White People are... Better?

[Thyunda]

I always thought the reason for it was necessity. The African tribes, for example, needed only shade from the sun, water and food. The land isn't much good for farming, and animals would tend to stick around water, till it dries up. So a nomadic existence is in order, there's no need to settle, since a settlement would last only as long as the water source.

Whereas in 'white' countries, the colder weather means finding permanent shelter is more practical, and the permanent water sources make long-term civilisation easily viable. It's not that white races were the only ones to rape, pillage and conquer. It was just that when two desert tribes clashed, all that was at stake was the people in the tribe and whatever small possessions they had. The permanence of European communities and such meant more was fielded, more was gained, and more communities learned the benefit of co-operation, eventually forming the nations we know today. So then the Western civilisations created through necessity and centuries of escalating war, met the cultures that had fought their wars in a constant stalemate.

 

[WanderingFool]

Guns, germs and steel?

Anyway, some group was always going to do better than the others, based on random chance.

Europe happened to develop faster than other groups, or perhaps didn't run into stagnation, and was able to dominate the others. This will change at some point, but hasn't yet.

Look at places like Japan or Singapore, for example, they were able to make the most of the changing world and have done well for themselves as nations.

While I agree, I just feel like pointing out that while Japan was an impressive nation before WW2, AFTER WW2 most of its progress was due to massive rebuilding and reconstructing efforts from the US. It's why the USA and Japan are best buddies today even though we nuked them... twice.

Dropped them right on residential cities, too. The Yanks attempted to tell us both cities happened to be important military points, but considering something like 90% or more of the causalities were civilians >_>

Pretty much as disgraceful as the Jewish Holocaust, only smaller.

Oh, shit. I just got here and already this thread is going someplace I dont want to go...

 

[geK0]

You know, because China, Japan and India haven't been doing much other than banging stones together for the past thousand years; haven't been successful in the least

 

[Twilight_guy]

For one, its less about skin color and more a response to environmental pressures. If the guys in Europe happened to be black they'd have 'evolved' the same way as if they were white. Its matte of where they were and where other people were and such. For two, your using the European standard of 'goodness' as your judgement. The values of 'western' countries are not the same values as other places and other ways of life are not 'less good' or below the European way but are different. You should do some research into the principles of anthropology and the history of the world. I think you will probably find the subjects interesting in relation to your question.

 

[AngelBlackChaos]

Guns, germs and steel?

Anyway, some group was always going to do better than the others, based on random chance.

Europe happened to develop faster than other groups, or perhaps didn't run into stagnation, and was able to dominate the others. This will change at some point, but hasn't yet.

Look at places like Japan or Singapore, for example, they were able to make the most of the changing world and have done well for themselves as nations.

While I agree, I just feel like pointing out that while Japan was an impressive nation before WW2, AFTER WW2 most of its progress was due to massive rebuilding and reconstructing efforts from the US. It's why the USA and Japan are best buddies today even though we nuked them... twice.

Dropped them right on residential cities, too. The Yanks attempted to tell us both cities happened to be important military points, but considering something like 90% or more of the causalities were civilians >_>

Pretty much as disgraceful as the Jewish Holocaust, only smaller.

Wow. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark. Not even in the same country! No. Just, no.

I'd call dropping nuclear weapons on innocent men, women and children akin to genocide--just on a much smaller scale. Areas of Japan are still fucked from it; birth defects, cancers and disease still claim lives. Watched a sad documentary about it a few weeks ago on The Discovery Channel. They interviewed a woman who was a child when it happened. The U.S. wanted to know what the radiation would do to humans, especially children, so they organized "medical research" teams to go over and "help." She vividly recalled being inspected and made to take her clothes off in front of a room full of men. Disgusting stuff, really.

One of the many reasons I hate the U.S. with all of my tiny, black heart, lol.

Well for Japanese: Rape of Nanking
China's official estimate is about 300,000 casualties, based on the evaluation of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Estimates from Japanese historians vary widely, in the vicinity of 40,000?200,000.

Every single country, and ethnicity has had their own murders, their own atrocities. Every. Single. One. I would never once blame someone uninvolved for any massacre, just because of where they are from. Not every person should be held responsible, nor should they be. I have yet to find a single country without murder crimes in their history books.

So. Generalize again.

As for modern war crimes? Should I blame every person just because their country decided on war? There has never been a time where every single person in a country had a choice about its country's choice of war. Sure, we vote for politicians...who have the choice to ignore their constituents after they are in office, and sure we can protest. Thats for the adults, not for the children at time of war. They have no choice, and adults tend to have only the illusion. The point is, only the people in power have a choice, and the one with the controls. That is all.

 

[Weaver]

The Ottoman empire greatly outclassed anything at the time in terms of culture and technology. They had indoor plumbing while the europeans were shitting in holes.

 

[Ryan Hughes]

OT: Well, not exactly. First of all, the idea that Europe has constantly been at the forefront of learning and technology is outright wrong. A few examples: The oldest surviving work of literature that we have -I.E. something that tries to communicate aesthetic pleasure through the written language- is the book of Job in the Bible. After the fall of the Greek intelligentsia, and the subsequent burning of the library in Athens, all works of classical Greek philosophy that survived were located in Arabia. All versions of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle today are actually translated from Arabic, not from Greek because none of those works survived. And, while Europe toiled in feudalism, they invented our number system and algebra in Baghdad, while in India and China they began developing extensive philosophical systems that still survive today.

Fast forward to the colonization of America, and most of the colonies would have been wiped out if not for the superior agricultural knowledge of the native Americans, specifically the innovations of fertilizer and crop rotation, not to mention the ideas of wildlife management, rather than extinction hunting. So, while the Europeans had amazing Naval and Navigation Technology that allowed them to sail the Ocean, the Native Americans had superior agricultural technology.

I could go on. The main basis for the advancement of European society were the advancements of Military Technology, like the cannon, the ocean-fairing ship, and advanced monetary and trade systems, which all allowed them to colonize other countries and plunder their resources, leading to their greater wealth.

Now, I am not saying that Whites are inherently evil, in fact, the voices against colonization and economic plunder were vast and diverse in Europe and America, but they failed to stop these things largely because of their own governments and vested financial interests.

 

[Khayl]

As a great man once said:

''Its not that white people are BETTER, its just that BEING white is CLEARLY better. i could get into a time machine, go to any point in history, and it would be fucking awesome when i got there. now, a black guy, trying to doing the same thing? ''oh, nothing before 1980, thanks''

 

[Yopaz]

Well, Europeans civilizations basically raped, pillaged, and ruined many civilizations that were advancing at a decent pace. Then they colonized all the places that had the best resources, usually over the ruins of those civilizations they wrecked. It was how the world worked back then, really. It could have just as easily been any other geographically based ethnicity that did so. Nobody's really to blame for it, it was just how the world worked back then.

But how did the white population, much, much younger than the others, manage to gain better technology, health and government that quick? We sort of went from zero to one hundred in five minutes, while everyone else struggled to get up to sixty. Then, with our technology that must have seemed godly to the poor natives, we took over everything.

It's quite simple. In Europe there's a lot easier to build a society. Agriculture is easier because there's easy access to water. The weather has made us make sturdy houses. The structure about this is what eventually led to battles being fought over land and this pushed forward the birth of the feudal system with rulers. Huge societies were born and with time new technology was invented and passed on to the masses where someone improved on that.

Life in some of the African countries is a lot harder. There's the heat which makes agriculture hard, the wild life is wilder and more fit to the environment than the relatively young human species living there. There is malaria, there are sleeping diseases, there has never been the need to move past the stage we call primitive.

Really, there's too much for me to go into, but there is a lot of coincidences and there's a lot of environmental differences. It's hard to say much about the societies they had before our involvement, but Europeans invading has torn down what there was to tear down. Since then there has been corrupt leaders with no wish to make a good country and just reap in wealth of their position. In short there's both sociology, geography and biology to consider here.

I might be wrong about everything I say here though since history has never been my strong subject.

 

[Voulan]

It comes down to cultural values. Western cultures typically favour development and progression, and others were likely perfectly happy the way they were. Their system worked for them, and they felt no need to change it. It's not a question of intelligence, but a consideration of the fact that people think differently, do things differently and have different values.

And 'white' people weren't the only technologically able cultures. Just look at architecture from around the world, and you'll see that evey culture in existence had very clever ways of doing things.

 

[BNguyen]

snip

So how were the Caucasians able to steal away inventions from other cultures if they were not in some way much more cunning or had some means to be better than the culture they stole from? If the cultures they stole from were advanced then they must of had a blind eye turned when the Caucasians picked their pockets.

And you're saying the Romans weren't European, great way to miss my point and a fact of what the Romans were.
Besides, I already mentioned how the Chinese were ahead of the curve before the Europeans were and while the Ottomans and Egyptians had impressive empires, their cultural heritage kept them developing as far as they could have, I mean in WWI the Ottomans still mainly used horses.

And on your last point, you still failed to notice that I had already mentioned the Chinese.
And Australia suffered from the same cultural isolation as the Native Americans, mostly keeping to small regions. So even though their culture may be older, they still did not develop utilizing technology and inventions like other nameable parts of the world, such as CHINA and parts of EUROPE.

What I am trying to tell you, but you don't seem to want to grasp, is that humanity has lived in portions of the world for far longer than in Europe, yet the Europeans somehow advanced culturally faster than MOST others. The Chinese were also ahead way before the European region by already having a massive unified nation, at most, the European side were still under Roman influence and at the same time, the Native Americans, Africans, Aborigines, and peoples of South and Central America, while having some beautifully crafted cities, were still living agrarian lives while other areas had developed long range sea travel, politics, and math.
And just so you know, the Ottoman Empire was not that old, developing sometime in the late 1290's AD, not like the European tribes and Chinese who had been around since practically the 17th century BC (for the Chinese) and for Europe around 8000 BC (based only on Stone Henge, I don't really have a clue on what structures might be older).

And I'd like to know what you think the Caucasians actually stole from other cultures in order to as you seem to think got ahead of everyone else.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

What is with all of the people saying that Europeans got ahead because they're they were more cruel and ruthless? If I said that kind of statement about black people, or just about any other groups racism flags would be flying left and right. Europeans weren't bigger dicks, they just had bigger sticks to be dicks with. If you're going to bring up the fact that America nuked Japan, the main reason they did that and Japan didn't was because the US actually had nukes. It's not like Japan wasn't free of atrocities by any stretch, if you've ever looked into the Nanking Massacre. The soldiers responsible for that were convinced that the Chinese were lower lifeforms than them and what they did was completely acceptable. That was 2 years before World War 2.

OT: Personally I think it's mostly circumstances. Different cultures were dominant at different periods of time, and Europeans happened to become dominant during the period where the most technological leaps were occuring

 

[teebeeohh]

my working theory is that europe always had a lot of different powers and was never unified, resulting in constant struggle. and struggle is the lifeblood of progress, sure we would have figured out how to build jet planes and and use nuclear power eventually but since it looked like it could win this giant war we worked on it faster.

 

[ThrobbingEgo]

It's widely believed the first of our species developed in Africa, before later moving through what is now Asia and eventually up to Europe. While the oldest human being we've ever found was discovered in Australia (50,000 ish years-old, btw) Africa is thought to be the pool from which the majority of humans developed. They spent a long, long time there, then moved North and into China, establishing the longest running empire yet. White people as we've come to know, didn't arrive on the scene until both the two other major ethnic "types" if you will, had already been growing, learning, evolving and advancing for quite some time. But somehow, white man managed to acquire a massive technological lead, obtaining things like mechanical engineering, health care and medicine, advanced sanitation and water systems, weapons of war--you get the idea.

'White people' aren't an actual genetic race. Neither are 'black people.' Race, as most people identify it, is more of a social construction based on largely superficial appearance than it is on genetics. A black Kenyan may have more genetically in common with a white Scandinavian than a black Ethiopian.

 

[BNguyen]

OT: Well, not exactly. First of all, the idea that Europe has constantly been at the forefront of learning and technology is outright wrong. A few examples: The oldest surviving work of literature that we have -I.E. something that tries to communicate aesthetic pleasure through the written language- is the book of Job in the Bible. After the fall of the Greek intelligentsia, and the subsequent burning of the library in Athens, all works of classical Greek philosophy that survived were located in Arabia. All versions of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle today are actually translated from Arabic, not from Greek because none of those works survived. And, while Europe toiled in feudalism, they invented our number system and algebra in Baghdad, while in India and China they began developing extensive philosophical systems that still survive today.

Fast forward to the colonization of America, and most of the colonies would have been wiped out if not for the superior agricultural knowledge of the native Americans, specifically the innovations of fertilizer and crop rotation, not to mention the ideas of wildlife management, rather than extinction hunting. So, while the Europeans had amazing Naval and Navigation Technology that allowed them to sail the Ocean, the Native Americans had superior agricultural technology.

I could go on. The main basis for the advancement of European society were the advancements of Military Technology, like the cannon, the ocean-fairing ship, and advanced monetary and trade systems, which all allowed them to colonize other countries and plunder their resources, leading to their greater wealth.

Now, I am not saying that Whites are inherently evil, in fact, the voices against colonization and economic plunder were vast and diverse in Europe and America, but they failed to stop these things largely because of their own governments and vested financial interests.

actually, the oldest surviving text from anywhere was written by the Babylonians on stone tablets documenting Gilgamesh, written in Sumerian I think and barely any of it is known to man because there is barely any record of the language

 

[Ryan Hughes]

actually, the oldest surviving text from anywhere was written by the Babylonians on stone tablets documenting Gilgamesh, written in Sumerian I think and barely any of it is known to man because there is barely any record of the language

The oldest surviving text, yes, the oldest surviving work of literature, no. Literature appeals to aesthetics, and since the Tale of Gilgamesh was originally written in ideographs that are arguably one step below Egyptian Hieroglyphs it is not a work of literature. While Chinese are Japanese writings are actually Ideographic, they are far more advanced than the Meso-Babylonian, which was not capable of any kind of aesthetic, and the aesthetics in the translations have been added by the translators.

Job, on the other hand, was written line-alliteratively in couplets. Meaning, Line 1 started with character "A", as did line 2. Line 3 began with character "B" as did line 4. Lines 5 and 6 began with character "X," and so on. So, this not only is the oldest work of literature surviving today, but also the oldest example of the poetic meter.

*Edit. According to the Wiki, Job was written in the 5th or 6th century B.C. But there are a number of dissenters that believe differently, some even feeling that it is pre-Abrahamic. But regardless of which was first -Job or Gilgamesh- we can agree that it neither originated in Europe, so the point is still valid. Personally, I think that Job is pre-Exodus, as no mention of the Hebrew Law is made during the course of the story, but think what you will.

Also it is interesting to note that ancient cultures did have writing systems in Europe, some maybe even as old as 1,000 BC or older, but unfortunately non of their writings have survived.

 

[Kinguendo]

And in which year did you stop on you "history bent"? 1999? If you were actually researching histories of various "black" nations you would realize why they are now significantly worse than "white" nations... P.S. that stereotype about black people being thieves... yeah, its that but not a stereotype and reversed.

UGH! Fine! I will tell you... our ancestors stole it all. Africa, believe it or not, actually had crops before we rolled into town. We got rid of those for what is known as "Cash Crops" like cotton and sugar, sugar is yummy but a balanced meal it aint. We also stole their natural resources and we left them with no infrastructure to build upon. We didnt help in any way, we didnt industrialize or anything... we just took from them and now there are some in the "white" community who have the fucking gall to be racist.

People like to try and whitewash it all by saying it happened so long ago it doesnt matter... well, Africa is an impoverished continent with rampant disease and starvation directly because of the actions of our nations and we benefitted greatly from what we took from them. You live relatively comfortably and happy because of what your nation stole and killed for, g'night kids!