re: #21 teleskiguy

This should be a huge scandal going forward. The Olympics are being held in authoritarian regimes (Russia, China), places with horrible human life indices and water that’ll get athletes sick (Brazil) and every first-world country runs away like their ass is on fire at the mere prospect of the Games being held in their country.

Oh, can anybody tell me what the second-world is? And I don’t even want to imagine what’s going on in the fourth-world. Yeesh!

Originally, The First and Second Worlds were what we laughingly called “The Free World” on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and their client states on the other. This was just understood, because those terms were never actually used. The Third World was everything outside that Two-Superpowers-and-their-allies dichotomy.

Now, since the Second World doesn’t exist any more, “First World” has come to mean the industrialized world, and “Third World” is used to mean the economically undeveloped world.

The “Fourth World” is actually better—it covers countries like China and Brazil who are at least perceived as starting to lift themselves out of Third World status.