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Comment by ianleeclark | Hacker News Reader

> That’s the lazy “blame the violent colonialists” approach though.

Crazy to think that hundreds of years of violence and extraction had nothing to do with this, and it's just due to cultural faults.

There's no world in which their legacy of oppression wouldn't affect their present day material conditions.

> Modern technology coming around and wiping out the need for most of your tribe to hunt and gather is going to have a big impact on cultures like that.

Culture isn't static, it evolves over time. It's not just "their time to die out," or whatever the subtext of a statement like this is.

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It's certainly not impossible that we've blinded ourselves to other problems by being so quick to blame all of their woes on colonialism however. The real world is rarely so simple. I find it a bit condescending when we try to pin all of the blame on western influence in the past, when these people are quite capable of fucking up their own lives without your help thank you very much. The idea that the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle was idyllic and perfectly in harmony with nature is also a myth.

> I find it a bit condescending

Cool.

> when we try to pin all of the blame on western influence in the past, when these people are quite capable of fucking up their own lives without your help thank you very much.

Guess we'll never know because of all the rape and pillage.

I'll never understand how people come to so deeply fetishize the subjective that they're entirely willing to cast off the shackles of the objective.

How is it not western supremacist thinking? This is simply the other side of the "all of the advances of the modern world are the result of superior western society", all of the problems of the world are the result of superior western society.

To be brutally honest, I find it more condescending when people try to downplay the brutality and devastation colonialism enacted on the various native populations while trying to claim it was the victims of colonialism that were truly at fault.

Generally speaking, wiping out large amounts of any population whether intentional or not is probably going to have negative multigenerational effects.

The amazing book 1491 calls this Holmbergs mistake: that the indigenous people lined in a static world and didn't have the agency to make their own mistakes.

> Crazy to think that hundreds of years of violence and extraction had nothing to do with this, and it's just due to cultural faults.

It's extremely easy to see other groups of people who suffered the same thing, and have extremely low suicide rates. At which point you could create the same post-hoc explanation for the opposite outcome, about how hundreds of years of violence created very tough and mentally strong people.

> which point you could create the same post-hoc explanation for the opposite outcome, about how hundreds of years of violence created very tough and mentally strong people.

This is pure ideology: we were actually helping them when we were chopping their children's hands off in the congo when they didn't produce enough.

I don't understand what you're saying. Who is saying anyone helped anyone else when children's hands were chopped off in the Congo?

I quoted you.

You quoted me, then made a very insincere and uncharitable implication of what I said.

I don't have any ideology, I was just pointing out how post-hoc explanations always fit the data. But that you could take other examples and come to opposite conclusions.

> I don't have any ideology

Yes, you do. Regardless of if you want to or not, you have an ideology.

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