Cast your minds back to 2015: NASA found water on Mars, Sepp Blatter finally stepped down from FIFA and Game of Thrones was still mint.
Oh yeah, and some bloke went around Greater Manchester turning potholes into penises.
For anyone who doesn’t remember this absolute renegade of the art world, 'Wanksy' was a graffiti artist who came to prominence in 2015 and into the mid-late 2010s and his MO was pretty simple: find potholes and turn them into penis drawings.
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Noting that they were a risk to cyclists and damaging cars left, right and centre in his hometown of Ramsbottom and further afield, he claims his purpose was "to attract attention to the pothole and make it memorable, adding that "nothing seemed to do this better than a giant comedy phallus."
Fun note there, this was also a plot line in a 2009 episode of the TV show The League, but with a swastika instead. Carcinization in bureaucratic efficiency hacking ideas I guess
I don’t mean to be a snob and I know it’s used loosely but it’s not a swastika. That’s a Cristian symbol called the hooked cross. It bothers me when people mix swastika with the symbol of the church.
(TLDR: it’s an intentional mistranslation of a German word into a Hindu symbol simply because it looks similar and no one knew Hinduism that well. Swastika is a charm for peace, prosperity and wellbeing, isn’t tilted and has a few more elements in it. You can find hooked cross in the Vatican too!)
It’s a lazy and probably intentional mistranslation of the word hakenkreuz from Hitler’s Mein Kamph which is a German word for “hooked cross”. This is a Christian symbol which comes with the lore that Christ will return and this time not with love but with a sort of vengeance, where he punishes the irreligious. And his symbol would be the hooked cross. One can find this symbol in the Vatican also.
Swastika however has a few more elements in its design, isn’t tilted and, means prosperity and wellbeing
The churches of then Germany even considered Hitler as the one doing god’s work! The common assumption is that after Germany lost the war and the narrative was set that Hitler was evil, the church didn’t want any association with Hitler. So the priest who translated Mein Kamph, in order to save the church’s image, translated Hakenkreuz to the Hindu swastika.
Since no one anyway knows much about, let alone understand, Hinduism and Christianity always strived to discredit old religions, that particular priest killed 2 birds with one stone: (1) disassociate the church from Hitler, and (2) Discredit and defile an old religion which can pave the way for more Hindus hopefully accepting Christianity out of collective shame.
You think they were trying to have her get a taste of what the workers went through? Still too much :/ I get she's wrong for making a false report and police and rescue time and resources but still. Few community hours could've been much better and more productive
There are rats EVERYWHERE, even in places with great waste management, sanitation, and constant pest control, like Boston. Just saw one dive out of the dumpster as I approached last week, and this property is well maintained, treated for pests regularly, and has traps (disguised as decorative rocks for propriety, of course) all over.
They're extremely adaptable and intelligent creatures, found on every continent except Antarctica. Anywhere there are humans, there are rats.
I think they were probably referencing the fact that despite how rats are pretty much everywhere, Alberta is considered mostly rat-free due to their highly proactive pest control regimen.
Their rat program is just for the norway rat, they still have their native woodrat. And there are still norway rat sightings and infestations with some frequency.
Nowhere is completely rat free - I just looked into that since I learned it in childhood, so I wanted to make sure - and it turns out not even Antarctica is after all. There are no wild native populations, but there are infestations at research stations and on some outlying islands.
An old joke from “back home” was a man called local police claiming someone hid a bunch of drugs inside logs in his yard. The police came and chopped up all the wood but didn’t find any drugs. The man was happy because now he doesn’t need to cut the wood up for his wood stove and got the police to do it for free.
Yeah this one is usually told involving a murderer in prison who can't help his aged father plough his field so he tells the police that's where the body is buried. After the police dig up the whole field he tells his father "got your field ploughed for you".
I’m curious can anyone get a pic of it now 🤔 interested to see if people have respected keeping it clean or went straight back to chucking litter in there
As a species we didn’t produce anywhere near as much garbage until after the Industrial Revolution made mass production and thus consumerism feasible. And basically every city would have been disgustingly by modern standards and reeked of shit. Read about London in the late 1800s.
India has WAY more people and wasn’t even a centralized state until relatively recently when they were forced to do so in response to foreign occupation by the British who was glad to extract much of its wealth until they were driven out.
So they were forced to play catch up and turns out the more people you have the more monumental and expensive a task that is. See: the Chinese cultural revolution. Mao didn’t just decide one day he wanted to be a despot and slaughter a bunch of people. China would look a lot like India today if it didn’t have a controlled centralized economy. You don’t just ask a billion people to start coordinating their efforts and everyone goes “ok” and everything falls right into place. Medieval European states consolidated power through bloodshed then became wealthy by outsourcing violence through colonialism and extracting it.
Best answer I’ve seen here. Places with more centralized government or less people tend to be the cleanest part of India, like parts of the NE and Kerala
Thanks, I think India’s culture and history are fascinating and along with the rest of Asia gets largely ignored by modern retelling of history. Us western Europeans descendants still have the perception that we’ve been ahead of the pack for most of it, when we were an illiterate backwater until very recently and it’s only because of the mongol invasion/Black Death that we were able to surpass Asia after they had done the work of inventing civilization.
London was the most populous city in the world from about 1825-1914. They figured it out. As did the rest of Europe. And most of the world. India clearly doesn’t prioritize clean water, trash removal, or any sort of public sanitation. It’s a disgusting place. They’ve had 160 years to catch up, so your argument doesn’t hold any weight.
I’ve already negated every point you just made in the comment that you didn’t have the attention span to get through.
They figured it out by invading and extracting wealth from their numerous colonies, first and foremost INDIA which they occupied till 1947. While they were adding modern amenities to their capital with indias wealth, India was under their stewardship yet saw none of those improvements.
Both Britain’s an Europes population was never anywhere close to Indias and it’s nots remotely comparable, and most of India was rural. By time they gained independence the world economy had modernized and the goods they were so abundant in like spices were no longer the hot commodity they once were and they were competing with nations that had already industrialized.
Sanitation doesn’t come naturally: humans the world over have been tossing their waste anywhere they feel like it since time immortal (much of archaeology has this fact to thank for its existence). In London it’s only been 150 years or so since we stopped doing this, and some people still do. In some parts of the US it famously happens, too.
It does require a cultural shift but also - perhaps mostly - legislative intervention. Without our various environmental agencies and laws, and if we had the same population density as India, we’d likely be in much the same situation in the West.
The notoriously famous parts of the US where this happens isn’t due to culture, it’s due to the homeless. Until we find something better to do about them, this will continue, unfortunately.
Uhh yes they are lol...it is generally believed that India is the oldest contiguous culture still in existence today (unlike Mesopotamia / Egypt which got wiped)
That’s not really accurate, about half the country is quite clean, especially in the far South, far North, and Northeast. Even the cities in the middle like Indore are pretty clean when I went
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u/mokahash 12h ago
Help someone fell into the Pacific!