British soldier left to starve after losing JSA

[Tuuvi]

Tuuvi, You seem to gather quite a lot of fields under one roof there... It is of course a scientists job to question things, but some moderation is in order.

Either you are trolling, or I am quite worried about you mate.

I was trolling, but I had a point I was trying to make. To me it seems like this is how people who believe in fringe theories decide what sources of information to trust. If a source confirms their beliefs then it is considered a trustworthy source, but the scientific consensus which contradicts their beliefs is dismissed as just "political correctness" or a "conspiracy" or what have you.

Maybe my memory is off but I remember you stated in a religion thread once that you trust in science above all else. However whenever someone tries to point out to you that the scientific consensus is that there are no biological human races, and thus no genetically determined differences between Blacks, Arabs, and others, you just dismiss it as political correctness, and that frustrates me a bit.

To back up my statement about the scientific consensus on race, here is the statement on biological aspects of race from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

[Strike For The South]

Can we define "races" please? Every couple of months we have this arguement and simply take race as something concrete and resolute. But the way "blacks" and "Africa" are being thrown around here shows we are simply painting the "other" with a broad brush. It's insulting to an area larger than Europe to be treated as such a monolith.

I don't believe in all this 19th century racial hokum. It's simply another boogeyman continental Europe can sink its teeth into. I will, however, say this. I am firm proponent of the superiority of an Anglo cultural tradition that stretches back as far as the property rights of pre Norman England or as recently as Fairfax and Cromwell.

Some "cultures" are best left to the trash heap of history. The German penchant for autocracy, The French fetish for tyrannical freedom, Russian barbarism, and the Irish and general are things best to be avoided for the sake of good government. Likewise an upper class with no sense of noblesse oblige and a lower class who has been deprived of all it's dignity.

I blame a lot of things for this (at least from an American perspective). The marginalization of mainline Protestantism in favor of Evangelicalism and Catholicism has led to a worship of worldly prosperity and a desire to be led by a strongman. This bleeds into the class warfare where the ultra rich become deified for what basically amounts (past a certain point) to luck. Identity politics eschews comprise and piecemeal solutions in favor of unworkable ideological purity.

And here we are blaming the browns. Sad.

[Husar]

*I guess I just have a problem with the idea that there's really an anglo-tradition at all.

Your humbleness is just more proof for the inherent superiority of the anglo master race.

[Kadagar_AV]

Poor whites blame immigrants for the fact that they have crappy jobs. Then, when immigrants come and replace them (which of course does occasionally happen in the course of the economy, ignorant rhetoric aside) they blame them for that too.

The only thing important here is the sense of the "other," and how it is being cultivated and by whom. Immigration policy is a magnet for the worst crazies.

White people blame immigration more than the immigrants, from what I have seen. "We shouldn't accept this many" is a far, FAR, more common thing to hear than "I blame the black people".

Me, I'm somewhere in between. I dislike the amount of immigration and the politics, but I also think that the majority of people from some ethnic groups don't really do their best to fit in nor advance the society further.

I was trolling, but I had a point I was trying to make. To me it seems like this is how people who believe in fringe theories decide what sources of information to trust. If a source confirms their beliefs then it is considered a trustworthy source, but the scientific consensus which contradicts their beliefs is dismissed as just "political correctness" or a "conspiracy" or what have you.

Maybe my memory is off but I remember you stated in a religion thread once that you trust in science above all else. However whenever someone tries to point out to you that the scientific consensus is that there are no biological human races, and thus no genetically determined differences between Blacks, Arabs, and others, you just dismiss it as political correctness, and that frustrates me a bit.

To back up my statement about the scientific consensus on race, here is the statement on biological aspects of race from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Fair point, how do you read your own source there?

point 2 in your own source: 2. Biological differences between human beings reflect both hereditary factors and the influence of natural and social environments. In most cases, these differences are due to the interaction of both. The degree to which environment or heredity affects any particular trait varies greatly.

point 4: There are obvious physical differences between populations living in different geographic areas of the world. Some of these differences are strongly inherited and others, such as body size and shape, are strongly influenced by nutrition, way of life, and other aspects of the environment. Genetic differences between populations commonly consist of differences in the frequencies of all inherited traits, including those that are environmentally malleable

Yadda yadda...

I never said we have clear cut races, less intelligent members on this board might have read it so though.

I have attacked certain ethnicities and cultures over my time on these boards. I don't think I ever talked about a white master race or any such hogwash.

To accept differences in humans based on genetics, ethnicity and culture does not = racism.

I posted somewhere on these boards a study about what groups of people have what genes to excel as students, as an example.

It is of course important to be open to science, heck, that's why I like to read on the subject (I find it interesting). The science world acknowledge more ethnic differences than you seem to believe.

Discovery channel ran a program on it some time ago, with Morgan Freeman as narrator. Was quite interesting, and the view they showed there mirrored my own.

In short: Yes there are differences but let's not go to war over it, mmmmkay?

And here we are blaming the browns. Sad.

Indian people are brown, ever seen me attack them? it's a little more complex than that.

[Greyblades]

*I guess I just have a problem with the idea that there's really an anglo-tradition at all.

How so?

[Papewaio]

So I think KAV wants a higher bar set for the standard of immigrants.

He probably would chuck at the worst of the worst including the white ones if somewhere else would take them.

[HoreTore]

I posted somewhere on these boards a study about what groups of people have what genes to excel as students, as an example.

Written by a parapsychologist. A wonderful source. And for the record, it wasn't a study, either.

Discovery channel ran a program on it some time ago, with Morgan Freeman as narrator. Was quite interesting, and the view they showed there mirrored my own.

Was that on after the show about the guy who drinks his own pee? Yet another brilliant source, well done.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Can we define "races" please? Every couple of months we have this arguement and simply take race as something concrete and resolute. But the way "blacks" and "Africa" are being thrown around here shows we are simply painting the "other" with a broad brush. It's insulting to an area larger than Europe to be treated as such a monolith.

With relation to Europe we're talking about a specific class of socio-economic immigrant. With relation to Africa itself we're talking about a continent generally similar enough as the "the West" or at least "Western Europe", and can be grouped together in the same way.

I don't believe in all this 19th century racial hokum. It's simply another boogeyman continental Europe can sink its teeth into. I will, however, say this. I am firm proponent of the superiority of an Anglo cultural tradition that stretches back as far as the property rights of pre Norman England or as recently as Fairfax and Cromwell.

Some "cultures" are best left to the trash heap of history. The German penchant for autocracy, The French fetish for tyrannical freedom, Russian barbarism, and the Irish and general are things best to be avoided for the sake of good government. Likewise an upper class with no sense of noblesse oblige and a lower class who has been deprived of all it's dignity.

I blame a lot of things for this (at least from an American perspective). The marginalization of mainline Protestantism in favor of Evangelicalism and Catholicism has led to a worship of worldly prosperity and a desire to be led by a strongman. This bleeds into the class warfare where the ultra rich become deified for what basically amounts (past a certain point) to luck. Identity politics eschews comprise and piecemeal solutions in favor of unworkable ideological purity.

And here we are blaming the browns. Sad.

So you blame the French rather than the "browns".

How on earth is that better?

[Kadagar_AV]

Hore,

*sigh*

Again, stop pestering me. You want to make a fan club, or what?

I will explain it again: I don't give a rats *** what you think or write, and will not reply to any points you make. So you might as well not bother.

But then again, it seems like you really do act like a bitch in heat with me as the only dog around, so I guess I can see it as purely amusing.







Everyone else: I would welcome a discussion on the topic, but preferably in some other thread. The discussion on genetic differences is an interesting one, although of course of less direct value than a discussion on culture.

There have come quite a few interesting sources the last ten years or so, don't know if everyone is kept up with it.

[Kralizec]

I don't believe in all this 19th century racial hokum. It's simply another boogeyman continental Europe can sink its teeth into. I will, however, say this. I am firm proponent of the superiority of an Anglo cultural tradition that stretches back as far as the property rights of pre Norman England or as recently as Fairfax and Cromwell.

Locke is a second-tier philosopher who’s more famous than he should be because he happened to speak English. In all fairness, he deserves at least a footnote or two in any book about society and philosophy.

Some "cultures" are best left to the trash heap of history. The German penchant for autocracy, The French fetish for tyrannical freedom, Russian barbarism, and the Irish and general are things best to be avoided for the sake of good government. Likewise an upper class with no sense of noblesse oblige and a lower class who has been deprived of all it's dignity.

I was going to write something to defend the French and the Germans from this, but then realized I couldn’t think of anything in defense of the Irish or Russians…so never mind.

[HoreTore]

With relation to Europe we're talking about a specific class of socio-economic immigrant. With relation to Africa itself we're talking about a continent generally similar enough as the "the West" or at least "Western Europe", and can be grouped together in the same way.

How is Ghana similar to Egypt? How is CAR similar to Namibia?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

How is Ghana similar to Egypt? How is CAR similar to Namibia?

How is Italy similar to Norway?

[Kadagar_AV]

How is Italy similar to Norway?

I always separate sub-Sahara Africans from the northern part, who are more middle eastern in their ways.

From that perspective it's rather fair to clump them together much like we do "Europeans" or even "the West".

Hmmm, is it racist to talk about "the West" when we just mean white people not from eastern europe.

[HoreTore]

How is Italy similar to Norway?

Never said it was?

Still, we have, at least, had contact with each other for more than a century. CAR and Namibia has not. Further, our influential national figures(Grieg, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Michelsen, etc) went to the same schools and academies as the influential national figures of Italy. They read the same books, discussed the same ideas. Ghanian and Egyptian figures? Not so much.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Never said it was?

Still, we have, at least, had contact with each other for more than a century. CAR and Namibia has not.

And yet the countries are in the same economic bracket and share similar economic, social, and political problems.

[HoreTore]

And yet the countries are in the same economic bracket and share similar economic, social, and political problems.

What? No? How?

1. What are the common economic problems CAR and Namibia have?
2. What are the common political problems CAR and Namibia have?
3. What are the common social problems CAR and Namibia have?

EDIT: to give you an idea of the economic differences, the difference in GDP between CAR and Namibia is much, much greater than the difference between Norway and Namibia.

(Namibia is 11 times greater than CAR, while Norway is 6 times greater than Namibia)

[Husar]

What? No? How?

1. What are the common economic problems CAR and Namibia have?
2. What are the common political problems CAR and Namibia have?
3. What are the common social problems CAR and Namibia have?

EDIT: to give you an idea of the economic differences, the difference in GPP between CAR and Namibia is much, much greater than the difference between Norway and Namibia.

(Namibia is 11 times greater than CAR, while Norway is 6 times greater than Namibia)

What's a GPP and where are the numbers from?

Wikipedia shows me the GDP and there Norway is around 500,000 Mio. $, Namibia around 12,000 Mio. $ and CAR around 2,000 Mio. $.

To me 11 x 2k is 22k and 6 x 12k is 72k. But even then only the relative difference between Norway and Namibia would be smaller, not the absolute difference.
Of course you may be talking about general physical preparedness or graph partitioning problems per country instead of the GDP, but at the moment your numbers seem a bit confusing.

[HoreTore]

What's a GPP and where are the numbers from?

Wikipedia shows me the GDP and there Norway is around 500,000 Mio. $, Namibia around 12,000 Mio. $ and CAR around 2,000 Mio. $.

To me 11 x 2k is 22k and 6 x 12k is 72k. But even then only the relative difference between Norway and Namibia would be smaller, not the absolute difference.
Of course you may be talking about general physical preparedness or graph partitioning problems per country instead of the GDP, but at the moment your numbers seem a bit confusing.

Typo aside, GDP makes little sense unless counted per capita. Wiki is bs, CIA is what it's at(unless searching for WMD stats). The factbook gives 55.400 per capita for Norway, 8.200 for Namibia and 700 for CAR.

55400/8200≈6
8200/700≈11

(all rounded down)

[Husar]

Typo aside, GDP makes little sense unless counted per capita.

Depends on what you want to say, if you don't say per capita, I assume you do not mean per capita.

Wiki is bs, CIA is what it's at(unless searching for WMD stats). The factbook gives 55.400 per capita for Norway, 8.200 for Namibia and 700 for CAR.

55400/8200≈6
8200/700≈11

(all rounded down)

That makes perfect sense, especially the part that wiki is bs given that wiki offers the values from the CIA World Factbook and the overall GDP listed ion Wiki is the same as on the CIA site for all three countries you linked.

As for expressing yourself clearly, Namibia is not closer to Norway as you claimed, it's closer to the CAR in absolute terms. I would not use the relative differences for classification here. Those numbers very much allow the claim that Namibia and the CAR are in the same economic bracket while Norway is in a different bracket. Depending on how narrow one defines the brackets of course. If you take brackets of 10k then Namibia and the CAR are in the first bracket while Norway is in the sixth bracket and thus quite far away from both. And neither is a country in the first bracket closer to one in the sixth bracket than to another country in the first bracket.

[HoreTore]

If you wish to express general economic weight, you would be spot on. If you wish to express general level of wealth, you need to go per capita to make sense of it.


The more general point, however, was that there's an ocean between the wealth level of Namibia and the wealth level of CAR. The former is well on its way to become an industrial nation, with exports and some high tech industry. The latter is almost exclusively subsistence farming.


EDIT: doing brackets can be useful, but you need to define useful brackets first. I am rather unsure that lumping 700 usd and 8200 usd together makes sense.

EDIT2: Further, bringing up gdp comparisons was just a general means of giving a brief oversight. It was not meant to represent any kind of absolute truth, as comparing two countries with wildly different gdp's have limited use. This is due to countries with a low gdp having a massive informal sector(like kids looking after their elderly parents, instead of sending them to a home), which is usually not counted in statistics. Still, the size of the informal sector is itself an indicator of general levels of wealth.

EDIT3: To sum things up, CAR is the Africa from the 80's Live Aid videos, while Namibia is the "Highest predicted growth countries in the world"-Africa.

[HoreTore]

Well, think about it. He's positing that, relative to other "traditions," there is an anglo tradition that surpasses all the rest in productivity, governability (is that a word? It is now!) political awareness, and all sorts of other factors that go into good government (or rather a good society capable of being governed). All based on a relatively short period of success from the British Empire onward (I don't know why you would say the old Anglo-Saxons were so special relative to other cultures, even contemporary ones). Its a very contrived thing that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Prosperity can certainly cause a society to develop certain habits, and those habits have certain characteristics to be sure, but there are no race bonuses!

It takes less than a generation to change the entire character of a society, and that's the uncomfortable truth that people don't like when you start talking about things like Ukraine, or anywhere in the Middle East. There is a common misconception that peoples and cultures, nations and countries, all have these permanent abstract characteristics like some kind of 4x game. That's just not so. What you see is what you get, and when peoples' fundamental needs are screwed with things change fast. This is also why the Marshal Plan was so, so important after WW2.

For further examples, compare post-ww2 Britain with Maggie, and Roosevelt with Reagan.

[Papewaio]

Compare Germany post WWI & post WWII
or Germany when the wall fell. It wasn't like the standard of living was identical in East and West Germany.

[Husar]

Compare Germany post WWI & post WWII
or Germany when the wall fell. It wasn't like the standard of living was identical in East and West Germany.

It was much better in the East, people had more free time and more money to spend on playing with their kids and their lead-coloured toys.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Well, think about it. He's positing that, relative to other "traditions," there is an anglo tradition that surpasses all the rest in productivity, governability (is that a word? It is now!) political awareness, and all sorts of other factors that go into good government (or rather a good society capable of being governed). All based on a relatively short period of success from the British Empire onward (I don't know why you would say the old Anglo-Saxons were so special relative to other cultures, even contemporary ones). Its a very contrived thing that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Prosperity can certainly cause a society to develop certain habits, and those habits have certain characteristics to be sure, but there are no race bonuses!

It takes less than a generation to change the entire character of a society, and that's the uncomfortable truth that people don't like when you start talking about things like Ukraine, or anywhere in the Middle East. There is a common misconception that peoples and cultures, nations and countries, all have these permanent abstract characteristics like some kind of 4x game. That's just not so. What you see is what you get, and when peoples' fundamental needs are screwed with things change fast. This is also why the Marshal Plan was so, so important after WW2.

The problem is that cultures do not tend to up end themselves as you describe. FDR and Reagan are still bound by a view of democratic government that is Lockean in nature. There has always been cycles of liberalism and conservatism in the us back to when presidents fought to create and dismantle the national banks. This does not mean that Anglo Saxon tradition is a meaningless phrase. On the contrary, that these cycles exist and are stable is why such tradition could be declared inherently better.

[Kralizec]

It was much better in the East, people had more free time and more money to spend on playing with their kids and their lead-coloured toys.

It's true, I've even heard that East Germany had to build large concrete walls and lots of fences, to keep themselves from being overrun by illegal immigrants looking for the easy life.

[Papewaio]

It was much better in the East, people had more free time and more money to spend on playing with their kids and their lead-coloured toys.

And your neighbors always looked out for you, the Stasi were so thoughtful.