Extremist content on Reddit, Discord worrying trend for young adults in India

I've seen users, occasionally even whole servers, get banned because of people saying things like "brb smoking a fag". I highly doubt any discussion of right wing extremism is possible in the long term on Discord, let alone it "primarily acting as a hub for the extreme right" or even being their primary platform in general.

Curious. I certainly must have missed the 500m Indians who did when I visited.

Although if you follow the claim to the linked source, it's a report by an NGO which I've never personally heard of (WaterAid), despite the fact that I'm heavily involved in aid work in Southern Africa, and it's also unsourced. This makes me slightly skeptical, but what's a little bit more fishy is that they didn't do any fieldwork to get to the result, and claimed that they calculated it from UN and WHO numbers. Going to those very UN and WHO numbers cited in that report, which I would trust, they define having a toilet as a proper indoor flushing toilet versus just having a standard pit latrine, which then makes that 500m number makes sense, because the vast majority of them would have used pit latrines back then (and indeed, it's a common thing to see, especially in rural areas).

Practically speaking, it's not open defecation in the way it happens in slums, as a pit latrine is just a bush toilet that you eventually pay (or force, as it is in some African countries) someone to empty and take to a disposal centre. Indeed, when I was a little boy, I helped my grandfather to build some on the farm that he owned for the farmworkers that stayed on the property. They're not that hard to build yourself, and in then rural Rhodesia (now modern day Zimbabwe) it was going to be prohibitively expensive to build flush toilets for all of them. Even on some of the farms of my extended family, bush toilets were the only option available, and bear in mind this was with a well off white minority. I'm sure they're still probably used today by the locals, although the rest of the farms have gone to waste since they were expropriated by Mugabe... but to come back to your point, I don't think I can assign epistemic credence to your claim that it's an 'established fact', given this information as well as my personal experience.

As a result, it makes sense that I didn't see any open defecation despite those numbers, because people who used pit latrines would be included in those very numbers. It's weird that I've never heard of this problem in India before though; it's quite an interesting rabbit hole because it seems there's a fair effort to try fix the problem, lots of good studies and data on it, and there's a lot of international media coverage on it unlike African countries, which would be far more receptive to it as many are doing very little about sanitation right now. I wouldn't say something like this is well known outside of the international aid space though, even though it's just the presence of basic sanitation and running water. People are surprisingly ignorant about developing countries, and organisations in the west can sometimes struggle to actually comprehend the situation on the ground.

There's a government program mentioned in the article that seems to be doing well by the looks of it due to newer numbers on Wikipedia, and according to a World Bank survey mentioned on the page it seems that most people are using them, which is good because at least there's uptake. Indeed, any industrialising country has to go through this stage: in Victorian London, there was obviously the Great Stink and infamously throwing fecal waste out of windows onto the street, and it was only with Bazalgette and building the outfall sewers that London's cholera outbreaks came to an end right at the dawn of the 20th century (Ackroyd's biography of London has a good section on this). It would be a great template for African countries to borrow and mimic, and it looks great costing wise too. Definitely a no-brainer thing, but getting the Zimbabwean (and indeed any sub Saharan) government to do anything remotely useful for its people is like herding elephants... never going to happen.

That might create the Nazi bar problem

https://nitter.net/IamRageSparkle/status/1280892535024619522

https://teddit.net/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kic...

The right wing discourse is about advocating the replacement of existing democratic law in place of the vedic laws just like the olden days of pre british era. Vedas are the Hindu religious book that provides structure by which a society should be run by dividing people in to varna system(caste system).

India can never go back to vedic days, simply because there is no incentive for all Hindus. All Hindus are not the same in Hinduism. Vedic book advocates only a particular caste should have monopoly over education and only another to the right of having weapons, etc. This worked well prior to british colonilzation because people were not educated and could not see the big picture. That changed after the british rule and every one was given education which woke enough people to see the bigger picture of caste system.

The right wing advocates know that just with Hinduism they can not unite. They need another religion to hate and unite over that hate. This is where ISLAM comes in. Indian Muslims like the rest of the world can not take a joke on koran or Allah. This is very convenient for the right wing to spread hate and unite people over it. In contrast there is lot of atheist movement especially in South India where they can trash talk Hindu gods and their scriptures on public media at least for now. South India is more progressive and educated compared to North states.

> There are plenty of Indians who will also say the NY Times loves to publish exaggerated and negative articles about India.

I'm sure there are, but that likely-true fact doesn't shed any light on anything. For instance, Trumpers say similar things, simply because they're hostile to anything that portrays Trump in a negative light. They attack the media in order to hide the truth.

Given how attacks against relatively unbiased media are now part of the standard propaganda playbook, I don't put much stock in them unless they're very convincing. "People say" doesn't pass that threshold.