Is There Anything Good About Men?

Wow, are you angry.

1) The British GDP increased dramatically with the (British-led) industrial revolution, regardless of any effect the British had on India. Comparing the two and claiming that it is entirely due to Britain's involvement with India is ridiculous.

2) Famines have a long history in India. During the British-led period, they were particularly bad. However, the strong system of government instilled by the British did pave the way for an organised, united Indian government that heaped resources into agricultural research in the post-war period.

3) It's not just British people that are racist. That's a feature of almost every culture and society. This is pretty much beyond dispute - take a look at the Indian caste system, for example.

4) This was done pretty much at the insistence of contemporary Muslims and Hindus. That it was done poorly is not disputed - that it is entirely the fault of Brits is a ridiculous proposition. India and Pakistan have been free from British rule for decades - there doesn't seem to have been any increased tendency for detente and diplomatic relations now that the British are inconsequential, does there?

You are also completely ignoring any effect that British rule had outside of the Indian region, aren't you? British ships were instrumental in stopping the slave trade in Europe, and British rule brought all kinds of scientific, engineering and medical progress to countries that, at the time of arrival, were still practising human sacrifice and had life expectancies in their mid-30s or younger. I think that you have a rather one-sided view on the matter.

You can find cynical explanation for every act of altruism if you want to. Bottom line is there were plenty of powerful British idealists and humanists with a vision for the world who acted to help the colonies at Imperial expense.

A few points

1. There is a much bigger correlation with India than you suppose.

You can a. build universities and schools to train people b. create favorable tax and corporate structures to foster industry c. capture markets to make a and b and c into a positive feedback loop that makes rapid advancement possible.

Guess which of these is the hardest. It is c - having a captive market. The british captured the Indian market through money and cunning and proceded to systematically weaken then denude native industry then force export their own goods under the pretext of governance. The ratio of manufactures turned from something like 4:1 in India's favor in 1800 to 1:4 by 1900. This entire period was the one of greatest growth for the industrial revolution and it was in fact financed by India. As a french guy wrote, even if the french lost the war to the brits, it was beneficial for europe as this arrangement reduced the cost of development for all of europe. There was no capitalism or industrialism in the west before the Brits came to India.

2. There is no simply comparison between famines under the British, where supplies were not sent out even though they had control of them, and instead levies on starving peasants were increased 10% year over year and famines before and after. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1770

3. It has become standard practice in the west to use the caste system to whitewash British exploitation. Fact is British rule made the situation for the poorest in India much worse than it had ever historically been economically. Poor people could'nt even buy salt which was monopolized by the British for almost 200 years. This salt tax which Gandhi nonviolently protested against was not repealed until the British were kicked out of the country.

4.There was a popular election in 1939 which Jinnah lost even in muslim majority provinces in India. When Nehru tried to pressure the British to leave, Jinnah took the opportunity to get the Queen's support to launch a party which never got even the Muslim popular vote for a new country in the name of Islam. Hindu-muslim is kind of a false label for what actually happened.

Nothing against the British really - they took advantage of history when it was in their favor. It's just the false propaganda that they were somehow hugely beneficial for India that needs to be called out, something which has become truth by sheer repetition.

While it is true that India tolerated a variety of cultural norms amongst its many people before the British, practices like those you mention were fringe practices and by no means mainstream. It was Indian reformers like Ram Mohan Roy who asked for British for help in removing them. The British being the much stronger party do deserve credit for heeding these demands, but in relation to the widespread damage Indian industry suffered under them, these were things that made for good press rather than something that bought about a systematic positive change. It was only after the 1857 war/mutiny fought by the Indians which ended the 257 year old East India Company that Indians were given greater share and responsibility in self governance. Not doing that would have been a fundamentally unstable government system. This very limited civil governmant participation is what eventually grew to a movement which led to independance. You only need to read the writings of Lord Curzon to see that the British never intended to leave India and on the contrary wanted to expand their control over China and Japan as well.

No on many counts. Evolution theory is an umbrella term for a number of predictions including common descent, mutation, natural selection which is sufficient in theory and observation to create genetic and then physical changes in a population.

We have observed macro evolution countless times in bacteria and viruses. It's not even difficult.

I'm not sure why you'd call Evolution a loaded term in a scientific domain. It's clearly loaded in politics these days, but it's a very clear and celebrated theory with sharp and validated predictions in scientific domains.

You're somewhat right in the statement that BBT extrapolates from data observable today, but due to the nature of the universe, data observable today provides evidence that is not fully localized in time. We believe that the universe is infinite beyond our light cone because if we make the minimal possible assumptions on the net geometry of the universe you end up with three choices, each having to do with the sum of the angles in a very large triangle. We measured this triangle (see WMAP) and found the angles to be very nearly 180 degrees corresponding to a flat, infinite universe. So long as we have no compelling reason to invent more exotic geometry (which if GR holds would require some rather incredible momentum-energy that we haven't observed --- all possible, but very, very exotic) then this is a safe prediction.

BBT theory doesn't even describe an explosion anywhere. There wasn't something to explode in to. It instead suggests that the invariant metric has been expanding throughout the lifetime of the universe making things grow further and further apart. It's unclear that there wasn't more exotic behavior in there again, but without evidence of it, the best prediction is the simplest prediction.

I could go further into how we KNOW things and why that's not really a great way to think about it, but this is already grown long. But if you want your crazy idea to be meaningful at all, please specify it formally enough so that it predicts something about the shape or behavior of the universe different from current theories and then see if that prediction holds. Without at least claiming a prediction, it's difficult to even begin to understand what a crazy idea might mean.