• corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    oddly Dickensian nightmare in a country that’s generally much more humane

    the idea that the system in Britain is generally humane is pretty naive

    You do understand that’s not what he wrote. Right?

    Like, do you get that it was a nightmare system in contrast with a society a little more humane than America? (A bit of a low bar)

    naive

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Re-read my post.

      It’s not a significantly more humane society, it’s just inhumane in different ways than America and the Justice System there reflects that.

      A system designed to slowly crush the less well off that “don’t know their place” for the rest of their lives might seem more humane than one were the police will just shoot them (especially if having the “wrong” skin color) but in terms of hurt inflicted the former might very well be worse than the latter because it’s basically lifelong torture. Also read all about Britain’s past: they got rid of Slavery and a few years later reinstated it as Indentured Servitude (and tell everybody they were the first country to outlaw Slavery, which is a pretty typical example of the local way in which bad things are just rebranded, not stopped and the rebranding is shamelessly used for image polishing purpose) plus had things like Workhouses all the way to the XX century - the Edwardian Era Britain (the real deal, were household servants were supposed to turn to the wall and look away when the master of the house was passing, not the hyper beautified version of British period series and movies) never got torn down by Revolution or anything similar, it just got buried under extra layers of social norms and a relentless cultural push to rewrite the common perception of it via deceitfully portraying it (such as in the above mentioned period series and movies).

      The cruelty in such a system is much harder to spot than in the bloody police violence you see in America (and it’s so by design) so people outside Britain tend to have quite a rosy view of the place, which is only natural until you figure the culture and forms of the English upper classes not just in their exercise of power and authority but in the way they interact with the “lower” classes and even each other. Hence my use of the word “naive” (as in naive about Britain, rather than generally naive) which I expected to be not insulting (I supposed I could’ve used “interesting” or “curious”, and Brits would definitelly have got the implied insult).