The Over Population Problem

Europeans really destroyed Africa? It seems, at least on the surface, that the countries that are most stable in Africa are the ones with large caucasian populations. Am I wrong about that?
Perhaps I should have been more specific. They destroyed Africa as a homeland for Africans, just as they destroyed North America, South America, Australia and many smaller areas as homelands for their indigenous populations. The only choice they left them was either to be marginalized to the verge of extinction or to assimilate to the culture of the occupying forces.

In sub-Saharan Africa the Europeans actually relented after WWII, but so much damage had already been done that the indigenous peoples probably have more work ahead of them than they had five hundred years ago.
 
Insufficient food, water, energy, minerals, proper climate conditions. The problem I see here isn't that there are too many humans. Instead there is clearly not enough earth and no clear path to ameliorating that situation.

Except for cannibalism, which basically solves all problems.

But seriously though, overpopulation is basically the root of all problems, and anybody who argues that eventually birth rates will overcome the longevity crisis, must have to eventually face the record of history, because populations can and will suicide themselves, for lack of foresight, in low resource environments.

And at no time in the history of the planet (that we know of) has there been such an intensively unsustainable drain on every resource at once. We are headed into uncharted territory, an experiment of sorts.
 
Arguably the root of the Africans' problems is that they were never allowed to develop in their own way at their own pace. Unlike the Americas, where indigenous civilizations developed from their own Neolithic cultures several thousand years later than those in Asia and Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa is too close to Europe and Asia so Europeans and Asians were always meddling in their affairs. Ultimately, in the European colonial era, African tribes were dragged out of the Stone Age and forced into a European model of nations and states that simply did not fit.

It's an interesting point that Fraggle raises here, because there were a number of significant and powerful empires that arose at various times in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's reasonable to assume that these empires, left to their own devices, would have eventually formed a state, or a number of states, that could have covered the entire country, based on the lay of the land and the dictates of the climate.

http://africanhistory.about.com/od/timelines/Timelines_for_African_History.htm

http://www.history101.com/1/africa/africa_research.htm

http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/students/curriculum/m7a/activity3.php
 
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It's an interesting point that Fraggle raises here, because there were a number of significant and powerful empires that arose at various times in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's reasonable to assume that these empires, left to their own devices, would have eventually formed a state, or a number of states, that could have covered the entire country, based on the lay of the land and the dictates of the climate.

What ...are you one more of a long line of people who loves Fraggle's wild speculations? Speculations that make it sound like he knows what he's talkin' about? ...LOL!! So you've been taken in, too, huh? :D

Listen, the Africans had hundreds of thousands of years headstart on the Europeans, yet lagged tens of thousands of years behind. Make excuses if you want, accept Fraggle's excuses for it, but the fact remains that the Africans simply lagged behind Caucasians in virtually everything that makes civilization valid.

Wanna' blame all that lagging on Europeans conquering a few parts of Africa? Well, golly, with thousands of years on the Europeans, the Africans should have been able to defend themselves easily. Africans had spears to defend themselves .....and had those same spears for tens of thousands of years. Europeans had guns ...which they invented in only a few years! Why were the Africans so far behind?

Please, don't make excuses, just see things as they are/were. The Africans were so far behind the Europeans that they were easily conquered. Fuck 'em! If they can't defend themselves, don't come cryin' to momma! ...or to Fraggle! ...for silly excuses to make 'em feel better.

Baron Max
 
Hi Baron:

It is not just Africans who were more advanced long ago than the people of lands closer to the pole (where winters make little food available without it being saved from summer). All tropical peoples and even those of the semi-tropics where some foods are available in winter have not advanced much in their control over the environment. Hell, even here in very modern Sao Paulo, which is not in the tropics, but lacks any snow, the houses get cold in winter, but none have heating - we just wear sweaters etc. inside to keep warm.

My theory is that this lack of progress by warmer land peoples has nothing to do with race (as you and other seem to imply) and everything to do with the easy of living with little effort of fore planning. Sort of "Garden of Eden" effect. Life is like in a Polynesian island, eat some wild roots, catch a few fish, bananas and a multitude of other fruit are available for the picking when the populations were small due to lack of medical knowledge - basic things like don't drink the river water until boiled, wash hands, etc.

Then the "do gooders" from the colder lands came with their medical knowledge, antibiotics etc. and more than doubled the life expectancies and cut the child birth deaths to less half what they were - Really fucked up the tropics so now the population is hungry and cannot compete with the cheap imported food the big agri-business corporation can produce. Cannot even defend their natural resources that the cold land people (mainly Europeans and North Americans, especially the US after the Monroe Doctrine), come and basically steal (give less than 1% of the profits to some local ruling collaborators and supply the tear gas / water cannons etc needed for them to keep the masses in economic slavery.)

I do not know about Africa, but bet it is even more true there than in South America that the average caloric intake (food) of the masses is significantly less now than prior to the arrival of "aid" from the "cold land peoples."

Perhaps in 1000 years, with global warming bananas will grow wild in Fargo N. Dakota, and US and European populations will not work, plan for the future, save and invest in progress, but just enjoy the easy living as birth control pills will get the total population back to the level of the American Indian density when easy living off nature was possible. - It that happens, watch out for those Eskimos - they will invade periodically make slaves of US and Europeans and steal your resources. Perhaps a compromise can be reached. The Eskimos will hire a few to be "overseers" of the majority who are slaves on the food plantations. I don't know how it will all turn out, but easy living prevents progress* - that much is for sure.
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*Progress being defined as social structure where each man has only one wife and big house to support so is deep in debt and must work from sun up to sun down at boring high pressure job, after long commute, go to night school to improve earning power, etc. to support them and buy all the useless plastic junk to fill the trash can with a month later, etc. (Nothing is worse for your social status than an old car and a nearly empty trash can sitting in front of your house.)
 
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It is not just Africans who were more advanced long ago than the people of lands closer to the pole (where winters make little food available without it being saved from summer). All tropical peoples and even those of the semi-tropics where some foods are available in winter have not advanced much in their control over the environment. Hell, even here in very modern Sao Paulo, which is not in the tropics, but lacks any snow, the houses get cold in winter, but none have heating - we just wear sweaters etc. inside to keep warm.

My theory is that this lack of progress by warmer land peoples has nothing to do with race (as you and other seem to imply) and everything to do with the easy of living with little effort of fore planning. Sort of "Garden of Eden" effect. ...

First, I never said or implied that race had anything to do with it.

Now, ...I've heard/read your theory before and it makes a lot of sense. But mostly it doesn't go far enough to suit me. For example, if everything was so wonderful and Garden-of-Eden-ish, why did some of the people leave to make their way into Europe?

See? My idea is that there was a race of white Africans who didn't like or didn't get along with the black Africans. They probably fought all the time, killing each other, etc. One day the white Africans decided to leave that shit-hole in Africa and find a better place to live - and one that didn't have black Africans that were fighting them all the time. The black Africans were too lazy to make that long trek, so they stayed behind in Africa.

So, ....the white Africans took off and ended up in Europe. They founded a great civilization and invented all kinds of wonderful things including atom bombs! Then they came down to Africa, beat the shit outta' the black Africans, captured a few of them for slaves and gave the future generations of black Africans plenty of excuses for their laziness. :D

Baron Max
 
billy said:
My theory is that this lack of progress by warmer land peoples has nothing to do with race (as you and other seem to imply) and everything to do with the easy of living with little effort of fore planning. Sort of "Garden of Eden" effect. Life is like in a Polynesian island, eat some wild roots, catch a few fish, bananas and a multitude of other fruit are available for the picking when the populations were small due to lack of medical knowledge - basic things like don't drink the river water until boiled, wash hands, etc.
One of the problems with that theory is that humans in "easy living" circumstances will overpopulate the place in a couple of hundred years - populations everywhere rise quickly to the point where the living is not easy, and the adjustments made then are what we see as human culture etc.

Another sign that that explanation will not do, is the remains of the large and sophisticated civilizations that we are finding all over the "Eden" regions of the planet - including South America, where there are areas of Amazon rain forest in which thousands of square miles of the very dirt seem to have been the product of deliberate and very sophisticated human fabrication, and webs of canals in systems rivaling Venice are visible in satellite photo analysis.

Whatever assumptions one may indulge about a culture that made its own dirt in a multistep process taking decades, dug its own river transport through rain forest, and bred trees for its agricultural systems in the resulting plantations (bananas, for example, are completely domesticated), lack of foresight or cultural inability to undertake long-term investments are not among them.
baron said:
See? My idea is that there was a race of white Africans who didn't like or didn't get along with the black Africans.
Why isn't this kind of stuff labeled "woo-woo"? Is it because the consequences of its ubiquity are so ugly, compared with the consequences of belief in alien abduction or advanced civilizations hiding under Antarctica?
baron said:
Europeans had guns ...which they invented in only a few years! Why were the Africans so far behind?
Specifically: The Europeans derived their gun technology partly from the Chinese, who came up with the basic technology partly (it seems) from earlier basic innovations derived from Middle Eastern innovations, North African innovations, and Eastern European innovations, which in turn rested on earlier North African, Chinese, and Middle Eastern innovations. Generally: The subSaharan Africans were not trading with the Chinese or Europeans or Middle Easterners or even northern Africans, for many reasons (see Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which was written specifically and explicitly to answer exactly that question: "Why do {white European folk} have so much cargo?)
 
Birth control is available and therefore there should be no problem . Some folks believe in their faiths that dictate no birth control at all . One of these idiots is the Catholic pope himself . He should know better .
 
One of the problems with that theory is that humans in "easy living" circumstances will overpopulate the place in a couple of hundred years - ...

Not if they haven't discovered cures for sickness and diseases ....as Billy mentioned, which you didn't read!

....see Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which was written specifically and explicitly to answer exactly that question: "Why do {white European folk} have so much cargo?)

No, Diamond is just another apologist for the backwardness of the African Blacks ...just one more of many, many people who refuse to face the truth.

Baron Max
 
Baron, I would argue that one of the greatest penalties faced by the Africans is the existence of the tetse fly, which puts large areas of Africa off-limits for farming. Another problem is that 1/3 of the continent is desert, and a considerable percentage is tropical jungle. So I don't think you could use the Pacific island paradise analogy for the Africans. There are not many kind environments on the African continent that would allow the population to sit back and relax, take things easy and let the fruit drop from the trees into their hands, which is what you're implying.
 
Baron, I would argue that one of the greatest penalties faced by the Africans is the existence of the tetse fly, which puts large areas of Africa off-limits for farming.

When the USA was bothered by huge swarms of mosquitos and the spread of malaria, they invented/discovered ways of dealing with the problem. As I recall, during the digging of the Panama Canal, the mosquitos were an enormous problem, as was the malaria carried by mosquitos. So the USA set out and solved the problem. We did it in just a few months. Africans have had gazillions of years of tetse fly problems, yet have done nothing to solve it ...nothing, after gazillions of years! And yet you make excuses for them?!

Jared Diamond, in his "novel", does the same thing ....makes excuses for the African blacks (among others). Is that what we're going to be doing 1,000 years from now ...making excuses for the Africans? ...while people like SAM celebrate as a good thing when some group builds a soccer field in Africa ...as if that helps anyone!!??

Baron Max
 
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