I guess the constant moaning from Blacks is uncalled for because they’ve always “thrived” as a minority.
For me, thatoneguy is a pure racist.
I will remind him that all homo sapiens were black until some left Africa.
i will remind him that African men have colonized the whole of Africa with primitive tools and that’s not a mark of stupidity.
Powder gun, paper, number 0, printing and other inventions were not created in Europe.
And, by your reasoning, most poor are less intelligent that rich people.
And, last, diversity is where people choose to look as such. In the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, in Europe, it was unthinkable that Catholics and reformers live in the same country.
Hundred of thousands of people were killed because of that. Not a proof of great intelligence.
And, about the successful development of White civilisation, don’t forget to put on the scales, 2 world wars, some genocides, in Europe and outside Europe, global climate change and so.
In July 1885, French parliament debated about civilisation.
I just give you an abstract of Georges Clemenceau speech against it, translated by Google.
Mr. Clemenceau: Superior races have a right over inferior races which they exercise, this right, by a particular transformation, is at the same time a duty of civilization. This is in its own words the thesis of Mr. Ferry, and we see the French government exercising its right over inferior races by going to war against them and converting them by force to the benefits of civilization. Superior races? Inferior races, that is soon said! For my part, I have been singularly rebuffing them since I saw German scientists scientifically demonstrate that France had to be defeated in the Franco-German war because the French are of an inferior race to the German. Since that time, I confess, I have looked twice before turning towards a man and a civilization, and pronouncing: inferior man or civilization. Inferior race, the Hindus! With this great refined civilization which is lost in the mists of time! with this great Buddhist religion which left India for China, with this great flowering of art of which we still see today the magnificent vestiges! Inferior race, the Chinese! with this civilization whose origins are unknown and which seems to have been pushed at first to its extreme limits.
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That’s confusing centuries of human history and how it relates to geography and natural resources with “groups”.
And what is your measure of intelligence? Is it intelligent to enslave? Is it intelligent to cut down forests? Is it intelligent to take the understanding of the power within an atom and make a bomb?
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But for ignorant racists, yes.
I’m reminded of this clip. (don’t need to have a FB account. I certainly don’t.)
You are so wrong. Intelligence is equally distributed among all races.
It is knowledge that is distributed according to need of the particular environment and population density.
When there is no need for use of sophisticated tools, they won’t evolve. Let me remind you that most scientific advances are a result of war for land or treasure.
But if we consider that modern medicine still relies for 70% on natural resources and medicine men in the deepest jungles of Africa were as knowledgeable in the preparation and use of medicine as any modern doctor today.
Ask yourself, for all our technical advances are we living in a sustainable society ?
We have managed to destroy the global environment in a few hundre years of “superior intelligence” and “industrialization”, where so-called “primitive” societies lived for thousands of years in harmony with nature.
Which is the more “intelligent” use of global resources?
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Is that a sign of intelligence?
This is why I ask value questions. People think they arrived at differences in races using logic and evidence. In my experience, they ignore the logic and evidence that races don’t exist. There’s not much scientific discussion after that. So my question is, why do they think what they think? The next level revolves around culture, but it’s always attached to appearance and country of origin. I’ve never heard good reasoning from there.
There are cultural reasons for differences, so it seems to them like they are on to something, but if you point to the problems with people who look like them, the merry-go-round starts spinning and the music gets discordant. See my post #67 above
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Complete nonsense. Medicine men were not equivalent to modern doctors at all.
As for sustainability, our society is not sustainable because it’s dynamic. Things go up and down, which is the price we pay for being rationalists. Primitive societies might live in so-called harmony with nature – but the price they pay for that is ignorance. Not to mention dysentery and tapeworms.
One can’t be separated from the other.
All this and much more. The most primitive peoples also have slaves and cut down forests, but they don’t do much with them.
It’s funny that someone like you who often says how far we’ve come because of our reason-based society is asking what have we ever done?
Western civilization is not perfect. Yet, it is very best civilization that has ever existed.
I’m going to try to untangle this, not as much for that one guy, as for myself. Discussion is a way to learn. It’s great when everyone in the discussion learns but that doesn’t always happen.
Yes, I would rather be alive now, rather than anytime in history. The question is not “what time in history is better”, the question is “how do we make this one better?" It’s better to be alive now because we have more tools than ever to answer that.
That would be funny if I had asked that. What I did ask is how you measure intelligence. You sidestepped that. You have been trying to use some measure of “societal intelligence” or maybe “group intelligence” as proof of individual intelligence. When you try to clarify, your logic becomes circular. Logic like, “black people get targeted by the police more because they are more violent”, or “black people aren’t kept out of white schools because of white oppression, it’s because of their own culture of not valuing education.” I’m paraphrasing common language, not yours specifically.
I gave examples of societal results of what I considered poorly thought-out decisions. And you said,
Missing the point. I would have to figure out what you mean by “primitive peoples”, but that probably won’t happen. Matt Dillahunty is famous for ending discussions at this point by hammering on the point that slavery is wrong and has always been wrong. The brutal forms of it are obvious but he includes any societal or individual support for a person owning another person in any way. With that in mind, “primitive people” have lived just about everywhere on earth, and still do. Slavery never ended. It gets codified in different ways its form changes.
My questions about intelligence were an attempt to lead to a discussion about what intelligent people should do to improve their lives and the lives of people around them. It was not a rhetorical question meant to imply modern people are stupid, or Western civilization is stupid. There are stupid people everywhere. My question, the question, is how do we leverage individual intelligence?
When you responded to me at this point…
that’s right, they can’t be separated. That’s what I said. So why do you separate them? You create a causal chain from low intelligence to bad groups. Low intelligence happens in all groups, and highly intelligent people can overcome the bad structures of a group. The separation is that an individual isn’t a group. But the types of groups we are talking about, “racial” and geographic, are always a mix low and high intelligence.
Yes, you have said this over and over, and it’s not logical. You separate individual intelligence, as if someone could be born, learn the wisdom of the ages, and create a new society in one lifetime. As if a country in Africa could write a Constitution tomorrow that allowed them to enslave thousands of people to grow some commodity that would be sold by a few so they could build better weapons and drop them on another continent and emerge as a world power. That’s not how history unfolds.
The people who are dropping the bombs now were handed resources and rules to do that and they believed it was some sort of natural order that gave it to them. That’s a belief that I say is unintelligent. Instead of comments like this,
I’m saying intelligence, which includes the use of reason and logic, can see those “big patterns” and relate them to individual action, and come up with theories, and make changes at the group level to test those theories, and learn how to engage everyone’s skills and abilities, as well as how to restrict them when they are used for harm, and continually build on what we learn, correcting our errors as we go. None of that rests on one group containing more intelligent people than another. This is what has driven progress for centuries.
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Now you’re talking about the best time to be alive. That’s wasn’t the question. I said Western Civilization is better overall than others. FWIW, today is not the peak of Western civilization.
Individual intelligence forms group intelligence. But individual intelligence doesn’t matter that much in the big picture because we have to interact with others. Dumb people are even more dumb in a group, and smart people in a group are smarter.
The ultimate measure of intelligence is how advanced a society is. However, this is a problem for liberalism because not all societies are advanced or equal.
“Primitive” just means very basic.
And we do leverage individual intelligence. Intelligent people can go far in life, I’ve never of society trying to limit them.
When did I separate them? Different groups are always formed by their environments. But some environments select for higher intelligence and other behavioral traits, which can give them an advantage over other groups.
You keep bringing up individual intelligence like it’s some factor I’m missing. Individuals don’t create societies, groups create societies.
If the average intelligence of the group is high, then that society will become more advanced than the society made by the group with the lower average intelligence.
This is good up to the last sentence. It does rest on an intelligent group.
You said “best civilization ever”. Not sure what you’re arguing here.
Just don’t agree with that.
Killing and jailing intellectuals is a standard dictator move.
Maybe you don’t like my word choice. I’m trying to describe your cause/effect logic and the way you say group outcomes indicate intelligence within the group.
That seems reasonable and I wouldn’t try to counter that. What we’re talking about though is the opposite. That is, is it true that if a society, not the whole world but a country or region, is less advanced, does that mean the average intelligence in the group is lower?
Besides the problem of defining “advanced”, I don’t think it’s true. There are too many other factors to consider.
How much of your computer’s ability do you use? Would you say you are a basic user ?
Does that make you primitive?
Let me remind you that conservation relies on respecting the earth’s ecology.
That is a basic tenet of intelligent living in a complex world.
And the fact that 70% of modern medicine is using the same natural resources as the “primitive” medicine man in the deep jungle..
And another reminder. Many diseases were introduced by European colonizers.
Have you ever wondered why man is considered a “invasive species”?
Are invasive species more intelligent than the species they replace?
Reading you, i am really wondering if being able to do things on a greater scale is a mark of intelligence.
I would use the classical meme : " We are dwarves on the shoulder of giants. "
We are the same as our ancestors, and they had to be intelligent to create civilisations. If they had not mastered the fire, invented the wheel, domesticated animals, found the way to make and work metals, we would not be there.
And from another point of view, western people are totally stupid.
To be able to wage 2 worldwide wars, killing millions of people, to be able to commit genocides, to destroy the planet’s ecology and go on, to be able to follow fascists and stupid leaders, are not great signs of intelligence.
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Of course it is.
I agree. Thank you Pythagoras, just to name one.
Yet, everyone else wants to live among us. The reason they want to live among us is because we do a lot less of the bad things you mentioned than they do.
You seem to fotget that mathematics was invented by Sumerians in Mesopotamia.
From Copilot;
The Sumerians left the earliest evidence of mathematics in writing, using clay tablets to record multiplication tables, geometry exercises, and division problems1. The Pythagoreans began studying mathematics as a “demonstrative discipline” in the 6th century BC, coining the term "mathematics"2. Greek mathematicians shared their discoveries with the world, leading to the word “mathematics” derived from the Greek word "mathema"3. The Babylonians and Egyptians also developed mathematical concepts for practical purposes45.
This has to go here…
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Who is this man who says interesting things ?
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It’s a clip from a TV show called, “The Newsroom.” The actor is Jeff Daniels.
Please understand, Morgan, that the national news in the U.S. could not be more shallow. It’s very sad. There is often more depth in entertainment shows like The Newsroom, or The Daily Show.
Social media has taken a huge toll on the world’s intelligence.
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