Strong emotions often cause people to believe things that are not true, and to disbelieve things that are true.
Unless there is some reason to accuse them of selective use of databases (the online Encylo gives the sourcing, there is zero upside for them to play with anything), this is merely a sad and pitiful rejoinder.
Your railing on against the CIA encyclo is frankly unhinged and hasn’t anything to do with the actual data presented. It’s a useful site for quick data, although pretty superficial.
Whatever ones feelings about the American intelligence services - I personally don’t share yours - the website hasn’t a any particular tie or connection to their intelligence operations and I very much doubt they give a flying fuck if you click or not.
Anyway, moving on from economic data and either pointless rage against or ostentatious silence on rebuttal, I think this second is worth the thread, given the overall context.
So what, exactly, is it that isn’t true? That SA’s economy is doing stonkloads better now than before democracy, or that the CIA are murderous bastards?
:rolleyes:Gotta love the editorial comment. Look, like I said, the original post was poorly-worded. I don’t doubt the provenance of the facts in the Factbook any more than I would that of Wiki or World Bank. But I wouldn’t pretend either of those are free of bias, either.
Well, then you’re the misguided one, I think. The CIA’s record of assassination and interference is open knowledge.
Of course they don’t. But* I* do.
If it was free much earlier on wouldn’t it simply be like most African countries? You seem to be ignoring the research of people like Greg Clark. The conditions that give rise to first world economies are pretty unusual.
I’m unaware that the CIA is the subject of this thread, so the supposed murderousness of CIA, KGB, DGSE, etc. really is besides the point. The data was perfectly good, but not comparable.
The nicest thing that I can say here is that you simply have no idea what you are talking about.
I don’t know anyone who prefers a hut over a nice concrete house, but there is nothing about a hut’s electrical outlet that prevents one from plugging in a TV. People all over Africa gladly tune in to Nigerian soap operas, telenovelas, Bollywood films and Caribbean MTV. When it is relavent to their lives, people figure out how to use the internet pretty quickly. Desperately poor people are most interested in making money, and from 419-scams to mail-order brides, the net cafes are booming. Nobody has any problem with taking antibiotics when they are sick. People are a bit resistant to see their local doctors at time, but that usually because the “doctors” have inadequate training and prescribe unreliable knock-off Chinese drugs that can do some real harm- people recognize the traditional healer might not do much, but at least he won’t hurt them.
To give an obvious example, it turns out that cell phones were very useful to Africans, and they had no problem adopting them.
Very few parts of the continent practice traditional religion primarily, and most people are just plain Christian or Muslim. Those that do practice traditional religions are not usually notably backwards- the vice-principal of my high school worshipped his ancestor’s skulls, and he was one of the most progressive and modern people i knew.
You gotta remember that these “exotic” spear dances (or whatever) are exactly the same as the square dancing your grandma made you learn in Junior High. A “bizarre ancestor worship ceremony” is exactly the same as an old fashioned tent revival. My Cameroonian friend’s family photo albums looked straight our of National Geographic, but to them, they are just photos of grandma, grandpa and old aunt Libby. That hut? It’s cozy and nostalgic like an old farmhouse or a log cabin.
Modernity can exist without having to look exactly like American culture (as surely we’ve realized from East Asia.) Nostalgia is present in every culture- from country kitsch to Africans nostalgic about Grandma’s hut.
FWIW, I’m heading to South Africa right now to work with a rural community outside of Kimberley on an education project. The place I’m heading happens to be involved in a complicated and protracted dispute about diamonds, which they expect to win. It will be interesting to be right in the middle of this.
From what I understand (which is limited) South Africa is still very…new…at figuring out how to be a modern and united country. The scale of inequality is staggering. I was sharply corrected when I asked a question about childhood malnourishment- “undernourishment” is the problem in the community where I wil be working. And yet I was cheerfully informed that there is a KFC down the street from the village. Inequalities like this do not co-exist easily or change smoothly.
The guy sounds like a young rabble rouser, and there are going to be people attracted to that sort of rhetoric. But i don’t think it represents a large movement.
That sounds like it would be interesting to read, but this is what I got when I clicked on it: Not Found
The requested URL /sdmb/-1 was not found on this server.
Do you have another link?
"Groups that became agriculturalists relatively recently, or not at all, are slow to master important new social and technical developments…
"[Jared] Diamond asserts [in Guns, Germs, and Steel] that such differences were entirely cultural, that is to say, learned - but if this were so, populations that missed out on these experiences could in principle catch up rapidly. After all, culture is learned anew every generation…
"economists have shown that the age of the transition to agriculture appears to have a strong influence on a country’s economic development in recent decades, even after controlling for many other factors…
“If the root causes of these differences are biological changes affecting cognitive and personality traits, changes that are the product of natural selection acting over millennia, conventional solutions to the problem of slow modernization among people with shallow experiences of farming are highly problematic.”
- Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, from The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Chapter 4, “Consequences of Agriculture,” pages 118-122.
The link was to this paper by Greg Clark that Steve Hsu posted about. It summarizes a lot of his work associated with ‘A Farewell to Alms’.
To answer the OP, I think not. SA has a lot going for it, in spite of the problems, and I think that people of all races probably recognize that in order to capitalize on their strengths, they must do so in a manner which indicates stability to world markets, and they can look to Zimbabwe as a fine example of what not to do. The devil is in the details, though, and it’s quite a devil, indeed, from what I understand.
Probably not.
This is an interesting article, but I disagree with this part: “It is puzzling that the Industrial Revolution did not occur first in the much larger populations of China or Japan. Dr. Clark has found data showing that their richer classes, the Samurai in Japan and the Qing dynasty in China, were surprisingly unfertile and so would have failed to generate the downward social mobility that spread production-oriented values in England.”
For two thousand years the imperial exam system in China enabled intelligent peasant boys to enter the Scholar Gentry. As members of the Scholar Gentry they had incomes equal to those of merchants, and far more prestige. They were expected to have several wives, and many children. They were more prolific than European aristocrats who lived during the same time, and there was easier mobility for talent into the Scholar Gentry than into the European nobility.
This explains why Chinese, and those of Chinese descent have higher average IQs than Caucasians everywhere in the world that they live.
For the sake of a bloody fucking Christ can we not make yet another fucking piece of crap pseudo-science African IQ thread?
Technology is not modernity as such.
And I dispute your characterisation regarding Drs. I have seen people in the French zone, Abidjan, with perfectly fine access to Drs prefer ‘traditional’ (however tenuous the tie to any actual historical traditions) for reasons entirely unrelated to supposed knock-off Chinese drugs.
There is, I think, a valid point in the issue of maladapted cultural norms, that has roots back into the near-agrarian, clan and tribe past.
Unlike Zimbabwe, South Africa is a fully functional democracy with an open press and a free opposition; quite frankly, I don’t see those things disappearing any time soon.
This thread is about South Africa and Zimbabwe, not your opinions of the relative IQs of different groups of people. Your posts about race and IQ aren’t relevant to this discussion. I also point out that you’re both venturing into one-trick pony territory here.
I’m going to speculate that most South Africans are not going to be interested in turning the clock back twenty years and re-opening a hugely devise issue that’s been settled.
I still don’t understand the question. The practice of taking land back from white men and giving them to black South Africans has been going on for years.
If you want to talk about increased threat and violence, I think that’s totally valid. But I remember this coming up years ago back when Mbeki was President. Or maybe I’m wrong. Was it just a bunch of talk that amounted to nothing? If so, it isn’t surprising. Land…appropriations…er…redistribution…is kind of sketch when you’re talking about people who have been there since 1994 and (presumably) many who have been there much longer. My cousin (related by marriage) is from South Africa (Johannesburg) and she left around 1999. Her parents were still there as of a few years ago. I don’t talk to her much now, but I do remember her talking about this issue.
“Land reform” just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
(You want to take back land from foreigners, whatever. Compensate and risk trade. But your own citizens? Ouch.)
*edit: I had seen this issue years ago as something that was ‘okayed’ by the government though not officially a ‘policy’ in the books.