I Am the Least Racist Person You Know

[Smitty-48]

I'm moving on, as it was never vital to the larger point either way.

Then why did you blabber on with the fallacy in the first place? You're just talking out of your ass for its own sake? Red assed baboon prattling on to his next prattle without ceding in good faith? Moving goal posts, wth?

[Smitty-48]

You do realize that the murder rate was far higher under apartheid, right? The peak murder rates in South Africa was from 1979 to 1991, the murder rate dropped precipitously upon the fall of the apartheid regime and has never got back to that level since.

The lowest was 34 per day in 2011, it's currently 49 per day, but in 1987 under white rule, it was 74 per day.

The current murder rate is the same as it was in 1980, "ZOMG ANC induced black Armageddon"? Apparently not.

[DBTrek]

That desperate for attention, eh Smits?

I grab dinner and you have three posts lined up. Wow.


Well, you're free to check my source, but it's not free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRfmWwciMGQ\

If Anthony Bourdain lied in his mini-documentary on SA and that never happened then I have bad info. It's probably as reliable as your statement that:

The murder capital of South Africa is Cape Town, the whitest city in the country, 32% white, 15% black.

Cape town:
The ethnic and racial composition of Cape Town is:

• 42.4% "Coloured"
  38.6% "Black African"
  15.7% "White"
  1.4% "Asian or Indian"
  1.9% other

No great feat in picking apart factoids when you know the speaker may be talking off the cuff or relaying an anecdote. I certainly don't find it to warrant an occasion for me to prance about like some major blow has been dealt. Especially when such minutia is irrelevant to the larger question of whether or not whites are to blame for the ills of the continent of Africa.

But then again, I also don't spam three posts in a row trying to get a stranger's attention, so clearly we operate differently.
/shrug

[Heraclius]

I wouldn’t really say that Africa was significantly behind Europe from the “sphinx to the Age of Sail”

You have the obvious superiority of the Egyptian civilization which extended well into the Middle Ages. Egypt was one of the most profitable provinces of the Roman Empire followed by West Turkey and North Africa. You can attribute some of the success to Roman reforms but it wasn’t like Carthage was a stagnate civilization over in Africa. Yes it was a Phoenician civilization but if they stayed around I’m sure they would have become the voice of what is considered a “North African” culture.

It was the Western Empire that needed civilizing and subsidies from the East and many consider the loss of Egypt to be one of the biggest nails in the Byzantine coffin.

During the Islamic invasions, the early caliphates centered around North Africa and Spain were a lare beacon of civilization and prosperity. It’s truly fascinating to read about because a large part of what caused their fall was their overreliance on Christian mercenaries and the refusal of their citizens to create an efficent army to fight against the heavily splintered Christian factions in the north. Again, you can argue that it is a Middle Eastern civilization rather than an African one, but the caliphate in Spain was distinct from the one in Baghdad so I don’t think it’s fair to attribute all their success solely to sticking to Arabic roots.

Then you have the several great kingdoms around the Niger River. Mainly Mali with Mansa Musa and Songhai and their rise. There is no reason to consider them “lesser” than the European civilizations around 1200-1500. They had a very similar feudal stucture. Europe was very far ahead in architecture and gunpowder, though.

Around the time West Africa got invaded by the Moroccan Sultans the Songhai ended up splintering up and suddenly it became a group of minor city-states fighting one another similar to the Italian peninsula. It was these wars that were used to fuel the slave trade in particular.

Also, the narrative that whites simply walked into a slave market and aren’t at fault is kind of inaccurate in modern historical analysis. There are sources that discuss people enslaving their own family in order to appease the Portuguese slavers demanding slaves, so it isn’t as cut and dry as people had thought when they created the counternarrative.

I also didn’t really touch on Ethiopia and the East African coastal city-states because I never really tried to learn much about them. They certainly had a functional society considering Arab traders regularly went there in order to trade. I doubt they would want to visit a bunch of stone age tribesmen to exchange goods.

The general fall of Africa can be attributed to a failure to fully adopt gunpowder like their neighbors, which was a major factor in the decline of West Africa, and the huge exponential growth that came from the discovery of the New World. Europeans end up developing risk managment tools that allowed them to create companies in the Mew World which in turn began to be utilized during periods of technological revolution to create growth. Most societies stopped economic develop with banks rather than pushing into risk management and insurance that provided a safety net for the people that would lead into cultural growth.

I would say it is also unfair to say the Europeans took “just” 300 years from Africa. Our pace of invention puts the last 300 years at a level comparable to the 2000 years prior, civilization has been on an exponential growth for centuries.

To sum it up, plenty of areas in Africa were either above or on the same tier of Europe until around the Wars of Religion that created the concept of a national identity and when the bendfits of the New World truly were fed into European development.

Societies tend to have a proclivity to advancing when they are around coastal regions, and complaining about the lack of Subsaharan civilizations is basically like complaining about the lack of Siberian civilizations. Except the Steppe people at least had the luxury of horses and so could abuse their steppe hardship to create a hard people that could harm other kingdoms.

(typed on phone excuse any typos)

[Smitty-48]

That desperate for attention, eh Smits?

Wot, are you back already? I thought you were moving on, but here we are with a wall of text and a cited source from the internet?

You can look it up right here;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Town

32% white, 15% Black African.

"Coloured" people in South Africa are not black, that's Cape Malay, Austronesians, basically Asians imported by the British Empire, Indonesians, Fillipinos, Malaysians, Sri Lankans etc.

The Cape is the British part of South Africa, the Boer ruled from Durban and Jo'burg.

[DBTrek]

Why would I look it up there when South Africa actually supplies the data itself:
http://www.statssa.gov.za/?page_id=1021 ... nicipality

The City of Cape Town has a total population of 3 740 025 according to the statistics on the City, dated 2012. The population is made up of the following groups: Coloured 42,4%, black African 38,6%, white 15,7%, Indian / Asian 1,4% and other 1,9%.

Still irrelevant to the larger question of white guilt regarding the state of Africa.

Heraclius had a nice rundown but he failed to tie the adoption of gunpowder to whiteness, therefore he's apparently on the side of Africa's ills not resting solely upon white shoulder. That leaves you and Monte, and thus far, no real evidence offered in support.
/shrug

[DrYouth]

The white man is like almost any other kind of man.
It dominated it's region.
It defeated it's enemies and it enslaved many of them.

This was true of the Roman Empire, the Islamic empire, the Chinese empire, the Mongol Empire... the Aztec and Inca empires etc.

What has been different about the British Empire... that spun off the American Empire.... was it's streak of devolution of power to it's colonies.

Canada didn't need to fight the British to become it's own nation.... neither did Australia or New Zealand.

And the USA and India didn't need to fight very hard.

The British Empire had the idea that they could benefit from their colonial "possessions" with trade rather than with exploitation...
This often involved wiping out a sizable portion of the indigenous population... but still this was a rather novel idea none the less.

And the world has never been the same since.

Much more than creating shitholes... this has had rather an uplifting effect on many civilizations.

Now we can't exactly expect many of the indigenous peoples to thank us for dispossessing them and leaving them in squalor... but they haven't all done terribly by it... But we needn't feel all that guilty about it either... they were usually raiding and enslaving their neighbours whenever they had a chance to... as has been done all though history.

[DBTrek]

The white man is like almost any other kind of man.
It dominated it's region.
It defeated it's enemies and it enslaved many of them.

This was true of the Roman Empire, the Islamic empire, the Chinese empire, the Mongol Empire... the Aztec and Inca empires etc.

What has been different about the British Empire... that spun off the American Empire.... was it's streak of devolution of power to it's colonies.

Canada didn't need to fight the British to become it's own nation.... neither did Australia or New Zealand.

And the USA and India didn't need to fight very hard.

The British Empire had the idea that they could benefit from their colonial "possessions" with trade rather than with exploitation...
This often involved wiping out a sizable portion of the indigenous population... but still this was a rather novel idea none the less.

And the world has never been the same since.

Much more than creating shitholes... this has had rather an uplifting effect on many civilizations.

Now we can't exactly expect many of the indigenous peoples to thank us for dispossessing them and leaving them in squalor... but they haven't all done terribly by it... But we needn't feel all that guilty about it either... they were usually raiding and enslaving their neighbours whenever they had a chance to... as has been done all though history.

Now this seems like a much more measured worldview (and it also saves me rehashing the rise of Medieval Universities vs stagnation on the African continent to Heraclius, which would've been a long post. Thanks!)

It acknowledges the good and the bad of British colonization, and also recognizes that, like Stalin's 5-year plans, really bad shit happened while considerable progress was made. So much more satisfying than a simple "Whitey is bad, they fucked the world over" version of history. I half suspect he's read a book or two on the subject.

[TheReal_ND]

The murder capital of South Africa is Cape Town, the whitest city in the country, 32% white, 15% black.

Blacks in the US statistically speaking are responsible for a much higher violent crime rate than Whites. I would be willing to wager this applies to South Africa and to an even greater degree.


Who are the other 52% of Cape Town? The fuck

[Smitty-48]

Still irrelevant to the larger question of white guilt regarding the state of Africa.

Who has white guilt regarding the state of Africa? Africa is actually doing reasonably well on the whole, what's to be guilty about? Overall GDP growth in Africa is 5.4%, in America it's what? 3.2%? By American standards, Africa is booming.