Comments by "Peter Jacobsen" (@pjacobsen1000) on "VICE" channel.

  1. It is said in the video that slave traders went into West Africa to abduct locals for slavery. But to send teams of English/Scottish people into an area they are not familiar with to abduct people seems both dangerous, complicated and ineffective. In my understanding, the traders instead told leaders of the coastal towns that they were interested in buying slaves and then let the locals do the abductions, lock the abductees up and wait for the traders to show up. This also made the locals on the coasts business partners, rather than simply bystanders. It also helped local leaders gain power through diluting enemy states of their young men/warriors. It's a bit like Rhino horns. You don't have Chinese people going into Tanzania to kill Rhinos. Instead they tell locals they're interested in buying rhino horns and let local poachers do the shooting.
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  2. Do you remember all the other Stock-Aitken-Waterman hits of the time? Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, Mel & Kim? They were all pretty similar, but we loved them.
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  3. Whether a country should be grateful or not for things left behind by colonial powers is entirely up to the people of that country, not for people of other countries to decide. However, this video seems to put the reason for all the ills of India at Britain's door. Perhaps the answer is a little more nuanced. After all, Britain had no particular interest in the partition of India and probably couldn't care less, but it was a demand by Jinnah. And even if the trains hadn't been there, wouldn't the Hindus and Muslims have killed each other anyway?
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  4. If the average lifespan of slaves in those Scottish plantations was only 7 years, that must mean that the extra labor you could squeeze out of the slaves in that timespan would have been worth more than the cost of buying new slaves. In turn, this must mean that slaves would have been relatively cheap. But in other parts of America, slave owners actively got slaves to produce children, because even with the cost of bringing them up, it was considered cheaper than buying new slaves. That seems to present a contradiction. Can anyone enlighten me on this?
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  5. Hah! If you think that's something, you should see what happens in youth hostels during the Mediterranean summer!
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  6. This was a pretty weak effort from Vice. It is more akin to one of those traveling YouTubers who make a video about this awesome new city they're in and talking to the locals. I feel there was very little journalistic effort behind this piece.
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