why some countries suck

[500grains]

Excerpt:

"The real culprit here and in countless other dysfunctional nations is human capital (to use the economist’s sanitized term). It’s the people who screw things up. Why, for example, has once wealthy, food-rich white-run Rhodesia collapsed into the poverty-stricken Zimbabwe? What has prevented African nations like Nigeria swimming in oil money from progressing beyond abject poverty and endless civil war? Do the British secretly oppress the native population while forcing decent democratically elected leaders to pocket foreign assistance? Why must Africa depend on westerners for clean water and cheap anti-malaria medicine? Why have China and Korea prospered despite histories of colonial occupation?

The truth that dare not speak its name, at least in the New York Times, is that some populations are smarter than others, harder working, more apt to delay gratification, less inclined toward hot-tempered violence, more honest, and more likely to place their faith in science than voodoo. Yes, many people mired in mayhem are artistically gifted and charming but they cannot run a modern country. There – elephant in room exposed! Critically, nearly everyone who has looked into variations in national development, including surmounting natural catastrophes, knows this to be true but recognizes these differences openly dooms one’s career. When James Watson, the brilliant co-discover of DNA, suggested that African economic backwardness might be attributable to cognitive insufficiency among sub-Saharan Africans, he was suspended by the Cold Springs Laboratory and raked across the coals. Yet, the hard data here is substantial. Watson had violated the taboo of taboos, and punishment had to be swift and public. (Two distinguished experts on IQ wrote to the Times defending Watson in great detail, but their letter was never published)."

article:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5323/pub_detail.asp

[bkb0000]

i've always firmly believed in the superiority of Americans. our philosophy, our society, our morality. we're better than everyone else, and if you don't believe that- you, by default, don't believe we have any justification for sovereignty, and may just as well go surrender to the next nearest country.

cant tell you how badly my GPA was effected by this belief, back during my Sociology days. :rolleyes:

[kaiservontexas]

Yes there is cultural supremecy. We do not stone women for being raped. We do not bridal kidnap. We do not insert pebbles under the foreskin of our member. (I am trying to be polite in writing that bit.) We would never accept that has a cultural norm. In other cultures though these things are the norm, and forced upon those by the threat of death that go against those norms in said cultures.

All of this is deemed racists. At the same time race does not exist. The human genome project proved this one. Cultures on the other hand do exist. Some cultures are better then other ones while other cultures are similar to ours. The difference between being in Japan or Texas (where neither group stones women for being raped, kidnaps their bride, or forces multilation upon their young as some weird cultus rite) compared to being in Arabia, one of those Mongol nations Russia somewhat owns, or some jungle tribe in the Amazon.

Heck a micro comparison of the two Koreas proves my point. N. Korea has death camps, cultus worship of the leader, every violation of the Nuremburg Code imagined, and cannibalism. S. Korea has electrical power, more broadband then America, food, no death camps, no cannibalism, no cultus worship of the "leader," and they are not trying to become the biggest violators of human rights on record; so, yes cultures are superior to other ones. No it is not dirty to point this fact out to political correct drones, and yes it does not go over well in most universities to point this out in class.