Current Events > Why does Africa suck so bad?

(+) Yeah! (+)

EndOfDiscOne posted...

Most warm climates are poor, except Australia. Diseases are more prevalent in warm climates.

Not just warm, but also jungle climates. Australia has a ton of grazing lands.
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CloneTheHero posted...

you just described the entire world. even europe had its bout with these issues.

It took Europe 1000+ years to recover. It's only been 50 years since the West stopped colonizing Africa. We are currently in the middle of the civil strife period that inevitably results from the power vacuum. Reminder that the US went through 150 years of civil strife before things started to calm down.
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ImAMarvel posted...

Honestly from what I've learned, discussing Africa on the internet is a horrible idea since so many people are actually completely ignorant on the subject, ESPECIALLY the racists. There are people ITT even who have made wildly ignorant assertions.

They Straight up ignored my post to keep shit posting. Few people want to be honest in these conversations.

India or the middle east are "worse"
Africa has a fair amount of developed, peaceful, modern cities.
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Rika_Furude posted...

India or the middle east are "worse"
Africa has a fair amount of developed, peaceful, modern cities.

That's not a true statement at all lmao
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Do Egyptians even consider themselves black?
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Just to make it clear, because people don't understand when this topic comes up

If you argue all of these together:

1) African's relative lack of success is due to lower IQ
2) IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence
3) African's lower IQ is innate and not due to biases in IQ testing or socioeconomic factors

That's indistinguishable from a gussied up form of classic racism. That's just a lot of steps to obscure the opinion that blacks/Africans are dumber. And every time this conversation is had, people will say whatever they have to say to get to that end point, ignoring challenges to 1, 2, and 3.
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Letron_James posted...

Rika_Furude posted...

India or the middle east are "worse"
Africa has a fair amount of developed, peaceful, modern cities.

That's not a true statement at all lmao

How many African capital cities can you even name without the help of Google? Never mind how many cities you can name in each country...

Don't laugh your ass off too hard. Your brain's in danger of falling out.

Africa is the litmus paper of the worlds conscience. One in every nine people alive on Earth lives in Africa south of the Sahara, and so do two in every five of the worlds poor despite the fact that the region now yields around 30% of the planets mineral wealth from beneath its soils and seabeds. Africa is the acid test of whether or not the global community has the willpower to make changes that scream out to be made.

Yet since apartheid and the Rwandan genocide ended 24 years ago, Africa has been shoved to the back of the bottom drawer of global politics; its barely even a sideshow in the war on terror. And this is in a wired world in which we're supposedly more informed and interconnected than ever before. If our capacity for basic human empathy is so shrivelled that we can push almost a billion lives permanently into the shadows beyond the edge of our radar, then all our self-righteous back-patting over the alleged civilized virtues and moral leadership of the rich Western democracies is just a slop-bucketful of meaningless bullshit lies.

But a lazy lapse into compassion fatigue isnt the only problem. Knowledge and understanding of Africa are in short supply too. Africa is seen as a bottomless charity sinkhole. (Yet being hooked up to an endless drip-feed of foreign aid rarely tarnishes the image of welfare frauds like Israel.) Its calamities are always seen as ones of its own making because of some supposedly inherent, uniquely African character defect thats passed down like a bad gene. Why this perception? Because the Africa we see pretty much the only face of Africa we ever get to see is always a symbolic, starving child. But the kid is missing a backstory and the crisis rarely gets given the context it deserves.

Thats predictable. The big disaster-relief NGOs are often wary of talking politics and economics. (During the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, NGOs who were guests of Mengistus government were careful not to blame it. Yet putting a bullet through Mengistu's head would possibly have saved more lives than all the sales of the Band Aid and Live Aid singles.)

African journalists work in a chronically under-funded and sometimes extremely risky profession. (At the time when I stopped counting in March last year, 156 journalists had been killed in sub-Saharan Africa since 1992, 102 of them local journalists murdered in direct reprisal for their work.) They face an uphill struggle to make their voices heard. The major news agencies who dominate reportage from the continent for the English-language market arent really geared to supply insider analysis by seasoned specialists. (BBC News employs one full-time foreign correspondent to cover Africa.) Most people will never even lift a book off a shelf if it's about Africa. So instead, the information gaps get filled in on forums like this one with lazy assumptions, fuzzy misconceptions, and ingrained prejudice.

So if the childs starving, it must be because Africa has too many babies and not enough condoms (not because government counter-insurgency policy uses hunger as a weapon). If ethnic flashpoints erupt in violence, it must be because African tribes have always hated each other (not because corrupt ministers have enriched their crony networks at the expense of a particular province). If small farmers are poor, it must be because African peasants are too stuck in their ways to change traditional methods (not because theyre obliged to sell their produce to marketing boards at prices fixed below market rates, or because of a lack of capital).

Misdiagnose the problems, and the snake-oil cures (e.g. the structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank) will simply fail or turn toxic.

Firewerx posted...

it must be because Africa has too many babies and not enough condoms

Well, rape is a problem in Africa.

The IQ test isn't a fair measure of third world intelligence. Iv'e done many tests and it clearly favors those who have an education.

Coming from a guy who averages 140 on these tests, it's a bullshit test.
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The whites are making all of those black people shoot each other even though they haven't controlled the continent for give or take 60-70 years

Firewerx posted...

Pretty much this exactly. It's shocking the extent to which the western world ignores the entire continent, except when it's time to moralize, test out racial theories, or get extract resources. Many people couldn't name a single African leader (except for the purpose of racial victim narratives). There is no popular media about Africa, no news, nothing to create empathy towards Africans and little to inform people about anything 1/7th of humanity is experiencing. Yet people feel comfortable diagnosing the whole continent's problems.

I would pay good money to get schools to really focus on African history outside of Egypt and slavery. Because without at least that foundation, people who have never been there or lived there, don't know anyone who's been there or lived there, don't know it's history, culture, or current events are forming opinions based on the only things left....stereotypes and narratives. And that's never been good for Africa.
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DarkProto05 posted...

The IQ test isn't a fair measure of third world intelligence. Iv'e done many tests and it clearly favors those who have an education.

Coming from a guy who averages 140 on these tests, it's a bulls*** test.

Scoring high doesn't make you an authority on the validity on IQ tests, which are the best means of measuring intelligence even if they're not perfect. Nor are the tests you've done relevant if you haven't done the test used to gather the data you dispute. They also typically don't use uneducated people in these studies. Despite whatever you believe, there are schools in Africa.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289609001275?via%3Dihub

DarkProto05 posted...

The IQ test isn't a fair measure of third world intelligence. Iv'e done many tests and it clearly favors those who have an education.

Coming from a guy who averages 140 on these tests, it's a bullshit test.

Word up I score in the 160s largely because I've done logic puzzles for fun my whole life and learned how to approach different questions and tasks. If I grew up worried about illness, poverty, and food insecurity, my focus might be somewhere else.

Also if it weren't for the top 0.001% of innovators all yall mother fuckers would barely be indistinguishable from chimps. We surround ourselves with the rather small number of truly game changing ideas and act like we're advanced. We are not. We are stupid and hateful, and the line between civility and stabbing each other in the back is very thin. Look at all the fools in this thread confusing wealth with sophistication. Shit we're witnessing first hand with Trump Supporters how somebody like Hitler can rise to power. These lemmings will support him no matter what, and if eased into it, you better believe they'd support Muslims and ALL Latino people being forced to wear stars (carry papers), be monitored, rounded up, and put so far out of his cult like followers' conscience anything would go. We are in no position to claim superiority over anybody.

The more you do these tests the better you get. Even if each test is drastically different than the last. You can even train yourself to do better on these tests like the above user.

Give these guys in Africa a higher education (at least high school equivalency, not a fucking 5th grade education) and allow them to practice IQ tests so they get better at them. I guarantee they score MUCH higher than 70.
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DarkProto05 posted...

The more you do these tests the better you get. Even if each test is drastically different than the last. You can even train yourself to do better on these tests like the above user.

Give these guys in Africa a higher education (at least high school equivalency, not a f***ing 5th grade education) and allow them to practice IQ tests so they get better at them. I guarantee they score MUCH higher than 70.

That's all true and also all completely irrelevant as their scores are compared to students with similar levels of education around the world.

Why didn't they advance and modernize first?
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KhanJohnny posted...

The whites are making all of those black people shoot each other even though they haven't controlled the continent for give or take 60-70 years

it's amazing how people like you don't understand the concept of "cause and effect"

oh wait

KhanJohnny

Novice User
User Since: Jun 2018
Karma: 40
Active Posts: 51
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Lordgold666 posted...

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I say Africa sucks as a continent, then people acuse me of being a racist and the topic turns into a debate about IQ for some reason.
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Because they don't know how to govern themselves in a post colonial world. If their former rulers had treated them with more respect and run the colonies benevolently, they'd have probably cared about independence less and been happier, better educated, etc., and the planet overall would be better off.
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Howl posted...

I say Africa sucks as a continent, then people acuse me of being a racist and the topic turns into a debate about IQ for some reason.

How do you know that Afrika sucks as a continent? Have you ever been there?
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TheCyborgNinja posted...

Because they don't know how to govern themselves in a post colonial world. If their former rulers had treated them with more respect and run the colonies benevolently, they'd have probably cared about independence less and been happier, better educated, etc., and the planet overall would be better off.

but there were multiple kingdoms and empires across the continent pre-colonialism.

the west has also been interfering with its others, positively and negatively, post-colonialism.
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Bishop9800 posted...

How do you know that Afrika sucks as a continent?

Quite a fair bit of drowning crossing the ocean to Europe or Israel.
Boko Harem and other terrorist groups
Extreme drought requiring the rest of the world solving their food problems via creating and sending genetic super drought resistant beans so that Africa doesn't starve to death.
The concept that women are still considered property in most of the countries of Africa.
Low life expectancy compared to the rest of the world
Etc.

KhanJohnny posted...

The whites are making all of those black people shoot each other even though they haven't controlled the continent for give or take 60-70 years

If your foreign policy props up repressive regimes in Africa, rewards bad policies and hamstrings reform, trains and arms the forces of a genocidal government, and your banks provide a pipeline for corrupt ministers to drain public money out of their country -- then no, you don't get to so easily scrub African blood from under your fingernails, do a Pontius Pilate and pretend that your hands are squeaky clean. And I'm sorry, but I feel that also extends to voters in a democracy where the only thing stopping them from trying to change their government's policies is their own apathy. I don't believe that wilful ignorance and indifference are quite the same thing as innocence.

mario2000 posted...

KhanJohnny posted...

The whites are making all of those black people shoot each other even though they haven't controlled the continent for give or take 60-70 years

it's amazing how people like you don't understand the concept of "cause and effect"

oh wait

KhanJohnny

Novice User
User Since: Jun 2018
Karma: 40
Active Posts: 51

Those are pretty normal stats, homie
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HiddenRoar posted...

The concept that women are still considered property in most of the countries of Africa.

Exaggeration, but they do tend to have traditional gender roles.
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Black462 posted...

mario2000 posted...

KhanJohnny posted...

The whites are making all of those black people shoot each other even though they haven't controlled the continent for give or take 60-70 years

it's amazing how people like you don't understand the concept of "cause and effect"

oh wait

KhanJohnny

Novice User
User Since: Jun 2018
Karma: 40
Active Posts: 51

Those are pretty normal stats, homie

Thanks!

Conflict posted...

"Normal stats" for people who get banned regularly for posting garbage like the both of you

Irony
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