This is why everybody’s who uses the expression “the Global South” (of which Russia is considered not only a part but a leader) is engaging in leftist propaganda.
There is no Global South. There are countries that like to pout at the US because it’s easy to consider the US the cause of all ills. It lets you off the hook of actually doing something to improve your own country. These countries can have permafrost covering half of their territory and still consider themselves “Global South.”
Clarissa's Blog 
I always thought the Global South meant the countries completely or partially south of the equator.
David Bellamy
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So Australia and New Zealand count?
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In rugby they are considered part of the south where people normally talk about the northern and southern style.
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I don’t know from rugby but these are clearly Western countries that have many more similarities with the US and UK than Guatemala or Benin.
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I thought “global south” was a replacement term for ‘third world’ because of some stupid PC idea about third being worse than first….. (and the ambiguous status of the second world countries after 1989-91).
I think the idea is that what they mostly share is being south of the colonial powers.
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I’d much rather we just stuck with “third world.” It’s honest and descriptive. But who needs honest when we can play weird language games, right?
As I said, “Global South ” is a left-wing invention.
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” “third world.” It’s honest and descriptive”
Not enitrely sure about that but at least it had a clear and generally accepted meaning. Leftists hate clear and generally accepted meanings because obtuse confusing terms allow them to get up to more mischief….
I still say ‘third world’ and have never considered saying ‘global south’…. I’m thinking it may have come out of the old unaligned movement? Not sure but I remember hearing it the first few times and rolling my eyes.
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Probably the euphemism treadmill as third world is generally accepted to mean poor and underdeveloped so a new term is needed until that also develops a negative stigma.
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Oh, so it’s like the way we can’t say “retarded” anymore?
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“we can’t say “retarded” anymore?”
We can’t? That’s retarded….
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Yeah, back when I was a kid, someone decided “retard” was mean, and then the workaround “mentally handicapped” was also deemed insulting so then it was “intellectually disabled” and probably we’ve moved on to some other strange circumlocution and now we just say, “Well, you know, he’s a little *slow*, bless him” and hope we don’t sound too patronizing because we’re on iteration 9 or 10 and whatever it was last week will probably get you banished to Siberia this week.
And then they tried to tell us we couldn’t say “ritardando” when the music called for it. Because someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended.
And yeah, that’s retarded.
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This is a hilarious story about ritardando. Also a scary one.
Until recently, it was “differently abled” but now it’s something new. I forget the term but we are moving in the direction where the Americans with Disabilities Act will have to be renamed Americans with Exceptional Talents Act.
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And the thing is, everybody knew exactly what “retarded” meant. ”Differently abled” could be describing a braindead vegetable, a dyslexic, or a world-class tightrope walker. Who knows? Could be anything.
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Retarded is a euphemism for the previously accepted terms idiot, imbecile, and moron.
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Wow, this is uncanny. Just as this discussion was going on at the blog, I was using the word “retarded” five times in a row in a conversation with a student.
No, I didn’t call the student retarded. I was trying to explain a short story by Santiago Roncagliolo.
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And for the down vote, I’m sourcing Wikipedia. What have you got?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retard_(pejorative)
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Aww, that’s my pet downvoter. I think it followed me here. Sometimes I drop peanuts for it and pat it on the head.
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Well … I just wrote “stupidity tolerant” elsewhere, but if those people wish to be identified as “retarded” instead?
I’ll allow it.
[says that like the judge in Squidbillies]
🙂
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This is one of those amorphous geographic terms that has a core meaning but becomes ambiguous around the edges. For example, “the West” has a core – Western Europe and North America. But does it also include Brazil, Ukraine, Israel, Japan? Depends who you ask.
The entry on Global South in Baidu Baike (China’s answer to Wikipedia) is funny. First it says that according to some South-South institute, the Global South is defined as China plus the G-77 group of developing nations at the UN. Then some Chinese netizen has added a section entitled “western conspiracy”, asserting that the West defines the South to exclude China, in order to decrease Chinese influence among the developing nations.
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%85%A8%E7%90%83%E5%8D%97%E6%96%B9/63306788
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Such geographical souf-istries …
Shocking. 🙂
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