An actual argument I recently saw:
Person B: “Any site which contains slurs against trans people in its sign up process is unreliable” (was referring to k!wifarms)
Person A: “Slurs aren’t considered bad in most countries”
Person B: “That doesn’t justify their usage. For example, conversion therapy isn’t considered bad or banned in most countries, that doesn’t mean conversion therapy is justified or good.”
Person A: “What are you talking about? Conversion therapy is banned in most countries”
Person B: “Shows a diagram showing that conversion therapy is only banned in a handful of countries”
Person A: “I mean in most civilized countries”
I’ve seen lots of other people refer to countries as civilized or uncivilized in similar contexts. Is this generally considered to be racist?
Ok, than now all we have to do is decide who’s civilized, Europe or America, and then we know which is right.
If we take the ancient Greek example of calling anyone whose language you can’t understand a barbarian, the US and UK are probably tied for peak civilisation
Now that’s easy:
The ones who currently try so hard to destroy the planet.
Europe is not a monolith, though - Putin’s Russia will happily watch the planet go up in flames. So it’s clearly “both”.