DarthOne
☦️
This is little something I found on another website; IT IS NOT MINE.
I thought I'd share it here and I'm curious to see what people think of it, and how it holds up to scrutiny from people more informed than I am.
Poor countries are poor because of bad culture. Rich countries are rich because of superior culture. The Left cannot accept this.
I thought I'd share it here and I'm curious to see what people think of it, and how it holds up to scrutiny from people more informed than I am.
Poor countries are poor because of bad culture. Rich countries are rich because of superior culture. The Left cannot accept this.
This is my rebuttal to a youtube video from a somewhat popular Youtuber, Wendover Productions, titled Why the Southern Hemisphere is Poorer. The dude can be amateurish, and his overly forced voice affectation is annoying, but he does decent research sometimes. Not this time. This video he just put out gave me flashbacks to my Marxist-professor-taught sociology classes in college in the 90s in which I was told that white people only got lucky, and that Europe wasn't better, and here are a dozen excuses for why Africa is poor as shit and only regressed since colonialism. Wendover just basically repeats these tropes without even putting in any serious effort to try to support them.
This entire video is an embarrassing violation of the basic principle that "correlation is not causation". Wendover doesn't even attempt to prove that the absurd idea that peoples are predestined to succeed or fail based on latitude, he just assumes it to be true because, hey, Norway and Japan are rich while Africa is poor. Nonsense. He then moves on to try to "explain" why this is so, but his offered explanations are just rehashes of old marxist academic excuses which are founded on "white people bad" anti-colonialism that the USSR pushed throughout the Cold War to try to turn poor countries away from NATO countries.
Everything in this video is just a rehash of old arguments trying to excuse why Africa has failed that strain to avoid the only obvious and correct answer: bad culture. Libs think that saying poor countries are that way because of bad culture is racist, even though some white countries are very poor (Balkans) and some non-white countries are very rich (Japan).
Cold weather is a massive handicap, it does not help. This is why the dominant civilizations through most of history were: the Roman Empire, Imperial China, and various Muslim/Persian empires, all of which arose in lower, temperate latitudes.
- Wendover claims Europe has an advantage because wheat grows better in Europe. Wheat? Seriously? Wheat was selectively bred by Europeans to be adapted to their climate. Of COURSE it performs better in Europe. Other climates and cultures have their own crops - not wheat - which are better adapted to their climates and perform the same function. Wendover acts like wheat being more suited to Europe is the reason that Europe employs fewer people in agriculture, but this is nonsense. The only reason modern countries cut their agriculture workforces is due to mechanization and similar technological advancements. Europe still had almost everyone working in agriculture a few centuries ago despite this wheat thing, so it explains nothing.
- Wendover then says that there are more diseases in tropical areas, so this is the excuse for why those areas didn't develop, but this again is nonsense, and it doesn't even broadly correlate to economic outcomes. Plenty of "high disease" areas developed rapidly despite this. Have you ever heard of JAMESTOWN and other US colonies? Disease was rampant and these people practically lived in a swamp, yet they adapted and overcame, thanks to their superior culture. Also: Australia.
- Wendover claims that, well, the UK got a head start, it just got lucky to hit the Industrial Revolution first, so it pulled ahead and left others in the dust, as if the UK rising up somehow magically pushed everyone else down. I guess Wendover has never heard of Japan, which started industrialization far later than everyone else, including Russia, and yet in a few short decades, literally from 1868 to 1904, eclipsed the Russian Empire to such a degree that Japan utterly crushed and humiliated the Russians in a major war. Why? Because Japan has superior cultural institutions that allowed it to rapidly assimilate Europe's breakthroughs and adapt it to its own society, such that by the 1930s Japan had the most powerful naval strike force in the world, and utterly dominated the whole Pacific region, easily stomping all other powers with the solitary exception of the US.
- Wendover then comes back to the argument that the rich early developers hold everyone else down. LOL. One word. China. Not even going to bother explaining this one.
Europe rose to domination because of (1) Christianity providing a stabilizing group identity, resulting in (2) a stable environment of competition which avoided things like genocide or collapse into Empire, and consequently the stagnation that arose in Imperial China and the Ottoman Empire.
None of this has anything to do with climate or temperature or latitude. It just so happened that the superior culture arose in Western Europe, which was superior everywhere it went. Australia proves that even Europe's outcasts quickly outproduced any other Pacific peoples by a wide margin.
The points expressed in this video basically amount to cultural Marxism. Many of these talking points were promoted by the USSR. They have evolved into things such as denouncing successful black Americans for "acting white" because they went to school and got good jobs.