The Big Picture: Relics

Creatural

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Spot1990 said:
Creatural said:
Also, everyone who is saying that the behavior of the people living in Africa was also savage and should give reason to the explorers to believe they were inferior needs to step back and examine themselves really closely. You're firstly assuming that all groups of African people behaved the same, they didn't, and secondly you're also saying that the more acceptable behavior of people for that time was that of the explorers. The explorers regularly did horrific things to the native people there and to their own people and implying that they were somehow more well behaved than all of the diverse cultures in Africa is not that great of an idea, that can make you racist and it also ignores how differently groups of people there actually behaved. Can we just not give into that type of thinking anymore?
That's not what we're saying at all. We're just saying it might not have been as simple as "No way could black people do that", because as I said, they thought the same things about ruins in countries populated by white people. No one's denying they were definitely racists.
You weren't saying that in particular, there was someone in here though that was literally calling the African people there savages and those are the type of people who that part of statement was addressing. I think, fortunately, that comment has since been deleted or otherwise banned from sight.

I was definitely not talking about you in that part of my comment.
 

Creatural

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Jegsimmons said:
grigjd3 said:
@Jegsimmons, actually, most civilizations tend to move both forward and backward in terms of technology, quality of life, etc. Europe went through the dark ages after the fall of Rome. Incan and Aztec ruins are all over South America, Pakistan and Afganistan used to be the center of culture and learning in the world and China has moved forward and backward so many times on this scale its ridiculous. To believe that society generally only moves forward is, well, ignorant of all of history.
Well here's the thing though... Europe's dark ages were fairly brief and followed up with booms in education and culture.
Asian is the same but they usually experienced some apocalyptic event and used previous tech to forward just a little more depending on seclusion...

Africa is (supposedly) the oldest inhabited continent on earth with the most resources and minerals.
and yet when they went backwards....they STAYED backwards. there are still tribes of African living in mud huts using stones. Tribes in Asia and south america use technology when they come across it, i remember seeing a documentary where they met up with cannibals in like Brazil and they wore friggin' shirts with logos on them and have metal and lighters.

So why is Africa the exception here?
Huts aren't actually a technological step backwards though for that area. Castles, while impressive architecturally, are actually pretty horrible to live in that environment for several reasons. Huts are better for your health because of how they let air in, you have less garbage to take care of in them, and they're actually better to use for your environment.

And the places where huts are used? It generally makes the most sense to use them instead of giant buildings like we have everywhere else. Just because a house is a good idea in Tennessee doesn't mean it's a good idea in parts of Africa.

Also, Africa has had, and still has, more war ravaging the continent than pretty much everywhere else on the planet and so people don't really have the time to put into making better structures while they're avoiding being murdered by their fellow man. Food is also still very hard to get in a lot of places, so that's going to get more attention than architecture too.
 

Jegsimmons

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Creatural said:
Jegsimmons said:
grigjd3 said:
@Jegsimmons, actually, most civilizations tend to move both forward and backward in terms of technology, quality of life, etc. Europe went through the dark ages after the fall of Rome. Incan and Aztec ruins are all over South America, Pakistan and Afganistan used to be the center of culture and learning in the world and China has moved forward and backward so many times on this scale its ridiculous. To believe that society generally only moves forward is, well, ignorant of all of history.
Well here's the thing though... Europe's dark ages were fairly brief and followed up with booms in education and culture.
Asian is the same but they usually experienced some apocalyptic event and used previous tech to forward just a little more depending on seclusion...

Africa is (supposedly) the oldest inhabited continent on earth with the most resources and minerals.
and yet when they went backwards....they STAYED backwards. there are still tribes of African living in mud huts using stones. Tribes in Asia and south america use technology when they come across it, i remember seeing a documentary where they met up with cannibals in like Brazil and they wore friggin' shirts with logos on them and have metal and lighters.

So why is Africa the exception here?
Huts aren't actually a technological step backwards though for that area. Castles, while impressive architecturally, are actually pretty horrible to live in that environment for several reasons. Huts are better for your health because of how they let air in, you have less garbage to take care of in them, and they're actually better to use for your environment.

And the places where huts are used? It generally makes the most sense to use them instead of giant buildings like we have everywhere else. Just because a house is a good idea in Tennessee doesn't mean it's a good idea in parts of Africa.

Also, Africa has had, and still has, more war ravaging the continent than pretty much everywhere else on the planet and so people don't really have the time to put into making better structures while they're avoiding being murdered by their fellow man. Food is also still very hard to get in a lot of places, so that's going to get more attention than architecture too.
hmm, very true....but war ravaged? that in its self brings up some questions.
if you look back on history almost every society has had a huge benefit frow war (long term anyway) through the 'necessity is the mother of innovation' idea. thats true from almost every culture, even the ones who lost. in an odd way, war (or just competition) has been one of the biggest driving forces for man in history right next to religion (different topic but i digress), so why didn't Africa ever innovate? with all the tribal conflict and competition, other civilizations would either adapt or innovate.
So why didn't Africa? its still kind of baffling to me.
 

Jegsimmons

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Therumancer said:
Jegsimmons said:
now if i may, do you (bob) think possibly that the reason they didnt think blacks built the civilizations was because that these were astounding castles and when they got there the people were....living in huts......thats sort of what is was thinking the whole vid. they probably thought that way because almost no other civilization has gone from castles to huts and seemed to move...backwards.
Now of course im not saying anything negative to be mean, i just like to think about all 3 sides of an issue (there's always at least 3 sides to any argument. Quiet frankly if i found a new civilization that lived in huts while finding remains of huge empires, i sort of wonder why the hell no one ever thought of rebuilding or replicating it for better living conditions. That may be part of the reason they couldn't believe they made it.

I find it odd that Bob can start out with a point about the issue of racism and how the term is used (ie in connection to first world social movements) and then jump right off the deep end into something kind of ridiculous that undermines any point that he might have been able to make with his initial prognosis.

The British explorers of the time were not exactly shocked by the idea of non-white civilizations having built things like that. I mean the dusky skinned Mediterreneans built the foundations of their own culture (Greek and Rome) back when what we call whites were still the Barbarians, we knew about the Egyptians and Persians (who are very dark skinned) and their great civilizations even if they were past their prime, and so on.

The thing with the "Lost City" trope in Africa is that the people there had no real abillity to do anything like that. Even looking at say the Egyptians you could see a culture that might not be at the top of the game, but there is a lot of history and enough of a civiliation to understand how they could have constructed a lot of these things. The thing with the Pyramids for is that they are more advanced than the civilization there, but constructed with primitive materials (stone blocks) which leads people to wonder if the Egyptians lost technology, had help, or whatever else... but it's not shocking in the same way as the African "lost cities" because you can at least see the possibility.

With Africa the people there didn't really have much in the way of tools, archetecture, or any kind of organized social structure to have justified such constructions. What's more a lot of the guys "puzzling" over such things have to deal with the fact that they had been studying the people in the region and can track a lot of these tribes and the patterns of where people were living back for centuries or even hundreds of years, with a relative
amount of cultural stagnation. The peoples there dont have the remnants showing that they might have been more advanced.

One old, prevailing theory is that the Africans WERE more advanced, but wound up getting on the bad side of the Greeks at a time when they practiced total war, and wound up getting decimated back to the stone age from which they never recovered. Some supporting evidence for this theory is how if you look at some of the stories that were compiled into Greek Myths and Legends you'll find referances in the way the stories were told to gods visiting places like Ethiopia to explain why they were elsewhere, which implies a degree of advancement (or at least respect as a civilization) but at the same time there is little direct evidence of a war, or much in the way of proof that the Greeks wiped them out at some point. The theory being similar to a lot of the arguements about Vikings having made it to North America where there is some minor evidence, but nothing concrete enough to paint a definate picture.

To be honest, racism was present during the early 20th century, but I don't think this itself was racist, or has tainted the idea. To date a lot of these cities and structures remain mysterious (as do ruins throughout the world) because a lot of them defy any efforts to paint a consistant picture of progress in the region. You can't reconcile history of the people in rhe region which can be tracked with the existance of the ruins.

On a creepy note, this is also the subject of a lot of TV shows on ancient mysteries and such. Things like Crystal Skulls being found on more than one continent, and how some geologists and experts have claimed to prove that certain stones used in construction on one place came from another part of the planet at a time when nobody could have quarried and transported them.

That said, a lot of what Bob is talking about is the myth of the "invisible knapsack" which is used by those with a vested interest in preserving racism for political power (to hold together racial voting blocks by promoting a common enemey to be opposed, whether it exists or not). Globally racism exists, China for example is massively racist and it represents like a third of the global population alone, but in the civilized Western World it's pretty much over with in any kind of mainstream sense.

What passes for "racism" in places like the US generally boils down to minority status in what is spiritually a democracy (even if it's actually a representitive Republic). The basic issue being that in a democracy, or something akin to one, the idea is that everyone has a say, and whatever gets the most people behind it is what everyone does. The thing is that when you represent a minority with special interests and motivations, that means consistantly losing to points of view that vastly outnumber you within the society. This leads to arguements that boil down to whether the society is working as intended (ie, they get a say, but don't have enough people to succeed against the majority in issues where they wind up in opposition), or if various principles in the country mean that not everyone should have an equal voice, with smaller groups being given a much louder voice and representation to create parity with the majority. There are no easy answers to this which is why it remains an issue, and it can be argued either way (I'm not going to get into it). People tend to confuse this issue (and it's a big one, that reaches into a lot of things) with actual racism. Today your more likely to see issues akin to say 25 members of a minority (blacks, asians, whatever) going up against 250 members of the white majority in a vote, and then insisting that despite the numbers that the 90% of people who voted against them should lose because there weren't enough of them present. Arguements about how changing such results or trying to force parity for minorities undermines the point of any kind of process to begin with, vs. arguements about how if the system works that way it means Minorities will never get what they want on ANY level because as minorities they will always be outvoted and overpowered within the system which amounts to a form of oppression. There is nothing racist about it despite people using that term when certain minorities come up, but it is a big issue.

In an absolute sense to find real racism in the mainstream you have to move away from the western world. If you go to say China, Japan, The Middle East, with strong feelings of racial dominance, purity, and destiny still present into th emodern day, you'll run into plenty of racism. It can be especially shocking when your white "cruader for equality" comes to the realization that internationally whites are a huge minority and plenty of people want to take us down for various reasons, including their own beliefs in their inherant superiority.

The US is only a little over 200 years old as well, while Bob can talk about the sheer inertia of racism, it can be argued that the US was eventually at the very tip of civil rights (and annoyed a lot of other nations pushing for it), a few decades ago... going back to the 1960s is like 20-25% of the history of our entire country. We aren't old enough to really have the kind of inertia that older and more established nations do with such matters, which is in part why we irritate people when we come walking in to stop genocides, ethnic cleansing, and other things that are the result of thousands of years of history in many cases.
wow, good read, but thats very interesting.
Though i have to argue against the greek or roman intervention point. while the greek empires did get pretty far, as did the romans, i dont think they ever got to central or southern africa. North africa yes. but not further down than that from what ive found.
in fact, from what i found, nobody until europe has ever set foot in part of that africa.
 

Balkan

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Racist thought arent always a pure hatred . Sometimer they are just a naive like the white explorers is africa .
 

MBE

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If you walked onto someone's rural acre of land, found a dilapitated abandoned house but then found the residents living in a mud hut not far away, would you not think the house was "lost" and that the people living in mud hut (instead of the fixer-upper house) would be, well, not exactly equal to yourself?

Why would a people move out of a perfectly advanced civilization/village and move into primitive mud and straw huts. It makes no sense.
 

the spud

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Who are some of your favorite internet celebrities? Any favorites? Any you despise? Anyone who inspires you?
 

arigomi

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MBE said:
Why would a people move out of a perfectly advanced civilization/village and move into primitive mud and straw huts. It makes no sense.
A civilization can fall due to war, disease, famine, or natural disasters. The survivors are forced to move away to settle elsewhere. It would take many generations before descendants would stumble across the ruins and choose to settle near them. During this time, a lot of knowledge about the previous civilization can be lost because oral tradition can be unreliable at preserving history.

European civilizations didn't experience this because their geographic location didn't impose as many challenges to creating a society. Sources of fresh water were abundant. The weather conditions allowed for agriculture and raising livestock. Natural resources for creating tools and constructing sturdy buildings weren't difficult to gather. In Africa, fresh water can be difficult to find. Unpredictable weather patterns made farming difficult. Many of the animals were unsuitable as livestock.
 

Creatural

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Jegsimmons said:
Creatural said:
Jegsimmons said:
grigjd3 said:
@Jegsimmons, actually, most civilizations tend to move both forward and backward in terms of technology, quality of life, etc. Europe went through the dark ages after the fall of Rome. Incan and Aztec ruins are all over South America, Pakistan and Afganistan used to be the center of culture and learning in the world and China has moved forward and backward so many times on this scale its ridiculous. To believe that society generally only moves forward is, well, ignorant of all of history.
Well here's the thing though... Europe's dark ages were fairly brief and followed up with booms in education and culture.
Asian is the same but they usually experienced some apocalyptic event and used previous tech to forward just a little more depending on seclusion...

Africa is (supposedly) the oldest inhabited continent on earth with the most resources and minerals.
and yet when they went backwards....they STAYED backwards. there are still tribes of African living in mud huts using stones. Tribes in Asia and south america use technology when they come across it, i remember seeing a documentary where they met up with cannibals in like Brazil and they wore friggin' shirts with logos on them and have metal and lighters.

So why is Africa the exception here?
Huts aren't actually a technological step backwards though for that area. Castles, while impressive architecturally, are actually pretty horrible to live in that environment for several reasons. Huts are better for your health because of how they let air in, you have less garbage to take care of in them, and they're actually better to use for your environment.

And the places where huts are used? It generally makes the most sense to use them instead of giant buildings like we have everywhere else. Just because a house is a good idea in Tennessee doesn't mean it's a good idea in parts of Africa.

Also, Africa has had, and still has, more war ravaging the continent than pretty much everywhere else on the planet and so people don't really have the time to put into making better structures while they're avoiding being murdered by their fellow man. Food is also still very hard to get in a lot of places, so that's going to get more attention than architecture too.
hmm, very true....but war ravaged? that in its self brings up some questions.
if you look back on history almost every society has had a huge benefit frow war (long term anyway) through the 'necessity is the mother of innovation' idea. thats true from almost every culture, even the ones who lost. in an odd way, war (or just competition) has been one of the biggest driving forces for man in history right next to religion (different topic but i digress), so why didn't Africa ever innovate? with all the tribal conflict and competition, other civilizations would either adapt or innovate.
So why didn't Africa? its still kind of baffling to me.
Well, no, actually a lot of civilizations didn't adapt well to war. There were a lot of civilizations and tribes that have been destroyed completely because of war, we just tend not to think about them since not a lot of history is left about the people our ancestors completely wiped out and not many people are going to care about people they can't be related to. And there are still groups everywhere that are suffering because they didn't win wars.

Look at Native American tribes in the U.S. in the modern day, they were war ravaged and most tribes still haven't recovered from it in one way or another. Parts of the ruling population still treat them pretty terribly too, kind of like in Africa where the groups with control you will notice have a lot of nice stuff going for them whereas the people below them have relatively nothing, so they can't recover as well as groups that don't have such things to deal with.

Also, history does show that there are actually more nations that do poorly after war than not. If you're using the U.S. as an example for countries that have done well after war you're using a very rare example and need to keep in mind that part of the reason the U.S. has done so well is that the wars didn't happen on U.S. soil. After WWI Germany, and other European nations, did terribly with everything they had and then it of course helped lead them into WWII. WWII did at first revitalize the economy for some of Europe, but after the war the economy began to tank for awhile. The U.S. was saved in economy because our entertainment industry boomed right after the war, but if you look at stuff now we're actually losing economy and technological advances right now partly because we're still in war (which is expensive) and there's no boom here to save us because we already have an entertainment industry, so we're not suddenly spending money on something newish and exciting, and because it's unfortunately not adapting to modern technology and the way it's being used.

War is actually very damaging for the most part and it's not really worth it unless you manage to pull resources from it that are worthwhile.

In the past Europe took a long, long time to adapt to war before any real innovations were made. The Viking raids on Europe actually destroyed a lot of things for Europeans and they didn't really adapt to survive them until they got the Feudal system going and even then the Feudal system was in many ways a step back from the things they had before and part of the reason it worked was that people had some land to retreat back into whereas people in Africa don't. They don't have other places to go and hide whereas most civilizations that have survived and made great innovations with war have had at least a few cities to retreat into. This only applies to the parts of Africa where that's happening though.

There actually parts of Africa that are extremely well developed in terms of buildings, health care, and several over things, but people tend to mistakenly still attribute all that development to people who aren't native or they just don't know about it. Johannesburg is a pretty impressive city, it's one of the largest cities in the world and it is the largest city that isn't next to a river, lake, or coastline (this is really impressive if you know how unlikely it is for cities to grow without bodies of water such as these), but people often unfortunately don't give the credit to native people there that they deserve for this city and they also just tend to not hear about the place.

But, none of that, of course makes it so that Africa as a whole is any less ravaged than it is or makes it so the people under attack there can automatically develop perfectly against it. The other thing to keep in mind is that a lack of education is also making it harder for most people to adapt. Even other places have had sanctuaries where people like monks could keep knowledge alive, without monks and nuns after the dark ages in Europe I can promise you that not nearly as many advances that needed to be made in technology to survive would have been made and we might even have had different civilizations dominating the world at this point. In Africa that's not really the case, sadly, and a lot of good knowledge isn't being passed around and the good knowledge being given to people is being given alongside some really awful ideas (like that there's actually a cure for AIDS and it's super easy to fix).
 

MarsProbe

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Funny this should crop up just now. It just so happened not more than a few days ago I downloaded a game on the app store called, strangely enough, The Lost City. With environments not that far removed from what Bob was describing here. Figures.
 

Proverbial Jon

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Nov 10, 2009
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Did I see racial stereotyping of the British in your mockery of the invading colonists there, Bob?

Oh ho ho, how very droll!
 

omega 616

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Actually when I hear "lost city" I think more of "I a am legend" or Racoon City with less zombies.

I dunno why I jump to more modern day cities rather than national treasure style stuff.
 

nelsonr100

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Pretty sure you are finding racism in your own assumptions of what these colonial explorers were thinking.

Surely if you were walking through a vast area of land, populated by many people living mostly in tribal communities of earthen and wooden huts/houses, when you came across a massive stone ruin, you would definitely wonder where it came from.

NOT because you are racist and don't think the local population could have done such a thing.
It was through simple observation of the fact that the local population no longer built things in that way, and that the cities which were built in that way were left to ruin! People think the same thing of stone henge fo goodness sake.... ugh, such an annoying episode
 

demalo

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My mail bag question: What movie or movie genre hasn't been portrayed well or lacks portrayal in the current entertainment industry?

It seems a lot of the same themes are played up again and again, is there anything you can think of that you feel would be a good change up or shake down?
 

Alex Sellers

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I don't know how funny it'd be, But since the SPC was this week i thought a thing on abridging would be funny. Maybe just a whole episode on Team four star?
 

monkyvirus

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nelsonr100 said:
Pretty sure you are finding racism in your own assumptions of what these colonial explorers were thinking.

Surely if you were walking through a vast area of land, populated by many people living mostly in tribal communities of earthen and wooden huts/houses, when you came across a massive stone ruin, you would definitely wonder where it came from.
That's what I was thinking, though I won't deny colonialists were racist I would think it was simply the fact they saw a ruined castle and then they saw people who weren't even using a lot of stone and thought "hmmm, well evidently this isn't the sought of thing they built.

I mean sure they were, by all accounts, pretty racist but I wonder if you've just applied that assumption of constant racism when it wasn't there.