BF2S Forums Why are Africa and the Middle East so Fucked Up?

Dilbert_X wrote:

Many African countries are immensely fertile

aynrandroolz wrote:

you call the entire continent 'immensely fertile'

Reading comprehension FTW

I wouldn't really say having a bourgeoisie is a mark of progress, many African states have  had one since time immemorial.

They haven't figured out how to feed themselves, can't handle democracy, can't even make a good deal with the Chinese - I'd say they're far behind.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2012-10-24 02:13:31)

by its very definition the bourgeoisie marks a certain phase of advanced civilization - the bourgeoisie as a class cannot exist without presupposing a certain set of material and structural conditions. countries having a bourgeoisie for "time immemorial"? you clearly and categorically do not understand what the 'bourgeoisie' are, or what that term denotes.

just dumb racist idiocy from you in this thread. please show me biological proof of our advanced cognition, developed due to our specific environmental conditions.

There are no different races presently. We are all one human race, dingus.

At the very least, it's difficult to equate technological progress with happiness or quality of life. The primary benefit of living in a modern society is not education or entertainment, it's the fact that we've removed ourselves from the earth and are much less likely to starve if our subsistent farming practices fail due to natural disaster or war. Everything else is just superficial. Yes, we have better medicine, and more education, and more gadgets and gizmos, but I bet we have a lot more depression and chronic illness as well.

I'm no anti-technologist, far from it, but I just can't look at a communal farming village in Africa and say 'yeah, my life is superior to that'. It's just different. Hell, most of the New Agists and environazi's in our own societies keep trying to go back to that place in our history. The people you look down upon in Africa have surely had enough exposure to the rest of the world that at this point they could change their society and 'join us in the 21st century' if they wanted to. It doesn't require a massive central government to effect change, just enough individuals with the requisite knowledge and the will to put it in action. Same goes for most of Asia. They're happy enough. Stop meddling.

Last edited by Jay (2012-10-25 07:37:13)

Superior Mind wrote:

Jay wrote:

The people you look down upon in Africa have surely had enough exposure to the rest of the world that at this point they could change their society and 'join us in the 21st century' if they wanted to. It doesn't require a massive central government to effect change, just enough individuals with the requisite knowledge and the will to put it in action. Same goes for most of Asia. They're happy enough. Stop meddling.

This is about as narrow minded as Dilbert's comments. There is a difference between choosing to live a pastoral life of a basic happiness and suffering through a life of impoverishment- having no access to the resources that would make "21st century" life possible- even though they are indeed living in the 21st century.

They do have a choice SM. They can run away to the city any time they want. There's nothing holding them down on the family farm or to life in the village. They're neither serfs nor slaves. If they remain, they remain by choice.

Jay wrote:

Superior Mind wrote:

Jay wrote:

The people you look down upon in Africa have surely had enough exposure to the rest of the world that at this point they could change their society and 'join us in the 21st century' if they wanted to. It doesn't require a massive central government to effect change, just enough individuals with the requisite knowledge and the will to put it in action. Same goes for most of Asia. They're happy enough. Stop meddling.

This is about as narrow minded as Dilbert's comments. There is a difference between choosing to live a pastoral life of a basic happiness and suffering through a life of impoverishment- having no access to the resources that would make "21st century" life possible- even though they are indeed living in the 21st century.

They do have a choice SM. They can run away to the city any time they want. There's nothing holding them down on the family farm or to life in the village. They're neither serfs nor slaves. If they remain, they remain by choice.

clearly you've never heard of forced labor and modern slavery in Africa?

lol what the fuck is going on in this thread. dilbert making a reference to occam's razor which i can even understand - more as a logician/philosopher than a scientist - as completely wrong and misapplied. and then jay, who is trying to 'do the good thing' by ratiocinating-aloud a vague defense, ends up completely condescending and coming across as ignorant, too. two idiots fumbling in the dark over an issue they know nothing about. as if it wasn't facepalm enough with only one arrogant white dude audibly slamming his head into a plank.

firstly: there is no scientific proof or statistical data to show that race x>y in terms of intelligence. race is a series of pheno/genotypes specified by environmental factors - yes. but the 'race' phenotype/genotype is, as the saying goes, mostly only skin-deep. we are all the same race with the same basic hardware 'under the hood'; there is no science, no data, and no social science hypothesis that supports the idea that different intelligences have evolved in the same time-frame as an alteration in skin pigmentation, or genotypical nose-shape, or epicanthic folds, etc. the human brain, or sapient part of homo sapiens, or however you want to present/poeticize it, has not changed in the same time-duration as (superficial) environmental responses that we categorically refer to as 'race'. race is a mixture of surface adaptation to environment and continued genetic-attributive breeding (i.e. a group adapt to their environment over several generations; that group tends to breed within itself, thus exaggerating certain desirable physical characteristics, and so on). there is NOTHING to support the idea that one race has become inherently more 'intelligent' than the other; there is NOTHING to support the absurd notion that a western-european is automatically more intelligent than a black african, just because he is born with white skin in a cold climate. this is terrible science.

dilbert you should consult any of the following: early 20th century geography (particularly cultural geography, or early polisci); mid-20th century french anthropology (levi-strauss et-alia); a common sense guidebook. there are plenty of academic and scholarly resources - nay, not even academic, just cold and irrefutable science, as you like it - which tells you that your bigoted little theory is completely wrong. the african is not 'behind' the european in any significant way, other than (available) technology/technicism and material gain. things which are, as i have said earlier in this thread, easily correctible within the space of even one generation: a mere blink of the eye in terms of human civilization and history.

jay... no, african people born into immense poverty and suffering do not 'have a choice' to go the city. it's not like being born in the boondocks or in the land of the silk/cottonmills and making a victorian and dickensian pilgrimage to the big smoky city to make your fortune. most african states are stuck in a neo-colonial double-bind, and most africans do have a totally shit deal. "they are neither serfs nor slaves" - well, not explicitly or politically, no, but they are very much still imprisoned by a system that negates and denies them at every turn. social mobility in america is bad enough, in the most technologically advanced society in the world (the worst in the western world in fact), but that's a mere trifle compared to the choices that an african born in a shitty village has to deal with. you have an extremely reductive and naive understanding of life for an average african. no, they are not biologically inferior... but it's just as bad to romanticize their 'agrarian' lifestyle, their bucolic-pastoral prelapsarian state-of-being, etc. that's a western and privileged position/viewpoint that i'm sure an african would laugh at, and find troubling. africans are not in a worse state than us because they are racially inferior, as dilbert would maintain... but they're also far from free. in the global capitalist hegemony, they are being beaten with the short stick, over and over. colonialism is officially over, but you'd have to be an idiot to think africa has been given the free choice and good chances that the western world enjoyed - enjoys still, indeed, at their continued expense. now china is in the process of using africa, again, as the foot-stool with which to raise itself up.

of course all this asinine talk about biology is doing a marvellous job of occluding the obvious main point-of-difference: cultural norms. it is not the environmental-evolutionary causes nor the genetic make-up of europeans vs. africans that determines their respective strengths and weaknesses: it is the cultures that each civlization has fostered and developed. it is also these cultural differences and relativism that should restrain any half-smart individual from making absolutist statements about 'progress' and 'success'. western democracy is not the endpoint of the human race.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-10-25 10:35:52)

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

And not all of Africa is family farms and villages.  And it's not as easy as just running away to the city.  We as a society celebrate when people overcome struggles like growing up in a poor area, dedicating life to school/learning and bettering themselves because we realize it's extremely tough to do.  Running away to the city is essentially that.

I know it is. It takes a helluva lot of courage to drop everything and move somewhere new for better opportunities. My partner in my Machine Design class back in college was a 36 year old from Nigeria that was putting himself through college to make life better for himself and his family. Always had a ton of respect for the guy. I don't want to leave Long Island/Queens because I would miss my friends and family. I can't imagine traveling halfway across the planet just to get a shot at a better life.

Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that people in Africa have the same opportunities to choose their lifestyle that we have. I'm sure many would love to have iPads or TVs and whatever other garbage we entertain ourselves with. I was trying to make the point that beyond the bare necessities of life, whatever you have on top of that is mostly just superficial tripe. I'm not glamorizing being poor, being poor sucks, I was just taking issue with the talk that they are inferior and need to be changed (the crux of both Dilbert's and uzi's arguments). Not everyone shares the same expectations for life, not everyone wants to be a technologist or a member of a hyper-capitalist culture. Let them make the choice for themselves without meddling, that's all I'm saying.

aynrandroolz wrote:

"so far behind" is a giant exaggeration. you seem to picture all of africa as being famine-starved and AIDS-ridden. in fact many african states have a well-educated bourgeoisie. the fact is that they mostly just leave africa for other nations, as part of that 'global market' you talk about, which should apparently benefit individual nation-states so much (read: it rarely does, not even for western nations; look at the former soviet bloc states for examples of recently 'de-colonized' developing states). you seem to think that a continent affected badly by famine and other ecological disasters is somehow 'proof' of its biological inferiority. yes, vast swathes of the african continent are actually inhospitable and unsuitable for advanced settlement. the fact you call the entire continent 'immensely fertile' shows you need a geography as well as a history lesson. people aren't starving in the nile delta or the serengeti.

I was referring to this. You defined a societies measure by the presence of 'well-educated bourgeoisie' i.e. their ability to be traders in an enlarged exchange economy. Is that necessarily progress, or are you judging them against what you feel is important in Western culture... like Dilbert?

All regions in the world have room for improvement; some more than others.

/epic sage wisdom

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

All regions in the world have room for improvement; some more than others.

/epic sage wisdom

Close. Estonia is paradise. No improvement needed.

Gonna go with problems started when white man built empires. We got ahead with the industrial revolution and handicapped anyone else who tried in the process.

you know fuck-all about both.