Its not that simple once we get down to the real issues that can actually fix the situation. There needs to be a solution for all sides such as long term working visas that allow Immigrants to not be illegal and work in US. Possibly 3-5 years where they can pay taxes and receive social benefits. Then if you go a period without being convicted a criminal they should be able to renew it. Id say Fast track to residency+ Citizenship if they serve the Military in an honorable discharge As it is now, an illegal immigrant can cut the line in front of someone trying to immigrate the legal way and send their kids to Public School for free in US and get a Drivers License in California. They also get legal protection in many cases and even encouragement to vote. Whats the point of US Citizenship then? I dont know how Public Education works in the EU but in the US taxpayers front it for everyone, there is no asking if they are legal or illegal. That would never fly in Asia. Also then why does Mexico not make their Immigration laws easier, Mexicos immigration laws are among the strictest in the world!
I am more of a liberal, and I want everyone to be able to go wherever they want. Maybe a wall is a temporary solution.
If thats the case every country should drop borders to be equally fair. Currently Mexico has some of the toughest immigration laws in the world. US illegal Immigration and Immigration laws are some of the most welcoming/ Lax in the world when we start comparing actual law and policy country by country. This should be discussed in News to bring a balanced perspective to the wall as well as the Drug Wars which has violence and a death toll far beyond Iraq and Afganistan⌠Sure if this war wasnt going on and as bloody as it is and bodies getting decapitated each week Id sayâŚmaybe there is no need for a wall but thats not the reality on the border⌠The Drug cartels outman, outgun and outspend US border patrol.
More-or-less true. However that doesnât alter the fact that that part of the world (crudely speaking, the bit that had trading and cultural links with Mesopotamia) is now as much of a shithole as sub-Saharan Africa.
In any case, the extreme desertification of that continent was mostly a result of human action (hubris rather than stupidity). The whole continent has a fairly brittle ecosystem, but the band of countries which are now the poorest-of-the-poor really only have themselves to blame for rampant ecosystem destruction.
I thought I answered that elsewhere. Europeans in (say) the 15th century were backward and stupid, by any definition you care to use. Contemporary descriptions of their behaviour sounds a lot like the backwoods of modern-day Africa. Intelligence is not static. It evolves like any other characteristic under the pressure of natural selection. If a population selects for low intelligence (either inadvertently or deliberately) then obviously the average IQ is going to shift downwards.
Human brains have a serious flaw in metacognition: theyâre unable to recognise their own lack of skills and/or intelligence. In other words, if youâre stupid, youâll probably think youâre as clever as anyone else, and the solutions for lifeâs problems that you come up with will be dumb, without you even noticing that they are. What seems to have happened in Europe is that an overclass of intelligent, relatively enlightened bunch of people gained social influence and forced an overall improvement in IQ. I suspect this happened more by accident than deliberate design.
This is a daft idea dreamed up by sunlight-averse academics who have never built anything or put their hands in the soil. Most of the planetâs progress was built upon human labour and (more importantly) human ideas, not sheer brute force. In fact it was the introduction of the plough and draft animals by the Romans which was partly responsible for the massive soil erosion that created deserts.
Are you serious? Where on earth did you get this from? Apart from the obvious fact that countries are not one-dimensional, most civilisations developed landrace crops for their own unique microclimate. Example: there are thousands of varieties of wheat (or wheat relatives) adapted for various latitudes; some thrive in the extreme north and some will grow in the subtropics.
In any case, the most useful plants in the tropics are trees and grasses, not annuals.
Not exactly. Biology can change pretty rapidly when given sufficient impetus.
I think the endless debate over who is âto blameâ for their predicament is precisely what holds them back. It doesnât matter. All that matters is the here-and-now, and they can either fix it, or wallow in their own failure. There are no alternative choices.
I doubt Colonialism was the problem because there are so many other examples of societies emerging from under the colonialist thumb bigger and better than ever. However, the common theme seems to be (a) collective high intelligence, usually nurtured by the colonial power and (b) a pragmatic approach to life, retaining those features of colonial impositions which were objectively useful and discarding those that werenât.
Singaporeans and Indians both benefited from Western-style education and legal systems; Singapore succeeded while India didnât because India insisted on throwing out the baby with the bathwater and going full-bore socialist. They didnât understand that institutions are part of a functioning whole, and although you can pick-and-choose to a certain extent, you canât just excise tiny bits and hope theyâll keep working.
Iâm not saying the West has got it all right and has all the answers. It clearly doesnât. Iâm just pointing out that failing as badly as Africa has failed requires a pretty big commitment to failure.
I donât prefer either because they are both wrong. Africans are not any more or less smart, or good than anyone else.
They were put into a horrible predicament of having the rights to their resources stripped away by colonialists and neo-colonialists, having their traditional territories cut off by artificial and arbitrary carved up boarders. Plenty of their states were set up to fail, grouping opposing people together like Yugoslavia would fail in any continent with any ethnicity.
From the scale of Europeâs rush to partition Africa to the massive slavery trade, I donât think thereâs a more exploited place on earth than Africa in the history of colonialism.
Then you have a difficult question to answer. How is it that people who are both smart and good manage to consistently treat each other so atrociously and make such incredibly poor life choices?
Sorry, but if someone goes through life making decisions that not only harm himself but the society around him, Iâm going to call him an idiot (or possibly a bad person). I donât care what happened to his grandparents. Heâs still an idiot. Failing to hold Africans to common standards of human behaviour, IMO, is just racism. It implies that they are sub-human, incapable of anything better.
My argument here is that they are fully paid-up members of the human race and should damn well start acting as such.
What a load of crap.
Again, you are judging diverse groups of people as if they are the same, and potentially based on their supposedly shared genetics (not sure if you are doing that still), based on their current, and relatively short predicament.
If you judge the last 200 years of China prior to the 2000s, I think for the majority of that time the Chinese faired not much better when it came to life choices and the way they treated each other. Yet you wouldnât have said they are less intelligent than others, genetically or not. Well, I guess you can, and people have made that claim, but how would that claim stand today? Are the Chinese now more intelligent than 50 years ago? If they were genetically inferior, have their genetics suddenly caught up just because their country is doing well in the last 20 years?
Your powers of rhetoric and rapier logic are no match for my arguments. I concede defeat.
Ask yourself this. Why didnât the economic boom happen in Africa instead of China? Both places were dirt poor at the same time, both had the sympathy of the western media, both had high unemployment that could facilitate the low cost labour needs. Africa is closer to the natural resources needed for manufacturing.
For one China had a lot more people. Second, the US wanted to build up China near the end of the cold war to hold the Soviet in check. Then all the previous manufacturing powers were near by in Asia, specifically this tiny island that happened to speak Mandarin pretty well because of KMT dictatorship. All these factors added up to speed up Chinese modernization. Plus, the CCP was eager to use economic development to ease public demand for democracy immediately after Tiananmeng massacre.
You just said they are the same. Which is it? Iâm trying to meet you on your own ground here.
Iâm suggesting they are potentially the same in that theyâre both human. I suspect the Chinese were also pretty unintelligent during the 1970s, not least because Jabba the Hutt killed off most of the intellectuals, or banished them. Look how fast that recovered. Iâm sure Africa could achieve the same thing ⌠if they wanted to. But they donât.
Yes. Obviously. Both on IQ scores and on national performance. Again, that doesnât mean theyâre doing everything right. It just means they have much higher-functioning faculties for solving problems.
Again, yes. Any animal breeder will tell you how quickly a breedline can be improved. Even slow-growing animals like cattle can be transformed out of all recognition in a human lifetime.
From my perspective, humans are all the same in terms of our capabilities for being good/evil, intelligent/ignorant. Being one ethnicity doesnât automatically makes one more inclined for one or the other.
However, if you are arguing that the differences in living standards are related to genetics, then Africans are genetically more diverse than people from any where else in the world. So essentially you would be treating a very diverse group as if they are the same.
I think that has to do with people getting a proper education and not starving, instead of their genetics changing.
I agree. But âcapabilitiesâ encompasses a wide range of behaviour. When you have a critical mass of people who are violent and stupid imposing their will upon wider society, youâre in big, big trouble.
Those things will change the population genetics - that is, people who are starving and uneducated will choose mates on different criteria compared to people who are well-fed and educated.
Population diversity represents the pool from which future genetics are drawn. In violent societies women will tend to select partners who excel at violence, because thatâs a useful strategy for survival (this is well-documented for the middle ages in Europe). Violent men tend to have little time for education (either for themselves or their children), and so it goes around.
A population cannot improve unless their is selection pressure to do so. It doesnât matter what the underlying diversity is if selection pressure favours negative characteristics.
You should let people like Obama or Kofi Annan know what youâre arguing here.
What? Why? Because they is black?
Tag their names on twitter and say Africans are stupid and see what the reactions will be.
Iâm pretty certain there was a bit more to my posts than that, but whatevah.