[nova]

It never stops to amaze me the doublethinking necessary to simultaneously believe that "colonization is bad and Africa is war-torn because of the arbitrarily drawn borders by Western powers" and "multiculturalism for the West is a great idea".

[toyg]

Why? The problem with colonization is that it disrupted the holistic growth of national communities like we experienced in XVIII to XIX century. We've "grown up" since then, recognising the competitive advantage of exploiting talents regardless of cultural provenance; but we couldn't do the latter without going through the former process and recognising its limits. Colonised countries were blocked from experiencing a similar process.

No doublethink involved, as long as you see history as a continuum, rather than believing in a fixed set of norms (typically your own, no offense) as an absolute ideal "best" transcending space and time.

[nova]

> The problem with colonization is that it disrupted the holistic growth of national communities

The same with immigration, then. Psychologically is even worse maybe, because instead of an overtly foreign power coming to conquer your land it's your own very government selling your society.

[pluma]

> XVIII to XIX century

This is off topic, but what is up with the Roman numerals when referring to centuries?

I tried googling it but came up empty. I can't find any authoritative source for this being a thing in any particular dialect of English and at least one person I've seen using this was a native Russian speaker. Google results only indicate that this is common in Spanish and maybe Polish.

Am I missing something? Is this a thing in American or British academia? Is it part of some popular newspaper's house styles? As a non-native speaker I find this incredibly peculiar.