good and bad on what you may find. I think another strategy is to define our arbitrary standard in a meaningful way and I think finding neutrality as I am trying to do above is a step to doing that. Perhaps Western culture may find that "water is good to drink" is backwards with Coke or Cabernet purchasable. So maybe that concept of neutral can still be refined. But eventually you get to a point where the survival value of some cultural value is universally met with concordant indifference, something everyone is familiar with yet doesn't think too much about.

    The same strategy can be used to think about the worst thing in the world. Something that makes someone in any culture sad, in a way that they stay sad for the longest possible period of time... In this way you have a standard comparison that is cross cultural, that can be used as a measuring stick between values each culture has.

    Do you think such a strategy could be useful? Could it simplify in a way that doesn't blur the details?

    Quote Originally posted by bsbray
    ...For example, the Brazilian government paid for her brother to study medicine in New Zealand for a couple of years or so. If you pass academic contests in Brazil the government will pay for your education in ways that the US government does not, including paying Brazilians to go to universities overseas and then bring what they've learned back to Brazil. Our education system here doesn't have any opportunities like this, and instead just puts millions of students tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they're even 30 years old.
    In the US there are scholarships which are roughly equivalent. My sister went to GW on nearly a full ride athletic scholarship (rowing club).

    Quote Originally posted by bsbray
    But they are both better places to live than most of the rest of the world. If they're in the top half of the world's living standards (which they definitely are according to the Human Development Index) then I don't understand why you'd want to call them failures anyway. I think you may be trying to cram a square peg into a round hole on this one. I'm sure Chile and Argentina have had their problems but they are not "failures" of countries when you look at the rest of the world.
    I think you are right. A certain myopic view that just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
    Last edited by lcam88, 15th July 2016 at 11:50.

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  9. #35
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    I think at this point we are mostly just discussing how to define a way to get meaningful data rather than the specifics of how and why one set of countries is any better or worse off than another, or for what reasons.

    Quote Originally posted by lcam88 View Post
    Name another culture where a father articulating the killing of his daughter is considered a good thing.
    Why should I have to name a second example to prove my point that there is no universal standard for what is "good"? You make it sound like we're going to define terms based on which views are the most popular on Earth. Would it not be totally arbitrary to define "good" by a simple majority opinion and then pretend that it's an objective and scientific standard for measuring things? Fathers also kill their daughters in Hindu parts of India for marrying outside of their caste. China still routinely kills live babies as part of their 1-child policy, even after it was slightly amended. They think this is "good" because it's necessary to control population growth, but I think it's a completely barbaric practice. There are still cannibals living on some islands in the Pacific. There are lots of people in the west who think that mankind should be murdered off en masse, by whatever underhanded means, in order to save the natural environment. My point is that "good" is defined by the person who is saying it, and definitely cannot be used as some kind of scientific measuring stick like meters or kilograms can, and neither can "bad" or even "neutral" because they all depend on personal beliefs.

    I think another strategy is to define our arbitrary standard in a meaningful way and I think finding neutrality as I am trying to do above is a step to doing that.
    Yes, redefining the problem in other terms is necessary to avoid just confirming our own biases from the start. "Neutral" is just like "bad," it only exists as a contrast to "good," so all of this is still not objective at all. Setting up your own personal standards for judging things is only going to result in confirmation bias. We could cut straight to the heart of the issue and just say that cultures originating from Iberia are bad and cultures originating from northern Europe are good, and viola, you've instantly made your case just by arbitrarily defining "good" and "bad," without actually learning anything about the real situation. If you really want to use these subjective terms to measure things then we really might as well say just that and call it a day. On the other hand, if you want an objective measuring stick to compare and contrast cultures to find meaningful differences then yes, we have to redefine the problem in objectively measurable terms, preferably something in units.

    Since this is really a philosophical issue at heart I'm going to quote the Tao Te Ching here:

    When people see some things as beautiful,
    other things become ugly.
    When people see some things as good,
    other things become bad.

    Being and non-being create each other.
    Difficult and easy support each other.
    Long and short define each other.
    High and low depend on each other.
    Before and after follow each other.
    http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~p.../taote-v3.html

    This is a really beautiful passage in general, but how this relates to our discussion is, "good," "bad" and "neutral" all define each other through contrast, and so they are not independent ways of measuring something and they are totally arbitrary. Putting it another way, you can't measure a decision that Obama makes in units of "good." It would be a waste of effort to even try to design a system where this would be possible, because somewhere in defining the system you would have to make arbitrary moral decisions that are going to turn the whole effort into confirmation bias. "Neutral" in this way of thinking is nothing but the halfway point between "good" and "bad," so if you can't define those latter two terms then the middle point is also meaningless.

    When we define a unit of measurement like a meter, it's also ultimately an arbitrary decision to make this particular length the unit of measurement. But the difference is that once we all agree to make this unit standard, we actually can get useful, objective data from it because we can compare it to things and get measurable differences that we can then apply mathematics to and all the rest. You can't do that with "good" and "bad" and "neutral" because you will never get everyone to change their own personal beliefs about what is "good" and "bad" and "neutral" just to humor you long enough to confirm biases. Even if you could, you wouldn't actually learn anything from the exercise.

    The best way to cut across cultures with a meaningful measuring stick, is just to pick something that is measurable (like economics) and stick with it. You can tell a lot about how people live through economics and demographics.

    If I had access to more direct data from colonial economies right now I would be posting it, but like I said above, info online seems pretty slim and I'd have to go digging around a university library.

    In the US there are scholarships which are roughly equivalent. My sister went to GW on nearly a full ride athletic scholarship (rowing club).
    It was probably a private scholarship, or else maybe from a charity or something. The US government itself doesn't do scholarships like Brazil or Germany do. What happens is some universities make big money from their athletic departments so they're willing to foot the bill for an athlete's education in order to make their teams more competitive, draw more people to their sporting events, sell more tickets and make more money. It's just for corporate profit in the end. In Brazil or Germany the governments are actually interested in trying to attract the best and brightest to advance the nation, so these governments pay directly for scholarships.
    Last edited by bsbray, 15th July 2016 at 17:41.

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