Eurocentric history has erased major Asian milestones including Tang Dynasty woodblock printing, Bi Sheng’s ceramic movable type, and Korean metal movable type. Framing Gutenberg’s press as a uniquely European development completely ignores those innovations.

It’s a shitpost sub. Agreed. But Eurocentric historical bias / propaganda needs to be called out if we’re actually going to have an honest grasp of the world and the many civilizations that have contributed to its progress.

The diabetic and lactase deficient Dave’s coconut milk ice cream with monk fruit and allulose quarterly social.

The argument is even weaker if we go to before the Industrial Revolution. The Renaissance and scientific revolution happened on the shoulders of intellectual property borrowed/taken from global civilizational giants and on the backs of forced / coerced labor in colonial occupied territories. The luxury of having intellectuals in coffee shops pondering how society should be structured could have only happened by exploited labor in the colonies propping up their livelihoods and arguably through contact with pre-civilizational (indigeneous) societies in the Americas.

Two civilizational giants that come to mind are China and India. Chinese scholars, as you know, invented paper without which the printing press is not possible in the way that we conceive it today. India invented the numerical notation system that allows us to communicate large values and datasets in an efficient manner.

If not for the work of Brahmagupta, al-Khwarizmi and (most importantly for Europe) Fibonacci this notation system would have never been accepted as the number system we use today was considered to be sacrilege and mystical in Europe for centuries.

For paper, as with numerical notation, the practice was brought to Europe with advancement by Islamic civilizations. Cai Lun, Zuo Bo and Fan Ye were crucial in the development of paper which spread globally as we perceive it today.

The colonial narrative, for hundreds of years was that this progress happened in isolation and that was used to justify racism and genocide. I’m glad that in 2026 we are able to unravel such narratives at the seams.

Hey now dudes over 6 feet can be femboys too. Don’t let your height limit your possibilities, king (?queen).

That certainly is an element but whether that story is an urban legend or not is matter of much debate:

“Along with Iqbal Wahhab, now of Roast Restaurant, I started the urban myth of CTM being tikka with added Campbell’s tomato soup and spices for a joke,” admits Grove. “Yet somehow it has become accepted as the official explanation the world over.”

https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2014/who-owns-chicken-tikka-masala/

dragged the whole world out of the Middle Ages

Doubt it can take credit for that when it denied the very same self determination it claimed was a core value in the territories it administered.

It was the capital extracted via colonialism and slavery that allowed the first Industrial Revolution to happen. The raw materials came from the colonies and the colonies acted as a consumer market for machine finished goods. A ton of intellectual property were stolen from colonized / occupied peoples, which were then poorly credited once spit out of a machine more efficiently than human hands/artisans (not dissimilar to AI). Sugar refining and cotton dyeing are just two prominent example.

Essentially this part of the world was the global 1% while everyone else toiled.

Tl;dr: Colonial powers were the Altman’s, Zukerberg’s and Bezos’ of their time. Let’s not rewrite history in their favor.

British dish made by the Indian diaspora. The people matter as much as do the “elements”.

That is highly contested mind you.

https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2014/who-owns-chicken-tikka-masala/

The British attempts to claim chicken tikka masala for their own have been heard in India, and they have raised ire. Rahul Verma, a New Delhi street food expert, bluntly rejects the Shish Mahal story, claiming to have tasted chicken tikka masala in Uttar Pradesh or the Punjab earlier in the 1970s. Hemanshu Kumar of the website Eating Out in Delhi, has gone on record calling out the silliness of the designation campaign, and offered an alternative origin for the dish in a recipe from the 1961 edition of Balbir Singh’s Indian Cookery. And Zaeemuddin Ahmad, a chef at New Delhi’s Karim Hotel, which was established by the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, claims that his family invented the recipe for chicken tikka masala many, many years before all of this. The general consensus being that Sarwar’s Glaswegian campaign [to obtain European Union Protected Designation of Origin status for Chicken Tikka Masala] was anything from absurd to offensive and imperialist, pillaging South Asia’s culinary culture in a type of aggressive culinary neo-colonialism.

But the biggest problem for Sarwar’s campaign, and for any attempt to pin down the origins of chicken tikka masala to write it into the story of British food, is that the Glaswegian origin story is definitively a crock of shit. The real origins of the dish are incredibly diffuse. “Many chefs have claimed to have ‘invented’ [chicken tikka masala], but it was certainly not Ali Ahmed Aslam of Shish Mahal,” says Grove. “The restaurant did not open until the ‘60s and there was already a Glasgow claimant in the shape of Sultan Ahmed Ansari, who owned Taj Mahal and claimed to have invented it in the late ‘50s.” But more than just the fact that there’s an earlier Glaswegian tale of CTM [chicken tikka masala is so ubiquitous that it has its own acronym], the very story of the fussy patron and the tomato soup was pure drunken invention. “Along with Iqbal Wahhab, now of Roast Restaurant, I started the urban myth of CTM being tikka with added Campbell’s tomato soup and spices for a joke,” admits Grove. “Yet somehow it has become accepted as the official explanation the world over.”

I disagree with several of the takes in this thread. This is exactly the type of war you’d expect to be protested (whether expected or not) since it has a direct bearing on the livelihood of the average American. Expecting a protest in the US against US imperialism on a moral basis would be naive - most Americans are forgiving of their government’s persecution of others as long as it means they can live a comfortable life - but this is precisely not that. This war has unequivocally made their lives less comfortable. Has the average American not made the connection between the Iran war, inflation and its consequent worsening of an already unbearable cost of living crisis? Are they concentrating all of their energy on punishing the Republicans in the midterms?

I do genuinely feel that many Americans are stuck in an almost cosmic cycle of production and consumption, living in a type of illusionary reality. But, at some point, the veil has to come off.

To be fair this is the second iteration of these protests so it has been more than two days overall. The first iteration led to the government accepting the protestors demands and the resignation of the key education minister that was held in contempt.

On one hand I would say India has a rich tradition of protest and the people naturally have an inclination to slap back at authoritarianism. British foreign occupation and Indira Gandhi declaring emergency in the post independence period come to mind. On the other, America has a similarly rich tradition of standing against tyranny albeit shorter, more violent and cushioned by relative prosperity. The No Kings protests were of a smaller scale and arguably less effectual but the spirit of standing against authoritarianism is absolutely present in both nations.

Yes the Western playbook is well known. I wouldn’t be too quick to trust the Chinese approach though. China has already reclaimed sovereignty over ports via debt trap diplomacy in regions like Sri Lanka.

This certainly is not as bad as American actions on the global stage but China is fairly new to being a global power (in the modern era at least, not historically) so the long term strategy remains to be seen.

This doesn’t have to be a simple dualism, there is a third option ie. it would be better for the US to lose power and others (not China) to gain power. The more equally power is distributed in the world the better a shot we have at balance. The last thing the world needs is a “G2”.

China is already an empire that enriches itself at the expense of the rest of the world via its non market practices. Inequal market access / lack of reciprocity have led to deficits that hinder development in many emerging markets. The belt and road initiative and China’s debt to sovereignty swap strategy allows them to build and own key infrastructure / ports around the world similar to US maintaining a global / hegemonic presence with its military bases.

I don’t think China wants to rule the world the way the US does. Its traditionally a very inward looking civilization. But I doubt it has qualms over potentially harming others to enrich itself, which is the case for any empire.

There’s a difference between deescalation and capitulation via self inflicted pain. Zelensky was not wrong to call this a weak decision.

Flailing to save face with a likely disastrous upcoming midterm for his ilk. The question is if the American voter base is unintelligent enough to fall for this while also clueless enough to see that this directly contradicts the “Lindsay Graham” sanctions against Russia introduced just one month ago. Unhinged discordance between foreign and economic policy though he’s managed to skirt accountability for that kind of incoherence so many times before. I hope the American people are tired of seeing their leadership swoop in with dysfunctional solutions for crises they ultimately created.

I can see some of the American voter base falling for this but sooner or later they’re going to associate worsening cost of living with the people in charge. The illusion can only be maintained for so long.

Looks like a modern take on ancient Indian stepwell architecture utilized in Indian universities of antiquity (Nalanda and Takshshila) several millenia ago.