The white inventor argument says that we know white people are better than everyone else because of all their wonderful inventions.
The argument has three main uses:
- To prove that whites are better – and the world better off despite whatever racism they may have practised.
- To change the subject. Blacks hate this argument and will jump on it, pushing aside whatever it was they were arguing about before. They are ready with their long list of so-called black inventions, stuff about the stoplight and Egypt or something. Not that you care – you just wanted to change the subject from whatever uncomfortable thing they were saying about whites.
- To point out that x would not even be possible without white people. So like if they are arguing about how racist a film is, just point out that film was invented by whites, so shut up already.
When people bring up something bad that whites did, like the slave trade, you quickly point out how other people have done it too, like Arab traders, how it is “natural”. People have such a bad habit of overlooking Historical Context! But with the white inventor argument you can take advantage of this: act as if whites invented everything, as if it is an uncommon gift that the whole world has been blessed with through the overflowing kindness of white people.
What is wrong with this argument:
- Doing something good does not excuse doing something bad. More particularly, inventing x does not give you or anyone else the right to misuse x. The invention of television, for example, does not excuse using it to push stereotypes about blacks.
- If inventions “prove” one part of mankind is better than all the rest, then the Chinese and Egyptians have a way better claim than whites.
The four inventions that made possible the rise of whites to world power were all Chinese: gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing.
The Egyptians invented civilization itself along with stuff like writing, calendars, irrigation and so on. They made huge pyramids that no has been able to match. Egypt was the most advanced part of the world for over 2,000 years – twice as long as even China.
True, most of the important inventions of the past few hundred years were made by white people. But that is only because they have been on top during that time. If it was because white people are born with more brains, then white people would have been on top throughout human history – instead of just a fifth of it.
If you assume that the largest city will tend to be in the most advanced part of world, then you can say how many years different people have been on top:
- 2072 Egyptian
- 974 Chinese
- 364 Roman
- 360 Sumerian/Babylonian
- 359 Persian
- 285 Greek
- 281 Arab
- 140 Anglo
Anglo power – British and American – is fresh in our minds, but it is merely the latest chapter in the book of history. And that is the Historical Context that this argument forgets.
See also:
- Largest cities through history
- How to argue like a white racist
- Mighty Whitey – where would people of colour be without those good, kind white people?
- white people
- white gaze – which puts whites at the centre of history, even during their dark ages!
- bits of history
Oh I hate the white inventor argument soooo much! I remember I was on a forum and someone started saying how black history month is bad and there should also be a white history month to honour all the great things white people do because they invented so much and if it wasn’t for them a whole lot of other races would be so lost.
Now that is three kinds of stupidity that made me want to reach into the computer screen and shake the hell out of the person who wrote it.
Anyway this was a great post Abagond.
People should realize that that this ‘white inventor’ argument has underlying currents. The point of making these specious remarks is not just to throw the racialized person off kilter. It is to show that your group is inherently inferior and incapable of inventing anything. If it wasn’t for their benevolence racialized people would be worse off in predominantly white societies. By imputing such positive attributes to a group, conversely, they imputing negative attributes to the racialized groups such as; blacks commit an inordinate amount of crime. Therefore by group affiliation are criminals by nature. They appropriate the accomplishments of a few and by implication state that it is because they are white that these few were able to accomplish these inventions. In this same way they use stereotypes about racialized people to imply negative behaviours. Funny how they don’t take credit for people like Stalin and Hitler these were anomalies.
There’s an old saying and I paraphrase; ‘Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it’.
@Herneith:
You’ve expressed this far more eloquently than I ever could have. As always…excellent post!
Historical context is everything. If you look at the Dark Age and Medieval times in European history, many innovators were given a hard time, Galileo for example. If Europeans as a whole were such innovators, they would have embraced these innovative people instead of persecuting them. This is why it is particularly enervating when they use these tactics in an argument on race, given what I know of European history. It was when they began to notice the benefits of these inventions that they began to appreciate the innovators. They were no longer seen as being in league with the devil or being witches. The leap in logic occurs when they indirectly take credit for these inventions by virtue of being white, whereas before this same people were reviled.
Herneith said:
“They appropriate the accomplishments of a few and by implication state that it is because they are white that these few were able to accomplish these inventions. In this same way they use stereotypes about racialized people to imply negative behaviours. Funny how they don’t take credit for people like Stalin and Hitler these were anomalies.”
Excellent point! The crime argument seems to be brought up in the same circumstances by the same sort of people as the white inventor argument. And, you are right, it is the same sort of fallacy: all whites get credit for a few inventors just as all blacks are discredited by a few rapists and killers.
Or: blacks get blamed for the mess in Zimbabwe – as was done the other day on this blog – while whites are not blamed for the mess on Wall Street, which has affected the whole world.
@ herneith,
Forget historical context, the whole white inventor argument is based on a heck of a lot of wrong info, pure ignorance and a presumption that white people created everything.
The next time one of those ‘people’ says anything about the Internet, simply mention the name Philip Emagwali
Philip Emagali is a Nigerian and the father of Super computers.
http://www.time.com/time/2007/blackhistmth/bios/04.html
Without him, computers would not talk to each other the way they do and the internet as we know it would not exist.
People in the west make me laugh, their teeth were rotting in their mouth before they came across us and wondered what in the world we were doing chewing these sticks and using them to clean our teeth?. Till today, they try to duplicate it and can’t.
Seriously, i could dispute and tear down pretty much most of their spurious claims, but who has time for that nonsense. These people are not open to debate and no matter how wrong they are they don’ care. They just cut and paste and keep moving.
It is up to us individual black people to ensure that we know the part we played in building and making things.
In Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, which measures the contribution of various cultures to science and art empirically. A full 97 percent of significant scientific figures between 800BC and 1950 have come from the West. Not a single non-Western figure is included in this glorious parade. The list of central events in the history of technology shows us that the equipment of modern life is almost wholly Western in origin as well. In fact, between the 11th century and 1950, all major technological innovations, from the watch to the steam engine to the computer, came from Europe and the United States.
Murray’s book reveals in startling clarity how high the achievements of whites tower over those of the other races of man. Certainly, other races played a role, but enlightened, modern, scientifically and technologically advanced societies are almost entirely the creation of whites. Anyone who can read Murray’s book without concluding that whites are a race with special gifts that set them apart from the rest of mankind simply isn’t being reasonable.
@White Man:
Igor is that you? lol!
White Man appears to be cutting and pasting from Stormfront. Here is the full text:
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=351682
It even mentions the Arab slave trade and Mugabe!
White Man:
Your comment was plagiarized, but for once it is on-topic (most plagiarized comments are not) and it is a beautiful example of what I am talking about. Thank you.
Charles Murray is just plain wrong even within his carefully chosen set of dates (which avoids most Chinese and Egyptian advances).
For example, both the compass and movable type were invented in the 11th century in China.
Paper did not reach Europe – from China!! – till the 12th century, though it was invented well before his 11th century cut-off.
Western science would be next to impossible without the number 0 – an invention from India. Or without the idea of a rule-based, law-giving universal Creator – an idea from the Middle East.
Murray reads history from a secular Western point of view and so, surprise, finds the secular West at its centre, saving the day. Many of the accomplishments he sees as important were not seen that way till the rise of science and industry in the 1800s. Read the Bible: its take on history is a bit different.
“whites are a race with special gifts that set them apart from the rest of mankind”
If that were true whites would be the most advanced people on earth all throughout history, not just for carefully selected parts of it.
Soul said:
“These people are not open to debate and no matter how wrong they are they don’ care. They just cut and paste and keep moving.”
I am afraid you are right.
Interestingly enough, I remember having this conversation earlier today with my mother. It amazes me how many Americans fail to realize that black Americans contributed greatly to some of these “inventions” that we use today, and that a black person laid out the plans for what is now known Washington D.C. When I was in grad school doing research for my thesis, I came across an interesting book in the library. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the title off the top of my head, but I do remember that it was about how so-called scholars kept out the contributions of blacks and Jews in Ancient Greece because of racism and anti-semitism.
Oh, and another thing that really gets under my skin is how a small group of people are willing to believe that “space aliens” helped the Egyptians and the Mayans to build their great monuments. No one says this about the Romans. I intepret this as saying, “there is no way that these inferiors could have done this on their own.”
Herneith Says:
Historical context is everything. If you look at the Dark Age and Medieval times in European history, many innovators were given a hard time, Galileo for example. If Europeans as a whole were such innovators, they would have embraced these innovative people instead of persecuting them.
Please don’t believe in that enlightment age myth! The dark ages were called the dark ages because not much about was known.
There were lots of advances in technology during the 6th – 11th centuries.
@White Man
Can’t you form your own opinons without copy and pasting something from a site develop some individuality.
Logic, the systematic study of human reasoning, is a Greek invention.
The Greeks also invented the mathematical proof, upon which the whole of mathematics is founded.
These two Greek inventions gave rise to the scientific method in the European Middle Ages and Enlightenment. It was Europeans who created the very concept of science: they were the first to clearly articulate the method of hypothesis and experiment and to grasp that the world had a structure that was comprehensible by mathematics.
It was Europeans who first mathematically formalized the idea of probability, resulting in the science of statistics. In the arts,
Europeans were responsible for the invention of artistic realism. It was the Greeks who first thought of depicting the human form as it actually appeared rather than according to stylized conventions, and Europeans of the Renaissance and Enlightenment first created the realist novel.
Perspective, which adds a third dimension to painting, was a creation of the European Middle Ages.
Musical polyphony, or music that has two or more melodic lines, is another; before this invention, music consisted simply of a single melody without harmony.
White Man Says:
Logic, the systematic study of human reasoning, is a Greek invention.
That’s wrong
White Man Says:
The Greeks also invented the mathematical proof, upon which the whole of mathematics is founded.
Nope, The chinese did!
White Man Says:
It was Europeans who created the very concept of science: they were the first to clearly articulate the method of hypothesis and experiment and to grasp that the world had a structure that was comprehensible by mathematics.
Yeah! Keep dreaming! The Chinese, Egyptians and Persians were way before!
White Man Says:
It was Europeans who first mathematically formalized the idea of probability, resulting in the science of statistics.
Wrong again!
White Man Says:
Musical polyphony, or music that has two or more melodic lines, is another; before this invention, music consisted simply of a single melody without harmony.
Man, you are stupid!
Nice try troll, but no cigar!
Wait a minute even this was plagarised! My god you are stupid!
@Aiyo:
@White Man
Can’t you form your own opinons without copy and pasting something from a site develop some individuality.
This would require some actual thought on his part.
You didn’t even read murray’s book. He does not look at this from a western point of view. Murray ranks the greats in several fields of human accomplishment from 800 BC to 1950. In each field Murray identifies a number of sources providing information about the leading figures in the field. The rankings are made from information in these sources. He categories of human accomplishment where significant figures are ranked in the book are as follows: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Physics, Mathematics, Medicine, Technology, Combined Sciences, Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Western Philosophy, Western Music, Chinese Painting, Japanese Art, Western Art, Arabic Literature, Chinese Literature, Indian Literature, Japanese Literature, and Western Literature. The omission of several relative categories, including a broader Chinese art category or an Indian art category, are due to a lack of identifiable figures as most of the work is anonymous.
Trains, planes, cars, rockets, telescopes, tires, telephones, radios, television, electricity, atomic energy, computers, and fax machines, Movies are white inventions. This is not to discredit the many contributions coming from non-whites, but fact is fact. Our most important and consequential inventions have come almost exclusively from white males. Now it is certainly true that China did lead the world in technology and commercial inventiveness about 1,000 years ago. They had great coal-mining operations, gunpowder, six-masted sailing ships, and intense commercial enterprise. But it all collapsed because the elites, the long-nailed Mandarins, centralized control–1,000 years before Mao–and crushed the expansion and inventions. Curse me, or all white males, if you wish, that changes nothing. But if you call me a liar, you’ll have to come up with the proof that I’m wrong. Remember, I didn’t say there were no important contributions by non-whites; I said the overwhelming majority.
The anti-white movements hate this but it’s true.
It’s almost impossible to have a rational discussion about this because as the post points out racists do not discuss this in good faith.
That said though there is something there.
Have people read “Carnage and Culture” by Victor Davis Hanson or “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond? Both authors are quite far apart from each other politically but both strongly reject racial determinist explanations for European technological or military accomplishments.
The challenge is to understand (despite the accomplishments of ancient Egyptians or Chinese) is what happened since. How did a small continent that was virtually depopulated as late as the 12th-13th century with plague and wars come to dominate the world.
Why did the Aztec and Incas not use the wheel or iron? Why was writing not more widely used among West African societies? Why were aborigines unable to provide effective resistance to the European invasion?
Although these are interesting questions in some respect the question is really what are we doing to ensure things like that don’t happen again.
I think Diamond’s book is excellent, Hanson’s less so. I think environment and a certain amount of randomness, explains what we see today.
Vindicator, you reduce your argument by calling me names and you offer no evidence to your argument. I can back up what I’m saying. The development of mathematical proof is primarily the product of early Greek civilization. Thales (624–546 BCE) proved some theorems in geometry. Eudoxus (408–355 BCE) and Theaetetus (417–369 BCE) formulated theorems but did not prove them. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) said definitions should describe the concept being defined in terms of other concepts already known
@White Man
I don’t reason with trolls. Trolls are unreasonable!
@White Man:
AGAIN with the cutting and pasting. lol!
I wonder if “White Man” is going to come back! Trolls eh, how sad!
Another great description of a common white derailment tactic! Thank you Abagond, a very valuable post. I’m enjoying the discussion this post has provoked too, including the white-supremacist desperation. I think you struck a nerve!
@Herneinth:
I find it interesting that many of the Enlightenment scientists were Hermeticists and were attempting, in their own minds, to rediscover the eternal truths already known but buried within the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Newton, for example, needed an accurate measurement of the circumference of the world for his theory of gravitation. He first turned to Hellenistic mathematician and astronomer Eratosthenes and his followers, but those numbers didn’t fit his theory. Newton’s next assumption was that althought Eratosthenes had lived in Egypt he had failed to preserve the ancient measurements accurately. Newton then turned to measurements of the Great Pyrimid obtained by an English contemporary John Graves who published figures that were widely accepted and presumed to enshrine perfect units of length, area, and volume as well as geometric proportions such as pi and ‘the golden mean’. Ultimately, even though Graves’ measurements were a closer fit than Eratosthenes’ they weren’t perfect but the larger point is that during the Enlightenment the common culture was built on the belief that their scientific enterprise was based on rediscovering ancient African mysteries.
White Man:
No, I did not read Murray’s book. I am going by your comments and bits of the Stomfront article that you are plagiarizing.
I am glad you can admit that the Chinese are capable of something!
Murray’s date of 800 BC cuts off the Egyptians and some of the Babylonians. While the Greeks did make important contributions of their own, much of early Greek science and mathematics came from those two places. They seem to appear out of the blue in Greece because Greek literature is better preserved. From my post on Thales:
“Although to the Greeks he seems to have made great discoveries about the sun, the moon and the stars, it is likely that he “discovered” most of them not in the skies but in talking to the priests of Egypt, who even then had records going back thousands of years.”
More here:
http://abagond.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/thales/
Thales travelled widely. He visited the older civilizations and LISTENED TO THEM and LEARNED FROM THEM. A degree of humility that most whites these days do not seem to possess.
Aiyo said at #14:
@White Man
Can’t you form your own opinons without copy and pasting something from a site develop some individuality.
An hour later #15 comes in: more cutting and pasting from White Man!
It is profoundly ironic that White Man is arguing that white people have such original, gifted minds and yet he himself is CUTTING AND PASTING!!!!
Does it get any better than this?
That white man Is still on here trying to make us think he’s special?
This is what i was saying, white people force everyone to kiss up to them and they expect us all to treat them like gods!
Superiority complex and delusions of grandeur all rolled in one.
Who is this person supposed to be that they believe that everyone should see them as superior?
Anyone can invent anything they choose!
And anyone can go get a patent.
Is he trying to say that white people own the ability to create and think?
Please! I do what I want, no “white man” tells me what i am capable of!
We don’t have to worry though, the Stormfront people will be dead and gone oneday, so we don’t have to deal with their superiority complex forever!
You listen to these people complain that they are superhuman because of inventions
and then you see them in an urn.
Being “white” does not keep them from death.
White Man pasted:
“Now it is certainly true that China did lead the world in technology and commercial inventiveness about 1,000 years ago. They had great coal-mining operations, gunpowder, six-masted sailing ships, and intense commercial enterprise. But it all collapsed because the elites, the long-nailed Mandarins, centralized control–1,000 years before Mao–and crushed the expansion and inventions.”
Plagiarized from “White Male Inventons”, http://www.dadi.org/ms_dwm.htm
Since the prose was less formal, I thought you had written that yourself! Oh well.
The thing about the white inventor argument is that it only works during certain periods of history, like this one.
China collapsed – we know how it ended. But do you seriously think the West will never collapse? All these wonderful white male inventions, after all, are destroying the earth. How will they be seen in 2100 or 2200?
In 1300 you could have made the Chinese inventor argument.
In 1000 BC you could have made the Egyptian inventor argument.
The truth is, invention is a COMMON human gift not limited by colour. But at any point in history most inventions will come from one part of the world because it is the most advanced at that time.
abagond Says:
Murray’s date of 800 BC cuts off the Egyptians and some of the Babylonians. Much of early Greek science and mathematics came from those two places. They seem to appear out of the blue in Greece because Greek literature is better preserved.
Don’t forget the Chinese. They discovered Pythagorus’ theroum and Trigonometry about 500 years before the classical greeks!
I think part of what underlies the emotion of this argument – at least it does for me – is the experience of seeing white people in day-to-day life claim credit and get rewarded for something that a person of colour did or thought of first.
I’m surprised at all of you…
Someone please point out the irony of ‘that troll’ including the greeks as ‘white’.
These people always include ‘others’ as white when it convenient for them. don’t they also at some points discount Greeks as non white and closer to meditteranean?. I mean the greeks are olive skinned.
Next they’d be claiming the Turks as white and damn it even the Algerians in the heart of Africa will be white to explain their prowess at horse riding.
Oh and it’s also ironic that they rarely just call Egyptians Africans. (I mean Egypt is and has always been in AFRICA hasn’t it?).
Anyway, the troll bores me, unoriginal, illogical and just plain FAIL.. but I like reading you guys responses .
I can play the same trick as Murray:
between the 16th century and 1850, 97% of all major shipments of slaves, from the Gambia to the Congo to Angola, departed Africa for the Americas.
Anyone who can read Abagond’s book without concluding that whites are a race with a special gift for racism that set them apart from the rest of mankind simply isn’t being reasonable.
But then people would quickly point out that the Arabs and Africans traded and kept slaves too.
Why are we so quick to point out Arab slave traders but not Chinese inventors?
Please don’t believe in that enlightment age myth! The dark ages were called the dark ages because not much about was known.
There were lots of advances in technology during the 6th – 11th centuries.
I don’t, hence my example of Galileo being persecuted for his theories.
Remember, I didn’t say there were no important contributions by non-whites; I said the overwhelming majority.
The anti-white movements hate this but it’s true.
Okay Jack er, I mean Whiteman, tell me about inventions by non-whites that you neglected to mention. And while you are at it ‘enlighten’ us with your cut and paste knowledge. Again you are attempting to take credit for what a few have accomplished. A sorry way to argue.
Seriously, i could dispute and tear down pretty much most of their spurious claims, but who has time for that nonsense. These people are not open to debate and no matter how wrong they are they don’ care. They just cut and paste and keep moving.
You are absolutely right! Debating with such people is like farting in a windstorm! They have their preconceived notions in place and have no intentions of listening to what you have to say. The main focus of their debate is not to learn or impart information but to reinforce their sense of superiority through someone else’s accomplishments. The sorry fact is that they are riding on a few coattails and appropriating these accomplishments as if they are their own. They do not, or don’t want to acknowledge this.
the larger point is that during the Enlightenment the common culture was built on the belief that their scientific enterprise was based on rediscovering ancient African mysteries.
Exactly! This is where the Greeks got most of their incipient knowledge if not most of it!
Thanks for the link on Phillip Emagali! It is up to us individual black people to ensure that we know the part we played in building and making things. You got that right! We have to seek out this information ourselves as it is not taught in schools. I think this is intentional.
ROFL! Another great post, Abagond. Yes, this drives me so absolutely crazy.
I’ve actually always been fascinated by the Middle East. Ever since I saw the Ishtar Gate of Babylon in Berlin on the Museums Insel. That left an indelible impression on me.
The vast majority of white people during that “glorious age” were just peasants. Just like the vast majority of people everywhere.
In Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, which measures the contribution of various cultures to science and art empirically.
You don’t think the man who co wrote the Bell Curve wouldn’t have a biased opinion? Seriously? How silly.
White Man,
Quit plagiarizing. You’ve already been busted once.
Logic, the systematic study of human reasoning, is a Greek invention.
The Greeks also invented the mathematical proof, upon which the whole of mathematics is founded.
These two Greek inventions gave rise to the scientific method in the European Middle Ages and Enlightenment. It was Europeans who created the very concept of science: they were the first to clearly articulate the method of hypothesis and experiment and to grasp that the world had a structure that was comprehensible by mathematics.
It was Europeans who first mathematically formalized the idea of probability, resulting in the science of statistics. In the arts,
Europeans were responsible for the invention of artistic realism. It was the Greeks who first thought of depicting the human form as it actually appeared rather than according to stylized conventions, and Europeans of the Renaissance and Enlightenment first created the realist novel.
Perspective, which adds a third dimension to painting, was a creation of the European Middle Ages.
Musical polyphony, or music that has two or more melodic lines, is another; before this invention, music consisted simply of a single melody without harmony.
You can find the text here:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2006/12/the_inverted_wo.php
It’s funny, and pathetically sad, that no matter how many times these jokers get busted for swiping other peoples words and plopping them here…they still continue to do it as it if it’s nothing.
so ridiculous.
@Abagond
An hour later #15 comes in: more cutting and pasting from White Man!
It is profoundly ironic that White Man is arguing that white people have such original, gifted minds and yet he himself is CUTTING AND PASTING!!!!
Does it get any better than this?
I know the irony is amazing
way to show originality White Man.
well he is showing he knows how to use the cut and paste function of his “white invention” the computer. lol
I’m a little late to this party but… ugh. I, too, hate this argument. As someone who LOVES to learn about ancient civilizations, I know full well that white europeans were not the first to discover or invent most things we see today. Everything we have today is the product of thousands of years of science and research, trial and error, from civilizations all over the globe. All inventions are HUMAN discoveries. Every people on the planet helped shape our world into what it is today.
Thanks Abagond for this post.
All the black people TRYING TO DENY THAT WHITE’S MADE THE MOST CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD ARE FUNNY. All you can do is say that it’s not true, but the fact is that we have the evidence to back it up. you can spin anyway you want but you know what I’m saying is true. That’s why you can’t come up with any evidence that I’m wrong.
Everything evrybody owns today was created by a white man. Name another group of people that can produce these names: Euler, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Galileo, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Cantor, Pascal, Picasso, Darwin, and Edison, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, Marie Curie, Einstein, Pasteur, Leonardo Da Vinci,
Afrocentric historical research is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship. Afrocentrism’s prime goal was to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride and to teacj black kids fairy tales.
Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has rejected black claims about Egyptian contributions to Greek civilization as being faulty scholarship. She contends that ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. Lefkowitz has criticized Afrocentrism as “an excuse to teach myth as history
Philip Emeagwali did work in supercomputing in the eighties, making improvements to the “Connection Machine” parallel supercomputer design. But supercomputing and the Internet are very different areas. And Emeagwali did not contribute to even one of the hundreds of Internet standards, or RFCs (Requests For Comments), that were created in the early decades of the Internet— an open process that anyone could participate in. His supercomputing reseach
was completely unrelated to the Internet.
Unfortunately, Emeagwali has promoted himself as a “father of the Internet.” This is based on Emeagwali’s claim that “the Supercomputer is the father of the Internet,” because both are networks of computers working together.
The biggest problem with this is that Emeagwali did his work in the late eighties, and the core standards for communication
on the Internet already existed by then. Yes, further improvements to the Internet have certainly been made since then— but Emeagwali did not make them. His research simply wasn’t relevant to the Internet’s growth.
A secondary problem is that Emeagwali’s contributions to supercomputing just weren’t all that significant. He didn’t invent the Connection Machine, and he didn’t build the fastest supercomputer constructed in the year in which he won the Gordon Bell Prize— not even the fastest based on the Connection Machine. His machine was only the second fastest. Normally, the prize was given out both to the fastest overall supercomputer and to the most cost-effective. In that year, however, the fastest computer was built by a team at Mobil… and that computer was also the most cost-effective. The judges decided not to award both prizes to the same computer. So Emeagwali won for his second-place entry.
I won’t mince words here: Emeagwali has no credibility as a “father of the Internet,” and his ongoing public claims to that effect don’t do him any credit. They only serve to damage the credibility of those groups and individuals who take his claims seriously.
“is the experience of seeing white people in day-to-day life claim credit and get rewarded for something that a person of colour did or thought of first.” Like what? Give me 10 examples.
@White Man:
You didn’t cut and copy as much this time except for the last paragraph. lol!
@Hazida:
I suspect you may be White Man as well since you cut and copied everything.
Here’s proof.
http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/history/emeagwali.html
Leigh:
Good call. Both Hazida and White Man are coming from the same Internet address, so Hazida is most likely a White Man sock puppet.
@abagond:
White Man/Hazida needs to give it up already. Seriously…he’s a joke.
White Man said:
“Everything evrybody owns today was created by a white man. Name another group of people that can produce these names: Euler, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Galileo, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Cantor, Pascal, Picasso, Darwin, and Edison, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, Marie Curie, Einstein, Pasteur, Leonardo Da Vinci,”
Aside from Aristotle all those people were born since 1400, during the last 10% of human history.
The West is currently on top, so nearly all the latest inventions are going to be Western. That is not surprising. I never disputed that. But it says nothing about white people having any sort of “special gift” because if they did, they would have been on top for thousands of years, not just hundreds. This is the point you never address and is the main point of my post.
Without looking it up, can you name any Chinese poets? Can you name any of their poems? Why or why not?
White Man said:
“Afrocentric historical research is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship. Afrocentrism’s prime goal was to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride and to teacj black kids fairy tales.”
Change a few words:
“Eurocentric historical research is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship. Eurocentrism’s prime goal was to encourage white nationalism and ethnic pride and to teach white kids fairy tales.”
That is not all that far from what passes for history in American public schools.
Why don’t you just come out and say it White Man… Whites created the planet Earth and every planet in our solar system. sheesh.
LMAO
Great catch Leigh. Beat him at his own game
Hazida spelled backwards is Adizah. Don’t ask me why i put that here. haha. time for me to go to bed.
The West is currently on top, so nearly all the latest inventions are going to be Western. That is not surprising. I never disputed that. But it says nothing about white people having any sort of “special gift” because if they did, they would have been on top for thousands of years, not just hundreds. This is the point you never address and is the main point of my post.
If white people had ’special gifts’, all of them would be inventors or innovators which they are not. Individuals invent, not groups. My refutation of White man’s premise that whites have special gifts, more so than any racialized people,s is the fact that you are imputing the talents of a few, to whites in general.
“Eurocentric historical research is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship. Eurocentrism’s prime goal was to encourage white nationalism and ethnic pride and to teach white kids fairy tales.”
That is not all that far from what passes for history in American public schools.
This is exactly it! Most of the ’scholarship’ comes from a eurocentric point of view. Starting in the 19th century with colonialism. Colonialism had to be justified, and writing ancient history from a eurocentric view was one of the ways to accomplish this. When someone writes something to the contrary, from an afrocentric point of view for example, high cockalorum ensues. ‘Scholars’ write tomes to refute this. Invert the wording as Abagond does and the same arguments could be made for afro centrism! Most modern day scholars agree that the Ancient Egyptians were a homogenous African group, not Caucasians who came from the north to colonize Egypt because the indigenous blacks were incapable of creating such a civilization. However, with that being said, many manage to get around calling them ‘black’. It is pitiful that most black people have to seek out knowledge of their own history as it is not taught in schools. To have so-called ’scholars’ constantly try to refute this adds insult to injury. As Martin Bernal says, ‘King Tut would probably been denied a cup of coffee at the local diner had he lived in Birmingham in the 1950s’(paraphrased).
@ Herneith
LoL at King Tut would be denied a cup of coffee. I think one thing that people don’t get that this term “black” is fairly new as in back in the day african people did not call them selves black and they did not call themselves african or by their country’s name but by their ethnic tribe.
Oh, and another thing that really gets under my skin is how a small group of people are willing to believe that “space aliens” helped the Egyptians and the Mayans to build their great monuments. No one says this about the Romans. I intepret this as saying, “there is no way that these inferiors could have done this on their own.”
This is what you do when someone gives this argument or makes such a statement. Make sure your bladder is empty as you may p*** yourself at their reaction. Let them go into impassioned details about the aliens building these monuments. Look as if you are enraptured in regards to what they are saying. When they stop babbling and elicit your response, tell them this; “I agree with you wholeheartedly, I get it. “You are from Mars, and I am from Uranus!”. Make sure you have a serious look on your face whilst saying this. Walk away. Laugh at their response out of sight if you can. This accomplishes two things; it shows the absurdity of this argument and the seriousness for which you take it, and the fact that you will not engage them in their lunacy. With irrefutable evidence showing these civilizations as non-white, they are grasping at straws to explain away these accomplishments. They are sending you the same arguments as White Man is, you are inferior, even though this particular argument is in the form of inane babbling’s. This is another type of argument that is employed although it’s not as popular as the others mentioned. I’ve employed this method and it was very effective and hilarious to boot. The look on their face and the reaction this elicits is priceless.
whites have to feel special i mean THEY HAVE TO. when they wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see all that blandness they feel SOMETHING GOOD HAS TO COME OUT OF BEING WHITE. they question why are they so ugly. so they HAVE to tell themselves that they invented everything. white bland skin HAS to mean something. if white people woke up and nobody paid attention to them, if they felt they were just regular folks like everybody else on earth they would all commit suicide.
White Man Says:
Wed 11 Nov 2009 at 22:05:04
All the black people TRYING TO DENY THAT WHITE’S MADE THE MOST CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD ARE FUNNY. All you can do is say that it’s not true, but the fact is that we have the evidence to back it up. you can spin anyway you want but you know what I’m saying is true. That’s why you can’t come up with any evidence that I’m wrong.
Everything evrybody owns today was created by a white man. Name another group of people that can produce these names: Euler, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Galileo, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Cantor, Pascal, Picasso, Darwin, and Edison, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aristotle, Marie Curie, Einstein, Pasteur, Leonardo Da Vinci,”
Clearly you are just another loser whiteboy that needs to use the achievements of other people to make yourself feel better.
You ain’t no Da Vinci and you ain’t no Picasso either.
And Picasso is latino, he ain’t white.
Funny how white people hate latinos and call them nasty names on one hand, but then they consider latinos to be apart of the “white race” when they need to take credit for the achievements that the latino has done.
And Da Vinci was an italian man,
italians are stereotyped and negatively portrayed by white Amerikkka too. So i don’t know why you are calling off their names when you have no respect for them in the first place.
@ErzulieRedEyes
Picasso is from Spain. He isn’t latino.
Secondly, Latino is not a race. I’m Afro-latino myself!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso
Thanks Vindicator
I was about to comment on that people get Latino mixed up and think Taino or metizo are the only latinos
But yeah Picasso is Spanish as in from Spain which is in Europe
Vindicator Says:
Wed 18 Nov 2009 at 08:13:03
@ErzulieRedEyes
Picasso is from Spain. He isn’t latino.
Secondly, Latino is not a race. I’m Afro-latino myself!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasso”
i KNOW Where Picasso is from, he is latino spanish.
Whites try to seperate themselves from latinos when its convenient for them and then they call them white when they need to take credit for their genius.
Yes I get tired of the invention argument and the fact that Africa had “no form of writing”
I will not deny whites their inventions. I just find it funny how a shelf stocker at Dollar Store feels comfortable taking credit such things. During the times of some of the old art and science the majority of European society couldn’t read and could barely survive. Yet almost every white who wants to use the invention argument wants to take credit.
Judging a society by its art and invention is a European concept done through European based measurements. How can someone fairly judge something they don’t understand using their standards?
It’s sad that such an inventive people thus in turn used their “genius” to measure others on their scale and deem them inferior, or not worthy of the natural resources present where they lived. Colonizers actually felt the right to pillage native populations because they felt they were not making proper use of natural resources.
However all peoples are creative and will invent the things that they need to survive. If you live in a near perfect paradise the need for certain inventions is not needed and what was invented was passed on as knowledge and ways of doing things. These however would not be seen as valid. Just simply as folksy knowledge.
Europe followed a course obsessed with expansion and driven by greed. Motives drive inventions.
Besides if we had invented more “valid” things would that relieve the world or racism? I have yet heard anyone say that they respected me as a black woman because a black paved the way for the modern day computer.
Actually your dates are a bit shabby with respect as to how long whites have been in charge.
First of all greece and rome are european and are considered “white” so according to your time line and adds an extra 700 years to our rule and reign, and you so quickly forget that between the years of 0-2010 it is the white culture, not just “anglos” but french, german, russian, spanish (yes spanish are white, not latino, most latinos are a mix of spanish and native american and are from latin america, hence LATINo, so mexico and below are not included in whiteness but spain is), and portugese that have ruled the world.
Rome ruled from 150 b.c. times till 400 a.d. Even after the fall of rome europeans were still the dominate force of the world. The printing press was invented in the 1400’s and the exploration of the world and conquest by europeans started in the 1400’s and continued till modern times. French and germans divided up Europe and africa. Russians dominated asia and china. Egypt and americas were ruled by the british and spanish all over the world.
But even with your dates, during the last 140 years of “our rule” we have made more advancements in tech and sci then the rest of the 6000 years of writeen history combined. Sure the chinese may have invented gun powder and writing and the arabs invented algebra but its the whites who figured out how to use it.
And to talk about hitler and stalin as the whites we refuse to take credit for, well my friends that are more then enough evil dictators of every color to go around for every culture. Currently africa, the middle east, and asia are ruled by some of the most ruthless war mongering murderers in existance. Thousands if not millions die daily in those places.
And people talk about all the horrible things whites do like slavery, well once again, every culture and color of people in the world have practiced slavery AND it is the blacks own people who sold them to us in the first place.
But anyways, as a whole we have done more for society then any other and if we hadn’t you would all still live like savages in africa or the middle east killing each other in tribes. As a whole we have been on the top the longest (the last 2000+ years and then some) and in recent years have done more then the rest of you combined over all of history. Either way we win. So just be grateful and say thank you to your local white person once in a while.
I count the Anglos, Greeks and Romans as white. Add their numbers and it comes to less than 800 years or a sixth of all history.
The Europeans did not clearly pass China or even the Arabs till the 1700s.
The latest inventions tend to seem to be the greatest. Since we live in a period where whites are on top, most inventions will be coming from them. That does not prove that whites are better – just that we live in a period of history where they are on top.
If whites were truly better than everyone else, then they would be on top all the time or almost all the time. But they are not. Instead the lead is constantly changing hands.
Also keep in mind that there are few inventions that are “purely” white. Take this comment for example. It depends on the Internet and computers – white inventions. But it also depends on the alphabet, a Phoenician invention, and the idea of writing itself, which in the West comes from Egypt.
Computers themselves would be next to impossible if all we had were “white” Roman numerals. Instead we use a different numerical system – a “brown” one from the Arabs.
it is true that some whites use the inventor argument to dodge racism. but it doesn’t deny that the white invention idea is true. ok so the egyptians and chinese invented paper, gunpowder, the compass – wow three things in 2000 plus years. i encourage you to keep going. progress was slow in those days, folks, it doesn’t even compare to today. virtually everything you use or come across in your daily life was invented in europe or america in modern history, you cannot deny this. this doesn’t mean whites are better as a whole than other races, it just means whites are better in that one area of thinking.
europe didn’t pass china till the 1700’s? i believe the “age of discovery” occurred during the 1400 and 1500s. in fact europeans were journeying in and out of asia mapping their own territory and establishing trade as early as the 1200s.
I was reminded of this post by a Tom Mountain article at Counterpunch.
White Americans like to hail their “founding fathers” for inventing so many democratic principles, and for authoring founding documents that express them. They very rarely credit all of the actual sources of such ideas — perhaps because some of the sources aren’t “white”?
Mountain writes in part,
As a printer [Benjamin] Franklin was in charge of the correspondence between the League of the Iroquois and the colonialists. He became such an authority on the American Indian that he was appointed to his first diplomatic post as Commissioner of Indian Affairs and acted as Ambassador to the League of the Iroquois for the colony of Pennsylvania.
Addressing the Albany Congress in 1754, Franklin called on the delegates from the English colonies to unite along the lines of the League of the Iroquois, something they were not to do until 30 years later.
Benjamin Franklin was also the author of the original, draft Constitution. When looking for models for Franklins new “democracy” in European society, you find little in over two thousand years of European history, having to go all the way back to the Roman and earlier Greek city states.
Yet if you look at Franklins neighbors, the League of the Iroquois, and their constitution, you find remarkable similarities with what Franklin envisioned in his Constitution.
Mountain goes on to list specific, imitated parallels between the structure of the U.S. government and the ruling structures of the Iroquois. He also describe Thomas Jefferson as a “student of the American Indian.”
And to talk about hitler and stalin as the whites we refuse to take credit for, well my friends that are more then enough evil dictators of every color to go around for every culture.But anyways, as a whole we have done more for society then any other and if we hadn’t you would all still live like savages in africa or the middle east killing each other in tribes. As a whole we have been on the top the longest (the last 2000+ years and then some) and in recent years have done more then the rest of you combined over all of history. Either way we win. So just be grateful and say thank you to your local white person once in a while.
You don’t get it do you? Who invented what,or on what historical continuum etc. What is being discussed is the fact that when employing this argument, many whites impute the accomplishments of a few to a whole group. People who employ these arguments will conversely attribute negative attributes such as rolling out crime statistics in regards to blacks for example. By insinuation they are saying that blacks are inherently criminal in nature. Please reveal to us what you have invented that is beneficial to mankind, you, not some inventor whose accomplishments you are imputing to a whole group. In fact, tell us what each and every white person has invented as this is one of the special gifts white people possess. You can’t as individuals invent, not groups. Conversely, this can be applied to racialized groups which have been negatively stereotyped. Hence, when people say that blacks commit crimes, no, individuals who happen to be black commit crimes just as other individuals from other groups do.
As always, Herneith, you hit the nail on the head.
In regards to taking credit for two of the worst mass murderers in history, you are talking out of both sides of your mouth. If you are going to take credit for the ‘good’ why not the bad? I understand where you’re coming from. It’s okay to stereotype racialized groups, but should they bring up miscreants like Hitler and Stalin, why, these are anomalies! Never mind the fact that millions of their countrymen enabled them to commit these atrocities. In regards to racialized groups, they did it, do it too, so this is okay? The old ;”They did, do it too argument. In essence you are excusing this behaviour, justifying it as others did it also! I guess it goes against the myth of ‘white benevolence’. Comprehension is an invaluable tool when reading in general, the two unfortunately aren’t mutually exclusive. You have illustrated this in abundance. You are being obtuse. In order to learn one asks questions. You reel things off as if by rote. Is this another ‘gift’ only white people possess? It would appear so judging by other responses similar to yours throughout this blog. No, this is another example of someone who feels inferior, and, by taking credit for something someone else accomplished and imputing this to their group, tries to make themselves feel superior. It aint working.
Have a nice day.
People with White ears will defend the superiority complex to the bitter end regardless of logic, facts and sometimes common human decency. If they are not superior then they are nothing it seems. It’s just so ingrained and so sad.
@Gen
People with White ears will defend the superiority complex to the bitter end regardless of logic, facts and sometimes common human decency. If they are not superior then they are nothing it seems. It’s just so ingrained and so sad.
THIS IS BEYOND TRUTH……so sad
Thanks Gen for once again putting it out there
yes but the fact is that abagond is comparing modern days to the egyptian and chinese empires, and using this as a way of explaining racial equality. saying that ancient empires are as good or even greater in terms of inventions and discoveries is ridiculous. there were more scientific achievements in america between 1900-1950 than most of all history combined.
That is not because white people are so much smarter than everyone else but because progress in science and invention is built on what has gone before. The more science you know the more science you can discover. The more inventions you have at hand, the more new inventions you can come up with. That is why the progress is exponential. It comes from the nature of science and technology, not from the nature of white intelligence.
Isaac Newton, one of the very people that white racists use in their inventor argument, agrees with me, Abagond:
“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
orchid Says:
“it is true that some whites use the inventor argument to dodge racism. but it doesn’t deny that the white invention idea is true. ok so the egyptians and chinese invented paper, gunpowder, the compass – wow three things in 2000 plus years. i encourage you to keep going. progress was slow in those days, folks, it doesn’t even compare to today. virtually everything you use or come across in your daily life was invented in europe or america in modern history, you cannot deny this. this doesn’t mean whites are better as a whole than other races, it just means whites are better in that one area of thinking.”
What’s your point!
orchid Says:
“europe didn’t pass china till the 1700’s? i believe the “age of discovery” occurred during the 1400 and 1500s. in fact europeans were journeying in and out of asia mapping their own territory and establishing trade as early as the 1200s.”
Actually many different people were exploring the world long before that!
South Indian Carnatic music is the most advanced form of classical music in the world. Western music can not match its complexity. Cant come near it.
Carnatic classical music originated from African descendants who were in India
You can expect hatred. Internet is the last refuge for white supremacy. It is disappearing fast. It is all part of the divine process.
The oppressed will inherit the earth again. It is destiny.
For those who want to believe that blacks are as inventive as whites and asians, I ask, Where are the Patents to prove it?
Where are the Nobel Prizes in Science, Math and Economics?
Where are the technical enterprises founded by blacks?
If blacks are the technical equals of whites and asians, then there should be black enterprises and black nations that form the living proof.
But there are none.
Africa is resource rich, and thus capable of financing basic education for everyone. But illiteracy is rampant. The state of life — the misery — of Africa is entirely the outcome of the people who live there — not whites. Not American whites.
I could have used the same argument in 1100 to prove that the Chinese are better than whites.
abagond, you wrote:
“I could have used the same argument in 1100 to prove that the Chinese are better than whites.”
The year is 2009. Not 1100. Your example shows only that societal mobility exists. Meanwhile, you have overlooked the fact that knowledge is not sacred. Once something is known, it is freely available to everyone on the planet.
Thus, a society showing signs of intellectual curiosity would quickly embrace new ideas from other countries. That’s how you get the benefits.
But even today, Africa is a continent where a huge percentage of the population is illiterate. It is a place where the “educated” are barely literate and almost no one knows anything about science and technology despite the fact that everything is available online.
However, the idea you seem to want to convey is the idea that the same group will always be on top.
That has not happened. However, history shows that whites have been the dominant intellectual force for at least 800 years.
Meanwhile, in 1100 there were no international competitions like the Nobels. There was no patent office and technology was primitive.
And — the pace of technical development was painfully slow in 1100. Probably 99% of all inventions came into existence since 1900.
By the way, Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner went on its maiden flight today. The plane is made largely of composites. Very little metal was used in this aircraft.
If you visit Boeing you will see very few black engineers.
Did you design this plane? If not, why are you taking credit for it albeit indirectly? Do you work for Boeing? As for the Nobel Prize, did you win one? Stop taking credit from individuals who you probably never met, will never meet, and know nothing about on a personal level. Now I am waiting for you to use the “Go back to Africa” argument, or perhaps the ‘Arab Trader’ one. Have a nice day Orchid, oops, Jack, or lord, I mean Slappz.
@ Herneith
Notice how this seems to go in an endless circle each and every time a poster comes on here with those very same arguments as to why Blacks ain’t shit?
and as you so eloquently put it. looks like its the same damned poster time after time.
oops i guess i shouldn’t have spelled out the whole S word. sorry
They seem to posess the ‘gift’ of pulling ‘facts’ out of their nether regions, LOL.
No Slappz said:
“However, the idea you seem to want to convey is the idea that the same group will always be on top.
That has not happened. However, history shows that whites have been the dominant intellectual force for at least 800 years.”
Because if whites were better than everyone else, they would be on top most of time – not just for one-sixth of history.
“And — the pace of technical development was painfully slow in 1100. Probably 99% of all inventions came into existence since 1900.”
Right because the more inventions you have the more you can invent and so the pace quickens. That is no credit to white people.
“If you visit Boeing you will see very few black engineers.”
You have no idea how America works, do you?
abagond,
Virtually no blacks worked on the newest Boeing plane because virtually no blacks graduate from engineering school and virtually no blacks get advanced degrees in science.
That’s how it is everywhere on the planet.
You wrote:
“…the more inventions you have the more you can invent and so the pace quickens. That is no credit to white people.”
Your point is merely a dodge. It is irrelevant. Today many simple inventions are patented. It is not just advanced semiconductors that are awarded new patents. Something as simple as a specialized dog collar can receive a patent.
Where are the black inventors in America?
In the last 50 years have any notable creations from blacks arrived?
Famous Amos cookies. That’s one.
On a related note, a lot of copyrighted music has been written by blacks.
There are some black writers who have written some novels. But other than Ralph Ellison, the handful of black writers are barely average.
A few black film-makers have had some success. Spike Lee.
But creating entertainment is unbound by principles of science. When it comes to inventing, all that matters is having enough education to understand the thing you are trying to make. To a guy trying to build a better mousetrap, a knowledge of advanced semiconductors is unnecessary.
Finally, it seems you have declared defeat. If you believe “the more inventions you have the more you can invent and so the pace quickens,” then you believe that whites and asians will continue to battle for first-place in the invention world while blacks will never get in the game.
herneith, you wrote:
“Did you design this plane? If not, why are you taking credit for it albeit indirectly?”
I see. Are you arguing that NO differences exist between races?
Why are blacks dominant in all forms of athletics?
You asked:
“Do you work for Boeing?”
No.
You asked:
“As for the Nobel Prize, did you win one?”
No. But my name is on a patent.
Do you know that Jews win science-related Nobels at about 50 times the rate of non-Jews? Coincidence? Luck?
You demanded:
“Stop taking credit from individuals who you probably never met, will never meet, and know nothing about on a personal level.”
If the discussion is about white inventiveness, then it is important to provide as much evidence of white inventiveness as possible. That includes winning Nobel Prizes and other awards for scientific achievement.
You wrote:
“Now I am waiting for you to use the “Go back to Africa” argument, or perhaps the ‘Arab Trader’ one.”
Why? Your problems is your inability to escape the facts. Whites and asians convert lots of technical ideas into realities. Blacks do not.
If it were otherwise, somewhere in the world an advanced black nation would exist. But there is no advanced black nation. And the few advancements that are found in black nations had their origins elsewhere.
It is still a huge task for black nations to provide clean water to their citizens. In fact, they do not, and one of the leading causes of death in black nations is disease contracted from drinking unclean water.
No. But my name is on a patent.
What, for mousetraps and dog collars? As you say anyone can get a patent for the most mundane items.
Do you know that Jews win science-related Nobels at about 50 times the rate of non-Jews? Coincidence? Luck?
Jews have been historically reviled and scapegoated through history, serving as the perennial ‘whipping boy’ for all sorts of ills. Because of this, they had to strive for excellence in many of the things they do to provide a safety net as it were. Even so, this didn’t stop all the pogroms, genocide etc, against them. This is what drives them perhaps, racist fools and not knowing when the next lunatic will appear to do the same thing again.
If the discussion is about white inventiveness, then it is important to provide as much evidence of white inventiveness as possible.
You miss the point. The discussion is not about ‘white inventiveness’. It’s about arguments posed when racism is being discussed. The white inventor argument is but one of many, an argument of last resort when the white person has run out of counter-arguments. Given this, why pull out facts out of your nether regions as this is not what is being discussed in this particular post?
Why? Your problems is your inability to escape the facts. Whites and asians convert lots of technical ideas into realities. Blacks do not.
What problem? I have no problems with inventions or who or what invented them. The problem I have is when people use this as an argument of last resort when such things as racism are being discussed. This is a blatant attempt to inflict their pseudo superiority complex on others. In reality it only shows their underlying inferiority complex. You seem to have a problem with comprehending this.
herneith, you wrote:
“Jews have been historically reviled and scapegoated through history, serving as the perennial ‘whipping boy’ for all sorts of ills. Because of this, they had to strive for excellence in many of the things they do to provide a safety net as it were.”
Oh. Whipping boy? For all sorts of ills? What ills?
Anyway, you are saying when one group of people demonstrate evidence of an unusually strong collective intellect they are punished. Is that it?
Karl Marx was a Jew. And Milton Friedman was a Jew. Einstein was a Jew.
Where are the black economists? Okay, Thomas Sowell. Where are the black physicists? Anyone?
You wrote:
“Even so, this didn’t stop all the pogroms, genocide etc, against them.”
Today, only two segments of the world’s population is inherently anti-Semitic: muslims and blacks.
You wrote:
“This is what drives them perhaps, racist fools and not knowing when the next lunatic will appear to do the same thing again.”
You are totally wrong. Jews are people driven by a basic desire to be good at what they do. There are only 15 million Jews in our world of 6.8 Billion people. But the outpourings of Jewish intellect have had a profound and lasting impact on humanity.
The intellectual output of blacks has had virtually no impact on human history.
As for my patent, it involves a pollution control device used by power plants. But someone I know patented a special type of dog collar, actually more of a harness, and made millions. His harness is used by dog-lovers everywhere.
Oh. Whipping boy? For all sorts of ills? What ills?
You don’t get out much do you? Go to any racist site and you will see just what people think of Jews albeit in various degrees. Many times you can’t figure out who is reviled more, blacks or jews.
Anyway, you are saying when one group of people demonstrate evidence of an unusually strong collective intellect they are punished. Is that it?
No, I did not say that they are being ‘punished’. That is your take on it.
Karl Marx was a Jew. And Milton Friedman was a Jew. Einstein was a Jew.
Yes, individuals.
Anyway, you are saying when one group of people demonstrate evidence of an unusually strong collective intellect they are punished. Is that it?
No, you are saying this.
Today, only two segments of the world’s population is inherently anti-Semitic: muslims and blacks.
Like I said, you don’t get out much.
The intellectual output of blacks has had virtually no impact on human history.
Racist drivel.
You have still missed the point of this post. It is about the ‘white inventor’ argument which is employed to justify or counter-act discussions or debates on racism. It is usually the argument of last resort. I must thank you for illustrating this beautifully! Have a nice day.
herneith, one problem I see is your inability to understand the words you use.
You wrote:
““Jews have been historically reviled and scapegoated through history, serving as the perennial ‘whipping boy’ for all sorts of ills.”
I wrote:
“Anyway, you are saying when one group of people demonstrate evidence of an unusually strong collective intellect they are punished.”
You wrote:
“No, I did not say that they are being ‘punished’. ”
The standard anti-Semitic arguments characterize Jews as crafty people who outsmart everyone else to obtain power and money.
Then, the anti-Semite says it is vital to stop the Jews. End their nefarious activities, end the craftiness by driving them out, or by killing them or persecuting them.
But in your mind, driving a group of people out of a country or killing them is not “punishment”. Get a dictionary.
Some anti-Semites like to focus on how Karl Marx is a Jew and therefore Jews want to create a communist world. But then on the other side of that coin are all the Jews who are the master bankers — the Rothschilds — pulling all the money strings worldwide.
Or to secretly control the world, the Jews manipulate world opinion by owning the media.
Every anti-Semitic argument casts Jews as intellectually superior people who mysteriously rise to the top of an industry, or a part of society and then use their power and position as part of a plan to control the world.
In response, the anti-Semite wants to Punish Jews for their success in their chosen fields.
Anyway, Marx, Friedman and Einstein were Jews. You say they were merely individuals, which means you believe their Jewishness has no bearing on their success and is no reflection on Jews.
Oh. But over the history of man, Jews are credited with a huge percentage of intellectual advances. Nobel Prizes are one measure. When it comes to science-oriented Nobel prizes, Jews win them at many times the rate of all other groups.
Blacks win virtually NO Nobel Prizes — in any category.
Meanwhile, virtually no blacks earn PhDs.
On the other hand, blacks dominate in athletics. No white man will ever again become heavyweight boxing champion. Blacks dominate basketball.
Meanwhile, the thing about talent is its unstoppable nature. A person with talent and discipline will triumph, as talented black athletes prove over and over. They almost all come from poverty, raised by single mothers in bad neighborhoods where failure and misfortune are the norms. But they overcome the odds and shine.
Would the same upbringing improve white basketball players? Or are blacks out-and-out better athletes?
The history of athletics since the start of the 20th century, when we began closely documenting every athlete, is convincing. Blacks are better athletes than whites.
Does this evident fact bother you? Since you want to believe everyone is “equal”, it must.
Anyway, as I said, blacks have contributed almost NOTHING to human knowledge.
You said:
“Racist drivel.” But you are unable to give a few examples of black intellectual contributions. Why? Because in the history of the world, there have been no notable black mathematicians, chemists, physicists, biologists, etc.
Worse, today, with all knowledge freely available to anyone who seeks it, academic achievement in the black world has remained at painfully low levels. But black athletic talent is popping up everywhere.
herneith, you wrote:
“You don’t get out much do you? Go to any racist site and you will see just what people think of Jews albeit in various degrees. Many times you can’t figure out who is reviled more, blacks or jews.”
What people say matters less than what they do. Nuts on websites who rant about Jews have zero impact on Jews.
However, when governments legalize discrimination against Jews and then begin to exterminate Jews, there’s a real problem.
Hitler wiped out 6 million Jews — one-third of all the Jews in the world. But despite the attempt a genocide, Jews have rebounded.
Blacks can rightly say that Jim Crow laws impinged upon their lives. But the last of those laws were eliminated in 1965. Legal discrimination based on race was ended.
At that point blacks were handed responsibility for their futures. The roadblocks — in the US — had been removed. As we have seen, when it comes to athletics and entertainment, no remedial help is needed. Talent abounds.
But when it comes to academics, problems persist. Top colleges add 200 bonus points to the SAT scores of blacks to make them competitive with white and asian applicants.
In other words, anti-black opinions held by whites mean nothing compared with actual laws affecting black life. White opinions of blacks are nothing compared with the impact of illegitimacy, fatherlessness, low academic achievement, substance abuse and violence.
Black culture is the force that retards black life. Whites are not the problem. When it comes to understanding success or lack of it, there is a fear of introspection and honest assessment among blacks.
Meanwhile, as I have said, if blacks were truly oppressed by whites, then somewhere in the world a successful black nation would exist that would prove the assertion.
Where is that nation? Does it have a patent office? Is it a place known for creativity?
no_slappz says:
“For those who want to believe that blacks are as inventive as whites and asians, I ask, Where are the Patents to prove it?
Where are the Nobel Prizes in Science, Math and Economics?
Where are the technical enterprises founded by blacks?
If blacks are the technical equals of whites and asians, then there should be black enterprises and black nations that form the living proof.
But there are none.
Africa is resource rich, and thus capable of financing basic education for everyone. But illiteracy is rampant. The state of life — the misery — of Africa is entirely the outcome of the people who live there — not whites. Not American whites.”
Did you actually read what Abagond!? I don’t think you did!
“Anyway, you are saying when one group of people demonstrate evidence of an unusually strong collective intellect they are punished.”
Are you dense or paranoid or both? As for Marx and Einstein, they are individuals who happen to be Jews. It is racist such as yourself who have made their religion the core of their being. You contradict yourself by ranting on ‘conspiracy theories, that I don-not for one, subscribe to. They are just that, the ranting of lunatics. It is these rantings that have caused these catastrophes. Anyone who subscribes to this is a fool. Unfortunately, the world has too many of them. I said and please, try to get the befuddlement out of your mind, that it is because of constant and rampant persecutions suffered by Jews, that many had to do better in order to survive in a racist world. If they were punished for that as you say, it was a result of racism.
As for you attributing these positive stereotypes to a group of people conversely, you go on to negatively stereotype another group. You see each group as monolithic, not as individuals who achieve things based upon their own merits and in many cases against all odds. You then go on to racialize groups giving them attributes that all must possess. You refer to black athletes using a similar example that I did with Jews. That is; the black athletes had to excel at their endeavors in order to succeed . Being oppressed either economically or socially,this was imperative for many. Is their group being punished through oppression due to the excellence of these athletes?
Does this evident fact bother you? Since you want to believe everyone is “equal”, it must.
You are right, everyone is not equal, but not in the racist way you characterize it.
“Racist drivel.” But you are unable to give a few examples of black intellectual contributions.
You still don’t get it do you? This topic is not about who invented what. It is about the argument of last resort when discussions on race occur. If you are losing an argument, bring up the ‘white inventor’ argument to shut down all discussions on race and to prove ‘white superiority instead of having a fruitful discussion on race. You have proved this in abundance. You go off into tirades of conspiracy theories and black athleticism. Thank you for providing an illustration of how this argument works! People take note! You see people as monoliths as opposed to individuals. Well, I am going to do what I do when I encounter this type of argument and that is, keep stepping. Have a nice day!
@no_slappz
I think what Herneith is trying to say is – Stop using straw man arguments!
It’s pseudo intellectual at best!
As for the “no white heavyweight boxing champions” what about the Klitschko Brothers!
See ya later troll!
vindicator, you wrote:
“As for the “no white heavyweight boxing champions” what about the Klitschko Brothers!”
You must be joking! Champions? No.
As far as I know, there are white fighters in every weight class. But they all lose to the black fighters. Why? Because the black fighters are better.
What makes them better than all other fighters? Their edge is a function of race. The records speak for themselves.
herneith,
Why are there NO successful black nations?
What black nation is the most successful black nation?
Why do black students in the US score lower than whites and asians on SATs?
Why are there almost NO blacks with PhDs in physics, chemistry or math?
Since you are being wilfully obtuse as to the meaning of this topic, don’t address me again as I will not be responding. Have a nice day1
herneith,
In other words, you refuse to answer the questions I asked.
Your refusal makes it clear that you understand an honest answer is an admission of subpar societal performance by blacks.
Bottom line, whites and asians have developed inventive cultures.
However, ding dongs like abagond pretend the entire parade of human invention would have failed to begin had not the Chinese developed gunpowder and paper.
Unfortunately, all of you fail to understand the nature of the continuum. Inventiveness begets more inventiveness, but there is NOTHING stopping anyone from getting into the game. No external barriers.
But there are cultural barriers. Islam is anti-inventiveness. The practice of Islam explains the absolute absence of innovation in the muslim world.
Muslims can no longer conquer others and absorb their developments. Thus, the world has left them behind, and it will continue that way.
It should be different for blacks. But Islam is becoming popular among blacks too. Thus, there is no reason to think inventiveness among blacks will increase. However, I do expect a continuation of black creativity in music and other forms of entertainment.
@no_slappz
My god you really need to read and get out more!
vindicator, you wrote:
“As for the “no white heavyweight boxing champions” what about the Klitschko Brothers!”
“You must be joking! Champions? No.”
Yet they have 3 out of the 4 championship belts!
Please stop using straw man arguments!
no_slappz says:
“herneith,
In other words, you refuse to answer the questions I asked.
Your refusal makes it clear that you understand an honest answer is an admission of subpar societal performance by blacks.”
This coming from a guy that uses straw man arguments! That’s rich!
no_slappz says:
“Bottom line, whites and asians have developed inventive cultures.”
Gosh! Stating the obvious and a straw man argument!
no_slappz says:
“However, ding dongs like abagond pretend the entire parade of human invention would have failed to begin had not the Chinese developed gunpowder and paper.
Unfortunately, all of you fail to understand the nature of the continuum. Inventiveness begets more inventiveness, but there is NOTHING stopping anyone from getting into the game. No external barriers.”
Explain where is this going!
no_slappz says:
“But there are cultural barriers. Islam is anti-inventiveness. The practice of Islam explains the absolute absence of innovation in the muslim world.
Muslims can no longer conquer others and absorb their developments. Thus, the world has left them behind, and it will continue that way.
It should be different for blacks. But Islam is becoming popular among blacks too. Thus, there is no reason to think inventiveness among blacks will increase. However, I do expect a continuation of black creativity in music and other forms of entertainment.”
Is any of this relevant! Nope just another straw man argument!
What have I learnt today! Oh nothing!
I deleted some comments on boxers. That is getting off-topic.
Julian Abagond: ” I deleted the lastet comment on boxers. That is getting off-topic.”
Abagond, when are you going to make another topic?? How about the topic is why men cheat? How about women who love married men??
If you want to suggest a topic, you should do it on the Suggestions page (the link is at the top of the page). If you do it here, I will forget.
No Slappz:
I agree with Herneith: you are not taking this seriously. People answer your objections and then you say it is besides the point. When people tire of arguing with you, you declare victory – without, by the way, answering the objections in the post. How nice.
No Slappz:
The reason blacks are so much better at sports than aerospace engineering has nothing to do with race: it has to do with education. Most blacks in America go to bad schools.
And, just so you know, racism did not disappear like magic in 1965.
@vindicator:
Slappz loves the sound of his own typing, LOL. It is the old conundrum; what came first the chicken or the egg? An argument that goes no where due to him being obtuse. He is only interested in pontificating on his views. However he is helpful in that he illustrates how the ‘white inventor’ argument works! Back to waxing the floors!
No Slappz said:
“However, ding dongs like abagond pretend the entire parade of human invention would have failed to begin had not the Chinese developed gunpowder and paper.”
If I am such a ding dong, then you should have no trouble destroying the argument I made in the post. Instead you argue past it. Or you beat us to death with points that were never in dispute, like that whites have made most of the important inventions of the past 200 years.
Invention is a common human gift. All races have it to a more or less equal degree. At any one point some part of the world is ahead of the rest – almost all the inventions will come from that part of the world. For about a sixth of human history, that part of the world has been white. So there is little reason to suppose that whites are any more inventive than anyone else.
Given that China and India now produce at least twice as many engineers as America, no one will be making this argument in a hundred years. Instead they will be making the Chinese inventor argument.
If you want to take in all of human history and not just the bit we live in, then the Egyptians are by far the most inventive. They invented stuff like, oh, civilization. They have been on top for 40% of human history, more than twice as long as whites. A good fraction of what we think of as “Greek” is Egyptian. Egypt is African. In the past it was much blacker than it is now. And it was not just the lower classes either: they found the skull of Cleopatra’s sister: she was black.
When a white person comes out with a great invention, it is because he is white. But when he is a serial killer, it is just him. Because then, suddenly, “whites are individuals”:
http://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/whites-are-individuals/
@Herneith
Most trolls have an overinflated opinion of themselves and their own opinions.
Did any of you guys notice that No Slappz never tried to defend himself when I kept saying “strawman arguments” to him?
Instead he kept saying to us we’re in denial. Weird!
The fact that we are talking about this troll means he’s done his job very well!
Btw Herneith thanks for checking out my blog! Any of you guys are more than welcome to view, comment and make suggestions on my blog!
vindicator, you wrote:
“Did any of you guys notice that No Slappz never tried to defend himself when I kept saying “strawman arguments” to him?”
You seem to believe if YOU claim an argument falls into the “strawman” category then that’s enough to end the debate.
Frankly, it’s clear to me you that you think a strawman argument is any argument you cannot rebut. At that point, you go for the “ad hominem” approach of calling the argument itself an bad name, and then you are done with it.
However, as I said, if the world were entirely populated by blacks, then the world would look like Africa, where adject poverty is the norm. Where the average life-span is less than 50 years.
Where diseases run wild. Where illiteracy is the norm. Where anarchy and tyranny define the general state of politics. Where there is no need for a patent office because no one invents anything.
no_slappz says:
“You seem to believe if YOU claim an argument falls into the “strawman” category then that’s enough to end the debate.”
No! YOU said it! Not me!
no_slappz says:
“Frankly, it’s clear to me you that you think a strawman argument is any argument you cannot rebut. At that point, you go for the “ad hominem” approach of calling the argument itself an bad name, and then you are done with it.”
Frankly it’s clear to me that you’re a troll and you don’t know the meaning of term “Straw Man Argument”
No doubt you will see this as an “ad hominem” argument as well! Oh well! Not interested!
No doubt you will you want the last word on this argument because you fragile trollish ego demands it. After that you will spout of with some c*** like “blacks have this problem” and “whites can do this” all the while only proving Abagond’s point!
Still be my guest as I won’t be responding to any more of your comments! This is getting old, very quickly!
no_slappz says:
“However, as I said, if the world were entirely populated by blacks, then the world would look like Africa, where adject poverty is the norm. Where the average life-span is less than 50 years.
Where diseases run wild. Where illiteracy is the norm. Where anarchy and tyranny define the general state of politics. Where there is no need for a patent office because no one invents anything.”
Like I said in my above comment “Blacks have this problem” argument yet we’re discussing a completely different argument! Total “Straw Man” if I’ve ever heard one!
I expect to hear from you soon! Just don’t expect me to actually care! If you want to take this as you winning the argument so be it!
I have better things to do then debate with a dude with an overinflated ego that uses strawman arguments and completely begs the questions!
Bye bye Troll!
abagond, you wrote:
“The reason blacks are so much better at sports than aerospace engineering has nothing to do with race: it has to do with education. Most blacks in America go to bad schools.”
Schools are a function of the people attending them. Harvard is great because almost all the students it accepts have already proven they are superior students.
When it comes to public schools in cities around the US, the grade schools are generally okay. In the early grades the kids are manageable and the academic differences between black, white and asian kids are not insurmountable.
But over the years in grade school, the gap widens.
Here in NY City, almost every year every kid takes city-wide and state-wide tests in English and math. Every couple of years the kids are given city-wide and state-wide tests in science and social studies.
The city has decades and decades of test data for the 1 MILLION kids who attend NY City public schools. Hardly a random sampling.
The results are painfully clear. Blacks and hispanics are almost all in the bottom two quartiles of achievement, while whites and asians account for almost all of the top quartile and a big portion of the second quartile.
You wrote:
“Most blacks in America go to bad schools.”
When you make this claim are you stating that the schools are deliberately staffed with incompetent teachers? Or do you mean there are violence problems in these “bad” schools?
Or do you mean they teach some strange form of math whereby the black students are taught to get different — incorrect — answers to math questions?
Do white kids go to these “bad” schools? How about asian kids?
When you say that “Most blacks in America go to bad schools,” does that extend to colleges?
America’s top colleges add 200 bonus points to the SAT scores of black applicants. Are they “bad”?
Who are the teachers at the “bad” schools? Are they the problem?
I guess you removed my Klitchko comments because they made it clear the two brothers had done well simply because they fought mainly white fighters and has-beens. But not because they were truly great fighters.
No reputable boxing analyst rates them at the top of the boxing world. Good fighters. But not great.
You wrote:
“And, just so you know, racism did not disappear like magic in 1965.”
Attitudes may persist. But, in fact, the Jim Crow laws were repealed by Congress. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they were gone — instantly.
In the 45 years since, the doors to every aspect of society have been open to blacks. Nevertheless, they lag in many ways. On the other hand, asians arrive in the US and build lives far more easily, even when they arrive without knowing English.
As a resident of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, I see people from almost every country of the world every day. Group characteristics are on display at all times.
abagond, you wrote:
“When a white person comes out with a great invention, it is because he is white.”
Whites and asians are inventive because the white and asian worlds include a highly inventive technical segment. The inventiveness extends to every area of life.
However, the divergence between the races is an interesting point. While blacks have created a lot of successful music, proving there is a creative spirit within, they have not had much success generating creative ideas that require an understanding and knowledge of math and science.
You wrote:
“But when he is a serial killer, it is just him. Because then, suddenly, “whites are individuals”:”
Only in the muslim world are there schools for mass murderers who target innocent civilians. Of course, to be fair, the US military trains many people to kill. Special Forces personnel are commissioned to assassinate.
But they cannot be called serial killers.
Meanwhile, by making your claim, you are playing a word game.
Murder is not a creative act. It is as unimaginative as an act can be. You might argue that attempting to commit the perfect crime takes a clever mind. But, as OJ proved, it takes only a jury willing to overlook the facts. In any case, the actual killing is an old story.
Meanwhile, most serial killers are mentally unstable people with measurable psychological dysfunction. If you want to claim the serial-killer dysfunction is more common in whites than blacks, okay. Possibly true. But there’s no link between inventiveness and a compulsion to murder.
In any case, when it comes to homicide, blacks commit murder at a rate about 7 TIMES the white rate. Seven Times. That’s huge. That’s staggering.
I’ve not been on this blog long enough to know whether “no_slappz” is a racist or if he is rather a race-realist(yes, I do draw a distinction though sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference). Nor have I read every single post in this thread so forgive me if I’m missing any key posts.
I think people like slappz tend to really drive black folks crazy because deep down black folks know that at least some of what he is saying has a painful sting of truth to it. It can’t be denied that most of the shit we use in the modern world came from Western thinking. And even when it did originate in another part of the world, Westerners greatly improved upon it and took it to new levels. The Japanese are now turning around and further improving upon things that Westerners created, such as cars, cameras and televisions. China has taken manufacturing to new levels beyond what the west has done. So this process is kind of never-ending.
I genuinely hate that kind of talk where it gets into “my race invented X more things than your race” and on an emotional level it irks me. Even if I was white I’d feel that way, because it just sounds so bellicose. Sure, whites have contributed a million times more to science and innovation than blacks have, that’s undeniable, but at the same time, the fact is, 99.9% of whites have contributed nothing either. And 99.999% of blacks haven’t. Those numbers are simply conjectural of course to illustrate a point. Accomplishment is first and foremost an individual act done by extremely exceptional people. Almost all whites as well as blacks will contribute virtually nothing to society of any lasting worth other than work for someone else, consume and pay taxes. So if you are white and have contributed nothing to innovation or technology, you have no business lecturing anyone else on what they haven’t contributed.
Of these few very exceptionally gifted people who have created so much in recent history, a disproportionate amount have certainly been white and especially Jewish and increasingly Asian. However, that does not amount to meaning that everyone in the group is gifted or capable of doing such things. Not by far, like I said 99.9% of any group will never do anything extraordinary like file a patent or win a nobel prize in science. Nor will any more than a tiny fraction of blacks out of a billion become world class athletes, even if they are *on average* better athletes than whites or Asians.
Having said all that, the world does have much to thank for the innovations of western culture. There’s no need for blacks or anyone else to lament that fact. The invention of the scientific method was probably the most important thing that came out of the west(and maybe all of world history) because it formalized the process of discovering knowledge. Knowledge then begets knowledge, discovery begets more discovery and advancement starts to become logarithmic. Which explains why it took thousands of years to invent the lightbulb, yet only 5 decades to go from the first rickety airplane in Kittyhawk to landing men on the moon. Why this process of discovery and invention happened greatly in some parts of the world and hardly in other parts, I don’t know for sure.
Some will say, “well the west has used their technology to exploit and plunder others.” Sure, they have. No doubt about it. But there is nothing about such behaviors that is exclusively western in thought or origin. Everywhere on the planet, one tribe or nation was warring with another and the weaker ones were killed off, exploited or enslaved. I’ve studied pre-colonial west African history and it’s various empires and vassal states. If they had the technology of Europe, I have little doubt we’d have seen the same global imperial behavior based on what was already going on in Africa. It’s just the primal human condition, period. Romans even enslaved other whites from N. Europe. In WWII whites were still fighting amongst each other and killing one another by the millions so if they could act that way toward even each other, it’s no surprise they could be that way towards non-Europeans.
But to get back the “white inventions” issue, I understand this topic does irk black folk, but there’s no reason it has to. If blacks have been unrepresented in the sciences for all of history, then it means it’s time to step up to the plate. We can either choose to get mad when people like no_slappz talk about lack of black accomplishments in science or technology, or we can start fostering a culture that values such things and steering black youth away from sports and more toward the sciences. Too many black kids see sports and entertainment as the only way to make it. In the end, who cares what racists think of us. I really don’t so long as they aren’t standing in my way, because what we do to each other is way more important.
abagond, you wrote:
“Invention is a common human gift. All races have it to a more or less equal degree.”
Where’s the proof? Blacks invent nothing while whites and asians have been clogging up the record books with inventions for centuries.
You wrote:
“At any one point some part of the world is ahead of the rest – almost all the inventions will come from that part of the world.”
Blacks have NEVER led the world. NEVER.
You wrote:
“For about a sixth of human history, that part of the world has been white. So there is little reason to suppose that whites are any more inventive than anyone else. ”
I see. So the sheer volume of inventions by whites is an indicator of nothing and the total absence of inventions by blacks is equally meaningless.
What information is meaningful?
You wrote:
“Given that China and India now produce at least twice as many engineers as America, no one will be making this argument in a hundred years. Instead they will be making the Chinese inventor argument.”
Now you are showing your ignorance about numbers. China’s population is around 1.5 billion — FIVE times the US population. India’s population is around 1.2 billion — FOUR times the US population.
Thus, if China is graduating TWICE as many engineers as the US, then the RATE is way behind the US rate. If the number of graduating engineers is your measure for inventiveness, then China would have to graduate FIVE times as many engineers as the US to maintain Parity.
But you claim China is graduating only TWICE as many. Thus, China is lagging.
In any case, the greatest engineering schools in the country are in the US. The best engineering students in the world come to America for their educations. No country in the world has schools that can beat MIT or CalTech. Moreover, there are many more science and engineering schools that are almost as good.
You wrote:
“If you want to take in all of human history and not just the bit we live in, then the Egyptians are by far the most inventive.”
Wrong. They built the pyramids, and can perhaps claim a couple of early technical advances. But arguing in your fashion suggests you believe if the Egyptians had not invented paper (or whatever you think they invented) then it would have NEVER been invented.
But, virtually every invention and scientific concept was under development in more than one location on the globe. Since ancient records are unreliable, it’s tough to prove who was actually first.
By the way, it is amusing that you think so highly of the Egyptians. The relatively modern Egyptians were incapable of reading the languages of their ancestors.
The Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt by Napoleon. A series of messages were etched into the stone. But no one in Egypt could translate the writing. Napoleon and his army took the stone back to France where it was deciphered by a French linguist/anthropologist in 1820.
You wrote:
“They invented stuff like, oh, civilization.”
“Civilization” was not invented. Meanwhile, organized human societies like those found in the Nile Valley existed centuries earlier in Sumeria.
You wrote:
“They have been on top for 40% of human history, more than twice as long as whites.”
Top 40%? How was that 40% measured?
You wrote:
“A good fraction of what we think of as “Greek” is Egyptian.”
I gather you have read one of those revisionist history books that claim everything attributed to “Egyptians” was actually the product of black Africans.
In fact, what we think of as Greek, is Greek.
If people in another part of the world happened to stumble onto a mathematical reality without codifying it into their societal records, it is impossible to claim they had any understanding of the phenomenon.
Anyone can draw a circle but have no understanding of the concept of Pi.
Everyone who has ever lived has experienced gravity. But it took Isaac Newton to begin to explain it. He’s a white guy.
Now here is where people like no_slappz take things way overboard. Of course there have been inventions in Africa. Have their been UNIQUE inventions there is another question. Agricultural was discovered in sub saharan Africa, they were also smelting iron in W. Africa before the process had been done in Europe(contrary to many people’s beliefs that black Africa was stone age). I noticed that slappz said that realism in art only existed in Europe, but that is not accurate, it also existed in west African sculpture. Look at the Yoruba sculptures and tell me that wasn’t realism.
http://www.africanway.tv/images/Yoruba-bronze-head.png
Look at the facial details and especially the detail on the ears which is one of the most intricate objects to sculpt. They are equal in likeness to anything I’ve seen in ancient Greek bronze sculpture. Here are some more:
https://images.asc.ohio-state.edu/is/image/mediamanager/A/a3305296-093b-47ca-bd9c-3b7995a9bc8f.jpg/?size=450,450&fmt=png
http://www.berkeley.peralta.edu/pic/10141/ife%20web.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2420/2459246970_37c55b929b.jpg
http://www.amico.org/AMICOlibrary/samplerecords/exampleImages/MIA_.1533c.JPG
So West Africa simultaneously had realism in art as well as highly complex abstraction:
http://www.barakatgallery.com/Auction/ItemImgs/IMG_0429%5B1%5Dw.gif
http://www.travel-images.com/senegal35.jpg
West Africa did not have an indigenous system of math or alphabet, but the beginnings of an African writing system was in the making in the form of various ideograms which eventually evolve to become a written language.
West Africa was certainly not technologically advanced, but at the same time, people act like everyone was running around naked swinging from vines using stone tools for tens of thousands of years. Which wasn’t the case either. There were many empires in west Africa, some with armies of cavalry, that had their own currencies, universities and traded across the Sahara. As for East Africa, I don’t believe most the Egyptians were black(there were some of course that came up from Nubia as we can see in their paintings of many black skinned people wearing Egyptian garb). Blacks did rule Egypt during the 25th dynasty, and the Nubians from further south in the continent and certainly were black and had an advanced civilization for the time.
It’s also interesting to note that many parts of Europe were quite primitive until the Roman expanded north. Britain was no more civilizationally developed than west Africa at the time the Romans encountered them. They had no system of math or writing, were practicing cannibalism and witchcraft and living as tribesman. If race had everything to do with advancement, the Celtics should’ve been as advanced as the Romans. But the difference is, the Celts were geographically isolated from advanced civilization, just as West Africans were. Civilization began in what we now call Iraq. Those that lived closest to that region got a huge headstart on everyone else, the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, etc. Those farthest away and geographically isolated e.g. west Africans, Aboriginees, Celts, Eskimos, etc were comparatively primitive. The civilizations of meso-America were an exception however.
tulio, you wrote:
“Of course there have been inventions in Africa.”
Inventions? In Africa? Name a couple. Name one.
You wrote:
“Have their been UNIQUE inventions there is another question.”
The wheel? Fire? Telling tme? Anything?
You wrote:
“Agricultural was discovered in sub saharan Africa, they were also smelting iron in W. Africa before the process had been done in Europe(contrary to many people’s beliefs that black Africa was stone age). ”
Please. First, agriculture was not “discovered.” It evolved from simple food-gathering activities. Obviously primitive people found edible plants in the wild, yanked them out of the ground and tried to plant them in soil closer to home.
This is like drawing a circle but having no idea about Pi. Or feeling the pull of gravity without having the slightest idea of what it is.
With respect to gravity, primitive people developed some slight understanding that water in rivers flowed downhill.
Anyway, an enlightened culture is a culture that develops an understanding of knowledge. It becomes understood that knowledge can be stored and shared.
The culture is the total of its accumulated knowledge. But the knowledge can come from anywhere. Either an internal or external source. Thus, written language became a key part of creating a warehouse of knowledge. The key to sharing the written knowledge came from reading.
Bottom line — white and asian cultures began to accumulate knowledge. Knowledge was spread through trade and through conquest.
Did Africans seek trade with people outside the contintent? No. Did explorers and traders from other lands arrive on the continent? Yes.
Whites explored the world and mapped it, finishing the initial job about 400 years ago. Blacks? Nope. No explorers.
In other words, the accumulated knowledge in black African cultures was limited to knowledge of how to survive. That’s it. Things remained at primitive levels until the 20th century and today much of the continent is, in relative terms, still primitive.
You wrote:
“There were many empires in west Africa, some with armies of cavalry, that had their own currencies, universities and traded across the Sahara. ”
There were many tribes, and through the influence of revisionist history, they might now be known as “nations”, but they were primitive societies that came and went, just like all primitive societies. The problem lies in the fact that the primitive societies were replaced by other primitive societies — until the explorers and traders arrived.
As for your claim about “universities” — pure nonsense. Total fiction.
Schooling was brought in by the nations backing the explorers and traders.
Anyway, there is only one reason a record of Africa’s history exists — because whites went to Africa and started taking notes on what was found.
Africans themselves knew nothing of their own history. But that’s hardly news when no one on the continent could read or write.
No Slappz said:
“I guess you removed my Klitchko comments because they made it clear the two brothers had done well simply because they fought mainly white fighters and has-beens. But not because they were truly great fighters.”
I deleted it because it was off topic. Read the title of the bloody post. Unless you mean that because blacks are good at sports they must lack intelligence. If so, you did not make that clear.
No Slappz said:
“In the 45 years since, the doors to every aspect of society have been open to blacks. Nevertheless, they lag in many ways. On the other hand, asians arrive in the US and build lives far more easily, even when they arrive without knowing English.
As a resident of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, I see people from almost every country of the world every day. Group characteristics are on display at all times.”
I can only imagine what you would think of me if you saw me walking down the street. I go to Flatbush every now and then, so maybe you have.
Racism: Yes, things are easier, but that does not mean racism is gone.
Some points about Asians compared to blacks:
1. They face less racism than blacks.
2. The ones who do well got a good deal of their education overseas or have middle-class parents.
3. The model minority is a self-serving stereotype that whites have about Asians. For example, Laotians, Cambodians and many of the Chinese in America are stuck in poverty.
More here:
http://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/the-model-minority-stereotype/
No Slappz said:
“The results are painfully clear. Blacks and hispanics are almost all in the bottom two quartiles of achievement, while whites and asians account for almost all of the top quartile and a big portion of the second quartile.”
So when the public schools fail, it is blamed on the students. How nice.
No Slappz:
My point about white serial killers and white inventors is that you quickly claim white inventors as “white”, but not serial killers. Why is that? I mean, you are into observed characteristics. So just as whites are naturally good at invention, so by your line of reasoning, whites are also naturally given to serial murder.
“Whiteboy” is now a moderated term:
http://abagond.wordpress.com/comment-policy/
No Slappz:
I get it: if someone does not share your narrow-minded reading of history, it is “revisionist’. How nice.
Do you get how close-minded you are? Instead of arguing from facts to conclusions, you argue from conclusions to facts, dismissing those that do not fit. You are not an honest thinker.
No Slappz said:
“By the way, it is amusing that you think so highly of the Egyptians. The relatively modern Egyptians were incapable of reading the languages of their ancestors.”
By the way, it is amusing that you think so highly of Westerners. The Westerners in the 1000s and 1100s were incapable of reading the Greeks. They needed the Arabs to know about their own past.
No Slappz said:
“Wrong. They built the pyramids, and can perhaps claim a couple of early technical advances.”
The West gets its writing from Egypt, by way of the Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians. But you dismiss that as “an early technical advance”.
“But arguing in your fashion suggests you believe if the Egyptians had not invented paper (or whatever you think they invented) then it would have NEVER been invented.”
I never said that. If the Egyptians had not invented paper, someone else would have. But, for the very same reason, if whites had not invented television, someone else would have.
No Slappz said:
“As for your claim about “universities” — pure nonsense. Total fiction.
Schooling was brought in by the nations backing the explorers and traders.
Anyway, there is only one reason a record of Africa’s history exists — because whites went to Africa and started taking notes on what was found.
Africans themselves knew nothing of their own history. But that’s hardly news when no one on the continent could read or write.”
Timbuktu in the 1300s had some of the best schools and scholars in the world. Timbuktu itself was larger than London and more world-famous at the time.
No Slappz said:
“There were many tribes, and through the influence of revisionist history, they might now be known as “nations”, but they were primitive societies that came and went, just like all primitive societies. The problem lies in the fact that the primitive societies were replaced by other primitive societies — until the explorers and traders arrived.”
Hardly, and I think Tulio can back me up here. In the 1300s the Mali Empire in West Africa was one of the richest in the world and had one of the world’s greatest seats of learning, Timbuktu:
http://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/mali-empire/
This is not revisionist history either. Some of its buildings still stand, making it clear that the empire must have been large and powerful. We also have traveller’s accounts, like that of Ibn Battuta.
Abagond: A good fraction of what we think of as “Greek” is Egyptian.
No Slappz: I gather you have read one of those revisionist history books that claim everything attributed to “Egyptians” was actually the product of black Africans.
In fact, what we think of as Greek, is Greek.
Greek writing, astronomy, geometry, architecture, etc, all go back to Egypt. Why do you think they wrote on paper and had temples built with columns? They did not get that from Babylon. We are taught not to see the Egyptianness of the Greeks but it is pretty clear to anyone who opens his eyes. It does not take a revisionist historian to see it.
@abagond:
By the way, it is amusing that you think so highly of Westerners. The Westerners in the 1000s and 1100s were incapable of reading the Greeks.
Also try reading Chaucer without it being translated. I doubt 99% of people today could read it, and that is English, or Middle Ages English. In fact, it was only the elite and religious orders who could read and write. So in effect most people were illiterate. Why were they not all literate if they were all so inventive?
Africans themselves knew nothing of their own history. But that’s hardly news when no one on the continent could read or write.”
This patently false. With the onset of colonialism, one of the first things they do is oppress the subjugated people’s
Culture. In many instances they erased it. Ergo, much of this information is lost and cannot be retrieved. It’s like the North American Native languages that have disappeared. Many cultures and languages have been eradicated through colonialism and, or land appropriation. It is disingenuous to claim therefore, that these things did not exist. We don’t know. Flipping the script at it’s best!
until the explorers and traders arrived.”
Bringers of rack and ruin more like. I am sure the inhabitants did not view them as ‘explorers’ after they got to know them. Traders? Thieves more like.
We are taught not to see the Egyptianness of the Greeks but it is pretty clear to anyone who opens his eyes. It does not take a revisionist historian to see it.
If you read about the any of the Ancient Greeks writings, you will constantly see references to Ancient Egypt as a source of much of their learning. Comte de Volney, 1757-1820, had this to say about the Egyptians.
“but reverting to Egypt, its contributions to history afford many subjects for philosphic reflection . What a subject for mediation is the present-day barbarity and ignorance of the Copts who were considered born of the alliance of the deep genius of the Egyptians and the brilliance of the Greeks, that this race of blacks who nowadays are slaves and the objects of our scorn is the very one to which we owe our arts, our sciences and even the use of spo ken word and finally recollect that it is in the midst of the peoples claiming to be the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that the most barbarous of enslavements has been sanctioned and the question raised whether black men have brains of the same quality as those of white men!
You see, it was even well known then as to where Greek learning emanated from. With the onset of colonialism, all to this changed.
abagond, you wrote:
“If the Egyptians had not invented paper, someone else would have. But, for the very same reason, if whites had not invented television, someone else would have.”
Someone else? You mean someone of another race? Perhaps. And if things had gone that way, the person would have been asian. There’s no chance the inventor would have been black.
Meanwhile, “Egyptians” were not a race. Perhaps the “ancient Egyptians” represent an ethnicity, but not a race.
In any case, people living in coastal areas, like those near the mouth of the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea, are the people most likely to meet explorers and traders.
Thus, you really have no idea about the actual flow of knowledge. Which way did it flow?
Of course you believe Africans were the ones to unlock a lot of secrets.
So what happened? Did mass stupidity descend on the continent?
Today, most of Africa is a dump. Illiteracy is the norm. Disease, violence and backwardness dominate the continent.
It takes a lot of work to drive all that historic knowledge out of the minds of virtually everyone in Africa. But virtually no one living in Africa today is a legitimate scientist who was educated in African schools and universities. Nobody.
As for London vs Timbuktu in the 1300s, well, the only measure that matters is how those two places have fared over the centuries.
A lot of factors affect the placement and development of cities. Some of those factors never change — like the enduring value of London’s location. And London’s leadership in education.
Timbuktu. Sorry. It was nothing but a trading post. A muslim trading post, by the way. There were no great universities or any other schools of lasting significance. Meanwhile, the place was conquered and reconquered over the centuries, which means there was always a more powerful force ready to drop by.
Bottom line — if you want to invalidate the claim that whites are the world’s greatest inventors, all you have to do is get out the record books and tally the inventions of each race. Since you believe blacks are as inventive as whites and asians, the data should confirm your hypothesis.
But we both know the record shows that blacks invent nothing while whites and asians invent stuff every day.
We also know that practicing Islam causes an end to inventiveness among muslims. To be black and muslim is a double whammy.
You wrote:
“We are taught not to see the Egyptianness of the Greeks but it is pretty clear to anyone who opens his eyes.”
No one is taught that way. A column (Doric, Ionic or Corinthian) is about as basic as a structure gets. Anyone who has seen a tree intuitively understands the concept.
That claim is one of the lunacies of “black history”. No white student cares about the race of the people who first developed anything. Geometry, arches, columns, logic, democracy. All that matters are the concepts themselves.
Every chemistry and physics test and every engineering exam I took in engineering school demanded my understanding of the scientific concepts. No professor ever asked about the person behind the theory.
All that matters are the concepts themselves. But people like you want to pretend it matters where an idea originated.
F = MA or E = 1/2MVsquared. Does it matter who had these brilliant insights? No.
The only important factor is getting more people to understand them and use them. But with blacks, it has not happened.
No Slappz said:
“Timbuktu. Sorry. It was nothing but a trading post. A muslim trading post, by the way. There were no great universities or any other schools of lasting significance. Meanwhile, the place was conquered and reconquered over the centuries, which means there was always a more powerful force ready to drop by.”
If you are going to overlook whatever facts of history do not suit your argument, then it is pointless to say anything to you. You are locked in your own self-delusion and nothing I say will make any difference.
You are locked in your own self-delusion and nothing I say will make any difference.
That is the understatement of the day! If he thinks blacks are so ’stupid’, why does he continue to debate the point? In fact, why does he come here at all? Another white supremacist trying to foist his pseudo superiority on the ‘lesser’ folk perhaps. He should go pontificate to someone who shares his views and actually cares about them.
I’m not going to bother debating futher with no_slappz because I have better things to do with my time than run in circles with close-minded bigots who have an axe to grind. After reading a few more of his posts, it’s obvious he has an agenda here, and it certainly doesn’t involve approaching us with an olive branch in hand.
No historian denies that Mali was an empire, nobody denies that it was black or that it had a university that was known throughout the Muslim world or that it had trade and currency. It’s laughable how people will then say, “well it was a MUSLIM city” like the fact that it got influence from the outside world is something lamentable. Christianity didn’t originate in Europe, nor did math, a system of writing, or even the invention of the wheel. ALL these things originated in the middle east.
I notice slappz didn’t even acknowledge that he was wrong when he made his absolutely ludicrous claim that only Europeans had realism in art when in fact African realism in art predates European realism in art, but he won’t acknowledge it, even though the information is widely available on the net. As for his inane nonsense about no empires in Africa, if he is too lazy to even do a google/wiki search on the topic where there is free and widely available information, not from Afrocentrists(who I don’t even bother with) but legitimate historians, yet alone read any books on the subject, then why bother with such a person. Who needs to argue with someone who is proudly ignorant and chooses to be.
He also said agriculture wasn’t discovered. Of course it was discovered. Humans spent 10s of thousands of years as hunter gatherers before somebody figured out that if you plant seeds in the ground, irrigate and take care of them, you can settle in one area and not have to wander about looking for food. Seems pretty axiomatic since someone already told you that, but if nobody explained it to you, you’d have no idea how it works. Agriculture was one of the most important human inventions ever, right up there with creating fire and metallurgy as it allowed for settlement itself. Agriculture was discovered independently both in east and west Africa. It was not discovered in some parts of the world such as aboriginal Australia.
West African entered the Iron Age before Europe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_West_Africa
“Iron industry, in both smelting and forging for tools and weapons, appeared in Sub-Saharan Africa by 1200 BCE. [1] The increased use of iron and the spread of ironworking technology led to improved weaponry and enabled farmers to expand agricultural productivity and produce surplus crops, which together supported the growth of urban city-states into empires.”
I wouldn’t call agriculture and iron smelting to be insignificant inventions. They were 2 of the most important things man ever discovered because they create a foundation for so many other things. They were both developed, independently in West Africa. So I don’t think it’s fair to say Africans never invented anything.
It’s interesting to me that white supremacist types love to beat Africans over the head and tell them how primitive and backward they think they are and that they have no history and whatnot. Interesting thing is, Africa was never the most primitive place on earth. People tend to think it was, and that’s historically inaccurate. The Native Americans of N. America were more primitive than the Africans, yet whites seem to respect them more. There were certainly advanced civilizations in central America and the Andes, but the natives of the Americas outside of that region were extremely primitive, like the Amazon Indians, the natives of horn of S. America. The natives of the Carribbean, pretty much all of N. America including the Eskimos. Metallurgy was unknown anywhere in the Americas, yet it was discovered in Africa. Yet people disrespect Africans more than Native Americans. The Aborigines and Polynesians were ever more primitive than the Native Americans. So when ranking various parts of the world on their “primitiveness” I don’t understand why people act like W. Africans were at the bottom. I mean I don’t see white supremacists on Native American forums beating them over the head about how much they never contributed to the world and how useless they are. I mean how much have Native Americans contributed to technology and science? So why don’t we see people like no_slappz on their forums arguing with them about it? Why is Africa their perennial whipping boy? Why do white racists wake up in the morning hating Africans who have never done a damn thing to them? Such miserable people they must truly be at heart.
Great post Tulio. I know we won’t even have to wait a hot minute before No Slappz comes back to add to his incessantly long posts full of drivel.
Mixing some truths with absolute fiction.
“sigh”
I agree: excellent comment, Tulio.
Good post, Tulio
Talk about changing the subject. You nitwits want to argue that blacks are as inventive as whites and asian, but the best you can do is sidestep into a commentary about other ethnic groups that had periods of backwardness and lagging that equaled or surpassed the black experience.
Yeah, let’s discuss Polynesians, Native Americans or Australian aborigines.
You might want to consider the aspects of life common to the Polynesians, Native Americans, aborigines and blacks. Then you might begin to develop an understanding of why some groups lag and others lead.
Anyway, if you had some examples of black inventiveness, I could treat your claims as more than a joke.
As for Timbuktu, the fact that it was a muslim trading post means it was developed and reached its peak because muslims came from another part of the globe and did what they did for a few centuries, which was to conquer hapless indigenous populations and extract whatever was there for the taking.
You fail to understand that the practice of Islam always marks the end of inventiveness. Muslims take from the societies they conquer. But they themselves do not add to the collective knowledge.
The spread of Islam is one reason Africa has languished. Islam bills itself as the comprehensive philosophy of life. Thus, if Muhammad did not envision something, then that thing is not permitted in muslim life.
Since Muhammad was no scientist, and since he declared Islam was superior to all things, the notion of science challenging the omnipotence of Allah was unacceptable. Hence, in Islamic countries, ignorance is the chief output of government and society.
As for your comments about art and realism, I don’t know where you got them. However, African art is, in every way, primitive, and has none of the psychological qualities of art from advanced cultures.
As for agriculture — it is NOT an “invention”. The wheel is an invention. The spear is an invention. Making metal is a process — which is an invention.
Agronomy is the science of crop production.
When did early hunter/gatherers/farmers realize they could collect seeds and plant more crops? Maybe you know. But early agriculture boils down to finding edible plants and attempting to get them to grow where the grower wants them rather than where Nature put them.
Thus, about the only “invention” tied to early agriculture was the sharp stick seed-planters jabbed into the ground to make the hole where the seed was dropped.
Anyway, once again I ask — if blacks societies were as successful as you claim, what happened?
I’ve always gotten a bang out of the explanations given by people like Minister Fard from the Nation of Islam.
He wrote about Tricknology and how whites stole all the knowledge straight from the heads of blacks. It’s all very amusing.
A round of applause for tulio! *woot*
Excellent post!
YUP. less than an hour and the KING of run- on posts is back. he is gonna keep commenting on this thing until the coroner has to come and pry his dead bony hands off of the keyboard-years and years from now. cos that is how long he is willing to keep this up.
No Slappz said:
“Since Muhammad was no scientist, and since he declared Islam was superior to all things, the notion of science challenging the omnipotence of Allah was unacceptable. Hence, in Islamic countries, ignorance is the chief output of government and society.”
Oh, right, Muslims hate science. If it were not for the Arabs the West would know very little of what Archimedes, Aristotle, and Ptolemy wrote. The West did not get it from the Romans because, despite their nice, beautiful white skin, they did not care much for science.
I doubt you will take this to heart, but here it goes:
You wilfully misread history to do what? To belittle Muslims and blacks. And why is that? Because American and Israeli society is unjust to them and deep down you know it, though you will never admit it to yourself. The only way you can feel good about yourself, as a Jew and as a White American, is to find reasons to look down on them and pump up Jews and whites. That is why you keep hitting us over the head with white inventions of the past 200 years even though that was never in dispute. That is why you feel the need to come here and twist facts and arguments so you can belittle us, making ignorant comments that would make Steve Sailer cringe.
@ AO
YUP. less than an hour and the KING of run- on posts is back. he is gonna keep commenting on this thing until the coroner has to come and pry his dead bony hands off of the keyboard-years and years from now. cos that is how long he is willing to keep this up.
—————————————————
All you’ll see is this
http://www.grannymar.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/skeleton1.jpg
EXACTLY. Aiyo.
@AO & Aiyo:
That’s hilarious! It couldn’t be further from the truth. lol!
Why the hell are we talking about Minister Fard or the NOI like anyone gives a damn. There are more whites that believe Elvis is still alive than there are black members of the NOI. If you want to discuss them, go right ahead, but I’m not interested, thank you. If you’ve got an issue with the NOI and their Afrocentric claims, take it up with them. I’m a pragmatist, not an Afrocentrist, which means I neither take the view that Africa was advanced and had all her inventions stolen by whites, nor do I take the view that blacks did nothing but swing from vines like monkeys until whites showed up and taught them how to walk. I don’t even listen to Afrocentrists, so don’t try and put that label on me.
Yeah, it’s called geographic isolation. It’s the reason why the illiterate, low-tech white people of Northern Europe were still practicing cannibalism and paganism while the Romans gained from the collective knowledge of nearby pre-existing civilization. Can you give me a reason why the Celts were primitive and illiterate tribemen while the Romans were an advanced empire even though they were of the same white race? It was hundreds of years after the Celts had been conquered and civilized by the Romans that they began to stand on their own two feet. Why is that? Why didn’t N. Europeans develop advanced civilization on their own?
Lol, so is that the reason you came here? To learn about black inventions? Why don’t you cut the bullshit, you aren’t here to learn anything about black people, you are here to give soliloquies for the purpose of boosting your own ego with the aid of a captive black audience. Tell you what my friend, why don’t you save both my time and yours with a google search. Weren’t you the one that was extolling the virtues of free and open information on the net? Well heed your own advice and quit wasting our time with circular arguments.
http://www.google.com/search?q=black+inventors
End of issue for me.
Uh, that’s quite a bastardized synopsis of Mali’s history. Not that I think for a second that you are here to learn anything, of course.
Once again, go avail yourself of the free and open information out there before you try to discuss things you clearly have no knowledge of. It’ll make things less annoying for all parties involved. Hell, even wikipedia is better than nothing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire
Once again, too much ignorance to even bother fully unwinding and I think you need to read more. Islamic society had a golden era while Europe was in the dark ages. From the 9th till the 15th century, Islam was at the forefront of philosophical enlightenment, math, science, engineering, architecture, astronomy, exploration, trade and many other things. You are imposing the modern picture of Islam(radical Islam in particular) and imposing it upon the Islam of the past. Lol, muslims don’t add to the collective knowledge? Guess you’ve never heard the world “algebra” before. It probably never even dawned on you that “algebra” is an Arabic word.
Ugh…I’m not even Muslim, or even a fan of Islam to be honest, and your statements are even pissing me off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
“Many medieval Muslim thinkers pursued humanistic, rational and scientific discourses in their search for knowledge, meaning and values. A wide range of Islamic writings on love, poetry, history and philosophical theology show that medieval Islamic thought was open to the humanistic ideas of individualism, occasional secularism, skepticism and liberalism.[10][11]
Religious freedom, though society was still controlled under Islamic values, helped create cross-cultural networks by attracting Muslim, Christian and Jewish intellectuals and thereby helped spawn the greatest period of philosophical creativity in the Middle Ages from the 8th to 13th centuries.[6] Another reason the Islamic world flourished during this period was an early emphasis on freedom of speech, as summarized by al-Hashimi (a cousin of Caliph al-Ma’mun) in the following letter to one of the religious opponents he was attempting to convert through reason:[12]
“Bring forward all the arguments you wish and say whatever you please and speak your mind freely. Now that you are safe and free to say whatever you please appoint some arbitrator who will impartially judge between us and lean only towards the truth and be free from the empary of passion, and that arbitrator shall be Reason, whereby God makes us responsible for our own rewards and punishments. Herein I have dealt justly with you and have given you full security and am ready to accept whatever decision Reason may give for me or against me. For “There is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256) and I have only invited you to accept our faith willingly and of your own accord and have pointed out the hideousness of your present belief. Peace be upon you and the blessings of God!”
The earliest known treatises dealing with environmentalism and environmental science, especially pollution, were Arabic treatises written by al-Kindi, al-Razi, Ibn Al-Jazzar, al-Tamimi, al-Masihi, Avicenna, Ali ibn Ridwan, Abd-el-latif, and Ibn al-Nafis. Their works covered a number of subjects related to pollution such as air pollution, water pollution, soil contamination, municipal solid waste mishandling, and environmental impact assessments of certain localities.[13] Cordoba, al-Andalus also had the first waste containers and waste disposal facilities for litter collection.[14]”
Once again, stop confusing today’s radicalized flavor of Islam with the Islam of centuries ago. It’s like comparing today’s Christianity with the repressive Christianity of the Dark Ages. Speaking of which, everything you are saying about Islam could’ve been applied to Christianity during the Dark Ages of Europe. Look what happened to people who said earth goes around the sun. Heck even today there are Christians denying science and reason.
Anything that is not found in nature and brought about by human thinking is an invention. Agriculture was an invention. Metallurgy was an invention. Neither of these things existed in the world before Homo Sapiens. There were random edible plants distributed about which could only support small populations of wanderers, and the human mind created a process of organizing them and controlling them and making settlement possible. Sure iron, bronze and copper may have been found in nature, but creating alloys from them is a human invention. Of course now that you found out that black folks were doing these things without whitey showing us how, now they are no longer “inventions”, hahahhahaa…
Another excellent post by tulio!!!!
Once again, on point Tulio.
Why do white racists wake up in the morning hating Africans who have never done a damn thing to them? Such miserable people they must truly be at heart.
They are miserable, else why come on a site to preach and enforce your pseudo supremacy on others? In reality, they feel inferior, imputing the accomplishments of a few to a whole group, is indicative of this. I wonder if this guy(?) would have these kinds of conversations with a black person face to face? He would be scared witless! Probably not. He takes out his vitriol on blacks anonymously. I am starting to think this guy is mentally ill. I really am. He just doesn’t get the post’s theme. Most racists who take it to his extreme have some mental problems. It’s as if he can’t control himself!
Of course now that you found out that black folks were doing these things without whitey showing us how, now they are no longer “inventions”, hahahhahaa…
Exactly, he rattles off ‘facts’ and when such things as the invention of agriculture is brought up all of a sudden it is not an invention! He doesn’t seem to understand that inventions are the work of individuals and not groups. If they were, everyone would be an inventor, they are not. As you say, the vast majority of people have not ‘invented’ anything but do indeed enjoy the inventions of the few. This guy can’t seem to comprehend what the topic is about. However, he will never admit to this, he prefers to babble on about his ‘facts’, oblivious to what’s being commented on.
You know he’s full of it when he says that no-one cares who invented what originally, but goes on to harangue commentors for not providing a list of inventors. One must take into account what came before, you have to start somewhere. In effect, he appears to be arguing for argument’s sake. As there appears to be no purpose other than showing off his ‘intellect and knowledge’. In reality he probably feels inferior. People who are accomplished in various fields don’t feel the need to belittle other groups for whatever reason.
I can only imagine what you would think of me if you saw me walking down the street. I go to Flatbush every now and then, so maybe you have.
He’d probably cross the street!
I wonder when no slappz is coming back for more punishment! I have to give him one thing for a troll, he is bloody persistant!
Oh. He’ll be back. Probably at home now trying to think of more ways to derail the original post.
I am beginning to forget what the original post was in the first place. jeez. :-O
herneith, you wrote:
“You know he’s full of it when he says that no-one cares who invented what originally, but goes on to harangue commentors for not providing a list of inventors.”
Whites don’t care about the race of inventors, scientists, engineers, mathematicians and discoverers. Whites care about the inventions, science, theories and discoveries.
But you care about the race aspect. You care about so much about it that you and many others subscribe to a rewritten version of African history.
However, your devotion to a past that never was makes today’s black world look bad.
If blacks in Africa were refining metal before everyone else, why did they stop? Is there even one steel mill in Africa today?
Muslims and Europeans went to Africa for natural resources. The resources were there, which means the indigenous people should have been able to derive a permanent stream of benefits from the exploitation of the resources.
But even today, with oil in West Africa, there is nothing but disaster. When Africans ran the Nigerian oil industry, the only refineries in the country were so badly mismanaged they ceased to function.
Only very recently has that changed. What changed? In short, Nigeria allowed western oil experts to return to Nigeria to repair and run the refineries.
Anyway, I am still wondering. Are there any successful black nations in the world today?
Whites don’t care about the race of inventors, scientists, engineers, mathematicians and discoverers. Whites care about the inventions, science, theories and discoveries.
Yet you keep harping on whites invented this, whites invented that, blacks have invented nothing, you contradict yourself.
But you care about the race aspect. You care about so much about it that you and many others subscribe to a rewritten version of African history.
No, I don’t care about the ‘race aspect’. It is you who cares about it hence your tirades. You don’t even comprehend the post’s meaning! I have already said that I couldn’t care less who invented what. What part of that do you not understand? As for penning a ‘revisionist tome’ of history, I have not done so, nor do I subscribe to any school of thought when it comes to historical writings. I draw information from myriad sources and draw my conclusions accordingly.
.However, your devotion to a past that never was makes today’s black world look bad.
Whilst I am an amateur history buff, I am not devoted to it per se. You quite obviously are. I am devoted to family and friends. This is a hobby of mine. I will freely admit I do enjoy studying different historical periods, so what? That doesn’t translate to revising it. You, however feel a need to pontificate on your views of history, in particular, ‘white inventiveness’. I ask you again; by inference you posit that blacks are ’stupid’ or intellectually inferior. If so why keep harping on the subject? Why waste your time? I can assure you, you are not convincing many here. Yet you carry on! It’s like you have some sort of compulsion!
Muslims and Europeans went to Africa for natural resources. The resources were there, which means the indigenous people should have been able to derive a permanent stream of benefits from the exploitation of the resources.
What’s that got to do with the argument at hand? For the millionth time. This post is not about inventions and who invented what. It is about an argument used as a last resort when people are debating/discussing topics of race. Why can’t you fathom this? Like I said, you seem to have some sort of compulsion present. You obviously dislike blacks unless they are athletes or musicians yet you seemingly dislike or more strongly, hate blacks who do-not fall into these categories! Anyhow I will give you this; You have provided some hilarity and have shown how this argument works. You’ve provided a service! Thanks for breaking the monotony between doing household chores!
once again, Herneith, thanks for bringing back the reality to this person who refuses to live in it. Great comment.
No slappz. Time to hang it up man….your audience has left the building.
herneith,
Humans have been measuring each other in many ways over many centuries. Thus, a large amount of data has accrued and it is telling.
Clearly humans have shown both individual and group traits.
Does our accumulated data tell us anything about differences between individuals or groups?
I think it does.
However, you think differences between groups translate into superiority or inferiority.
I happen to believe that blacks are better athletes than whites due to genes. A biological edge.
Does that mean whites are incapable of playing a decent game of basketball? No. But blacks are better.
Can whites box? Yes. But not as well as blacks.
Does this reality damage white’s images of themselves? No.
But when it comes to blacks and intellectual efforts, instead of an acknowledgement of human record, a debate about superiority/inferiority breaks out.
Can blacks learn physics? Yes. But few bother.
That’s the issue. Why is black academic achievement as low as it is — worldwide?
If life in Africa were not as miserable as it often is, the question would have minimal importance. But life is horrible for hundreds of millions of people in Africa. Simple problems go unsolved.
In Africa lack of clean water is the chief problem. But the white world has been able to provide itself with more than enough clean water for centuries.
On the other hand, every year the number of people who die from drinking unclean water in Africa is over 5 million.
FIVE MILLION. Staggering. It would be one thing if the solution to the problem did not exist. But it does exist. Is this death toll a sign of intelligence?
HAHaha, hilarious, back to cleaning!!!!
Oh, wow. He’s still at it? He must have no life then.
Alrighty, now back to your regularly scheduled programming. lol!
LOL Leigh204
all he can do is talk about how terrible Africa is and how they lack the simplest most basic necessities. like clean drinking water, etc. but is he offering any kind of solutions? since he is part of the GREAT WHITE INVENTORS. is he trying to think of something to possibly help instead of sitting on his duff talking about how terrible that continent is and its inhabitants are?… NO because he is incapable of such thoughts…jeez
i am now done with him too… what a waste of my days before Christmas reading his mess. HAHAHAAH
No_slappz said:
What the hell do you mean *if*, it’s beyond dispute that metallurgy existed in pre-colonial West Africa and that it had left the neolithic era. Are you seriously disputing that??
He does not dispute it, he merely dismisses it. He chooses which facts he wishes to believe in. It is part of how his racist delusion works.
Poverty. Find me one poor country that is a bastion of Nobel Prize winners. You have to reach a certain level affluence before you have free time for intellectual pursuits. Look at Maslow’s heirarchy of needs. It’s hard to concentrate on long-term goals like getting a PhD when you don’t where your next meal is coming from.
These conditions are widespread in Africa, but not unique to Africa. You’ll see the same thing in Bolivia, Cambodia, the bush of Australia or Bangladesh and none of these people are black. Also, I get kind of tired of people talking about Africa like it’s a country rather than a continent with widely varying situations. Not everybody in Africa is starving or infected with AIDS. People in Namibia and Botswana are eating just fine for example. Botswana has a per capita income of $14,000, bringing it to about the level of a middle-income nation. Whereas in Mali, income is extremely low. Gabon is another middle income country with an expanding economy. AIDS may be sky high in S. Africa, but in Senegal it’s not higher than it is in the western world. Somalia is extremely dangerous, but Ghana is safe and friendly to tourists. While white nationalists like to keep harping on the murder rate in S. Africa, you never hear them mention that Senegal’s murder rate is lower than anywhere in Europe. It’s only good to point out the bad.
Water was clean in Africa prior to colonialism for the simple fact that there were no pollutants. I’ve never read reports of European explorers that mentioned African dying in mass from diseases and dirty water. Whites superimposed a western culture on Africa through colonialism that simply wasn’t natural to them. It’s no different than us trying to impose democracy on Afghanistan and thinking it’s going to hold up when that region has no history of such thing and nor do the values of that region support western style law and economy. It’s no different with Africa. The mess you see in Africa is the result of imposing an alien culture with an entirely different set of values and world view onto one that is radically different. If stable, advanced societies evolved in Africa, it would be best if they had come from within, not imposed from the outside. It’s the same reason why Native Americans are living in misery and alcoholism in reservations instead instead of being the proud people they once were. Just a mere shadow of themselves unable to mesh with the western system. It doesn’t work for them.
Like I said, this wasn’t a problem before colonialism. And once again, the problem of cholera infected water can be found worldwide, in every case, it’s in a country that was a former colony that had no such problems prior. Coincidence?
No Slappz:
On genes and history:
You take the way the world is now and read it back into people’s genes. You say blacks are the best boxers, that it is in their genes, but would you have said that before Joe Louis, in the 1930s?
Back in Roman times Cicero thought the British were naturally lacking in intelligence.
By your line of reasoning not only would he be right – Britain was a backwards corner of the world then (and remained so for over a thousand years) – but you would have said it was in their genes. Which means the British Empire – and America as we know it – would have never been.
You forget that you live at only one point in history, that other points in history were different.
If our fates were written in our genes, then little in the world would change. Anglos would have been on top not only since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 but for most of history. Instead for most of history they were backwards. Before 1500 they were nothing compared to the Chinese, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Turks, the Egyptians or even the Mali Empire at their height.
No one in his right mind in 1500 would have thought that some day English would become a world language, a respected language of learning, science and business. If you said that in 1500 people would have thought you had too much to drink.
The apparent differences between the races are produced by accidents of history, not by genes. Mankind spread across the world too fast, on a biological or evolutionary time scale, for there to be the kind of profound differences between the races that you are talking about.
No Slappz:
On Africa being screwed up:
1. It is hardly the basket case that you see on American television. If it were, it would not be able to support a billion people. Africa is not wall-to-wall with unwashed children.
2. Africa is screwed up mainly due to colonialism and its after effects. I agree with Tulio on that, though I think it has more to do with power and less to do with culture. In the late 1900s all the white rulers were thrown out of power, even in South Africa, but the place is still largely run for the benefit of whites and now, increasingly, the Chinese. These people do not care about drinking water or anything like that: they just want Africa’s natural wealth at cut rates. It suits them just fine that Africa is so divided and poor and run by people who take bribes.
No Slappz:
I will have to do a post on Shell Oil and Nigeria, but in the meantime I did do one on Gabon. As Africa goes it is a “success” story, but it shows you the degree to which outsiders still run the place despite independence:
http://abagond.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/gabon/
Abagond,
Gabon IS another nightmare state.
Lifespan of a child born there today: 53 years
Huge AIDS problem
Median age: 18. Thus Gabon is a nation of children, though there are only 1.5 million people in the country.
Stunningly high infant mortality rate. 52 per thousand live births. That’s catastrophic.
The net migration rate is -3.48, one of the highest in the world and a clear statement that people are desperate to get out of Gabon.
Major problems with water-borne diseases.
High illiteracy rate.
Economy is depedent on oil exports. But it also exports timber and manganese. However, nothing is manufactured in Gabon.
The per-capita GDP is high. But the reality is this: Those in charge of the country take it all and the vast majority of Gabonese have nothing. An example of misleading with statistics.
Gabon shares some characteristics with Norway. Norway exports 90% of its oil. but it has used the money to finance an advanced state that provides Norwegians one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Given the natural resource wealth of Gabon and other African nations, we should see the emergence of similarly advanced nations in Africa. But no, that has not happened.
Why? African nations are almost always ruled by despotic thugs who steal everything possible and leave the country to the dogs.
abagond, you wrote:
“It (Africa) is hardly the basket case that you see on American television.”
Since the nations of Africa are presented in every possible light on TV, your statement about Africa on TV has no meaning.
However, the continent is a nightmare.
You wrote:
“If it were, it would not be able to support a billion people. Africa is not wall-to-wall with unwashed children.”
The continent is a mess due to the fact that Africans cannot establish governments that function for the benefit of the people. Thus, in fact, it is true that unwashed children are a huge percentage of the population.
That is a particularly bad sign. Every black African nation has a stunningly low median age. In many countries the median age is about 18, which means that most of the people in Africa are children. Mostly uneducated children who have no hope of becoming educated prosperous adults. Children leading children who are having more children.
Meanwhile, subsistence farming accounts for much of the employment on the continent, and for most people, the 20th Century has NOT arrived.
Like I have said, clean water is a problem. It is a problem because African leaders do not spend the relatively small amount of money it takes to purify drinking water.
Yes, other countries have water problems. Bolivia, as you mentioned. In other words, if you want to know if a country is run by a moronic thug, check the water supply.
Bad water = bad government. Very simple.
What’s the solution? Kill the dictators. Robert Mugabe must die, and the sooner the better. Unfortunately, since blacks have shown total incompetence in government, there is no reason to think a house-cleaning will lift black African nations from their benighted state.
It would take a benevolent dictatorship. The closest example is Singapore. Not that any nation in Africa is likely to duplicate or approximate the experience of Singapore.
No Slappz:
Good point about the Gabon stats, but you missed one of the main points of the Gabon post: that the French still run the place, that it is the French and the Chinese who mainly profit from its natural wealth, not the people who live there. On paper Gabon is free and independent and under black rule, but in practice it is still a colony.
abagond, your statements go from the ridiculous to the absurd. You wrote:
“In the late 1900s all the white rulers were thrown out of power, even in South Africa, but the place is still largely run for the benefit of whites and now, increasingly, the Chinese.”
Apparently you are claiming the existing governments of African nations do not run the countries. Thus, Robert Mugabe is NOT the cause of the complete economic collapse of Zimbabwe. The real cause comes from outside. The “foreigners.” The whites. The asians.
You get even nuttier with your next claim:
“These people do not care about drinking water or anything like that: they just want Africa’s natural wealth at cut rates.”
China does not care about the drinking water in America either. Nor does it care about the drinking water in Europe. Although China might care if it can service the water industries in America and Europe. But otherwise, providing clean water in America, Europe or the nations of Africa is the problem of the local government. Not China.
The Chinese and all others who import stuff from Africa want the stuff. Like I said, it’s all about trade. Why would China assume the role that government is meant to play? Trading means getting stuff you want in exchange for stuff you have.
Nigeria and Gabon have oil. The oil is sold at world market prices and then the corrupt leaders of Nigeria and Gabon steal as much of the revenue as they can carry off.
Meanwhile, Nigeria is incapable of producing people who can run the oil industry. So, experts from other nations now handle the job. These conditions and realities are the problems the local governments are expected to solve. but they do not.
Your greatest piece of nuttiness:
“It suits them just fine that Africa is so divided and poor and run by people who take bribes.”
If African nations were prosperous, honest and progressive, all other nations would benefit. However, as long as African nations are poor and corrupt, outside investment will remain limited.
Exxon Mobil will not commit a lot of capital in countries with thug governments llikely to seize their property, which has happened even though the company has been cautious.
Like I said, there were three refineries in Nigeria — built and owned by non-Nigerian companies. Eventually Nigeria seized them. But, due to the usual African incompetence, the refineries ceased to function and they were closed.
But somehow, it dawned on the morons running Nigeria that it was better to have working refineries rather than non-working refineries and competent operators were allowed to return. I believe all the refineries now operate as joint ventures between the Nigerian government and some oil companies.
But the whole world would benefit if Nigeria were to become like Norway, which exports 90% of its oil production and spends the money wisely.
abagond, there is a serious flaw in all your reasoning. The following is a good example:
“Back in Roman times Cicero thought the British were naturally lacking in intelligence.”
You give the OPINION of one man, who lived in an era when the known world was a tiny fraction of the whole, you give his opinion from 2000 years ago as though it carries more weight than the mountain of data that has been collected in the 2000 years since he offered his opinion and prediction.
You wrote:
“By your line of reasoning not only would he be right – Britain was a backwards corner of the world then (and remained so for over a thousand years) – but you would have said it was in their genes. Which means the British Empire – and America as we know it – would have never been.”
Wrong. The fact that humans had made their way from where they started to the land that became known as Great Britain shows the earliest Anglos and Celts were explorers.
No one alive at the time of Cicero could have made an accurate prediction about the future of humanity. But, by creating and developing concepts of math, science and government, the Greeks and Romans had an effect on white culture that began to show its extraordinary value when it caused whites to shake off religious dogma and demand — take — freedom.
As whites freed themselves from the religious straitjacket, the pace of change in the world increased, getting up to a roar a couple of hundred years ago. Today, the leading edge of the world is advancing hourly, with the most stunning advances coming in mobile communications.
In other words, it is almost impossible to escape the onslaught on knowledge. The whole world — and its entire history — is visible and available to anyone with a computer.
However, there are huge segments of the world’s population that remain either willfully ignorant, or deprived of modern reality by repressive governments.
What do people in North Korea know about the rest of the world? Not enough. But the two largest pools of ignorance on the planet are found in the muslim world and in Africa.
As for the arrival of Joe Louis and my opinion of the superiority of black boxers, actually, in my view, it was Jack Johnson who proved the point.
But, the real isssue is about how people attain or approach their potential when they live in FREE Societies.
Johnson and Louis may have lived in a Jim Crow America, but Jim Crow laws were not enough to smother the talent both were able to cultivate as Americans. If they had been born in Africa, they would have lived and died anonymously.
Since all doors to blacks have been wide open for 45 years we have seen the effects. The records speak for themselves. Blacks have risen to the top of every form of athletics in which they compete. Next I expect to see blacks winning Olympic gold medals for swimming.
But when it comes to academics, the results are unimpressive. Again, the results speak for themselves.
The critics blame “the schools”, which is another way of blaming whites. Of course if for some perverse reason whites were preventing blacks from learning, we would know because academically accomplished blacks would come from African nations and show, by their existence, that the American education system itself is the problem.
Aba wrote:
Good point about the Gabon stats, but you missed one of the main point of the Gabon post: that the French still run the place.
No Slops is writing about African nations as if Europe has never ruled them. As if they don’t suffer from the self-serving, resource-grabbing rape of colomialism, and now neocolonialism. China is currently stepping up to take part. Generally, emiseration is worst where extractable resources are greatest. As for leaders, toadies of Western elite interests get inserted into “power,” unless they get the strange notion in their heads and/or hearts that Africa is for Africans, in which case they get removed by Western elites (a la Saddam, and the recent cases of Haiti and Honduras). And what is the Number One instrument of rapacious elite interests? The United States’ federal government.
I’m amazed at the persistence of hardcore white supremacists like No Slops. They’ll rarely admit in mixed company that that’s what they are. Instead, they just keep presenting spurious, blinkered “evidence,” as if black “inferiority” just speaks for itself. And it’s always them Negroes that most get to these people.
But it’s not really that that gets to them, is it? Black people are a shibboleth for them, a dark, detested substitute for something else inside themselves that they can’t or won’t acknowledge for what it really is.
Btw, I’m seeing this boxing argument keep being brought up. Blacks don’t seem to be dominating in fight sports like they used to. It seems like Russian and Brazilian guys are the best fighters these days, if you’re also including MMA. That said, I still think Mike Tyson in his prime could’ve beat anyone out there today.
How naive. About half the world’s 7 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. Buying a computer to them would be like us trying to buy a Ferrari Enzo. Access to knowledge and education on this planet is VERY limited. It might seem widely available because you were luckily enough to be born in an advanced country so that’s all you know, but if you were born in rural Burma, you’d find your options for learning and bettering yourself to be extremely limited. There is virtually no social mobility in 3rd world countries. You are either born into wealth through luck or you are born into the majority of impoverished people and will remain stuck there for life.
The thing is, the west was once the same way. Ignorance prevailed for the unwashed masses, wealth and knowledge were extremely concentrated and there was no social mobility. Even as late as the 1800s, life in America wasn’t much different than it would be Latin America today. People got little or no education because their parents needed to put the kids to work. There were no social services so people had large families as their security, there was a corrupt upper class(The Gilded Age) that exploited the unwashed poor. A much greater percentage of the population depended on subsistence farming. Educational embetterment was extremely limited if not non-existent for anyone but the elite. The west came out of this period before others and you will eventually see it in the 3rd world at some point.
No Slappz said:
“The critics blame “the schools”, which is another way of blaming whites. Of course if for some perverse reason whites were preventing blacks from learning, we would know because academically accomplished blacks would come from African nations and show, by their existence, that the American education system itself is the problem.”
Right: West Indians who come to America show that the poor performance of Black Americans in education has nothing to do with being black by race and everything to do with how racist America is, how screwed up the schools are that most blacks are forced to go to.
No Slappz said:
“No one alive at the time of Cicero could have made an accurate prediction about the future of humanity.”
Right, and neither can you. That is just my point.
I did a lengthy post with some interesting links on another forum on the topic of black performance in schools, I can’t find it right now though or I’d repost it here. But in brief, I was compiling some articles and studies on the success of independently run private and/or charter schools with majority black students and a dedicated black staff. The kids at these schools were performing very well. Especially on written/verbal skills.
I think a large part of the underperformance in black schools really is schools that just don’t work well for black kids. Studies show that vouchers show improved results for black kids, yet not non-black kids. So that tells you something right there. We probably have a lot teachers that just don’t care, that have low expectations and low standards. Not to mention kids that come from bad backgrounds with low parental involvement in education. When these same kids are sent to private or charter schools that show genuine care about them and hold them to high standards, and make take themselves seriously, the improvement is marked. If I can find that post I made, I’ll repost the links I came across that broke this down in detail with stats and numbers.
tulio wrote,
Even as late as the 1800s . . . there was a corrupt upper class(The Gilded Age) that exploited the unwashed poor.
And there’s not today? LOL!
Re Aba’s thoroughly debunking points on education, there’s this too:
Africans are the most educated immigrant population in the United States, with 49% holding college degrees—a larger percentage than Asian immigrants, American-born whites, and American born blacks. 86.4% hold high school degrees or more, while only 78.9% of the “model minority” Asian immigrants do. Children of African immigrants also go on to achieve higher levels of education as compared with the rest of the population.
Doesn’t seem possible if blacks were as dumb as No Slops thinks they are. I’m sure he’ll come up with some deluded effort to explain it away, though.
Tulio:
Please do. That would be wonderful.
Thanks, SUsan.
To pick up on whast she said: According to No Slappz’s thinking, West Indians and black Africans who come to America should do WORSE than Black Americans since they are in general blacker. Instead they do way better. A huge reason is that they did not have to go to the public schools that most Americans blacks had to go to.
@Linda
yes I have read about how African Immigrants are slowly becoming the new model minority in America.
Those quadruplets who all got accepted into yale university mother is nigerian
To be fair though, I think that African immigration is highly selective. Very few Africans are granted visas or residency in the U.S. It’s usually the most educated that are able to come in, so in the case of immigrants from Africa, we may be skimming from the very cream of the crop so to speak and only letting the most well-off to move here. Whereas with Mexicans for example, they can either just walk across the border illegally, or get in via family reunification if they already have family here. The U.S., even though we let in many immigrants is still fairly tough to get in for most people unless you already have connections here or you have education and affluence already in your home country.
@Abagond and Linda:
I think Abagond’s “Thanks Susan” was meant to be “Thanks Linda” regarding Linda’s comments on education .
Logically it seems obvious that there are likely several factors that might contribute to poor school performance in blacks in America. I have to question the motives and goals of those who automatically conclude that laziness or inherent inferiority are the cause, and refuse to be open to all the other factors that are at work.
abagond, I wrote:
““No one alive at the time of Cicero could have made an accurate prediction about the future of humanity.”
You responded:
“Right, and neither can you. That is just my point.”
You are confused by the difference between a person making a PREDICTION 2000 years ago, when no one knew much of anything about the world, with a person today, who offers the now well documented history of the world as the explanation for why things are the way they are today.
I have not predicted continuing failure for blacks. In fact, due to the social mobility that exists in democracies, much has improved for blacks.
Today black millionaires appear in the form of young men who sign big sports contracts. Such sudden black wealth was unimaginable a couple of generations ago.
We now have an historical record that accurately shows who has done what over the ages. You want to quibble about racial mixing in the Nile Valley a couple of thousand years ago, thus mooting the issue of precisely who did what way back when.
But after those early years when there was virtually no written record, humans began keeping track. We know who has done what for a long long time.
Moreover, you confuse group behavior with individual characteristics.
Blacks have proven they are good athletes as individuals. But that is not the same as coordinating that athletic skill in the form of a military.
However, with respect to the future of blacks, I predict more of the same in Africa. Nothing much is changing for the better. I predict better times for blacks who live in mostly white democracies.
However, the social pathologies that afflict blacks far more than whites are not disappearing. Fatherlessness, illegitimacy, crime, violence, substance abuse and low academic achievement will continue to plague blacks in the US and other leading nations.
Linda, you wrote:
“No Slops is writing about African nations as if Europe has never ruled them. As if they don’t suffer from the self-serving, resource-grabbing rape of colomialism, and now neocolonialism. China is currently stepping up to take part. Generally, emiseration is worst where extractable resources are greatest.”
Linda, you and your fellow black-victimization believers make only one case with your arguments:
You all claim that once a black society anywhere on Earth has met with a white society, irreversible damage is done and every successive generation of blacks is impaired as though some defective gene had been implanted in them.
The subtext of this argument is plainly anti-black. A clear decaration that blacks cannot withstand the effects of contact with the white world.
Susan is right: I meant to thank Linda.
Thanks, Susan.
abagond, you wrote:
“According to No Slappz’s thinking, West Indians and black Africans who come to America should do WORSE than Black Americans since they are in general blacker.”
I have no idea how you concluded the degree of blackness affects education. But, you wrote it.
You wrote:
“Instead they do way better. A huge reason is that they did not have to go to the public schools that most Americans blacks had to go to.”
Oh. The education systems in the West Indies were created by the English and Europeans. The same goes for education systems in black Africa.
In muslim Africa, education is dominated by Islam, which means nothing important is learned.
Meanwhile, there is a substantial underclass of blacks in the West Indies. Haiti is in the news today. Aside from its status as a national disaster, it is now claimed that 225,000 children in the country are actual slaves.
Bottom line, the percentage of blacks achieving some notable level of education in the West Indies, then coming to the US is smaller than the percentage of blacks who reach notable levels attending school here in the US.
Moreover, black colleges in other countries are grade schools compared with US colleges. There are a lot of West Indians here in Brooklyn. They run for public office and tout their West Indian educations. However, when they circulate their campaign literature, it always contains many misspellings, terrible grammar and evidence of ridiculously poor thinking. Moreover, they all seem to be closet communists.
No_slapps, what exactly is your agenda here, I’m just curious. Is there something you’re trying to tell us? It’s clear you don’t care too much for black people for one reason or another, but why brings you to forum? Do you go to Native American forums to tell them how few Native American nobel prize winners there? Do you do this with all ethnic groups, or just blacks? What is your issue with blacks?
@tulio:
I don’t even bother to read what he, I’m certain no_slappz is a he, has posted. It’s becoming tiresome.
No Slappz said:
“Moreover, black colleges in other countries are grade schools compared with US colleges. There are a lot of West Indians here in Brooklyn. They run for public office and tout their West Indian educations. However, when they circulate their campaign literature, it always contains many misspellings, terrible grammar and evidence of ridiculously poor thinking. Moreover, they all seem to be closet communists.”
Well, you are a good speller, I will give you that. Maybe one of the best who has appeared on this blog. But you are a shockingly poor reader and to say you have “ridiculously poor thinking” would be a kind way of putting it.
@ Leigh.. You took the words right out of my typing fingers. I have gotten to the point where i don’t even read what no slappz or no slops as his new name is on here by some (LOL) writes. I am so OVER him and his endless and i mean endless writing…
Cos believe me, Santa will have come, dropped his gifts all over creation, and gone and no slappz will still be killing us all by degrees with his endless comments.
@AO:
no_slappz has a new name? No slops, huh? lol! I like it! I like it a lot!
tulio, you asked:
“No_slapps, what exactly is your agenda here, I’m just curious.”
This site, which I found because abagond commented on something I wrote on another site, is similar to sites run by white supremacists, anti-Semites and others with an agenda based on falsity and victimization.
The central theme of sites like this one is: It’s not us. It’s them.
The Other Group is always the cause and source of all the misery and misfortune afflicting the group that swims in its self-described victimization.
By the way, someone mentioned the black quadruplets who were recently accepted by Yale. They are seniors at Danbury High School, Danbury, CT, a city best known for its prison.
Based on the claims from people at this site that blacks are stuck attending bad schools and therefore are unable to learn much, how did these four black students get into Yale?
If I accept the most popular theory on this site — that schools attended by blacks are no good — then the four siblings must have gotten into Yale because they were black, rather than because they were good students.
abagond, there is a serious flaw in all your reasoning. The following is a good example:
“Back in Roman times Cicero thought the British were naturally lacking in intelligence.”
You give the OPINION of one man, who lived in an era when the known world was a tiny fraction of the whole, you give his opinion from 2000 years ago as though it carries more weight than the mountain of data that has been collected in the 2000 years since he offered his opinion and prediction.
No, there is not a serious flaw in his thinking. However there is in yours. This post is about the ‘white inventor’ argument which is used as an argument of last resort when discussion/debate arises in regards to race. It is not about who invented what, who is ‘dumber’ than who etc. Yet you go off on tirades about Africa when America is being discussed for instance. You are obsessed! Like I wrote before, you don’t even like blacks unless they are ‘boxers’ or athletes. Well I am a lousy athlete, unless you consider shopping to be a sport. Am I an anomaly? By your reasoning I may be. As for Cicero, he was one of the most admired men of his time and people listened to what he said and read what he wrote. You are doing exactly what he does, giving your opinion, however you do not have the attributes that Cicero had. Besides which, opinions are like anuses, everyone has one! People still read Cicero, so some of what he says is still pertinent. No, what you are saying about blacks lack of intellect is basically what Cicero said 2000 years ago about people in Britain. Julius Caesar said similar things about the people in Gaul being savages, at least the ones who didn’t take on Roman traits. Hence the comparison. I doubt anyone will be reading anything you say 2000 years hence.
No one alive at the time of Cicero could have made an accurate prediction about the future of humanity.
They can’t now regardless of their vaunted knowledge. If you can let me know. I am going to Bingo tomorrow night and if I am not going to win, I won’t go. Can you predict this for me? I will give you ten percents of my haul if you do. I am also purchasing lottery tickets, if you can predict the numbers, it would be greatly appreciated!
As whites freed themselves from the religious straitjacket, the pace of change in the world increased, getting up to a roar a couple of hundred years ago.
Now it’s religion or lack thereof that has spurred ‘white inventiveness’? You are all over the map!
However, there are huge segments of the world’s population that remain either willfully ignorant, or deprived of modern reality by repressive governments.
If all these people were good athletes, maybe the countries would be ‘run’ better! To bad Joe Louis and Jack Johnson weren’t around today! They could be sent to these countries to run them as they were excellent boxers! As for willful ignorance permeating the globe, count yourself in!
The records speak for themselves. Blacks have risen to the top of every form of athletics in which they compete.
Sheer and utter nonsense! But I better shut up as any response to you triggers your tirades. I can’t resist! HELP! SLAPPZ’S COMPULSIONS ARE RUBBING OFF ON ME! Maybe the athletes can help me. ARRGH!
Of course if for some perverse reason whites were preventing blacks from learning, we would know because academically accomplished blacks would come from African nations and show, by their existence, that the American education system itself is the problem.
Send Hank Aaron to run the school systems, he was one of the best athletes! Maybe he’ll improve it!
What is your issue with blacks?
That is the million dollar question which he refuses to answer! He has been asked this throughout this post constantly. He is obsessed albeit in a hilarious manner! He can’t stop himself!
Herneith said:
“No, what you are saying about blacks lack of intellect is basically what Cicero said 2000 years ago about people in Britain… Hence the comparison. “
See that, No Slappz, she got just what I meant, unlike you. The stuff you were saying about Africa reminded me of what Cicero said about Britain. And it is just as wrong for just the same reasons. Just because Britain was backwards then did not mean it would last forever. Because it had nothing to do with genes, but more with their distance from Egypt.
Leigh said:
“I don’t even bother to read what he, I’m certain no_slappz is a he, has posted. It’s becoming tiresome.”
I try to ignore him but it is like a train wreck: I cannot NOT look.
@abagond:
Well, that’s a good analogy…trainwreck. You just know there is massive carnage underneath the twisted wreckage of the postings that is no_slappz.
@ Leigh. Well i Slappz case he is a trainwreck, burning building and 5 car pile up all rolled into one.
lol
LOL.
herneith, you wrote:
“No, there is not a serious flaw in his thinking. However there is in yours. This post is about the ‘white inventor’ argument which is used as an argument of last resort when discussion/debate arises in regards to race.”
It is an incontestable fact that whites and asians have invented and discovered far more than blacks. Even if we consider all of human history — and view things on your terms — blacks have invented and disovered almost nothing.
Anyway, reasonable debates depend on data. Historical data. It is 2009 and we have centuries of data. The record books have been accurately maintained.
Thus, when it comes to knowing which societies, groups and races are advancing — and why they are advancing — we have an answer. And the answer is based on fact. Not guesswork.
You wrote:
“It is not about who invented what, who is ‘dumber’ than who etc.”
As always, the records speak for themselves.
Meanwhile, how do YOU define intelligence?
You wrote:
“As for Cicero, he was one of the most admired men of his time and people listened to what he said and read what he wrote.”
He said a lot of things, including Birds of a Feather Stick Together. Many of his observations about human nature have held true over the last 20 centuries. Some, including his comment about a certain group of people, were erroneous. In other words, he was working with bad data. In fact, he had no data.
You wrote:
“You are doing exactly what he does, giving your opinion, however you do not have the attributes that Cicero had.”
You should learn the difference between Inductive Reasoning and Deductive Reasoning.
Knowledge was limited 2,000 years ago. Cicero knew nothing about North and South America, or the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. For all he knew, the human tribes of North and South America were driving cars and flying airplanes while he was walking around Rome. Of course he did not know the other half of the world existed. Thus, he was working without sufficient data.
Anyway, limited observations about a small group of people living is a small region tell you only about their specific experience. Cicero was in no position to understand or recognize the factors that would cause the Anglos and Celts to become what they became.
Today, we are much better informed.
You wrote:
“People still read Cicero, so some of what he says is still pertinent.”
Like I said, some of his work is still valid and those who read it will remark that he was a brilliant observer of man. But, also an observer who makes an occasional mistake.
You wrote:
“No, what you are saying about blacks lack of intellect is basically what Cicero said 2000 years ago about people in Britain.”
Wrong. You have no idea WHY Cicero said anything he said. But you are jumping back and forth between claiming he was one of history’s brightest lights and a nitwit who could not foresee the rise of Great Britain, a development that occurred centuries and centuries after Cicero died.
By the way, where is the black Cicero? The black Plato? The black Homer?
You wrote:
“Julius Caesar said similar things about the people in Gaul being savages, at least the ones who didn’t take on Roman traits. Hence the comparison. I doubt anyone will be reading anything you say 2000 years hence.”
Caesar was a conquerer. Not an anthropologist. Thus, his comments about human nature mean nothing.
I wrote:
“No one alive at the time of Cicero could have made an accurate prediction about the future of humanity.”
You responded:
“They can’t now regardless of their vaunted knowledge. If you can let me know.”
In fact, we can. The nations of the world will continue along their current paths unless disturbed by a major force.
Perhaps Iraq will become a capitalist democracy. The Iranian government might collapse as a result of the influence of neighboring Iraq. It too has the possibility of evolving into a capitalist democracy.
However, if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will fire that weapon at Israel. Israel will respond with a nuclear barrage and destroy Tehran. The strike and counterstrike would bring almost all nine members of the world’s nuclear club into a confrontation that would most likely lead to big problems for the muslim nations.
You wrote:
“I am going to Bingo tomorrow night and if I am not going to win, I won’t go. Can you predict this for me? I will give you ten percents of my haul if you do. I am also purchasing lottery tickets, if you can predict the numbers, it would be greatly appreciated!”
Here’s my prediction. If you continue to gamble — bingo and lottery — over the duration of your life, you will lose about 20% more than you win. Thus, over time, you will be a net loser.
Based on your gambling statements, it is clear you do not know the difference between Chance outcomes for specific events and the concept of Probability over time.
Consider the topic of life-spans. The average life-span of a person born today in the US is about 80. On the other hand, the average life-span of a person born today in almost all countries in Africa is about 50.
The predictions are based on extensive historical data and the factors that caused the historical figures to be what they are.
If African governments embrace basic public health policies that include cleaning the water, then African life spans will increase rapidly. As we know, blacks living in the US today can expect to live as long as whites — 75+ years. But there is no sign of change in most African nations. As I have said, every YEAR about 5 MILLION Africans die from diseases transmitted by dirty water.
I wrote:
“As whites freed themselves from the religious straitjacket, the pace of change in the world increased, getting up to a roar a couple of hundred years ago.”
You responded:
“Now it’s religion or lack thereof that has spurred ‘white inventiveness’? You are all over the map!”
All over the map? Not at all. We know what it takes for creativity and inventiveness to grow. The Ancient Greeks understood too. But organized religion mixed with government smothered the creative impulse in rituals that led ultimately to subservience.
I wrote:
“However, there are huge segments of the world’s population that remain either willfully ignorant, or deprived of modern reality by repressive governments.”
You responded:
“If all these people were good athletes, maybe the countries would be ‘run’ better! To bad Joe Louis and Jack Johnson weren’t around today! They could be sent to these countries to run them as they were excellent boxers! As for willful ignorance permeating the globe, count yourself in!”
Apparently the best you can do is to toss off snide comments that are so lame they lack even a hint of comic inventiveness.
Again, your rejection of the White Inventor Argument boils down to your ASSERTION that it is flawed. But if it were flawed, the evidence of the flaws — or its complete falseness — would appear in the form of examples of blacks accomplishing some of the same feats as whites and asians.
As I have stated, too much religion is bad for general creativity and inventiveness. However, the religions themselves are human creations. The Bible and the Koran were both the products of whites. The primary books of Eastern religions were were compiled by asians. Where are the books on the religions of Africa?
Language is a powerful force. Though muslims themselves were not inventive, they did exploit the inventions and discoveries of the people they conquered. As a method of expanding their influence, conquering muslims FORCED their new subjects to learn Arabic. The Ottoman Empire benefited hugely from the widespread use of Arabic.
How many languages are/were spoken in Africa? The language barrier stops the flow of knowledge. As the Tower of Babel story shows, the problem of communication has been recognized for a long time.
A long winded speech on something totally irrelevant to the topic! Typical no_slappz!
I am done talking to him. He believes what he wants to believe. It is hard to have an intelligent conversation with him.
That is probably the best thing all of us can do in the case of No Slappz. Just ignore him and not respond to any of his comments. He may soon get tired of commenting to no one who is listening. Or he may go on until his heart stops beating and his fingers fall off. Either way I am done with reading his silliness.
Here’s my prediction. If you continue to gamble — bingo and lottery — over the duration of your life, you will lose about 20% more than you win. Thus, over time, you will be a net loser.”
This is the most pertinent thing you’ve written. Thanks for the advice. I haven’t gone to Bingo in about ten years. Thank you for deterring me and saving me from losing 20%!
Based on your gambling statements, it is clear you do not know the difference between Chance outcomes for specific events and the concept of Probability over time.
Again, thanks for telling me. I will not longer spend ten bucks on the lottery when the jackpot is over 30 million(I’ve got a big family, ten or so millions will only go so far).
Apparently the best you can do is to toss off snide comments that are so lame they lack even a hint of comic inventiveness.
I thought it was hilarious!
As the Tower of Babel story shows, the problem of communication has been recognized for a long time
An apt description in your case as you are an expert on babbling. Over and out!