Comments by "" (@A86) on "Study: Liberals & Atheists Smarter Than Conservatives & Very Religious People?" video.

  1. "The answer is no" You have no way to back that up because no one knows what Africa or Europe would have been like if contact had not been made. African civilizations wouldn't have been ravaged and Europe would have developed more slowly. At what rate they would have developed independently is anyone's guess. Hence why your question is an infinite regression fallacy. I could equally ask "Would the Spanish have sailed to the Americas had they never made contact with the Romans?"
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  2. Dude, UNESCO is mostly controlled by Western countries. What's next? The ancient Greeks were anti-Western/anti-white for praising the Sudanese and Ethiopians? I'm done with you. This is ridiculous.
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  3. Religious lefties tend to be more comfortable with science because religious people on the left tend to be less literalist in their interpretation of religion and tend more towards universalism. Most Christians on the left actually accept Evolution. But you're right that non-religious people are more likely to embrace scientific advancement than religious people.
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  4. Race doesn't exist from a genetic standpoint. The number of genetic differences in humans is far too small and non-linear to warrant the title of "race" from a taxonomic point of view. "Race" basically means "species". There is only one species of human: Homo sapiens sapiens. The last other races of humans died out 30,000 years ago. The genetic difference between a black man and a white man is actually too small to even be considered "Form" on the taxonomy scale.
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  5. Actually a good number of inventions people assume were invented by a white person actually weren't. Or the "invention" created by a white inventor turns out to be an innovation on an earlier invention by a non-white person. I don't believe in racial invention anyway. Individual create inventions. Not "races". All white people have no more room to take credit for the invention of the telephone than all black people have room to take credit for the invention of open heart surgery.
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  6. So did the Malians. If your qualm is that their script comes from Arabic then you should also have a qualm with the Greeks adopting their manuscript from the Phoenicians.
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  7. The Mali Empire was not run by Arabs. There was not even a significant Arab presence in Mali, or in Africa for that matter. The Arab Invasion occurred centuries later and stopped at the edge of the Saharan. Berbers were their main trading partners. The Mali civilization was established by the Mandinka peoples the early 6th and 7th century CE. Your comment is as silly as saying the Byzantine Empire was run by Persians.
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  8. Incorrect. The Mali Empire was larger and more advanced than the majority of European empires in its time. While Europe was in the thick of the Dark Ages it was actually a Golden Age for much of West Africa. It actually had a naval fleet in the late 13th century the size of which wasn't seen again until the height of the Spanish Armada centuries later.
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  9. @bumfire007 - You're right. I should have known better. I've tried to correct racist types many times before and it almost always ends up being an exercise in futility. The most annoying thing is they'll go around repeating their delusional nonsense which is sometimes accepted as truth by uninformed people who don't know any better.
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  10. Largely the religious views (which you said you don't ascribe to) but many conservatives have taken up positions in modern years that aren't historically true. Like claiming Ronald Reagan didn't increase the size of government and that he balanced the budget. Or that the New Deal was a failure and that No Child Left Behind was a big success. I don't buy into IQ but your claim about black national IQ is incorrect. The black average IQ is around 93 now. IQ changes every generation.
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  11. I don't think there is necessarily a correlation between intelligence and being non-conservative but I do notice more educated people and thinkers tend to be more liberal. However, this could be because many conservatives eschew higher education and intellectualism because of the conspiracy theory among many conservatives that college is an indoctrination camp for lefties.
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  12. Surprise, surprise. Anyone surprised? A lot of conservatives and religious people disavow education. Religious people because they're retreating from science that encroaches on their religious dogma. Conservatives because a lot of their current beliefs take a beating when subjected to logical review and because of their perception of higher education as under the control of the evil cabal of libruls, commoonists and queer-lovers.
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  13. Well, in your defense we are 8 light-minutes away from the nearest star. ;)
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  14. Ge'ez and Meroitic script was the written language of much of East Africa. Especially the Horn of Africa. The only part of Africa which uses Arabic script aside from Swahili traders are Mali and Niger. Which was adopted from the Berbers. Crediting the Arabs and Berbers for the Mali civilization is about like trying to credit the Phoenicians for the Greek civilization since Greek script comes from Phoenician script. Again you have no idea what you're going on about.
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  15. This is way too long to go into here and this is already really off-topic. You'll have to go look up some of these civilizations to read for yourself. Here's a short example: Read up on the Kouroukan Fouga. It's the Constitution which was established in Mali in 1235 CE by Mansa Sundiata Keita and lasted until Mali was conquered in the 17th century.
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  16. As for rule of law the Mali, Oyo, Asante, Hausa, etc. civilizations have had established law since ancient times (as in before 600 CE). North Africa was no more civilized than the rest of Africa. Unless you consider slave trading "civilized". I don't. P.S. "Caucasian" is not a term used anymore by biologists and geneticists. According to the definition of the term Sudanese, Ethiopian and Somali peoples could also be considered "Caucasian".
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  17. Yes. The Egyptians and Greeks wrote about the mathematical knowledge of the Nubians. Several Greek scholars and historians wrote about their travels to the region and visiting universities there. This is commonly known to historians. Sudan and Ethiopia have some of the world's oldest universities.
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  18. Yes, some Empires lacked written languages. The Huns are a famous example. So are the ancient Brythonic and Scandinavian empires. However, about half of the African empires had written languages. Some had wheels though there have been many empires that had no wheels. Like the Aztecs. No common mathematical gradations? Please. Trigonometric and calculus knowledge in medieval and ancient Africa is known by scholars. Otherwise they couldn't have built towers and castles like they did.
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  19. I don't know where you heard that. It's accepted by UNESCO. It is true that at that time much of Malian history was oral but most scholars have established that oral history in Africa is almost as trustworthy as written account. Oral history in Africa is different from the European traditions of oral history. Griots are held to very rigid standards and aren't nearly as free with historical repetition as troubadours.
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  20. Nok, ancient Nubia and Axum, etc. I love how you keep trying to credit Arabs. Arabs were not a significant presence in sub-Saharan Africa until the 16th and 17th century CE. Even during the Arab Conquest most of the territory in Africa conquered by Arabs was in North Africa which is mostly Berber. Even today Arabs are not really a presence in sub-Saharan Africa.
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  21. Whatever, Matt Hale.
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  22. You not liking UNESCO because they don't believe in European/Western supremacy is not an argument.
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  23. Call it whatever you want. It's still not an argument and it's not even true. You have yet to refute a single word I've said.
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  24. I'm talking about the conquest missions, not the peaceful exploration missions. Most of the conquest missions were failures until the early to mid 19th century. Even then the Europeans still suffered many defeats until the late 19th century. Superior technology? Maybe, at least militarily though this took centuries to develop. Not to mention that it developed through industrialization which was fueled by a lot of non-European knowledge and resources. Superior intellect? Lol. Hardly.
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  25. The sun isn't light-years away from the Earth. Just a small correction before someone tries to use it against you.
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  26. D. Williams' surgery was more penetrative and radical than Dr. Romero's.
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  27. I just corrected these claims of yours. They're quite erroneous. Few scholars would call the Mali civilization, the Oyo civilization, Abyssinia, the Hausa State, etc. "backwards". At least no more so than contemporary European civilizations. You shouldn't talk about Africa if you know nothing of its history. The more you type the more apparent it becomes that you have no clue what you're talking about. Because you don't know anything about Africa doesn't mean nothing was happening.
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  28. BTW the European conquest of Africa was not something that happened overnight. It took several hundred years (from the 1500s to the mid-1800s) before the Europeans started making significant headway into Africa. You can read accounts of early European voyages to Africa and early conquest attempts. Most of the early conquest attempts failed and quite often Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish would-be colonists ended up having to flee.
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  29. I agree. I don't know if I really buy the study because I'm not really a believer in IQ. But I've seen lots of other studies which pretty much confirm this. Lefties and the non-religious tend to have more education than hardcore conservatives and religious people. We also tend to be bigger readers and are more likely to travel outside of the country. Most artists and intellectuals, especially scientists, tend to lean left and tend to be either non-religious or spiritual but not religious.
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  30. You didn't state any truth. Your "counter-argument" consisted of you not liking UNESCO because they're not White Supremacists. That didn't refute a single word I said.
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  31. Actually the majority of liberals and other people on the left are religious. Though the left does have more atheists and non-religious people than the right because most right-wing ideologies prize religion as a centerpiece of politics or society as important. The difference is that the Religious Left generally doesn't wish to enforce their beliefs on people as law while the Religious Right does. Religious lefties also tend to be less literal in religious interpretation.
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  32. This is a pretty silly diversionary tactic because I could just as easily ask would anyone who did anything in Europe outside of Rome or Greece have done what they did had Rome never built upon Greek civilization and had Rome never colonized and brought their technology to much of Europe. It's the infinite regression logical fallacy.
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  33. The spoken language was the Mandinka language. Their written language was derived from Arabic script loaned from the Berbers. Much the way Byzantine derived script from Latin and Greek. Metalworking in West Africa dates as far back as 500 BCE. The production of steel in Mali dates back to around 800 CE. The Muslims who opened the Sankore University in Mali were Malinke. Islam is a religion, not an ethnicity or race.
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  34. I've never contested that Dr. Romero operated on the heart earlier. However, Dr. Romero's surgery was on the pericardium. Dr. Williams' surgery penetrated beyond the pericardium. You yourself just noted Romero's surgery was on pericardial effusion. Dr. Williams' was also the first surgeon to open the ribcage to do surgery on the heart of a live patient. Look up "The Evolution of Cardiac Surgery" by Harris B. Shumacker.
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  35. Griots were, at the time, the main system of spreading word about law and history. It's not like they had TV or the Internet. They are like the West African equivalent of heralds. The laws were written later but they're the same as the griots were ordered to spread across the country. Changing the law in spoken word was a punishable offense. I think you're equating griots too much with troubadours.
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  36. However I'm not a believer in IQ. So far all they've proven is that IQ is correlated with the ability to get good grades on standardized tests. IQ changes every generation and people from the same family or "race" can have vastly different IQs based on what kind of upbringing they have. It also has a high correlation with income and nutrition. IMO EQ seems like a more fruitful measure in the making than IQ.
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  37. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams' surgery is what made open heart surgery possible in the first place. At the time he was the only doctor to have gone beyond the pericardium.
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  38. That's pretty much what I was saying. Book knowledge is part of intelligence but just one facet of it. Intelligence can mean many things beyond just book knowledge.
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  39. I'm not sure what your line of work is but so far when it comes to IQ they've found that people with higher IQs tend to test much better with standardized tests. But when it comes to other areas of life like common sense, street sense, wisdom, creativity, the quality of one's work in the workplace, etc. they haven't found a strong correlation. People from developing nations with low IQs seem to be able to function just fine in industrialized systems.
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  40. Though when it comes to getting by in life having higher test scores usually helps. People who get better grades in school get to go to better colleges and have more job opportunities which in turn makes them less prone to crime or having a bunch of unnecessary kids. Since they have access to better education it allows their kids to become better educated and becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
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  41. @bumfire007 - Lol, yes, it would be more convenient for sane people and people without identity issues. I'll just let him believe in his conspiracy theories that UNESCO and race traitor ancient Greek scholars are trying to help the brown and black man take all the white wimmins. The nice men in white coats will come to take him to the happy farm shortly. Or maybe he's not off his meds. He could just be intellectually dishonest like most racists.
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  42. Who knows. Would Europe have been like it is now had it not come into contact with other civilizations outside of Europe? Doubtful. Europe's industrialization was heavily fueled by colonization. In the 15th and 16th century much of Europe was relatively backwater.
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  43. "if it was not for Arabs and Europeans The natives of Sub-Saharan Africa would have no knowledge of either of those religions" And without the Hebrews the Europeans would have no knowledge of Christianity. Who cares? It's not like the Abrahamic religions are better than indigenous religions. "a primitive tribal culture" All of these African Empires actually had their falls AFTER coming into contact with Arabs or Europeans.
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  44. This is getting really off topic but there were several written languages in sub-Saharan Africa prior to European contact. Ge'ez, Tifinagh, Sudanese hieroglyphics, Vai, Meroitic, etc. There was also use of the wheel in areas of West Africa, Sudan and the Horn of Africa. If you want to get really technical all currently existing European writing systems are derived from the Phoenicians (who were Semitic).
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