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A 14-year-old boy who was living off the grid with his mother and his aunt in the Colorado wilderness was down to 40 pounds when he died, according to autopsy reports.
The boy, his mother Rebecca Vance, 42, and his aunt Christine Vance, 41, all died of malnutrition and hypothermia, and the deaths were accidental, the autopsies found.
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Paris on Friday became the first European capital to introduce a ban on self-service rented electric scooters after five years of concerns surrounding their safety and environmental impact.
The ban, which went into effect Friday, comes two days after a 12-year-old girl was reportedly killed on an e-scooter after colliding with a car in Chessy.
Sky News reported that three deaths and 459 injuries were a direct result of the mode of transportation in Paris last year — compared to one fatality and 353 injuries in 2021.
Interestingly, although nearly 90 percent of people voted in support of the ban, according to reporting from Euronews, less than 8 percent of people on the electoral roll turned out to vote.
Colonialism and Progress
There is a fuss in Great Britain over a new book bringing a different, moral assessment of colonialism. This is some of a recent WSJ review.
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“Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning,” by Nigel Biggar, emeritus professor of theology at Oxford. The book’s manuscript was rejected in March 2021 by Bloomsbury, the British publishing house that commissioned it, on the spineless ground that “public opinion” (in the words of Bloomsbury’s top brass) was “not currently favourable” to Mr. Biggar’s arguments. When the author asked what was wrong with his book—for it was an editor at Bloomsbury, aware of its thesis, who’d encouraged the writing of it—he received no answer, except that the book’s publication was being canceled. This being Britain, however—where minds do not yet march entirely in lockstep—editorial cowardice didn’t prevail. Another publisher, William Collins, stepped into the breach and took the book to market.
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Mr. Biggar’s intellectual opponents are the anticolonialists who teem in Western academe, “self-appointed spokespeople for non-white minorities” who insist that “systemic racism” is “nourished by a persistent colonial mentality.” Their aim, he says, is to corrode faith in Western civilization by denigrating its historical record. They place particular emphasis on slavery, which for them epitomizes the West’s “essential, oppressive, racist white supremacism.”
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he tallies the evils of British colonialism, “not only culpable wrongdoing or injustice, but also unintended harms.” These include “brutal” slavery; the spread of killer disease; the “unjust displacement” of natives by settlers; instances of unjustifiable military aggression (such as the First Opium War, 1839-42, when the British Empire waged war on China’s Qing Dynasty); the disproportionate use of force (the massacre in Amritsar, in India, in 1919); and the failure to admit “native talent” quickly enough into the upper reaches of colonial administration.
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What will grate with the throng for whom anticolonialism is a stock-in-trade is Mr. Biggar’s obdurate—and eloquent—insistence that there is also a hefty credit side. This can be summed up as follows: the creation of a “worldwide free market” that gave native producers and entrepreneurs opportunities that were previously absent; the establishment of peace by imposing curbs on warring peoples, some of whom would have wiped their opponents out; the setting up of a civil service and judges who were “extraordinarily incorrupt” (especially when compared with their postcolonial successors); the laying down of essential infrastructure (yes, the railways: the British laid down more track in India than all other European colonialists did in their empires); the dissemination of modern science and medicine; and the introduction of social reforms that raised living standards and relieved the plight of the most downtrodden.
As for slavery, in the pursuit of which Britain—like every other slave-trading nation of the time—often acted with great cruelty, Mr. Biggar asks us to remember this: For the second half of its empire’s existence, “anti-slavery, not slavery, was at the heart of imperial policy”—that’s 150 years, he suggests, of abolitionist “imperial penance.” He also notes that slavery was neither invented by, nor the exclusive preserve of, Western imperialists. Contrary to Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1978), many aspects of native cultures (especially Hindu) were “rescued from oblivion, not obliterated, by British Orientalists.”
There is also the truth, uncomfortable to many today, that the colonized often bought into the mission of the colonizers. Mr. Biggar quotes Tirthankar Roy, an Indian history professor at the London School of Economics, who has written that the East India Co. “came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to rule India.” Mr. Biggar also quotes Manmohan Singh, a former prime minister of India, who said at Oxford in 2005 when being conferred with an honorary degree that the Indian constitution “remains a testimony to the enduring interplay between what is essentially Indian and what is very British in our intellectual heritage.”
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This is a fascinating argument. What is progress? Do all coherent cultures have dignity and value? Does an expanding culture have a motive? Are the acts of some omelet-makers more sacred than others? And who are these academics so opposed to different, provocative views? Is it true that all issues are black and white and, if true, how do we keep from creating Inquisitors and Star Chambers?
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