The woes of Africa
Yesterday in a thread on the unrest and violence in South Africa, the perennial question of what’s wrong with Africa came up. It occurs to me that it might be time to recycle a post from seven years ago that I wrote on that very question. Rather than cutting and pasting the whole thing, I’ll just post this link to it, but I suggest you read the post in its entirety. An excerpt:
The entire question is a fascinating although depressing one, and it led me to a couple of hours of reading last night, with the Google query “Why is Africa such a mess?” leading the way. What I discovered was a certain consensus, and although I don’t think it goes deep enough it’s certainly a credible piece of the whole.
The gist of it is that, after colonialism ended, when Africa had a seeming chance to set its own trajectory, its countries rejected liberal democracy and capitalism in favor of strong men and socialism. The strong men exacerbated the corruption, and the socialism led to—well, the bad economies to which socialism tends to lead. Both choices (if you can call them that) almost certainly made things worse in Africa than they would otherwise have been.
And today I’d like to add some links to a discussion of Africa by Thomas Sowell. First we have this article from 2005 entitled “Geography and man have all but killed Africa.” Here’s an excerpt:
Almost every great city in the world has risen on navigable waterways — and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent…
Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level, and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and streams must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.
Water transport was crucial in the thousands of years before there were trains or automobiles. It was crucial for developing an economy and crucial for developing a culture in touch with enough other widely scattered cultures to make use of advances in the rest of the world. But many African societies have been isolated by that continent’s dearth of both navigable rivers and harbors.
Isolated regions have almost invariably lagged behind regions in touch with a wider cultural universe…
Small, tribal societies were another consequence of geographic isolation — and the vulnerability of such societies to conquest by outsiders was another…
Many people expected great things from Africa when new independent African nations began to emerge from colonial rule in the 1960s, often headed by leaders who had been educated in Europe and America.
Unfortunately, what these new leaders brought back to Africa from the West were not the things that had made the West prosperous and powerful but the untested theories of Western intellectuals and ideologues who had taught them…
The net result was that African leaders, full of confidence because of their Western education and the adulation of the Western intelligentsia, made their people guinea pigs for half-baked theories that had contributed nothing to the rise of the West and had contributed much to its social degeneration.
And Sowell wrote this in 1996. Here’s a portion of it:
In narrowly economic terms, even though it is true that too many African nations had their standards of living fall below where they had been under European imperialists, still the 1980s and 1990s saw some turnarounds. The economies of Nigeria and Ghana, for example, began to grow after the statist regimes began to allow freer operation of the marketplace, often under heavy pressure from international aid agencies that finally stopped accepting excuses and started insisting on performance.
Comparisons with Asia are less apt than comparisons with the Balkans would be, both historically and currently. The clearest parallels in sickening atrocities and blind ethnic hatreds are those between the Balkan wars and tribal warfare in Africa…Historically, both areas have been culturally fragmented by their geography..The resulting poverty and disunity of both regions likewise made both vulnerable to the outside world and sources of slaves–the Balkans supplying Europe and the Middle East with slaves for centuries before the first African was taken in bondage to the Western Hemisphere.
Geographic handicaps do not merely limit economic opportunities or inhibit political consolidation, they limit the development of the people themselves by isolating them from one another and from the outside world. Such isolated peoples are almost invariably backward and often brutal, whether they are isolated in mountainous terrain or on small islands scattered across vast reaches of water or–as in sub-Saharan Africa–isolated by a painful combination of geographic handicaps, ranging from a dearth of navigable waterways to debilitating diseases that weakened men and made draft animals virtually impossible to use over large regions.
To me, these explanations make a lot of sense – as Sowell so often does.
On issue also is tribal clans, just finished Black Hawk Down and it explains the infighting in Somalia.
Despite his brilliance, Sowell seems perhaps to have gone slightly astray with his emphasis on geography, important though it is. Two generations ago, South Korea and Ghana (newly independent from Britain) were at roughly the same stage of economic development, with similar GDPs. Since then, South Korea has developed far beyond its northern (quasi-Stalinist) neighbor and far beyond what was formerly the Gold Coast. Geography no doubt plays some role (although no country in the Balkans is nearly as dysfunctional as almost all of black Africa), as does the misrule, over decades, by corrupt African kleptocrats (the “big men” and their cronies), not to mention the low level of education and literacy amongst the populace, but billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into sub-Saharan Africa to almost no effect, and many African intellectuals and students have had the opportunity to study the best elements of the Western model, also with little, if any, effect. One suspects that something else may well be at least partly responsible, although few are willing to broach the taboo.
North Africa shares the Roman Lake with Europe. At one point Phonecian led Carthage was quiet the place.
The topic of geography in societal development is from Sowell ‘s ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’. The book was an eye opener for me. It’s much more than the title suggests. The chapter on middleman minorities, for example, is brilliant.
I also just read Sowell’s ‘Basic Economics’. I took Econ in college and have read a lot so there is not much new, but a) it’s a great refresher course, b) a perfect intro to those who have never read about the subject (and everybody should).
Sowell is indeed brilliant. He cuts through so much bullshit that passes for intelligence.
I think Sowell has it right for the long-range view on why Africa didn’t develop as Europe and the Near East did. For the shorter range, Neo’s got it. Post-colonial leadership from Africa through the Arab states and over to India were, if Western-educated, trained in the socialist thinking which people thought at the time was the wave of the future. Instead, it enabled the strong man dictatorships all over the regions.
South Korea vs Ghana:
South Korea had a role in the Cold War IIRC and significant presence of US forces and influence. South Korea also had a somewhat authoritarian government in place as a bulwark against the NorKs, but did get investment from abroad?
Ghana? Not so much on either count?
May be more complicated than just melanin.
Sowell’s arguments are plausible, but also taste of post hoc rationalization.
One can imagine such arguments applied to the new state of Israel in 1948. A primitive land of few resources, a nation surrounded by enemies who wished to obliterate it, populated by a people impoverished and severely damaged by a nearly successful attempt at genocide plus a substantial proportion of leftists who believed the half-baked doctrines of Marx, et al.
What chance did Israel and Israelis have? If Israel looked like a typical sub-Saharan state today, who would be surprised? And no doubt there would be a Jewish Thomas Sowell to explain how poor Israel’s chances were.
Instead something quite different happened. It would be useful to understand what differences made the difference.
Jon baker:
When people speak of Africa as a whole in the sense we are discussing it here, they’re not really talking about the far northern part of Africa, which has a very different situation regarding communication with other parts of the world. As you point out, the Mediterranean exerted a huge influence.
They are mainly talking about the vast part of the continent that is sub-Saharan.
I agree, j e. Wholeheartedly. Sowell’s explanations make a great deal of sense and are highly plausible. But I don’t think they offer a complete picture (or anywhere close to it). Nor do any theories/arguments anywhere on the spectrum of ‘mainstream’ social science. There is an elephant in the room here, and yet it is very, very risky for almost anyone to acknowledge it.
Have you looked at the IQ scores of sub Saharah Africa? They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the chandilier.
j e; Ackler:
On the contrary, plenty of people – even on this blog as well as elsewhere – have talked and talked about what you refer to as the elephant in the room. That “elephant” is often cited as an explanation – it’s actually the easiest one and I believe the laziest one. I also see nothing that convinces me at all that it’s correct. In my opinion, Sowell and others have given plenty of reasons – a plethora of reasons – that explain sub-Saharan Africa’s plight without it.
huxley:
The Israel comparison is, in my opinion, a very poor one. In the 1940s when Israel became a country it had a population as well as leaders the vast majority of whom were from Europe, who shared one basic religious and ethnic and cultural background (although from different countries) and even set up a unifying language (Hebrew) early on. Ashkenazi Jews are very closely connected to each other in terms of genetics and DNA, as well. They had a tradition in Europe of tremendous accomplishment when given the chance. A better analogy to Israel would be to the Nigerians who came to the US, for example, who are doing really really well.
In addition, Israel is not isolated geographically.
Later on, more Mizrahi Jews came to Israel, with different traditions and a different background. They’ve had a harder time of it, but because Israel is not a failed country, they’ve had the benefit of that.
Neo, Jon baker: Yes on Neo’s comment about North Africa. Egyptians, for instance, do not speak of themselves as “African” although they belong to the continent.
huxley, re: Israel: I don’t think the comparison holds. Much of the modern Jewish influx comes from Western-educated places, and of course Jewish tradition encourages education for religious reasons. They did start with a socialist model, I believe, but the economy has exploded since they ditched that and went more free-market.
[testing]
If you’re looking at political developments, why not compare Africa since 1955 to Latin America over the period running from 1810 to 1875. I’m not sure Africa would get the worse of the comparison.
See some of Stanley Engerman’s work attempting to quantify rates of economic growth in pre-industrial societies. The pace of sustained economic growth in the Early Modern occident was slow. Engerman calculates that during the colonial period, per capita product in British North America was increasing at a mean of 0.6% per year.
Just posted at Quillette: a lengthy article about the violence in SA written by a Brit who lives in Cape Town:
https://quillette.com/2021/07/16/why-violence-and-looting-has-exploded-across-south-africa/
Africa in 1960 had only a modest minority who were even literate.
Ray:
African IQs have been discussed here many times in previous threads. I don’t have time to find those discussions right now.
You might see this, though, about the lack of education in Africa:
Much more, but the main point is that one doesn’t have to posit any special innate (that is, racial) IQ problems in Africa to see why measured IQs might be very low there. In addition, though, it is also the case that a lot of the more intelligent Africans have left the continent over the years, and many are doing well, in some cases exceptionally well.
Africa had very little in the way of established social relationships among political elites operating within modern institutions.
Africa was ruled by elites who were only modestly educated
One shouldn’t infantilize the population of Africa but let’s not forget that colonialism only really started to wind down in the Dark Continent after World War II and less than a generation later we had the U.S. and the West supporting a lot of unsavory characters as our proxies in the Cold War. An appreciation of human and property rights was not exactly at the top of our agenda and things didn’t much change after the Soviet Union fell.
and readily seduced by
notions abroad of state-directed economic development,
It was also stuck with the challenge of contriving a modus vivendi among competing tribes, and prone as any place to the formation of vested interests with particular rent-seeking scams. (A manifestation of state-direction and rent-seeking was the ubiquitous agricultural marketing authorities which were such a drag on African economies).
and less than a generation later we had the U.S. and the West supporting a lot of unsavory characters as our proxies in the Cold War.
Do you have a macro that write sentences like this? The United States has never been the primary patron of any Africa country bar, perhaps, Liberia. And the social dynamics of the place do not permit of the emergence of ‘savory’ characters.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-modern-african-studies/article/abs/personal-rule-in-black-africa-prince-autocrat-prophet-tyrant-by-robert-h-jackson-and-carl-g-rosberg-berkeley-los-angeles-and-london-university-of-california-press-1982-pp-xi-316-2500-995-paperback-political-leadership-in-africa-by-john-cartwright-london-and-canberra-croom-helm-new-york-st-martins-press-1983-pp-310-1495-2750/A26B48FD12BF373AFE6B741F667899A8
Another thing Trump was right about that he took heat from Dems and media. He could have been a little more diplomatic but that’s not really his style.
Most of Africa is still a $hithole!
“The United States has never been the primary patron of any Africa country bar, perhaps, Liberia.”
As Chandler Bing might respond, “Could you GIVE the game away anymore with that carefully worded statement?”
1. I specifically wrote ” the U.S. and the West.”
2. “Primary patron?” How do you not gag on such a deceitfully lawyerly phrase?
3. Here’s the link to an article about some post-Cold War U.S. policy in Africa –
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2000-06-02-0006020048-story.html – Still think it’s just the Africans who have a problem with unsavory characters?
Mike
2. “Primary patron?” How do you not gag on such a deceitfully lawyerly phrase?
It’s not a deceitful phrase at all. Every occidental country had foreign aid programs and also contributed to international agencies and non-governmental organizations. A given African country is receiving concessionary deals, manpower, equipment, funds from a dozen sources.
Here’s the link to an article about some post-Cold War U.S. policy in Africa
And you take reporters at face value just why?
In the politico-military sphere, France has for 60 years been the most influential and active western power.
Still think it’s just the Africans who have a problem with unsavory characters?
I neither stated nor implied that. You offer bad arguments, followed by accusations and red herrings.
This video’s pretty long at 40 minutes, but I was interested throughout. “Why Africa is Still Poor” — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW46xDXNO3Q
There’s too much to really just sum up, but what Sowell said up above was part of it. There was a lot more too, though.
Carefull, the anger and gag reflex are easily triggered. And an article from 21 years ago. Might have to do some fisking of that article. Or not.
Keep on the sunny side. 🙂
They had a tradition in Europe of tremendous accomplishment when given the chance.
IOW, the German and Ashkenazic Jews brought a great deal of human capital with them. The Sephardic and Oriental Jews were in their countries of origin merchants, artisans, and journeymen so also had skills to deploy toward building a modern economy that African cultivators had not acquired.
I don’t find Sowell’s explanation plausible. It is too relient on geography. It doesn’t explain why civilization first emerged in Eurasia instead of Africa, where modern humans originated.
For me, Jared Diamond’s is the definitive work to answer these questions. He provides a far more complex and nuanced explanation. Also, his treatment of the subject spans ancient, modern, and prehistoric history.
Guns, Germs, and Steel https://g.co/kgs/qqHc65
We have to remember that sub-Saharan Africa was at the level of hunter-gathering all the way up to 600 years ago. The introduction of the crops rice and beans to West Africa began agriculture and the Bantu Expansion. Compare that to the 10 to 12 thousand years of agriculture leading to civilization in Eurasia.
I lived in East Africa for two and a half years. Put simply, the African cultures are very young. Very often, the people have a childish perspective of the world. I often found them charming. I also found a lot of incredibly short-sighted thinking.
But any discussion of the current state of Africa should also acknowledge how far and how fast Africa has developed since the initial backslide after decolonization.
Simply put, we need to be a little patient. Africa got into the game really late.
And an article from 21 years ago. Might have to do some fisking of that article. Or not.
It’s a cookie-cutter nonsense article. Whenever the term ‘support’ is applied in that context, it’s a rhetorical exercise. It’s a maneuver meant to stick the bill for local political dysfunction with outside parties. The reasoning is if you have ordinary diplomatic and trading relationships with a country, you’re responsible for everything that happens there. That’s rubbish, of course, but no one ever accuses reporters of thinking clearly.
Roy Nathanson, Sowell’s theory says that the trade routes and the cross-cultural contacts that went with them explain why Eurasia developed civilizations when Africa didn’t. That’s changing now, with modern travel and communication.
neo, Kate:
My intent in that comment was not a direct comparison of Israel vs Africa, but the sort of reasoning, as in Sowell, to explain failure as a sum of negative factors.
Certainly Israel is quite different from African countries, so direct comparison is iffy. However, my point was to apply Sowell’s negatives method to Israel in 1948. Israel’s negatives were considerable.
If Israel had failed, who would be surprised? Who foresaw that Israel would make the desert bloom, resurrect Hebrew into a living language, survive multiple attempts at military invasion and a global hate campaign that continues into the present day and create a thriving economy in that region without oil?
IMO Israel is something of a miracle. As I concluded my previous comment:
Instead something quite different happened. It would be useful to understand what differences made the difference.
Roy Nathanson, Sowell’s theory says that the trade routes and the cross-cultural contacts that went with them explain why Eurasia developed civilizations when Africa didn’t. That’s changing now, with modern travel and communication.
Might be a vector, not a full explanation. Pre-Columbian civilizations developed in the Americas without any contact with the other hemisphere, albeit much later than in the Near East or Europe or India or the Far East. Not sure ripuarian or coastal transportation was all that important for any of them. IIRC, Inca civilization was centered on the Altiplano, not the coast.
huxley:
But the point is that, although Israel had some negative factors, it had few compared to sub-Saharan Africa, and it also had many positive factors that sub-Saharan Africa lacked.
There was a black US boxer. in Africa for a fight, who toured a lot of African nations a few years back who stated upon his return to the US. “I thank God my relatives were sold as slaves and sent to America”
PA+Cat on July 16, 2021 at 4:45 pm said:
Just posted at Quillette: a lengthy article about the violence in SA written by a Brit who lives in Cape Town:
https://quillette.com/2021/07/16/why-violence-and-looting-has-exploded-across-south-africa/
_____________________________________________________________
PA Cat:
I just read the Quillette article, and I want to thank you for the suggestion. Like you, I’d recommend the article to anybody who’s interested in “why violence and looting has exploded across South Africa.” (That’s the title of the Quillette post.)
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.
Parts of South Africa were violent twenty years ago when my husband used to travel there on business.
But the point is that, although Israel had some negative factors, it had few compared to sub-Saharan Africa, and it also had many positive factors that sub-Saharan Africa lacked.
neo:
It depends on how one does the math. To my mind emerging fresh from the Holocaust is a considerable negative and one most African nations did not share.
I don’t claim to have the answers here and, as I said, I would like to have a better handle on it.
I was quite impressed by “Guns, Germs and Steel,” Jared Diamond’s Sowellesque explanation for the West’s success over the rest of the world for largely geographic reasons. Then Diamond wrote “Collapse,” his book explaining Easter Island’s problems as an ecological parable and I began to doubt Diamond’s approach.
Later I read VD Hanson’s critique of Diamond for leaving out Western values and ideas as crucial elements for the West’s success.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/05/decline-and-fall-victor-davis-hanson/
So what elements make the difference? Is Africa’s fate sealed because it lacked certain waterways or its population outstrips its ability to feed new generations adequately or its brain drain to the West? And so on…
I bought into the post-WW2 optimism (when we weren’t worrying about WW3) that the world would continue to improve. Africa is a tough, sad case.
It’s pretty simple.
Ashkenazi Jews > North East Asians > Whites (arbitrarily assigned mean IQ 100) > Blacks
Have left out a shit ton of ethnic groups and sub-groups and the Indian Caste System which itself is a bunch of cognitive and behavioural silos after just 2000+ years of religiously mandated assortative mating.
You can grab an outlying Sowell here or a few Igbos on Wall Street there and their relative rarity proves just about what you’d expect about the properties of the distributions whose far right tails they’re selected from… *if* you have the faintest clue how Normal Distributions behave…. Which most Hand Wavers don’t.
Or just look at National per capita GDPs and adjust for recently-acquired windfall oil / gas wealth — amp up the fiddle factor when you notice that all the engineers are foreigners (as in the Gulf).
Never in human history has so much garbage been written to try to avoid seeing what is unfortunately obviously true.
I don’t give a Rat’s Posterior what people claim to believe if it makes them look good in the public sphere… but the problem is that you end up with morons actually really *believing* it and setting Public Policy based on blank slatism. Which is Genocidal.
There. I said the G word.
Explain to the Japanese who lack navigable rivers and have incredibly inhospitable rugged terrain with few mineral resources and who Crossed the T at Tsushima and thrashed the Russians at Port Arthur 60 years after modernizing in response to US Military Aggression how they shouldn’t be good at stuff.
huxley:
Actually, from what I’ve read I believe the Holocaust acted as a spur to Israel’s success. It drove many people to consider it one of the few places that could constitute a refuge from what had been revealed to have been the hatred of so much of Europe for Jews. The survivors were a very very very tough and determined lot.
Kate,
The trade routes and cross-cultural exchange is a part of the equation. Another part was the lack of domesticable species of plants and animals. No large African animals have ever been successfully domesticated. They have had partial success with ostriches, but it still isn’t commercially viable. Basically… bad luck.
In contrast, the prehistoric humans who arrived in the Americas were able to domesticate corn, potatoes, peppers, llamas, etc… When the Europeans arrived, the “indigenous” natives had already had civilization and empires for centuries.
What mostly did in the natives of the Americas was European diseases, like measles, syphilis, and the like.
Again, its a complex story. Read the book.
@Roy Nathanson:
The lack of domesticated animals must have come as a great surprise to the Xhosa and Zulus and all the other hundreds of millions of sub-Saharan Bantu whose measure of individual wealth since time immemorial (but how long can that be, since they never developed even the most rudimentary writing?) has been.. wait for it.. wait for it… (Trigger Warning) CATTLE.
It’s possible that one of the secret sauces underlying the lightning fast military ascent of the Zulus during C19 was their adoption of maize farming turning them into carb-fueled beer swilling killing machines. But that’s another story.
Seriously. People. Stop clutching at straws.
Thousands of years… All they have to show for it are some horrid looking Benin Bronzes, scary masks, and the ruins of Great (it is to laugh.. go look at aerial views of it) Zimbabwe. You guys built bigger Mikvehs in the unfashionable end of Bialystok.
Get this: To acknowledge the above does not mean to hate or despise Africans. It means that you don’t have unrealistic expectations regarding what they can and cannot achieve and you do not go subject your own peoples to having to live with them. Really quite simple. Leave them to their own devices and maybe they’ll build Wakanda in another 10,000 years. They can wipe you out with numbers and their dysfunctions long, long before that happy day comes to be.
Roy Nathanson on July 16, 2021 at 6:42 pm said:
What mostly did in the natives of the Americas was European diseases, like measles, syphilis, and the like.
_______________________________________________________________
Roy Nathanson:
I don’t disagree with your point, but I think you’ve slipped up by using syphilis as an example. Although there are still people who dispute its origin, syphilis is almost certainly a New World disease. It may even have been transmitted by sailors on Columbus’s ships. If so, the phrase “Columbian exchange” would, in this case, be literally true.
Sowell’s “Conquests and Cultures” is fantastic. Makes Diamond’s work look pathetic.
No special pleading or planted axioms.
Except for the massive Congo basin, most of SubSaharan Africa is above/beyond the “falls line”. In addition, some of the rivers are unnavigable part of the year due to lack of rainfall in the dry season. So if you don’t get your boat back down, it stays up there….
In contrast, the Amazon can be followed a thousand miles inland. And the Mississippi’s tributaries will take a light draft boat to West Virginia, nearly to Canada, and into the Dakotas.
Africa’s shores are bleakly straight. What with bays, harbors, islands, bays on islands, river deltas, islands in river deltas with their own rivers…..Europe has more ocean front than Africa, which is to say is the school for sailors. And they had the Med to practice in. Off Africa, take one step in and you’re in the big blue. No point in sailing a hundred miles right or left; hardly any noticeable difference and…no harbor in which to shelter which is okay since you didn’t have one from which to leave.
Flowing water, which is to say highly oxygenated water, is home to simulium damnosum, the vector for river blindness. So a bridge or dam which disturbs the water flow and oxygenates it….. Standing unshaded water, a feature of slash and burn agriculture, hosts the anopheles mosquito.
Can’t win for losing.
As for the crossroads of civilization effecting cultural and technological development, one might look at the far flung British isles and ask, how were they before the Romans came? My impression is they were tribal and not so advanced?
What is interesting to me is how the secular world insist that humans emerged from Africa while the general Judea-Christian understanding, is that humans , and not just civilization, emerged from the Eastern side of the present Mediterranean. And those humans eventually spread TO Africa and the other continents. All , regardless of skin color, related. ( Among some Old Earth Creationist, who insist that there was a lot of time between those first two verses in Genesis, myself among them, is the belief that much of the creation story followed a catastrophic global reset, limited to planet Earth, and that much of the fossil record occurred in that murky , ancient, long period , between those two verses. There is at least three different Hebrew words being used in that first chapter of Genesis for “ made”, “ create”, etc, that implies a lot more nuance to the story than those “6,000 year old New Earth types” seem to pick up on.
Actually, from what I’ve read I believe the Holocaust acted as a spur to Israel’s success.
neo:
Sure, I can read it that way. History is replete with individual success stories in which a negative is turned into a positive.
Tony Robbins tells a story, supposedly true, of two brothers from a very troubled family background. One ends up a respected doctor; the other in prison. When asked why, they both responded to the effect, “Given my background, how could I have done otherwise?”
However, flipping a negative to a positive seems to put us back in the realm of post hoc reasoning.
Again, if Israel had failed or semi-failed, who would have been surprised, given the negatives it was up against? How far can we go with Sowellesque reasoning?
Yes, I know Israelis are tough. I made my money at a Silicon Valley startup founded and led by Israelis. Tough, smart hombres, and more than a bit ruthless.
Roy said “ No large African animals have ever been domesticated.”
Are you forgetting about the LITERAL African elephant in the room?????
That should be news to Hannibal of Carthage , who took them over the Alps to fight against Rome!
Those Hannibal had at Zama were not so well trained yet, and by then the Romans knew how to open their lines and let the elephants pass thru the path of least resistance.
The Africans literally had access to living, breathing heavy equipment capable of lifting trees before the internal combustion engine!
“Parts of South Africa were violent twenty years ago when my husband used to travel there on business.”
The Boers had a bit of an anti-Television thing for a long time. So there was no television broadcasting in South Africa until late 1975 or 1976 — can’t be bothered to look it up. So the poor #@$%ers got a very bad case of the dopamine hits with no childhood acquired immunity and became TV Soap Opera Addicts.
To the degree that a family friend returned to Australia ca. 1980 from a visit back to relatives in wealthy part of Cape Town and complained vociferously that the place had gone to the dogs because he’d been out for his evening walk and gotten mugged by blacks at gunpoint and gone home and everybody had just nodded and commiserated in a bored kind of way and kept eyes glued to the Dallas episode.
Blacks are Blacks. Let them off the hook and they get up to stuff. It’s doubtless meet and proper to go live in (randomly example) a nice very white part of New England and play the Glass Bead Game of coming up with excuses for their mass behaviour — just pray that you never have to live with the results of policies based upon such wishful thinking. Living with the results of these policies should only be the fate of Poor Flyover Whites, after all.
Can Do!
Tell us more about all of the USA from Hong Kong. It’s all the same as inner city Baltimore (pick the worst and extrapolate to everywhere, because, Can Do!). And make assumptions that because neo is in New England everyone else is too, because, Can Do! Such vast knowledge, we are so blessed.
huxley:
Of course, Jews were already culturally very very different. Among other things, they also had a lengthy and detailed history of persecution and triumph over it. Their story was that they had almost been wiped out many times and yet won out over it. There is also genetic evidence that around 1200, Ashkenazi Jews had been reduced to a breeding population of something like 250 individuals. They had recovered from that, but the gene pool was not very varied as a result.
neo:
Well, yes. You are not telling me anything I don’t know.
It’s also well-known that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ for an ethnic group on the planet, while African blacks have the lowest.
Perhaps this is the prime factor explaining Israel’s success versus African failures. There are alternate explanations, but those don’t mean the IQ explanation is false.
I don’t know, but Jordan Peterson says that IQ has been shown to be a huge undeniable factor in individual success in our society. It sure looks that way to me.
My younger sister was diagnosed developmentally retarded, whatever that means, on account of a pregnancy problem. She can’t see around corners at all and her life is very painful.
Fortunately, investigating IQ/race correlations is taboo and will end a young researcher’s career, so we’re not likely to settle the question anytime soon.
The Boers had a bit of an anti-Television thing for a long time.
Wasn’t that. The impediment derived from disputes over how to allocate programming time by language.
Blacks are Blacks.
Leaving aside Haiti, the Caymens, and St. Barts, the island in the non-Latin Caribbean the most murder prone has a homicide rate 18x that of the least murder prone; the most affluent territory has real income levels 5x the least affluent.. If you want to understand why Martinique is Martinique and Jamaica is Jamaica, or why the US Virgins are the way they are while Belize is the way it is, biology doesn’t get you very far.
Get this: To acknowledge the above does not mean to hate or despise Africans. It means that you don’t have unrealistic expectations regarding what they can and cannot achieve
98% of the history of our species was lived before the advent of civilization. Piss off.
Art+Deco:
For a person who was never there and doesn’t have longish family history and network of relatives there and didn’t spend decades paying as much day-in/day-out attention to what goes on there as some Americans following this Blog do to goings-on in (obligatory random pick, say for example) Israel as I did… you sure as @#$% know a lot of stuff for sure about ZAF that isn’t so.
“Fortunately, investigating IQ/race correlations is taboo and will end a young researcher’s career, so we’re not likely to settle the question anytime soon.”
What’s even more taboo is investigating who made it taboo.
Can Do! has his nappy in a twist and has to throw down the Israel connection for some obscure reason. It is a profound mystery. But he can tell us all about the USA. Hoot. He didn’t stay, but chose to run away, brave brave Sir Robin.
jon baker, Hannibal was Carthaginian, i.e., North African, not sub-Saharan.
you sure as @#$% know a lot of stuff for sure about ZAF that isn’t so.
You haven’t pointed out one inaccurate statement I’ve made.
“He didn’t stay, but chose to run away, brave brave Sir Robin.”
At least me and mine didn’t saw off the branches we and the rest of us were sitting on.
A significant fraction of the ‘Whites’ who supported the ANC and ran safe houses, etc. for them are now sunning themselves on the beach at Netanya or contemplating their moral superiority from the safety of Hampstead, Highgate, or other comfy foreign enclaves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18GeelXaOaA
https://www.jta.org/1986/01/06/archive/south-africas-reform-jews-leading-jewish-struggle-against-apartheid
https://www.972mag.com/denis-goldberg-apartheid-palestine/
World’s Most Put-Upon Minority: Improving @#$% for People Since Forever.
Always with the blowing *@#$ up and then heading off airily somewhere else to leave the less rootless less cosmopolitan locals to deal with the mess.
Seriously.. take a well-earned rest from your labours or something. Pretty please 🙂
Read Charles Murray’s newest, “Facing Reality”. It is a book on the differences between the races, good and bad. He only provides and explains the data. There are no “whys” in it.
The evidence is incontrovertible. In IQ rank, Asians beat Europeans who beat Latins. At the bottom, there are the black Africans and Afro-Ams, with an average IQ of 85 (normal average is 100). Yes there are great black African individuals, but they are not and never have been common. Education does not increase cognitive ability despite Harvard’s efforts to make that so.
This goes a long ways to explaining the degradation of American culture, manifest everywhere. 13% of the population commits about 74% of all murders in which race of the perp is identified.
Juneteenth, hah.
Jon Baker,
Elephants have been “trained”… not “domesticated”. There is a BIG difference.
In any case, elephants have been trained to work and were used in war. They mature far too slowly to be used for meat.
As you noted, the point stands.
@Cicero:
The concept of “Smart Fraction” is very useful when comparing groups. A modern economy with all the requisite technology and logistics requires some percentage of the population to have the necessary IQ to operate these things.
Allowing that not all populations have same SD (this is true for cf. just adult males and females of any one given race), it’s still nearly always going to be the case that the more a population’s mean IQ shifts to the left, the more stuff will be broken down or dysfunctional in their society because they lack people smart enough to make those bits work…. let alone innovate.
Can Do!
Stealing from a philosopher isn’t very original. Do you have any more It Ain’t Necessarily So stories?
Do you and yours know the difference between a branch and a tree? Again, the USA isn’t your forrest, so keep your matches in your jumper. Burn down your own wood lot. Oh, you already did. Sucks to be you; channeling the philosopher.
Cheerio, and tonkety tonk.
Cornflour,
Interesting about Syphilis…
Apparently, there are two competing theories and the science is very much not “settled”. But, you are right that I should not have used that in my examples.
In any case, the European germs were far more deadly to American natives than American germs were deadly to Europeans. Very often, the diseases arrived actually arrived and wiped out the natives before the European explorers did. Many native American civilizations that existed at the time of the discovery of the New World are only known to us through archeology. Sadly, the more sophisticated cultures had higher living densities, and were thus more vulnerable.
Curiously, the reverse happened in Africa. Malaria was a killer that the black Africans had developed a degree of resistance to. For the Europeans, it was often a death sentence. In the beginning of European exploration of Africa, two out of every three explorers or colonists died in their first year. It was Malaria that prevented the population of Africa from being largely replaced by Europeans similar to the end result in the Americas. Ironic, no?
Zaphod,
Cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens, are certainly in Africa now. But none of them were indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa. They were all domesticated elsewhere.
Much of Sub-Saharan Africa manifests a mild but unpredictable ecology. Mild in that there is no winter and primitive agriculture is very easy and even the most retarded retard would find it difficult to starve. Unpredictable because it’s full of wacked out bizarro diseases — Sleeping Sickness, Bilharzia, Ebola, Malaria, of course… and yet more.
It’s the harsh but predictable ecologies which produce your North East Asians and Blue-Eyed Northern European Uebermensch smartypants types. Africans didn’t evolve much in the way of Future Orientation or any kind of executive planning faculties because these things offered no evolutionary advantage — you didn’t need to store away food and make warm clothes for harsh winters.. and there wasn’t much point in much other forward planning since by the time you were half way to getting started along would come some tropical bug and kill you anyway.
Equatorial Asia — another place where you just pop a stick in the ground and it grows into something edible — did much better with less disease burden… but still you won’t fine the natives there being super smart. Not for nothing that the Overseas Chinese and Indian Brahmin and Commercial Caste imports are the Jews of SE Asia.
Kate, I am well aware that Hannibal was North African. But the African Elephants range is not limited to North Africa. Their range includes sub saharan Africa. Or do you think that elephants only existed in North Africa? https://www.elephantsforafrica.org/elephant-facts/
@Roy Nathanson:
https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-how-livestock-made-its-way-to-southern-africa-64256
Zaphod, so basically, Cows got to southern Africa a couple of thousand years or more before they got to Texas….
Tony Bath, in “Hannibal’s Campaigns” , does state that Carthage used the smaller African Forest Elephant and Indian Elephants, rather than the larger African Bush Elephant. The Forest Elephant did seem to have a smaller natural range than the larger Bush elephant, from what I can see.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184927382916?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-213727-13078-0&mkcid=2&itemid=184927382916&targetid=4581183927179143&device=t&mktype=&googleloc=&poi=&campaignid=418233787&mkgroupid=1241348861725295&rlsatarget=pla-4581183927179143&abcId=9300542&merchantid=51291&msclkid=7355293a1b621452f9a949c8513cdc04
Africans didn’t evolve much in the way of Future Orientation or any kind of executive planning faculties because these things offered no evolutionary advantage —
Thanks for the pop anthropology. Such an education
@jon baker:
The Ashkenazis semi-accidentally but fortuitously for them, at least, bred themselves a 15 point IQ advantage (Nothing special about Sephardi IQ and Mizrahim generally not regarded as being sharpest tools in the Israeli drawer) *in roughly a thousand years* +/- some fiddle factor. Probably got some kick-start from mutations involved in recovering from the genetic bottleneck — been estimated that Third Cousin Marriage is optimal for genetic health — you don’t want too much hybrid vigor, just the right amount.
How many generations old are dog and cattle breeds? Provided you start with reasonably good stock material and the right conditions you can do pretty well. I mean you could randomly send the Cossacks to visit the Igbo from time to time and create artificial cute little grass hut Shtetls, permanently lower the temperature by 30 degrees C, and put their Igbo religious scholars in charge of their separate communities’ powers of life and death super complicated full of abstruse loopholes and mental gymnastics legal system and then you’d find that the smart and commercially successful Igbo guys would be marrying their daughters off to the Igbo let’s call them say Rabbis’ smart sons stat in a bit of mutually beneficial assortative mating and in no time at all you’d have Wakanda and the Wakanda Federal Reserve… and Wakandawood… with maudlin sob stories, to boot 😛
This notion that evolution stops at the head or that humans cannot be bred is silly and childish. But we can keep believing whatever we like and the Chinese geneticists will do whatever they like.
I’m not convinced that it was the arrival of this or that animal or the existence of this or that mineral which has limited Sub-Saharan IQ. They just haven’t had the evolutionary pressures over the long term which would result in good intellectual root stock material. The more successful of them have been pragmatic enough to adopt new animals and crops — e.g. Cattle and sheep some thousands of years back.. and maize — C18/19. But they never invented the wheel. Or the Mayan Calendar if we have to be nice to wheel-less savages.
It is what it is.
@jon baker:
That makes sense re Hannibal’s elephants. The True African Bush Elephant you go to see on Safari is not the most friendly fellow. Not as deadly as a Cape Buffalo (good luck domesticating *those*) or a Hippo with PMS, but not something I’d be trying to break to the howdah.
Seen much more of Asian Elephants and they are the most amazing animals. Not just intelligent, but also quite fastidious in their eating habits — really interesting to watch them shake the bugs and dust off a branch of some tree before they get to work stripping the leaves. And still, every now and then one goes nuts and kills its handler.
@Roy Nathanson:
“They were all domesticated elsewhere” — As were Humans when you really get down to it.
Making Eugenics respectable again, can Can Do! do it? Eugenics has such a splendid history (sarc).
And Can Do! eliminates malaria from Asia (and any other diseases, such as scrub typhus?). Who knows what power lurks in the heart of Can Do?
@om:
Go easy on that Culture of Critique there, Old Boy. Supposedly not your bailiwick anyway, what?
Can Do!
Here’s some news from your social credit score masters:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/07/16/video-china-threatens-to-nuke-japan-if-it-defends-taiwan-n1462441
Check your nappy now, they may upset your rice bowl after all.
huxley – I am halfway through Diamond’s book “Collapse” – it’s very interesting, and I think he has done a lot of useful analysis, but he steps sideways around the fatal characteristic of the failed communities (of various demographic sizes). So, even though he presents all the data needed for the conclusion, there was only one time (in re Greenland) when he stated aloud the actions that separated failed from successful communities, who also had environmental degradation problems & several other characteristics.
When the societies diverted their production and labor to service the grandiose narcissism of either priests or princes (using the terms generically), they went too far down the road of destruction to survive.
@om:
Wouldn’t you love to live in a country still capable of making credible threats? 🙂
Bombing the Chinks with Rainbow Flags or sending the Village People Navy won’t scare them off.
Paris might have been worth a Mass to King Whatshisname, but I doubt the Japanese will trade Tokyo for Taipei. And I doubt the Chinese would get too pushy with the Japanese either. Deep down, The Chinese know they have an inferiority complex about the Japs.
It’s all just noise. But if you are happy running after latest News Cycle talking points like a puppy after a stationary car, go ahead. Whatever floats your Gender-Inclusive Missile Boat.
How could Jared Diamond do other than promote Blank Slate-ism? Apart from his professional career depending upon it, his entire world view and sense of place in the historical order of things requires him to believe in it. If it’s not true then Jared Diamond and his vastly over-represented co-ethnics in Academia, High Finance, and virtually every other intellectual / power-wielding high ground in American society must be partly attributable to Luck in the Genetic Lottery and not 100% totally Horatio Alger justified after all that hard work and suffering and triumphing over the odds and.. yadda yadda… Whole can of worms right there. Then imagine if you could identify all the Lucky Winners in this very unfair game of life just by surname and physiognomy… Fun times!
I think Mister Diamond sleeps in his bed much better at night when he feels that the Blank Slate Narrative reigns triumphant.
Same goes even for non-Jews in our credentialed ‘Elites’.. If it’s not just Hard Work and Grit and Moral Superiority in not wasting time on NASCAR and they’re just smarter and better at doing the tests they have conveniently designed for themselves… well then what happens to their fragile self-worth?
We’re in a very real bind. I can see the value in not blasting out Bio-Realism to the masses… The problem is that the Elites do a very poor job of being rational about Bio-Realism in their setting of public policies… Either that or they are deliberately and maliciously using Race as a weapon to hammer the Average White.
VDH, of course, is quite correct in his opinion of Diamond’s book, but deals with other, wider, aspects. Still, the stories Diamond tells are interesting even if his conclusions are suspect.
Hanson talks in passing about one factor that underlay all of the failures: the environmental degradation that caused their doom stemmed from the cutting of forests for fuel, much more than for agriculture; it was fossil-fuels that enabled other communities to persueing that fatal course to ultimate oblivion.
Can Do!
Swings and misses again. Am I supposed to be offended by your cluster bomb of stupid? Why would I assume you really know jack about your masters; they are after all the inscrutable Orientals, not some flyover proles. Do you actually know anything about flyover prole land, by the way?
Wouldn’t you love to have a country to live in?
Al Catraz on July 16, 2021 at 5:55 pm said:
There was a black US boxer. in Africa for a fight, who toured a lot of African nations a few years back who stated upon his return to the US. “I thank God my relatives were sold as slaves and sent to America”
“I watched the dead float down a river in Tanzania.
Of all the gut-wrenching emotions I wrestled with during three years of covering famine, war and misery around Africa, no feeling so gripped me as the one I felt that scorching hot day last April, standing on the Rusumo Falls bridge, in a remote corner of Tanzania, watching dozens of discolored, bloated bodies floating downstream, floating from the insanity that was Rwanda.
The image of those bodies in the river lingered in my mind long after that, recurring during interminable nights in desolate hotel rooms without running water, or while I walked through the teeming refugee camps of eastern Zaire. And the same feeling kept coming back too, as much as I tried to force it from my mind. How can I describe it? Revulsion? Yes, but that doesn’t begin to touch on what I really felt. Sorrow, or pity, at the monumental waste of human life? Yes, that’s closer. But the feeling nagging at me was — is — something more, something far deeper. It’s a sentiment that, when uttered aloud, might come across as callous, self-obsessed, maybe even racist.
But I’ve felt it before, that same nagging, terrible sensation. I felt it in Somalia, walking among the living dead of Baidoa and Baardheere — towns in the middle of a devastating famine. And I felt it again in those refugee camps in Zaire, as I watched bulldozers scoop up black corpses, and trucks dump them into open pits.
I know exactly the feeling that haunts me, but I’ve just been too embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I can: There but for the grace of God go I.
Somewhere, sometime, maybe 400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I’ll never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants somehow made it up to South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36 years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn’t been forced to make that horrific voyage, I would not have been standing there that day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist — a mere spectator — watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have instead been one of them — or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.” – Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith Richburg.
That’s interesting. Keith Richburg is now an academic teaching Journalism in HK.
https://www.keithrichburg.com/
Spotted him popping up on Twitter during the protests in second half of 2019.
Although for how much longer might be moot. Honest Journalism has about as much of a future here as in the West.
Zaphod:
It’s not as though people all over the world were inventing the wheel. And, once invented, it spread only to those places where it made sense. For example:
You make a lot of assertions that don’t prove what you think they prove.
By me from 2014.
https://baldilocks-talking.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-scattered-spritual-reasons-for.html?m=1
By me from 2017. Re: “not the brightest bulbs.”
https://baldilocks-talking.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-halfricans-perspective-on-black.html?m=1
The black American boxer who thanked God that his ancestors got on the slaves ship was one Muhammad Ali.
Regarding the arguments that blacks have lower IQs on average:
1. I have some doubts about how significant this is. Any people that could be so endlessly clever about inventing new ways to steal from my jobsite when I was working in Africa can’t be THAT stupid.
2. I am pretty sure that nutrition and nurture contribute a pretty big share to the end results.
3. And, finally, it only makes the argument that we need to forget about skin color and treat individuals on the basis of their character and abilities. I’m white and I don’t want to be stereotyped any more than black people do.
I would be in favor of eliminating race and ethnicity from ALL government forms and databases.
Re NEO’S link, “ …lack of draught animals…”.
Well, according to that link Zaphod put up last night, cattle got to southern Africa 2000 years or more ago. Or are you saying they did not? Cattle are draught animals. Some breeds obviously better suited than others.
“ Where systems of slavery and forced labor were prevalent, that might have reduced incentives to upgrade labor efficiency.”
Ok, I can see that. They said the same thing about the old American south. And in a way, we verify that when we say raising the minimum wage will force restaurants to further mechanize.
Thats on the one hand.
On the other hand, the Romans had plenty of slaves. Apparently they used them to build roads and aqueducts. I saw both still visible when I was in Greece.
Besides, the scuttlebutt on the web among “ youths” is that African on African slavery was basically nice slavery. Lol.
well lets consider the alternatives, lumumba was certainly about socialist economics, mobutu wasn’t much better, could a liberal regime have flourished in south africa, why didn’t it from the start, rhodesia had mostly the same problem, angola was under portuguese occupation, and that rarely helps anyone’s wellbeing
now we have seen kabila wasn’t any better, mandela was the best of a bad lot, with the nadir being zuma, who occasioned this last degringolade, there’s a new madman in malema,
Animals are one thing, yokes, harnesses, wheels, are another. The American plains Indians had horses for a few hundred years, before those other American came into the Great Plains, and used the travois with their horses (and dogs, and people). They never moved on to wheels. Is there any evidence of travois or other systems in sub Sahara Africa? Those things called archaeological evidence or “artifacts?”
Here’s the word from somebody who lived in SA and escaped:
“My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read:
“Three Headless Bodies Found”.
The next day: “Three Heads Found”.
The third day: “Heads Don’t Match Bodies”.
You can’t make this stuff up.
As a result of all this, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Drought causes crops to fail, thousands face starvation? Yup, that happened many times while I was growing up. Inter-tribal rivalry and warfare causes wholesale slaughter? Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? Not more than nine or ten of those. In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, floods in South Africa, famine in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, famine in Ethiopia, floods in Mozambique, wholesale slaughter in Uganda, and tribal warfare in every single country. There are others, but you get the point.”
https://www.kimdutoit.com/2017/05/05/let-africa-sink/
jon baker:
I’ve been puzzled by the discussions of draft animals in Africa. I’ve skimmed this article that sheds some light on the topic. If you’re interested, the part relevant to sub-Saharan Africa starts on page 5.
Whatever’s happened in the past, West Africa’s suffering political violence in two places – Mali and the Borno State in Nigeria (and points adjacent to Borno State). The Congo, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Sudans, and Somalia are suffering because the state is notional. Not much in the way of political violence elsewhere. What you have are high rates of street crime, high rates of incompetence and parasitism in the public sector, low levels of human capital, and wretched public health. The thing is, with some countries excepted, it used to be worse.
In the political sphere, you actually do not have grisly tyrants in Tropical Africa as we speak and most countries have a body of elected officials and some measure of pluralism. The anxiety about South Africa concerns the possibility of deterioration in the quality of life (arising from increasing crime rates and possible mass seizures of real property by the government).
could a liberal regime have flourished in south africa, why didn’t it from the start,
It would have required a MacAruthur regency in the four territories in question, and the British government was not interested.
As far as I can tell, all the famines which have hit Tropical Africa in the years since 1985 have been coincident with violent political disorders on the Horn of Africa or in the Equatorial Zone. The notable exception would be the Sahel drought in 2010-12 (which I do not think generated many excess deaths).
the ethiopian derge which mengistu profitted off live aid, was the model, many countries in sub saharan africa,
Regarding the arguments that blacks have lower IQs on average:
Roy Nathanson:
It’s more than an argument, it’s a fact that blacks consistently score lower on IQ tests than all other groups. Even John McWhorter concedes that there is at least a problem with how blacks take IQ tests.
In response one can argue that:
* IQ tests don’t truly measure intelligence and the number is meaningless
* IQ tests are biased against blacks in various ways so their scores are reduced across the board
* Black IQs are reduced by poor nutrition or nurture
* Black IQs are reduced long-term by what one black gentleman in a dashiki I overheard in a cafe call “Post-Traumatic Slavery Disorder.”
There are long discussions to all of the above, but I say let’s stick a pin in those and consider the honest possibility that IQ tests work reasonably well and blacks do have an average intelligence corresponding to their IQ scores. It’s unpleasant to contemplate, but it’s still a possibility.
The problem is that IQ follows a bell curve, which means that sure there will be plenty of blacks sharing the meaty part of their bell curve with whites, but there will be many more blacks in the lower part of the curve and many fewer in the upper range.
https://iqtestprep.com/iq-bell-curve/
According to “The Bell Curve” book the average black IQ is 85 and for whites 100. For the sake of argument, say 130 is the minimum IQ for an MIT student. According to the curve this means that 2% of white students meet that minimum while only 0.1% of blacks would. Since whites outnumber blacks in the US by ~5x, therefore American whites would outnumber American blacks at MIT by 100:1.
Of course there will be blacks at MIT but vanishingly few and all attempts at “equity” given that reality will destroy acceptance by merit.
The situation is equally bleak at the lower end. According to Jordan Peterson, the US military used IQ extensively to accept/reject applicants then slot them into positions of greatest suitability. Based on this research the military decided that an 83 IQ was the minimum for recruits. This means that close to half of all American blacks would not meet the military’s minimum requirement to work the lowliest jobs.
If true, this is heartbreaking. See this link for IQ/occupation correlation:
https://psychologenie.com/average-iq-score
@Huxley:
“This means that close to half of all American blacks would not meet the military’s minimum requirement to work the lowliest jobs.
If true, this is heartbreaking.”
I don’t see it as heartbreaking. I see it as a cold hard fact about life. Just as is having Extreme Right Tail Ashkenazis lord it over *my* kind one way or the other until the collapse of this civilizational cycle and a world in which superior ability in the manipulation of words and symbols gives one more power over people than the manipulation of physical objects.
So.. confining ourselves to American Blacks: Too cruel to just ship them back to Africa. A milder form of Apartheid and reservations seems to be just the ticket to me. And back in the day that’s pretty much what they had and it pretty much worked OK until some infuriating Do Gooders showed up and brought down the edifice that at least worked after a fashion and instituted a reign of calamities with the Civil Rights Movement.
But for this to happen, would require the Top (will try not to resort to name-calling) to *want* and agree to stop using the bottom as hammer and flail against the Middle. Don’t hold yer breath.
Come to think of it… Nobody has mentioned Africa Addio. Has anyone here seen this film?
Bit faster paced than Antonioni’s Chung Kuo 🙂
(Both roughly contemporaneous films when released caused their own special snowflake shit storms.)
I don’t see it as heartbreaking. I see it as a cold hard fact about life. Just as is having Extreme Right Tail Ashkenazis lord it over *my* kind…
Zaphod:
I agree on both counts, but as you know, I’m a bleeding-heart ex-hippie. 🙂 I would much prefer a world where IQ was doled out equally.
I made it into a Gifted Children program when I was in 4th Grade, so I was fortunate enough to be dealt a high IQ card.
But I’m a long way from breathing the same air as Alan Turing and John von Neumann or any number of the Ashkenazim. I’m sad about that, but what are you gonna do?
___________________________________
A man’s got to know his limitations.
–Clint Eastwood, “Magnum Force”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52yjY_7RgZw
the ethiopian derge which mengistu profitted off live aid, was the model, many countries in sub saharan africa,
Model for whom?
Just as is having Extreme Right Tail Ashkenazis lord it over *my* kind…
Hy Goldberg fired you for cause. Get over it.
Never got over the discovery that he wasn’t the smartest man in the world. Sad.
@Art Deco:
*speaks loudly and slowly*
You’re getting confused. It was Shlomo Teitelbaum wot fired me. Hy Goldberg’s your neuro-proctologist. And only he can clear up this and other matters for you.
Never a Dull Day in Spokane (or wherever the hell) when I’m here, eh Om?
Wonder what Mark Fuhrman is up to these days. Poor fellow.
Of course there will be blacks at MIT but vanishingly few
About 5% of each cohort attends private research universities, swank private colleges, or public ivies as undergraduates. If admissions formulae tracked psychometric scores precisely (they wouldn’t), making the cut for a black applicant would require one’s performance was measured as being 2.54 sd above the subset median (equivalent to 1.65 sd above the median of the whole).
[(0.0055 x .14) / .05] = 0.0154 or about 1.5%. Small, but not vanishingly small.
(If I understand correctly, your vector equation to determine who is admitted would have other variables because IQ is not perfectly predictive).
Art Deco:
I thought we had an understanding to steer clear of each other…
And now you are busting my chops because my obviously rough calculation for educational purposes was 1% and yours is 1.5%.
Or you are arguing about the proper numerical bracketing of “vanishingly small.”
Your comments are so useless.
I thought we had an understanding to steer clear of each other…
No, you thought you had a right to dictate to other posters as if you owned the place.
Can Do!
Spokane? Nope. Eastern Washington is a pretty big place, but not the naval of the universe, Hong Kong, or where ever it is you are at any particular instant.
Mark Furman? Is that all you got? Speaking “prole” for you, and not in received English.
But you are a hoot at best, and something else most other times.
Cheerio, chappie.
Forget about Navel of the Universe, Om.
(Naval Jelly is something else entirely. I recommend you use it only for rust-removal and don’t let your imagination run to riot. The stuff burns..)
Obviously you must inhabit the Omphalos!
Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Continuing past AD’s usual and usually questionable nitpicking…
If blacks’ average IQ is 85 and that truly corresponds to their level of intelligence and relationship to other groups, then it is a serious problem in multiple respects.
In a meritocratic world it means there would be very few blacks in professional positions like doctors, lawyers, judges, police chiefs, programmers — far fewer than one would expect given that blacks are 12-13% of the US population. Very different from Hollywood world where almost every minor character professional is black.
It would hurt to see that. It would look like White Supremacy world as the CRT people claim.
However, if that is reality and we cater to the CRT crowd it means we will be putting mediocre blacks into professional positions and everyone suffers, though no one will criticize for fear of being called racist.
It also means that blacks admitted to colleges above their abilities will be overmatched and suffer the pain and self-doubt of not being able to keep up, then likely drop out and end up with substantial college debt very hard to pay off. That’s a horrible experience and situation.
As to Africa — if half a country’s population is unable to meet the minimum requirement to do the lowest work in the American military, plus there are few higher-IQ types around to run things and many of those emigrate to the US or Europe, it may not be possible to keep a relatively modern African nation running. Full stop. Thus, the woes of Africa are not due to a lack of favorable waterways in the past as Thomas Sowell would explain in part.
None of this is proven. But IQ is a cruel mistress and seems to work well enough for every other group. If true for blacks, what do we do?
Can Do! speaks from experience on Naval Jelly it seems. Must be something he learned in Thailand. Rough trade and TMI. LOL.
It’s not always just the Blacks.
https://zimbabwe-today.com/gay-baboon-terrorises-villagers-in-southafrica-rapes-5-men/
Ex Africa simper (sic) aliquid novi.
No, you thought you had a right to dictate to other posters as if you owned the place.
Art Deco:
As I recall that interchange, you lost the argument, so you called my comments “onanistic.” Neo, for understandable reasons, deleted your offensive comment. Then I suggested, not dictated, that we steer clear of each other.
You did not reply, so I took that as your agreement.
Still seems like a good approach IMO for the sake of the blog.
Assumptions, huxley.
As I recall that interchange, you lost the argument, so you called my comments “onanistic.”
If it helps you feel better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSDj7bjAv2s
Me… I like to think I’m Animal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeQg2auVlU4
The Great John Derbyshire and Mad Bad Ed Dutton converse on topics, including Africa:
https://odysee.com/@JollyHeretic:d/John-Derbyshire-Joins-Us-at-The-Jolly-Heretic:2
or here:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/8W7JrVLA5Nhe/
As a bonus, here’s his latest edition of Radio Derb:
https://vdare.com/radio-derb/idiocracy-sa-riots-soccer-diversity-not-strength-walt-whitman-cancelled-and-george-floyd-struck-by-lightning-etc
John Derbyshire was fired from useless grifting cucked scam National Review for his article “The Talk: Non-black Version”
https://thecampofthesaints.org/john-derbyshires-the-talk-nonblack-version/
Zaphod:
I almost told you the other day that if you keep commenting as you have, you would be fired from “National Review.”
Clearly you are aware of that. Good. Saves me the trouble.
More seriously, I thought Derb’s “The Talk” was spot-on. If the black leadership and their complicit white allies were honest, they would admit that the most real and serious danger to black children (and white) by factors of ten was other young black men.
@Huxley:
I think I can view that possible outcome with equanimity!
Seriously, too… the Dutton / Derbyshire back and forth chat is good listening. Some pretty cool listener questions too.
As I recall that interchange, you lost the argument, so you called my comments “onanistic.”
If it helps you feel better.
Art Deco:
As you did say and you do not deny.
Perhaps you would care to explain your high-minded, fully-justified purpose in using the word “onanistic” towards an opponent in debate.
I recall St. Thomas Aquinas considering the weighty question of whether angels had sperm, but I don’t recall him ever dismissing the arguments in his standard triune “ABC But I say” format that the problem with A, B or C was onanism.
No doubt you know better.
Here we go, Monty Python:
https://youtu.be/xpAvcGcEc0k
Perhaps you would care to explain your high-minded, fully-justified purpose in using the word “onanistic” towards an opponent in debate.
There are three commenters I make it a point to look for what they have to say, and, of course, I come here to see what the moderatrix has to say. There are others who have an observation that I find interesting, but I usually forget who said it shortly thereafter. There is one other individual who has a very consistent set of concerns and another whose company has him living in odd locales for stretches of a year or two, or so he says; I remember them. There are two others who are annoying in signature ways. Most people who post here have a handle I recognize, but I really cannot attach a perspective with the name.
I don’t bloody remember what our exchange was about; I vaguely recall having an exchange with someone who had a neuralgic response to my disagreement with him, which I found puzzling, then made complaints about my person in repeated posts. All of which is oddly familiar right now. Yeah, exchanges about exchanges are [redacted], especially when one party really hasn’t a clue what prompted the exchange about the exchange.
Baldilocks: good to see you on this forum. Thanks for weighing in on this thread.
Roy Nathanson: “I would be in favor of eliminating race and ethnicity from ALL government forms and databases.” You and me both. That’s how the French do it, and they’re cold-eyed unsentimental bastards when it comes to national unity and national interest.
Where I work, a black colleague (from the West Indies)–an MIT-educated physicist and a very good guy–was just appointed interim dean of the college of sciences and mathematics. Another black colleague (from North Carolina) is a computer scientist who specializes in AI.
I could go on. Yes yes yes, I know: it’s the Aggregate (which, fittingly enough, happened to be the codename for the A4, also known as the V2 rocket). Unfortunately, due to my incorrigible penchant for seeing what’s in front of my nose, I can’t help seeing the individual in all of this. My lodestar is national effectiveness in the July 20, 1969-As-Apogee sense. Happy to tap whatever talented individuals we have on hand to help restore it, regardless of skin color/heritage.
Which is not to say that aggregate IQ is not an issue. Leaving it to Zaphod and Huxley to thread that public-policy needle.