equality, do you believe in it?

[Ronald Wilson Reagan]

The British way was being a warlike, disease infested country that conquered and subjugated entire populations, forcing them to adapt to their way of life. The British way of life also includes going periods of hundreds of years at constant war. I'm also pretty sure the wheel was invented a bit before the peak of the British Empire, or even the beginning of the british empire.

[shark tits]

no shit i've just always thought it was funny that the american indians still didn't have it when the british arrived. skateboarding would definitely not be american if it weren't for all the invading euros.

[Beer Keg Peg Leg]

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Does anybody else find it hillarious that people are using Hitler in an example about how some people are inferior?


And with the eurocentric racist shit. All humans have survived and evolved up to the same point in history- right now. Surviving and thriving under differing conditions results in humans who are different in many ways. However, to say that one person's way of adapting to the world is more correct than another's is ridiculous. The question always discussed in mulitcultural education is "who's knowledge and traditions are valued?" If you value only your own knowledge and traditions, then you will naturally see the difference in others as inferiority, but that view of the world is foolish. When you wonder about your own success in your culture, the question then comes of assimilation as well as talent and intelligence. How much do your knowledge, values, and traditions match up with those of your employers, educators, and lawmakers? Nobody is a complete match, but it's worth noting and well documented that your ability to assimilate to the perspective of those with power often times can give unfair advantages.

[close]

i don't know if 'correct' is the proper way term but the british way of adapting to the world certainly seems more successful than the native american approach. who knows, in the end maybe israel, america and all the shitty bully countries will destroy the earth and we'll wish we learned to not even invent the wheel like the noble redman.

the 'british' or western model of 'adapting' to the world has also involved the complete and utter destruction of many of the earth's ecosystems, and is the primary reason we are now facing such a daunting environmental catastrophe. Many other cultures around the world however were able to augment rather than exploit their surrounding environments. Many native american cultures were much more advanced than we are today in such respects.

[bakingsoda]

Expand Quote

Does anybody else find it hillarious that people are using Hitler in an example about how some people are inferior?


And with the eurocentric racist shit. All humans have survived and evolved up to the same point in history- right now. Surviving and thriving under differing conditions results in humans who are different in many ways. However, to say that one person's way of adapting to the world is more correct than another's is ridiculous. The question always discussed in mulitcultural education is "who's knowledge and traditions are valued?" If you value only your own knowledge and traditions, then you will naturally see the difference in others as inferiority, but that view of the world is foolish. When you wonder about your own success in your culture, the question then comes of assimilation as well as talent and intelligence. How much do your knowledge, values, and traditions match up with those of your employers, educators, and lawmakers? Nobody is a complete match, but it's worth noting and well documented that your ability to assimilate to the perspective of those with power often times can give unfair advantages.

[close]

i don't know if 'correct' is the proper way term but the british way of adapting to the world certainly seems more successful than the native american approach. who knows, in the end maybe israel, america and all the shitty bully countries will destroy the earth and we'll wish we learned to not even invent the wheel like the noble redman.

Well if success involves privatizing property in a land were the concept never existed, introducing a system which breeds poverty and erasing cultures and populations around the world then the British might be "successful."

[Tufty]

^ Yeah cause there is no alternative.

[chockfullofthat]

Taki mag looks like it is trying it's best to remove any doubt on what we've always known.  Libertarians are racist fuck faces.

[Jared]

[givecigstosurfgroms]

 Shit,people ARE equal. And as individuals we can further define ourselves by action.  But peoples validity is unquestionable and its all just as important big and small , rich or poor.  You dont have to realize that either, but it is a good truth for me, god willn.

[weedpop]

Man, that article (and all the others I saw on that site) was powerfully stupid. If the raison d'etre of takimag is to produce woefully underresearched, poorly argued pieces of faux-intellectual racebait for disaffected 20-something libertarians, then its doing a mighty good job.

Some problems with this piece specifically:

1) The author is arguing against a huge strawman. Nobody in their right mind believes that genetic difference does not exist, except for the slack jawed "alterna-individuals" the author so aptly caricatures at the beginning of the piece without offering any proof of their existence. There isn't a single quotation or documented example of this view being articulated by anyone in the piece, despite the fact that the author continually says that this is the way all liberals think. If this is such a commonly held belief, why no examples?

2) The author fails to make any real distinction between biological equality (physiological similarity), legal equality (equal treatment under the law), and equal esteem ("equal under God") effectively arguing against them all as if they were the same thing. This is a blatant attempt to appeal to "common sense" as a justification for policies that treat members of other races as inferior, although the author deliberately avoids following his ideas through to their logical conclusion to avoid outing himself as a sneaky undercover bigot.

3) The author constantly demands proof (of an idea that nobody is actually arguing for) but fails to provide any proof of his own despite the claim that there is literally "mountains" of it. Not a very good way of convincing someone of you point of view (though I guess that's not an issue when you can be sure that 99% of your readership thinks the same way you do).

He's also essentially asking the '"egalitarians" to prove a negative ("genetic differences between races have no measurable impact on physical/intellectual capabilities") which, aside from being a logical impossibility, would be extremely difficult to do due to the fact that all potential test subjects would have been impacted by social factors to some degree. A logical argument against egalitarianism would proceed from a challenge to the idea that socialization/social exclusion based on race has a measurable impact on a person's capabilities. However, the author doesn't even begin to argue this, probably because he knows that there is a "mountain" of evidence that contradicts it.

[ROCKxADIO420]

has anyone actually ever seen a black person in real life?

[Shredsledder]

Expand Quote

Does anybody else find it hillarious that people are using Hitler in an example about how some people are inferior?


And with the eurocentric racist shit. All humans have survived and evolved up to the same point in history- right now. Surviving and thriving under differing conditions results in humans who are different in many ways. However, to say that one person's way of adapting to the world is more correct than another's is ridiculous. The question always discussed in mulitcultural education is "who's knowledge and traditions are valued?" If you value only your own knowledge and traditions, then you will naturally see the difference in others as inferiority, but that view of the world is foolish. When you wonder about your own success in your culture, the question then comes of assimilation as well as talent and intelligence. How much do your knowledge, values, and traditions match up with those of your employers, educators, and lawmakers? Nobody is a complete match, but it's worth noting and well documented that your ability to assimilate to the perspective of those with power often times can give unfair advantages.

[close]

i don't know if 'correct' is the proper way term but the british way of adapting to the world certainly seems more successful than the native american approach. who knows, in the end maybe israel, america and all the shitty bully countries will destroy the earth and we'll wish we learned to not even invent the wheel like the noble redman.

Gipper is right.

shark tits I couldn't disagree more with you. Successful in what way?

Our way of life causes so many problems around the world, "if we could see/feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it. But we live in a realm of abstractions, excuses, our society's wealth provides incredible levels of pampering and of softness that lie between us (the western material "elite) and the planet's problems."

anybody who can tell who said that I'll be stoked.

I'm pretty convinced the white christian man is the worst thing that ever happened to the earth.

[Tufty]

Our way of life causes so many problems around the world, "if we could see/feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it. But we live in a realm of abstractions, excuses, our society's wealth provides incredible levels of pampering and of softness that lie between us (the western material "elite) and the planet's problems."

anybody who can tell who said that I'll be stoked.

I'm pretty convinced the white christian man is the worst thing that ever happened to the earth.

Actually everyone knows what we are doing. We are in the age of internet. However we dont care as long as it isnt happening in our backyard.

I am pretty convinced that middle class and the upper classes(their way of life) are the worst types of creatures earth has seen.

[shark tits]

successful in there's more british than indians. i put the question that all this 'success' might be shortlived as pertains to unsustainable practices so i don't know what i'm wrong about. just throwing out ideas for people to think about. sure, it's trite and obvious to blame the white man for all the ills of technology but shouldn't one also thank him for all the good of technology? i usedta claim to be a lot more strident against just about everything but i never gave credit for the roads, libraries and plumbing. it's more complex than 'white christian bad, noble savage good'. lotta them indians were warlike as hell, just weren't so proficient w/ gunmaking.

[oyolar]

successful in there's more british than indians. i put the question that all this 'success' might be shortlived as pertains to unsustainable practices so i don't know what i'm wrong about. just throwing out ideas for people to think about. sure, it's trite and obvious to blame the white man for all the ills of technology but shouldn't one also thank him for all the good of technology? i usedta claim to be a lot more strident against just about everything but i never gave credit for the roads, libraries and plumbing. it's more complex than 'white christian bad, noble savage good'. lotta them indians were warlike as hell, just weren't so proficient w/ gunmaking.

Ignoring the fact that what you mean by "white man" or "savages" is bound completely by context, libraries were first invented by ancient Sumerians, plumbing exited in a variety of nations Western and Eastern, guns first appeared in ancient China, and the oldest paved roads were found in India.

[GAY]

has anyone actually ever seen a black person in real life?

Does this count? Because I've seen one of these:

[shark tits]

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successful in there's more british than indians. i put the question that all this 'success' might be shortlived as pertains to unsustainable practices so i don't know what i'm wrong about. just throwing out ideas for people to think about. sure, it's trite and obvious to blame the white man for all the ills of technology but shouldn't one also thank him for all the good of technology? i usedta claim to be a lot more strident against just about everything but i never gave credit for the roads, libraries and plumbing. it's more complex than 'white christian bad, noble savage good'. lotta them indians were warlike as hell, just weren't so proficient w/ gunmaking.

[close]

Ignoring the fact that what you mean by "white man" or "savages" is bound completely by context, libraries were first invented by ancient Sumerians, plumbing exited in a variety of nations Western and Eastern, guns first appeared in ancient China, and the oldest paved roads were found in India.

so india invented the technology then got bored w/ it? sumerians are ancient egyptians, right? who's to say what color they were? that middle east is kind of murky but i think most arabs are technically 'caucasoids' or whites. india people are asian but i know iranians and iraqis are euros who've been in the sun too long. northern africa has had it's shit together a little better than the rest of the continent. i was arguing w/ this son of a cleveland pig [who'd shot a black guy recently] and the son and his friend kept pressuring me 'show me where in africa black people are doing well. or where it's built up like a modern city.' i snuck in S.Africa hoping they wouldn't know who developed it. really had no good answer which sucked cause they were smug racist kids w/ connections and i couldn't come up w/ anything better than 'well, if the dutch/british/brazilians/israelis hadn't fucked them over....

[vancanman]

If the question is are all groups blessed with the same IQ, Athletic ability, etc then no. Obviously all people are not born equal. Just looking at the average height of one group vs another shows that. To believe that their average body sizes are different but they have the same mental capacity from birth on average would stand in the face of reason. The book Guns, Germs and Steel does a pretty good job at showing how environment shapes the genetics of the human species. Every environment rewards different attributes in a person and over hundreds of generations changes the genetic average of said group. A human group of any race living in the same environment will over time end up basically the same.

However, if the question is should everyone have the same rights and freedoms from birth then absolutely yes. Every group and culture has value.

[twitchflip]

a fair indication of how the English have been 'successful' over time is how widely spoken their language has become

[weedpop]

sure, it's trite and obvious to blame the white man for all the ills of technology but shouldn't one also thank him for all the good of technology?

I don't know. Does this still make sense if the "good" of technology is actually the main contributor to our ability to destroy the environment? Is comfort and affluence actually a "good" when its actually contributing to our eventual destruction?

In any case, I think it's silly to put too much blame or praise on 'the white man' for this (aside from the difficulty of even defining what 'the white man' is) because as Oyolar said, many of the technologies associated with 'white' imperialism were developed centuries ago by 'non-white' people. It's not like the Spanish/Dutch/British/American's created the first empires either, although 'whites' were perhaps the first to create global empires. The current state of hegemonic globalization is just the culmination of a process that has been going on for a long time, and which has no defining racial characteristics except for 'human'.

[oyolar]

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successful in there's more british than indians. i put the question that all this 'success' might be shortlived as pertains to unsustainable practices so i don't know what i'm wrong about. just throwing out ideas for people to think about. sure, it's trite and obvious to blame the white man for all the ills of technology but shouldn't one also thank him for all the good of technology? i usedta claim to be a lot more strident against just about everything but i never gave credit for the roads, libraries and plumbing. it's more complex than 'white christian bad, noble savage good'. lotta them indians were warlike as hell, just weren't so proficient w/ gunmaking.

[close]

Ignoring the fact that what you mean by "white man" or "savages" is bound completely by context, libraries were first invented by ancient Sumerians, plumbing exited in a variety of nations Western and Eastern, guns first appeared in ancient China, and the oldest paved roads were found in India.

[close]

so india invented the technology then got bored w/ it? sumerians are ancient egyptians, right? who's to say what color they were? that middle east is kind of murky but i think most arabs are technically 'caucasoids' or whites. india people are asian but i know iranians and iraqis are euros who've been in the sun too long. northern africa has had it's shit together a little better than the rest of the continent. i was arguing w/ this son of a cleveland pig [who'd shot a black guy recently] and the son and his friend kept pressuring me 'show me where in africa black people are doing well. or where it's built up like a modern city.' i snuck in S.Africa hoping they wouldn't know who developed it. really had no good answer which sucked cause they were smug racist kids w/ connections and i couldn't come up w/ anything better than 'well, if the dutch/british/brazilians/israelis hadn't fucked them over....

Sumer was the area around what is now called Iraq and Kuwait.  And their race is not any more "murky" than any other race in all of history.  I doubt few people would call  people from the Arab world "white" or "caucasoid" (as if those terms actually mean anything or interrelated).  And saying that Africa would be better developed if it wasn't for colonialism is completely reasonable and true.  Complex societies existed all over the world and could have easily developed well past Western countries if they hadn't been leveled by invaders (Mongol destruction of the Middle East, which I heard helped set that area back hundreds of years) or completely torn apart by colonists.  When a country is stripped of its resources and it's social foundations are decimated (like the Congo, for instance), this makes it difficult for "successful," "advanced," whatever you want to call it societies to develop and develop quickly.

How about this response--if white countries are so superior, how come most of their attempts to "fix" these countries are horrible failures?

[shark tits]

their attempts to 'fix' including arming the children of the jungle? teaching that god cures aids not medicine? i don't think they're per se trying to 'fix' them so much as cause havoc. maybe let them genocide themselves so all that land is free to a new population? that's kinda conspiracy theory and some of those shitty 3rd world places have to take some responsibility but i don't think there's any altruistic aid going on in the world. marcus garvey's back to africa rhetoric sounded great but we got liberia. everything's kind of a piece of shit.
and yes, anthropologicaly speaking there's only 3 types of people caucasoids, negroids and mongoloids. then there's combinations like hispanics and such but yeah, arabs are genetically white.

[botefdunn]

one way of interpreting the word "equality" is "indifference"- as in no difference between 2 and 2.

By this definition, humans are definitely not equal, since true indifference would result in death (you have to really not give a shit to just lie down in the ditch and stay there).

But like Reagan illustrated, even without an absolute, you can still measure something by degree, for instance
 
some people are more equal (indifferent, tolerant) than others, but even the most unequanimous person has some degree of equality, otherwise, they couldn't function.

So yeah, I believe in it.

[oyolar]

their attempts to 'fix' including arming the children of the jungle? teaching that god cures aids not medicine? i don't think they're per se trying to 'fix' them so much as cause havoc. maybe let them genocide themselves so all that land is free to a new population? that's kinda conspiracy theory and some of those shitty 3rd world places have to take some responsibility but i don't think there's any altruistic aid going on in the world. marcus garvey's back to africa rhetoric sounded great but we got liberia. everything's kind of a piece of shit.
and yes, anthropologicaly speaking there's only 3 types of people caucasoids, negroids and mongoloids. then there's combinations like hispanics and such but yeah, arabs are genetically white.

I agree that those tactics aren't fixing anything. That was my point.  But a lot of people think that they way to solve all of the third world's problems are to waltz Western countries in there and give them free reign.

As for negroid, mongoloid, and caucasoid divisions, those were biological anthropology and focused on regional relationships of indigenous people.  And even then, they were extremely rough divisions and were never related to skin color or genetics at all.  So because someone falls into the caucasoid region or heritage or what have you, doesn't mean that they are "genetically white," look white, or really anything at all.  They were made up groups that aren't use any more because they were proved to be very flawed ways to organize people.

[shark tits]

i disagree. whites or caucasoids area lot more dynamic w/ hair, eye colors and they can run the gamut from pale to swarthy. mongoloids does a good job encompassing all asiatics and their thicker eyelids. negroids covers any dark skinned group w/ larger lips and wide noses. it's pretty obvious which each label encompasses and the differences therein.

[oyolar]

No, it's not clear once you actually look at people with an unbiased eye and look past stereotypes.  First, your understanding of what those groups included is flawed.  They were based on geography with biological differences/stereotypes mapped onto those.  Which is why areas like the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and sections of Russia were contested as being mongolioid or caucasoid.  Second, you're assuming that all of these other traits (eyes, lips, hair, etc) are inherently tied these made up racial groupings. For instance, several indigenous South American and Inuit tribes have "mongolioid eyes" but live in geographical regions and have skin colors generally given to "caucasoid people."  Which are they?  Third, to say that caucasoid encompasses a wider range of skin/eye color is biased to ignore differences in the other groupings.  There are tons of skins differences throughout Africa and Asia, but they just don't fall into the drastic middle territory occupie by caucasoid phenotypes. Even then, when does swarthy become too swarthy?  Is there a color tab for that?  What happens once that color is reached?  That person is now a negroid?  What if they don't have any of the other "markers?"  What then? 

What you're doing is equating one socially constructed group with another and then connecting them to perceived differences in genes.  There is a reason that people who study race, whether in biological or sociological terms, don't use those categories anymore despite working in the fields that invented them.  It's because they work even worse than our current understandings of race.

[Ronald Wilson Reagan]

Seriously? Are you claiming that multiple race theory bullshit? That shit has been discredited so long ago and so blatantly that I'm shocked you even found out about it. That shit died once they started mapping DNA, when it became obvious that categorizing humans in that way is ridiculous. Do you really think that some human life started in the Caucuses mountains, other human life started in Africa, and even different form of human life started in mongolia? Because that is seriously the basis of that complete fucking brainless bullshit you have just polluted this board with.
However, you have changed my mind on the topic. Everybody is equal but shark tits, he's fucking worthless.

[shark tits]

no egghead, i believe that human life started on Pangea and different peoples strayed different way as the continent split. mongoloids and caucasoids also share DNA w/ neanderthals whilst negroids do not. there are differences through breeding, climates and other factors. eggheads like you are not equal because you're backed up w/ repressed anger that belies your feel good ideologies. i hope your students play knockout w/ you soon.

[Ronald Wilson Reagan]

I'm sure a racist like you believes knockout is a real thing. I'm going to revert back to three letters that make any argument you come back with pointless: DNA.

And nobody thinks life began during pangea. Are you just making shit up that sounds good to you and typing it?

And if you are trying to make an intellectual argument, calling the person who is shooting your points down an egghead does nothing o help you.

[oyolar]

no egghead, i believe that human life started on Pangea and different peoples strayed different way as the continent split. mongoloids and caucasoids also share DNA w/ neanderthals whilst negroids do not. there are differences through breeding, climates and other factors. eggheads like you are not equal because you're backed up w/ repressed anger that belies your feel good ideologies. i hope your students play knockout w/ you soon.

I thought we were just arguing about outdated/proper terms, but nope.  You are an idiot.

[dillanharp]

Pangea was waaaaay before homo anything.  Take a physical anthropology class, we different.