Alt Left: Repost: Setting the Record Straight About Pre-Contact Africa

This is an old piece but people are still commenting on it so I will republish it with an extensive introduction.

John Engelman is a race realist liberal who was a frequent commenter on the White nationalist American Renaissance. He’s not a White nationalist. He’s just a liberal who got mugged by Blacks several times, the last time leaving him with permanent injuries. He’s the proverbial “liberal who’s been mugged by life.”

As the old saw goes, White liberals are all liberals until they get mugged by a Black.” After that, maybe not so much. Nevertheless, I think he is wrong here.

I do not think agriculture was innovated in Babylonia 11,000 YBP. It would be news to me. I’ve always heard it was simultaneously innovated 9,000 YBP in three different places, though the latest information is that agriculture was actually innovated by Africans 12,000 YBP, starting with proto-agriculture in fencing off fields of edible foods (yes, that is proto-agriculture).

The Indians in California nearly cultivated individual oak trees for their acorns. I told my mother they way they treated those trees and the ground around them and asked her if that was agriculture. She said, “Not really, but it sure is awful close.” Keep in mind that agriculture does not necessarily involve sticking seeds in the ground.

Another fallacy is that because Africans, Papuans, etc. have quite low IQ’s now and are behind Whites and Asians, that this means it has always been way. This is a backwards projection of White Supremacist. “Whites are better now, so we’ve always better!” Not necessarily so! No one knows what the IQ’s of any groups were long ago, and higher IQ’s in Whites and Asians may well be a quite new development far along into the Holocene.

Furthermore, like it or not, Africans truly innovated almost all of the most important aspects of human civilization. Language, fire, stone tools, toys, agriculture, animal husbandry, art, decoration, jewelry, fishing with hooks, sewing – it all came out of Africa first, every single bit of it. When you see a Black person, you’re not looking at some alien species. You’re looking at your oldest grandparent of them all.

All humans came from African Blacks. For some reason, the idea that “Grandpa was a nigger” is insulting to White Nationalists, who go to great lengths to try to show that OOA is not true. This shows the extreme insecurity that lies at the base of all supremacism.

I told a Chinese commenter about this and he laughed and said Chinese people didn’t care if they came from Blacks. He said, “If you go back further than that, we were all frogs. We Chinese are just the latest model.” I told my mother what he said and how it differed from the insecurity of White Supremacists, and she said, “See! That proves that Asians are smarter than Whites. We Whites aren’t all that smart, you know.” I don’t know about that, but we are apparently more secure.

Also although the Out of Africa people left Africa at least 60,000 YBP, they didn’t progress all that much in the meantime, and in fact, they continued to resemble Blacks for a long time. Most of the OOA people looked like Aborigines, Papuans, Negritos, and Melanesians until quite recently. The earliest White man looks like some sort of an ugly freak, resembling an African Bushman most of all. 20,000 years ago, Europeans looked like the Makah Indians of Washington State in skull structure. Go look at them. They look like Asiatics.

A Swedish girl from several thousand years ago has green eyes and quite dark, though not Black, skin. I’m not aware of any important human innovations that the OOA people made until the Holocene that were not made in Africa. Yes, they had arrowheads, but I think Africans had those too. The advancements of the White and Asian man, while impressive, are quite recent indeed.

European Whites have only appeared in the last 9,000 years. All “Whites” before then looked something like Arabs. So in a way, Arabs are “the oldest Whites of them all.” South Indian Dravidians and some odd-looking North Africans like Moabites may also be the remains of the most primitive Whites. The claimed achievements of Mesopotamia 11,000 YBP that the White Supremacists like to harp on were done by Arabs at a time when all Whites looked like Arabs. And White nationalists say Arabs are non-Whites or at the very least are “mongrels” or “off-Whites.” So there.

John Engelman: Agriculture and civilization select a race for intelligence. Caucasians began agriculture about eleven thousand years ago. We began civilization about five thousand years ago. Negroes only adopted agriculture about four thousand years ago. They never developed their own civilizations. They have only recently been exposed to White civilization.

Agriculture was probably developed by Africans before it was developed by anyone else. There is evidence for agriculture or pre-agriculture in Africa (West African Guinea Highlands) as early as 12,000 YBP. You must realize that Africans originated many things that we as humans do.

The next to develop agriculture were the Mayans (corn), the Chinese (rice), and the Papuans (yams), all at 9,000 YBP. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians were not far behind. Africans even had plantation agriculture as early as 900 CE in Tanzania. I doubt if Caucasians developed agriculture 11,000 YBP. Are we referring to Mesopotamia, the Levant, or Egypt here?

Animal husbandry was also developed very early on in Africa. It may have been developed in the Western Sahara before anywhere else on Earth. A figure of 9,000 YBP is suggested for animal husbandry in the Sahara. However, pigs may have been domesticated in Papua around this time also. Animal husbandry was widespread in Africa, particularly in the Sahara, the Sahel and Ethiopia, on contact. I don’t know much about animal husbandry further south, but I have heard there was a shortage of animals to domesticate.

At any rate, the invention of the hoe and subsequent hoe agriculture along with the spear played a major role in the history of Africa. Both derived from the early development of metallurgy in the form or iron. Indeed, the Iron Age came to Africa before it came to Europe. The development of iron metallurgy and the subsequent creation of those two iron tools allowed the Bantus to expand massively all over Central and South Africa in only the last 2-3,000 years.

Africans definitely had civilizations, that’s for sure. Mostly in West Africa but quite a few in the Sahel too. There was even a civilization in Rhodesia. Early European explorers drew drawings of large African cities. Looks like civilization to me. Civilizations were especially common in Nigeria. They had manufacture, trade, agriculture for export, all sorts of things.

Repost: A Quick Overview of Some Types of Internet Scams

Same thing, reformatting and reposting some old posts. Hope you enjoy.

I don’t talk about it much on here, but I had a Yahoo group with over 1,200 members to fight scammers out of Nigeria and West Africa. We focused on the love scammers. These are people, often males or gangs of males, who use fake pictures of men or women, often stolen from porn or model sites, to engage in fake Internet romances with Westerners, the purpose of which is to get money out of them. In many cases, the scam can go on for years or until all of the money is drained.

Nigeria is Ground Zero for romance scamming, and Ghana is second. Many Ghanaian scammers are Nigerians. It’s also spread to Benin. These are the same scumbags who started off with the famous 419 scams and now are branching out.

They are now into romance scams, fake renter scams, fake buyer scams, fake auction buyer scams, and fake seller scams (especially beetles from the Cameroon).

The fake renter scam works something like the guy is going to rent your place but somehow needs money fronted to him. He never shows up for the room, and you lose the money.

Fake buyer scams involve the use of stolen credit cards to buy stuff in the West and have it shipped to West Africa. Merchants report that out of every 10,000 credit card requests from West Africa, not even one will be legit. The culture of lying, stealing, and general scumminess is so pervasive in West Africa that most credit card companies have banned the whole area from getting any cards. Fake buyer scams also involve overpayment schemes.

They write you a $10,000 check.

But the item is only worth $4,000.

The check is no good. You deposit it and send the $4,000 back to the guy Western Union.

3 weeks later the check goes bad and you lose $4,000.

Similar schemes involving expertly forged money orders, especially US postal money orders, are common. You cash the money order, keep 2

In 3 weeks it goes bad, and now you owe $5,000 or whatever.

And the banks do want to get paid. Banks will often just cash any shitty check for you without even checking to see if it’s any good. They have actually fought legislation to require them to figure out if the check is any good before they cash it. This would be time-consuming and harm their capitalist bottom line.

Auction buyer scams are similar to overpayment scams. I believe that they also set up fake seller schemes. You send the money and the stuff never shows up.

The beetle scams were interesting. There are actually lots of guys who are so weird that they actually collect beetles. They pin them to boards and whatnot. I guess it’s more honorable than politics or pitching prime loans. Anyway, Cameroon has an incredible amount of beetles, including some of the hugest and rarest beetles on Earth. The West Africans quickly infiltrated the beetle lists on the Net and offered to sell these rare beetles. Lots of folks shelled out $100’s for them, and of course they never showed up.

The West Africans have now fanned out all over the world and operate out of many places, doing their scams. The Nigerians are notorious and hated all over Africa by their fellow Blacks for being a nation of liars, thieves, crooks, and all around scumbuckets. There are now expat Nigerian gangs in Libya, Egypt, Spain, Netherlands, the UK, Switzerland, etc.

Nigerians have swarmed in the Balearic Islands of Spain, where if you go into the cafes, it’s all Nigerians, and probably 9

In Nigeria itself, in many of the cafes, many to all of the people in there are criminals sitting there all day and nite trying to rip off Westerners. One of our informants saw a famous local TV newscaster who had lost his job in the cafe trying to steal from Americans.

There is now a tremendous amount of romance scamming coming out of the Philippines. They scam in the open, use their real faces and real names, and shamelessly rip off every American guy they can find. These are usually young Filipinas promising love or marriage to American males. The law enforcement system in the Philippines is terminally broken, and LE does not even bother to arrest or prosecute the scammers. Philippines is starting to seem like as much of a failed state as an African nation.

There is also a lot of Internet crime coming out of Russia, including romance scamming. The romance scammers are the Russian Mafia operating out of Mari-El Republic. Dating sites are saturated with fake Russian chicks promising to marry you. They hire college students, male and female, to write letters to the Western male suckers and draw them in. Female coeds man the phones 24-7. When you call up your Russian lover girl, Natasha answers the phone and pretends to be whoever she needs to be. End of the scam is she needs airfare to come marry you. You fork it over and she never shows.

The Russians to their credit have busted some of the scammers. There have been several arrest roll-ups, and hundreds of crooks have been arrested, but the scamming goes on. With the return of capitalism, Russia has turned into one of the world’s most horrible epicenters of Organized Crime, Internet Crime, scams, and ripoffs.

There are also many scams, including romance, rental, and auction scams, coming out of Eastern Europe. The return of capitalism has also turned much of this area into crime-flooded pestholes, and Organized Crime practically runs the show in many places. Little is known about these criminals, but the auction scams are mostly run by “Romanians.” Investigation revealed that all or nearly all of these “Romanians” were actually Gypsies, possibly the most criminal ethnic group on the planet.

Alt Left: In the Desert, It’s Fight Dirty or Die

How else do you fight in the damned desert? You fight dirty and sneaky and dishonestly or you’re dead. Real simple. The terrain itself doesn’t allow for honest fighting or even a lot of honest dealing really.

The desert’s a funny place. You think it’s empty til you go try to fight a war there. Good luck.

Are the Houthis beaten yet?

Did we ever beat the Iraqis?

How about the Taliban?

Iran?

The Syrians?

How did Israel do against Hezbollah?

How are they doing against the Palestinians?

And no one can seem to get rid of Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, the Sinai, the Maghreb, Northern Nigeria, Tunisia, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Sometimes I wonder how anyone wins any war in the desert. Hard environments breed the hardest of men, perhaps by necessity, as all the weak men just die in the heat chasing mirages that never show up.

Alt Left: African Blacks Act Dramatically Worse Than American Blacks

Polar Bear: Read an article on a Sub-Saharan African gang raping dogs.

Nothing really surprises me when it comes to depravity in Black Africa. But I would like to point out something. Even the worst of our US Blacks have some standards. Sure the low class ghetto type group acts awful, but do the men form street gangs that go around raping stray dogs? I mean even our ghetto thugs have certain things that are completely beneath them.

A lot of Whites think that a certain large group of Blacks act pretty bad, and in fact they do.

But I would like to tell you something. I have met Sub-Saharan African Blacks from Africa. Most were from Nigeria. I had a Yahoo group for people who were scammed by Nigerian scammers.

At one point a lot of Nigerians came into the group. They claimed to be “helping us to fight the scammers.” Well, they almost all tried to scam us themselves. And these were the good ones!

The men’s behavior was horrific. We had cam sessions and most of the group was women. So it would be just me and maybe one other man and a room full of women. Yet the Africans were constantly PMing the women on cam, and when the women would go look at their cams, the Africans would all be jerking off. Some of the women got freaked out by this.

And as I said, most of them tried to steal from us at some point or another. It was always “I had a catastrophe. Can you help me?” Or “I need to start a business. Can you help me?” They always had their hands out.

And most of the men were what we called “marriage scammers.” They were trying to marry a White woman to get out of Nigeria. However, these marriages almost never work out. The men are habitual cheaters and they treat women terribly. The women don’t take kindly to being held prisoner.

The men refuse to work and just live off the women. They stay home all day and chase women on dating sites or try to scam people out of money. The marriages are disastrous and never last.

Anyway, my point is we had some US Blacks in the group. First of all, most of them were not part of “that group” of Blacks that causes all the problems. They were just regular decent Black folk that no one ever talks about. We did have one guy who was part of “that group.” His behavior was very bizarre and he was quite shady. We finally figured out that he was a psychopath, and we threw him out. But he was the only one. ~9

Almost none of these Africans were ok. Maybe

Eventually we had to throw all the Africans out. and we had to institute a totally racist “No African Blacks” rule in the group. A bunch of people called us racists and took off to form a new group with a bunch of the Africans. Thing is we had to be racist in this case. There was simply no alternative but racism. Anything less was not going to work.

But I had a shocking realization. The behavior of these Africans was just awful. They were a bunch of uncivilized animals. And compared to them, the US Blacks looked positively angelic. Granted this is the group that acts fine and no one talks about. But they were very easy to find, and it was very hard to find one African who acted decent. There may be tens of millions of Black people just like that here in the US.

I almost wanted to shout for joy and praise God for leaving us with these wonderful African-Americans! It could have been so much worse. He could have left us with these awful Africans!

And another thing dawned on me. US Blacks are not far removed genetically from Africans. So why is their behavior so dramatically better? Look, it’s got to be culture. These US Blacks have been living here with us for hundreds of years.

Although they will probably never admit it, hundreds of years of exposure to White Christian culture has probably had a dramatic effect on US Blacks. They probably acted about like these Africans when they showed up. But they’ve gotten dramatically more civilized over the centuries to where 20 million of them don’t act a whole lot different from us.

And this was even with White people acting pretty damn bad towards Blacks. We enslaved them for hundreds of years, and then there was a century of Jim Crow. Even for a couple of decades after that, things were not real great. Yet somehow or other, even when we acted awful, our culture must have worn off on them.Even when we treated them terribly, their behavior got a lot better. How much better would they have acted if we had treated them well?

I’ve been saying here forever now that White people have a good effect on Blacks. Throw a few ghetto Blacks into a White town and watch them shape up dramatically. Whites serve as good cultural role models for Blacks, even the worst ones. I think it’s good for Black people to like Whites. Blacks who like White people seem to do a lot better than those who are hostile towards us. As awful as we’ve been towards US Blacks, it was probably still better than staying in Africa.

I think we ought to give US Blacks a bit of a break. You don’t realize how great they act until you meet Africans. Their behavior and culture has improved dramatically over centuries in the US. Let’s give them some credit. A metaphorical pat on the back and a cheer of encouragement, if you will.

Identity Politics or Tribalism Was Behind Many of the Most Horrific and Genocidal Crimes of the 20th Century

Zamfir: “Having a collective interest is not the same thing as a hard and fast identity like race, ethnic group, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or even religion.”

Okay, I didn’t understand that “identity” for you has to do with only these kinds of characteristics. But then I’d put it this way: Any group of people that share collective interests can have good reasons to organize politically in defense of their interests. It doesn’t matter whether the reason has to do with their “identity” in your sense or instead something less “hard and fast” such as economic class.

Because people who organize around more banal everyday political issues are typically not as insane and flat out deranged, homicidal, paranoid, hypersensitive and even genocidal as IP types? I mean do you see Democrats running around screaming about the Republicans “They hate us! They hate us! They’re out to kill us! We need to fight back!” Do you see environmentalists or pro-abortion people saying that anti-environmentalists and anti-abortion people, “They hate us! They hate us! They oppress us and dominate us! They’re out to kill us!”

Ordinary politics is not tribal like IP is. Few people would say they are member of a tribe called Democrats, Social Democrats, Bolivarians, Sandinistas, environmentalists, gun control activists, anti-free trade types, anti- or pro-immigration activists, liberals, workers, or poor or low income people? Hell no.

And the people in the paragraph above don’t scream, carry on, act paranoid, have a huge chip on their shoulder and accuse everyone of hating them all the time.

Haven’t you noticed that IP people are all insane? They all say my group is completely innocent and good, and we are being persecuted, oppressed and dominated by this evil other group. They’re all hypersensitive to any slights, always accusing everyone of hating them. They hate us! They hate us! They hate us! They’re trying to kill us! And there’s often genocidal language, sometimes towards the hated group and other times it’s, “They’re trying to kill of us!” Often it’s “they’re trying to kill all of us…we need to kill all of them!”Haven’t you noticed that IP people are all insane? They all say my group is completely innocent and good and we are being persecuted, oppressed and dominated by this evil other group. They’re all hypersensitive to any slights, always accusing everyone of hating them. They hate us! They hate us! They hate us! They’re trying to kill us! And there’s often genocidal language, sometimes towards the hated group and other times it’s, “They’re trying to kill of us!” Often it’s “they’re trying to kill all of us…we need to kill all of them!” Before the Tutus slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis, the radio played non-stop that the Tutsis had just murdered the Hutu president and were organizing a war to kill all the Hutus. The solution? Kill them first. Remember Hitler said the Jews are trying to kill us all? Solution? Kill them first. Notice how the Israelis are always screaming that their enemies are exterminationist Nazi type anti-Semites? They’re out to kill us all! Solution? Oppress them, dominate them, wage war on them, kill their soldiers and their politicians, assassinate their leaders. Can’t you realize that almost all of the horrible things that are going on today are all based on IP to some degree or another. In the ME, they are slaughtering each other over religion or even factions of a religion or even factions of factions. In Turkey, this is behind Turkey’s war on the Kurds and their conquest and annexation of Syrian land to expand the “Turkish nation.” The ethnic cleaning wars of the Balkans were all wrapped up in IP. The Islamist insurgencies in the Caucasus, Turkestan, Thailand, Sudan, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Egypt, Nigeria, India and to some extent Syria and Iraq are Islamist jihads against the infidels; in the cases of Nigeria and Sudan, take exterminationist proportions. The Hindu Buddhists wage an exterminationist jihad against the Hindu Tamils. The Myanmar Buddhists wage an exterminationist jihad against the Rohinga. The Hindus oppress the Muslims of Kashmir and wage war on them. The Jews oppress the non-Jews of Palestine and wage war on them and conquer and annex their land. Muslims and Christians wage exterminationist wars against each other in the Congo. In Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, Hutus, and Tutsis wage exterminationist wars against each other. Saddam said the Persians were plotting to kill all the Arabs (and most Sunni Arabs still say that the Iranians are plotting to at least conquer all the Arabs). Solution? Kill the Iranians first. The Young Turks started their jihad against the Armenians by saying that the Armenians were plotting to kill all the Turks. Solution? Kill the Armenians. Similar things were said of Greeks and Assyrians. Solution? Kill 500,000 Greeks and Assyrians before they can kill us first. Nazism was nothing but Aryan Germanic IP against non Aryans such as Gypsies, Jews and Slavs. The war in Northern Ireland is a pure IP war. Notice how all of these groups employ the IP extremism – “They’re trying to kill us all so we need to oppress/kill of them first!” Our tribe is 10 Notice how paranoid they all are and how hypersensitive they are to any slight and how they all immediately accuse you of hating them if you even look at them wrong? Notice the insane, “They hate us! They hate us!” all the while when the people screaming about people hating them are horrific haters themselves. But their hate and racism/bigotry is good and justified and the other people’s hate and bigotry is evil. We just want liberation and to be free! They want to oppress us and dominate us! IP turns genocidal and exterminationist or at least slaughtering quite easily.

Setting the Record Straight About Pre-Contact Africa

John Engelman: Agriculture and civilization select a race for intelligence. Caucasians began agriculture about eleven thousand years ago. We began civilization about five thousand years ago. Negroes only adopted agriculture about four thousand years ago. They never developed their own civilizations. They have only recently been exposed to White civilization.

Agriculture was probably developed by Africans before it was developed by anyone else. There is evidence for agriculture or pre-agriculture in Africa (West African Guinea Highlands) as early as 12,000 YBP. You must realize that Africans originated many things that we as humans do.

The next to develop agriculture were the Mayans (corn), the Chinese (rice), and the Papuans (yams), all at 9,000 YBP. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians were not far behind. Africans even had plantation agriculture as early as 900 CE in Tanzania. I doubt if Caucasians developed agriculture 11,000 YBP. Are we referring to Mesopotamia, the Levant, or Egypt here?

Animal husbandry was also developed very early on in Africa. It may have been developed in the Western Sahara before anywhere else on Earth. A figure of 9,000 YBP is suggested for animal husbandry in the Sahara. However, pigs may have been domesticated in Papua around this time also. Animal husbandry was widespread in Africa, particularly in the Sahara, the Sahel and Ethiopia, on contact. I don’t know much about animal husbandry further south, but I have heard there was a shortage of animals to domesticate.

At any rate, the invention of the hoe and subsequent hoe agriculture along with the spear played a major role in the history of Africa. Both derived from the early development of metallurgy in the form or iron. Indeed, the Iron Age came to Africa before it came to Europe. The development of iron metallurgy and the subsequent creation of those two iron tools allowed the Bantus to expand massively all over Central and South Africa in only the last 2-3,000 years.

Africans definitely had civilizations, that’s for sure. Mostly in West Africa but quite a few in the Sahel too. There was even a civilization in Rhodesia. Early European explorers drew drawings of large African cities. Looks like civilization to me. Civilizations were especially common in Nigeria. They had manufacture, trade, agriculture for export, all sorts of things.

Gedalia Braun's Piece on Africans

Sam: A possible explanation for Black behavior. “…common understanding among blacks of what morality is: not something internalized but something others enforce from the outside…” https://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/ Tulio: Interesting article. But I’d like to examine multiple perspectives on this topic before I draw any conclusions. I’ve never been to Africa to observe her findings first hand, and given that the author writes for Amren, this individual has an obvious predisposition. For example she speaks of cruelty and torture in Africa, but that has existed among whites as well. I’ve seen some of the torture devices used during Europe’s middle period. Even looking at them was unbearable. Even in this country witches were burned at the stake. Blacks were hung from trees on false accusations while whites stood around and cheered. I don’t like her conclusion that blacks have some inherent flaw that makes them incapable of being moral or having any abstract thoughts. Google a list of African proverbs and they contradict everything she just said.

First of all, Gedalia Braun is a man, not a woman. No idea what that first name is all about. I actually think he is onto something, especially as he lived in various African countries for many years. That was always one of my favorite articles on Amren. The odd thing about that article is that while is not real flattering towards Africans, the author doesn’t seem to hate Africans at all. In fact, it seems that he is rather fond of them despite it all. I don’t think just writing for Amren should disqualify you as biased. One of the truly disturbing things about Amren that I learned from hanging out there a very long time is that so much of what those articles say is flat out true. That is hard to swallow. However, the site is dishonest and biased as it only reports the downside to Blacks and never says anything good about them, while I know some of you will be amazed, but there are actually quite a few good things you can say about US Blacks if you are looking to write good things about them. The Black love of cruelty and sadism does seem to be a part of the race. Yes any culture can become extremely cruel and sadistic, even the “highest” races of all which can become downright genocidal under the right conditions of Organized Violence.  Not long ago, two of the “highest” races of all, the Germans and Japanese, engaged in some spectacular cruelty, sadism, out and out evil and even horrific genocide. And yes, European White did use to be quite sadistic and cruel as the torture devices indicate. However, under normal peacetime conditions, most European Whites in Europe and the West demonstrate remarkably little sadism and cruelty, while with Blacks, even US Blacks, it just seems to go on unabated. I should note that cruelty and sadism are not Black traits. They are human traits! Humans are naturally cruel, sadistic and downright evil, at least at times. Most human societies and most humans have it in them to be sadistic and cruel. I was a pretty vicious little boy, but all my friends were too, so I just figure that boys are just naturally rather evil. But you grow out of it. I still have cruelty and sadism in me of course, but I try to keep it locked up in a cage inside of me and hope it never comes out. My argument is going to be that Blacks are more susceptible to the normal human tendencies than say Whites or Northeast Asians are, not that Blacks are evil and sadistic and White people are real nice. Screw that. Some of those things may not be race-dependent. For instance, even if Blacks are bad at abstract thinking as a race, if you push their IQ up, their capacity for abstract thinking ought to grow quite a bit. African Americans appear to be dramatically more intelligent that Africans for whatever reason. One standard deviation is nothing to shake your finger at. Hence, even if US Blacks are have some inherent issue with abstract thinking, pushing that IQ up to one SD is going to make US Blacks a Hell of a lot more abstract than Africans. I should also note that a number of the other downsides to Africans that he writes about – childlikeness, love of cruelty and sadism, needing morality imposed from the outside rather than from within A lot of that has been said before. Albert Schweitzer wrote much the same things after working for years as a do-gooder in Africa. The fact that he was such a do-gooder makes his remarks particularly potent, as I do not see how a man with that much of a kind heart would deliberately make up a bunch of evil things about Blacks. In fact, if you study so called racist literature down through the years, you will find many of these things that Braun talks about repeated many times. Much early anthropological writings on Blacks are now called racist because they were pretty blunt about the race, whereas now the field is very PC. For instance, the thing about Blacks being “childlike.” Childlike is not the same thing as childish. Childlike is not a bad thing really. I would love to be childlike in some ways and I hope I am, actually. Early American writings including I think Thomas Jefferson noted the same thing: they also said that Blacks were childlike. The morality thing sort of makes sense. In situations where brute force enforces morality, Blacks do pretty well. I heard they do pretty well under Communism. Supposedly you could walk from one end to the other of Maputo in the middle of the night and no one would bother you. Maputo is the capital of Mozambique. That was under the Communist like government of Samora Machel, who is actually one of my heroes. Havana is the safest large city in the Americas and it is very Black. Blacks also do well under Islam. Reporters have gone to the parts of West Africa that are under Islam and they say that things are a lot smoother, less chaotic and far less crime ridden than in the non-Muslim countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia to the south. I hear there are also many Blacks in Yemen, maybe up to 4 Under both Islam and Communism, morality is for sure imposed from the outside in a pretty heavy handed way. It was similar in the typical African village or villages that was ruled by a king. I have heard that pre-1960, Nigeria was mostly a country of small rural villages. There was almost no crime in these villages. Not only was law enforcement pretty brutal, there was also a heavy shame factor involved similar to what we see with the Northeast Asians, who do not want to commit crimes or even do bad things in general because it will bring shame unto their families. Amazingly rural Africa was able to operate under the same shame-based morality as the Northeast Asians, yet the NE Asians are usually thought to be a “higher” race than Africans. So it looks like some of those things that make these “higher” races higher can actually be imported and be used by the “lower” races, which seems counterintuitive but is also hopeful. The notion that Black genes make societies inherently unstable is belied by the fact that North Africa (1 Also Ancient Egypt was 1

The Development of Metallurgy in Africa

JM8 writes:

There were some in Africa that were equal to or more advanced than those in Eurasia — i.e. Nok and others like it. One might mention the Gajiganna Culture. Cultures on that general level were not rare at the time or in times fairly soon after in West Africa, but those were notably the oldest and most advanced (or among such) in their region at the time. There were also some that were less advanced and/or did not become so until much later. Of course these were not the most advanced cultures on earth… …Tangentially speaking, not to belabor the point too much: there are especially important developments in Africa that are early and especially stand out by by global standards: for instance, the likely invention of iron metallurgy in West Africa the Igbo region ca. 2000 BC, 1,000 years before its only other independent discoveries in two other places — China and the Near East. Another is one of the few and oldest independent inventions of pottery other than that of Asia (both around the Mesolithic in either Southern Mali or Central Sudan and somewhere between N. E. Russia and China).

I was very interested in this subject at one time, and I did a lot of research into when metallurgy appeared in Africa and whether iron smelting was an independent development in Africa as so many insist. I read ~90 pages out of a book on subject that was available for reading on the Internet. The author was a respected anthropologist. The claim was that metallurgy was independently developed in Africa in Nigeria before anyone else, and that Africans completely skipped the Copper and Bronze Age precursors and went straight to the Iron Age, a mighty feat if true. However, the conclusion that I reached after all that reading is that Africa did not independently develop metallurgy. In fact, metallurgy developed much earlier in Eurasia as the Copper and Bronze Ages, which appeared long before the Iron Age, the last stage of metallurgy. So metallurgy itself was developed probably centuries if not millennia before its appearance in Africa with the smelting of copper and bronze, two earlier stages that never showed up in Africa until much later. And the smelting of iron also does not appear to have developed independently in Africa. Instead it developed first in Anatolia. Anatolians were already familiar with the smelting of copper and bronze, and it appears that iron smelting was invented here some time in the 4th Century BCE. It then slowly filtered over to Libya, a process that took centuries. The Libyans or pre-Carthaginians traded a lot down through the Sahel with Sub-Saharan Africans. So iron smelting somehow made its way down the Sahel to Nok, Nigeria, where it appeared 2,900 BP or 900 BCE. It is this well-known Nok development of iron smelting that is the evidence used by misguided people (often Afrocentrists) to claim independent development of iron smelting in Sub-Saharan Africa before anyone else on Earth. Other than the facts, there were some other suspicious things about this theory. First of all, the claim that Africans were so advanced that they skipped the Copper and Bronze Ages altogether and leaped right to the Iron Age seems suspicious. The normal trend in metallurgy was copper -> bronze -> iron. It went like this the world over. Why would Africans be so advanced that they leapfrogged over the rest of the planet and skipped the first two possibly necessary stages. Also iron smelting did not appear with the Igbo as claimed above but instead was developed by the more North African/Sahel (and later Islamic) influenced Nok Culture in the far north of Nigeria in what is now the Hausa-speaking region part of Muslim Nigeria. Nevertheless, I like the Nok Culture, and in my opinion it takes a fairly advanced culture to even borrow things from other cultures, and Nok was very advanced for its time 2,900 YBP. I would also like to point out that most cultural innovations are actually borrowings. Few major cultural developments occurred independently. The alphabet is a good example, and most of the world’s alphabets borrowed ultimately from the Phoenician alphabet, the first character set that went on to conquer the world. Even Indian scripts are borrowings from the Phoenician, as are the Arabic, Aramaic, and Persian scripts, etc. There is nothing wrong with borrowing a major cultural advance. Most cultures on Earth obtained most of their major cultural advances via borrowing as opposed to independent development. Furthermore, it is important to note that after iron smelting occurred at Nok, it spread very quickly through Africa. It appeared in Tanzania not long afterwards, and it rapidly spread through much of the region. Furthermore, Africans made wide, almost stunning variety of innovations in iron smelting, and these innovations were indeed independent developments. Speed of cultural transmission and improvements/innovations in major cultural borrowings are also examples of advanced cultures.

"Black Women and Beauty," by Phil

This article shall partake in an investigation of “attractive traits” with females of West African extraction in terms of their effects with regard to appearance, along with a discussion of their development. Such an endeavor is undertaken due to Satoshi Kanazawa’s controversial work in analyzing differences in perceived beauty among races. Here. This would be a decent example of what I’m talking about. However, it’s time to get to cons. 1. Head shape – From what I read, at least for the average African American female, they tend to get a wider face. Personally, a face that’s more pointed or oval – that is, having a thinner lower face – is more attractive on women. In the case of Black women this is caused by the larger Jaws of Blacks generally, more prominent cheek bones, and emphasized with a narrower forehead amongst blacks. However, I believe this is more of a male trait than female. 2. Nose – Basically more angular noses are preferred but I think it is more of its relative size and how much the nostrils flare. 3. Body – Reading info from Steve Sailor, while Black men in America have narrower hips than Whites or Latinos, Black women have the widest waists of women and even wider waists than Black men. This is basically due to a combination of earlier development of female fat distribution in females and Blacks being on average more impulsive, in this case particularly with food. In some African cultures it’s a sign of beauty. Often before marriage ceremonies the women go through a fattening period. Examination: While many are probably familiar with European-mix progression, examples of African progression can be seen here amongst these Igbo women, an ethnic group of various looks. Igbo Women The two on the right and the second from the left are overall better looking than the one in the middle or on the left end (though the one in the middle is of course notably older). The causes are more noticeable in the one second from the left and the one on the far right, having less prominent cheek bones, more expressive eyes, and smaller lower lips. The eye traits are present in the one second from the right, though she has prominent cheekbones. This trait is complimented with a wider forehead and what I believed to be a more prominent chin. More African women. Compared to the one on the far left, the other two look more appealing due to having smaller jaws. But overall none look hideous, just more “ethnic looking” in which they have the traits to a noticeable but not to an exaggerated degree. All three, however, show the cheekbone trait (which I may add looks actually nice when coupled with a smaller jaw) but they seem to have “better” facial proportions where their faces don’t look unpleasingly wide. Their eye shapes seem to vary, too. Ibo women. The one on the far left shows African achievement of a face highly reduced of maxillary prognathism, while the one on the right shows one that is only partially reduced but is at a point that displays that unique “attractive” jutting I mentioned earlier. The one second from the right when compared to the one second from the left has wider (more almond) eyes and less prominent cheekbones, appearing more attractive due to a slimmer looking face and more expressive eyes. The one in the very middle is blurry but appears to resemble the type on the far right. Young Ibo Women of Ibuza Each of these girls, in my opinion, deviate a fair amount from typical vices due to the lower jaws with smaller lips and noses, though the one on the left seems to have a lower forehead (a vice that I forgot to add as well as possessing more slit eyes. The one on the right is quite the opposite, having quite a wider and higher forehead with bigger eyes.) Igbo Women This is a favorite of mine in which it shows a very good example of African progression that I speak of, being prognathism that is subtle and pronounces the fullness of the lips, not extending further than nose length, an overall smaller nose, what appear to be almond eyes, cheek bones that are showing but not overly prominent, with a forehead that is round. The only concerning “flaw” it the forehead’s height but it’s not that big of a deal. Biafrans. The one on the right has the smallest jaw, thinnest lower face, intermediate nose and eyes size, and least exaggerated cheekbones. Still, all are rather pretty in my opinion anyway. Though we’ve seen many examples of well-formed faces, actual specimens of body shapes yield little variation (from what I could find) to offer in forms of images. Most were slim, lanky forms that, while not truly unpleasing in my opinion, I must admit I would be biased in saying that it wouldn’t have limited appeal. Among African-American women these forms seems occasional but not that common, at least to me. Thus, it is likely due to nutritional factors if not wholly due to admixture, for native Africans were often recorded to be vegetarians, meat being held more commonly as a luxury rather than a given. However, I’m fortunately in possession of positive commentary of European comments on Gold Coast women of both the Fanti and Ashanti tribes. “The women when young are ugly in face and beautiful in form, when old they are in both.” (This is likely due to R/K breeding, causing faster maturation and possible loss in the retaining of younger traits). “In general appearance the Ashanti much resemble the Fanti though they are not perhaps so strongly built. They are however quite as good looking and according to Mr Bowdieh the women are handsomer than those of the Fanti.” – The Uncivilized Races of Men in All Countries of the World Volume 1. by J. G. Wood Discussion: Now that we are familiar with the identification of African progression of attractive female traits, what possible mechanisms in Africa caused the common (without influence of modern opinions) stereotype type to prevail? Well, Satoshi, after ruling out BMI and intellect differences, claims testosterone differences. The reasoning behind this is due to his findings that, net of intelligence, Black men were rated higher than men of other races. This led him to suggest that difference in testosterone, which produces masculine features and being recorded to being highest in blacks, resulted in Black males deemed more attractive and females not. I’m unsure of this inference, but it does draw attention to the stronger association between “beauty” and intellect in Black males compared to females. The topic between his research of beauty and intellect can be accessed here for others to discuss in the comments, for now I’m going into some knowledge of why the results are the way they are. Beautiful People Really Are More Intelligent One possible reason for these results is social roles in regards to sexual selection. From reading Among the Ibos by George Thomas Basden:

“In the majority of cases young man makes his own choice. He happens to a girl who attracts his attention and he immediately inquiries as to her parents and whether she be engaged or not. If she is free he endeavors to through her friends information concerning her in cooking trading and other useful and profitable accomplishments. He also inquires about her whether she be of good temper quiet industrious and so forth. Should these investigations prove satisfactory he lays his case before his parents or his friend for he cannot make the first advances personally.”

According to this, while initial notice (likely attraction) starts courtship, it is actual character that causes union to follow. Some HBD’rs claim that populations in Eurasia had a more directed course of selection, often described as self-domestication. It’s possible that in cases like here with some African tribes different standards in selection caused for different measures of association of intellect – for example, a proxy of character – that caused the weaker association in black women. It is worth mentioning, however, that based on Satoshi’s research that the correlation between attractiveness and intellect is higher in men than women by about 2.4 IQ points. I believe the association becomes stronger as a society develops. The Ashanti have often been commented to have a higher culture than Fanti, and the women of the Ashanti were commented to be more beautiful as well, though the margin between men was regarded as relatively smaller, with the Fanti males having a better build but the Ashanti being superior in facial features. Regardless, I’m an amateur at best with the topic and I urge anyone else knowledgeable on the topic to share in the comment section.

“Problems” and “Solutions”

Discuss Severaid’s quote and my examples given below, agreeing, disagreeing or expanding on the notion.

The chief cause of problems is solutions

– Eric Sevareid

I think this guy is onto something.

Examples:

War on Terror – Solution was all out war on “terrorism” – really just disobedient Muslim states and some international guerrilla/terrorist groups.

The “solution” did not solve the problem at all, and in fact it made it much worse and introduced quite a few new problems.

The “solution” to the “Muslim terrorism problem” did nothing to alleviate the problem, and the problem only expanded massively, in the process destroying much of the secular Muslim world and replacing it with ultra-radical, armed and ultraviolent fundamentalists. Several new failed states were created out of functioning but authoritarian secular regimes.

A wild Sunni-Shia war took off with no end in sight. A new Saudi-Iran conflict expanded to include all of the Sunni world against Iran and some Shia groups.

The policy was incoherent – in places (Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Libya) secular nationalists were overthrown and replaced with radical fundamentalist regimes (Iraq, Palestine) or failed states teeming with armed fundamentalist actors (Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Mali). In other places, fundamentalist regimes were overthrown and secular nationalists were put in (Egypt).

We alternately attacked and supported radical groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. An awful Russia-Turkey conflict took off on the Middle east with the US and NATO siding with Al Qaeda and ISIS supporting Turks. The US attacked and armed fundamentalists to attack Shia Iranian, Hezbollah and Houthi armies waging all out war on Al Qaeda and ISIS. In Yemen we actively attacked the Shia who were fighting Al Qaeda while supporting Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Sunnis with intel and weaponry.

Some Kurds were called terrorists and support was given to those attacking them. Other Kurds were supported in their fight against ISIS. In actuality, all of these Kurd represented the same entity. There really is no difference between the PKK, the YPG and the rulers of the Kurdish region. Meanwhile, Kurds fighting for independence were supported in Iran and Syria and attacked in Turkey though they were all the same entity.

Billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives were wasted for essentially no reason with no results or actually a worsened situation. Russia, one of the most effective actors in the war against Al Qaeda and ISIS, was declared an enemy and attacks on them by our allies were cheered on.

A horrible refugee crisis was created in Europe.

Muslim populations in the West were substantially radicalized.

Instead of ending Islamic terrorism, Islamic terrorist, conventional and guerrilla attacks absolutely exploded in the Middle East and to a lesser extent in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. It also exploded in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Thailand, the Philippines and of course Syria and Iraq. There was considerable fighting and terrorism in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Morocco and Jordan. The Palestinians ended up much better armed than before and the conflict exploded into all out war on a few occasions.

Terrorism and guerrilla war exploded in Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Somalia and Kenya with some new attacks in Niger, Mauritania, Chad and Uganda. Somalia took a turn for the worse as a huge Al Qaeda force set up shop there and the country turned into the worst failed state ever with nothing even resembling a state left and the nation furthermore split off into three separate de facto nations.

The “solution” failed completely and simply ended up creating a whole new set of problems that were vastly worse than the original problem for the which the solution was directed.

Technology: Technology itself could be regarded as a lousy fix to many problems.

Slavery in the Muslim World: The Tradition Is Not Yet Dead

From here.

Bottom line is, yes, slavery has been present in the Islamic World from Day One. In fact, one can make a case that slavery was an inherent and even emblematic aspect of Islam since its inception. It only left the Muslim World due to pressure from the West when the West emancipated its own slaves in the late 1800’s. Officially, most of the Muslim World dumped theirs. Yet the practice continued. Saudi Arabia only outlawed slavery in 1962. An advertisement for a castrated Black slave for sale recently appeared in a Saudi publication. Mauritania only outlawed slavery a few years ago, and the ban is hardly enforced.

As societies collapsed, the peculiar institution experienced a recrudescence. Libyan ports now export many slaves destined for Europe. Syrian teenage girls in Jordanian refugee camps are trafficked to brothels in Amman and sold to visiting Gulf men for $140-175 for a “temporary marriage.” In Northern Nigeria, even before Boko Haram kidnapped scores of teenage Christian girls, Muslim men had been importing concubine slave girls from the north to serve as “fifth wives.” The abuse and rape of female domestics in the Gulf who are little more than slaves of their owners has been documented for years.

Worst of all is the migrant labor scam that the Gulf states have been running for decades involving workers from South Asia, especially Pakistan and India,  and Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines. For all intents and purposes, work which is tied to contracts with the employer is little more than slavery, let’s face it. Gulf employers of these men have referred to them as slaves. They are housed in the most miserable conditions in a very wealthy country and worked to exhaustion and sometimes to death in ferocious heat with little protection or rest. A number of deaths have occurred to poor working conditions. Some poor countries to the east have forbidden their workers from going to the Gulf to work. There has been a bit of a crackdown, but it was mostly fake. Kuwait gave its “slaves” rights recently, but the Emir has not yet signed the bill. Qatar is worried about its reputation as the Olympics are coming soon, but its response instead of cleaning up its act has been to cover the whole mess up and beat up and detain the protesters. Any progress elsewhere in the Gulf has been frozen in recent years. Instead we get the predictable fake backlash whereby the Gulf states say that critics of their Slave System are “Islamophobes.”

The progress for serious progressive change for alleviating remaining vestiges of slavery in the Arab World seem dim at the moment as the region undergoes a retrenchment, a backlash and a hardening of reaction.

The link between Islam and slavery goes back from the start, so ISIS is not doing anything new. The fact that the formal Muslim states of the world continue to refuse to clean up their mess is most discouraging, but it too may be blamed on tradition.

“Spoils of war,” snaps Dabiq, the English-language journal of Islamic State (IS). The reference is to thousands of Yazidi women the group forced into sex slavery after taking their mountain, Sinjar, in August last year. Far from being a perversion, it claims that forced concubinage is a religious practice sanctified by the Koran.

In a chapter called Women, the Koran sanctions the marriage of up to four wives, or “those that your right hands possess”. Literalists, like those behind the Dabiq article, have interpreted these words as meaning “captured in battle”.

Its purported female author, Umm Sumayyah, celebrated the revival of Islam’s slave-markets and even proffered the hope that Michelle Obama, the wife of America’s president, might soon be sold there. “I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home,” she wrote. Sympathizers have done the same, most notably the allied Nigerian militant group, Boko Haram, which last year kidnapped an entire girls’ school in Chibok.

Religious preachers have responded with a chorus of protests. “The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam. It was abolished by universal consensus,” declared an open letter sent by 140 Muslim scholars to IS’s “caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, earlier this year. “You have taken women as concubines and thus revived…corruption and lewdness on the earth.”

But while IS’s embrace of outright slavery has been singled out for censure, religious and political leaders have been more circumspect about other “slave-like” conditions prevalent across the region. IS’s targeting of an entire sect for kidnapping, killing and sex trafficking, and its bragging, are exceptional; forced labor for sexual and other forms of exploitation is not.

From Morocco, where thousands of children work as petites bonnes, or maids, to the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan where girls are forced into prostitution, to the unsanctioned rape and abuse of domestics in the Gulf, aid workers say servitude is rife.

Scholars are sharply divided over how much cultural mores are to blame. Apologists say that, in a concession to the age, the Prophet Muhammad tolerated slavery, but—according to a prominent American theologian trained in Salafi seminaries, Yasir Qadhi—he did so grudgingly and advocated abolition.

Repeatedly in the Koran the Prophet calls for the manumission of slaves and release of captives, seeking to alleviate the slave systems run by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Jewish Himyarite kings of Yemen. He freed one slave, a chief’s daughter, by marrying her, and chose Bilal, another slave he had freed, to recite the first call to prayer after his conquest of Mecca. His message was liberation from worldly oppression, says Mr Qadhi  – enslavement to God, not man.

Other scholars insist, however, that IS’s treatment of Yazidis adheres to Islamic tradition. “They are in full compliance with Koranic understanding in its early stages,” says Professor Ehud Toledano, a leading authority on Islamic slavery at Tel Aviv University. Moreover, “what the Prophet has permitted, Muslims cannot forbid.”

The Prophet’s calls to release slaves only spurred a search for fresh stock as the new empire spread, driven by commerce, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Persian Gulf.

To quash a black revolt in the salt mines of southern Iraq, the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad conscripted Turkish slaves into their army. Within a few generations these formed a power base, and from 1250 to 1517 an entire slave caste, the Mamluks (Arabic for “chattel”), ruled Egypt.

A path to power

Their successors, the Ottoman Turks, perfected the system. After conquering south-eastern Europe in the late 14th century, they imposed the devshirme, or tribute, enslaving the children of the rural poor, on the basis that they were more pagan than Christian, and therefore not subject to the protections Islam gave to People of the Book. Far from resisting this, many parents were happy to deliver their offspring into the white slave elite that ran the empire.

Under this system, enslaved boys climbed the ranks of the army and civil service. Girls entered the harem as concubines to bear sultans. All anticipated, and often earned, power and wealth. Unlike the feudal system of Christian Europe, this one was meritocratic and generated a diverse gene pool. Mehmet II, perhaps the greatest of the Ottoman sultans, who ruled in the 15th century, had the fair skin of his mother, a slave girl from the empire’s north-western reaches.

All this ended because of abolition in the West. After severing the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 19th century, Western abolitionists turned on the Islamic world’s, and within decades had brought down a system that had administered not just the Ottoman empire but the Sherifian empire of Morocco, the Sultanate of Oman with its colonies on the Swahili-speaking coast and West Africa’s Sokoto Caliphate.

With Western encouragement, Serb and Greek rebels sloughed off devshirme. Fearful of French ambitions, the mufti of Tunis wooed the British by closing his slave-markets in 1846. A few years later, the sultan in Istanbul followed suit.

Some tried to resist, including Morocco’s sultan and the cotton merchants of Egypt, who had imported African slaves to make up the shortages left by the ravages of America’s civil war. But colonial pressure proved unstoppable. Under Britain’s consul-general, Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Egypt’s legislative assembly dutifully abolished slavery at the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman register for 1906 still lists 194 eunuchs and 500 women in the imperial harem, but two years later they were gone.

For almost a century the Middle East, on paper at least, was free of slaves. “Human beings are born free, and no one has the right to enslave, humiliate, oppress or exploit them,” proclaimed the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990. Early jihadist groups followed the trend, characterizing themselves as liberation movements and, as such, rejecting slavery.

But though slavery per se may be condemned, observers point to the persistence of servitude. The Global Slavery Index (GSI), whose estimates are computed by an Australian NGO working with Hull University, claims that of 14 states with over

The criteria and data used by GSI have been criticized, but evidence supports the thrust of its findings. Many Arab states took far longer to criminalize slavery than to ban it. Mauritania, the world’s leading enslaver, did not do so until 2007. Where bans exist, they are rarely enforced. The year after Qatar abolished slavery in 1952, the emir took his slaves to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Government inspections and prosecutions are rarities. “The security chiefs, the judges and the lawyers all belong to the class that historically owned slaves,” says Sarah Mathewson of London-based Anti-Slavery International. “They are part of the problem.”

No labor practice has drawn more international criticism than the kafala system, which ties migrant workers to their employers. This is not slavery as IS imposes it; migrants come voluntarily, drawn by the huge wealth gap between their own countries and the Gulf. But the system “facilitates slavery”, says Nicholas McGeehan, who reports for Human Rights Watch on conditions in the desert camps where most such workers live.

The Gulf’s 2.4m domestic servants are even more vulnerable. Most do not enjoy the least protection under labor laws. Housed and, in some cases, locked in under their employer’s roof, they are prey to sexual exploitation.

Irons and red-hot bars

Again, these workers have come voluntarily; but disquieting echoes persist. Many Gulf nationals can be heard referring to their domestics as malikat (slaves). Since several Asian governments have suspended or banned their female nationals from domestic work in the Gulf out of concern for their welfare, recruitment agencies are turning to parts of Africa, such as Uganda, which once exported female slaves. Some domestic servants are abused with irons and red-hot bars: resonant, says Mr McGeehan, of slave-branding in the past.

Elsewhere in the region, the collapse of law and order provides further cover for a comeback of old practices. Syrian refugee camps in Jordan provide a supply of girls for both the capital’s brothels and for Gulf men trawling websites, which offer short-term marriages for brokerage fees of $140-270 each. Trafficking has soared in Libya’s Mediterranean ports, which under the Ottomans exported sub-Saharan labor to Europe. Long before Boko Haram kidnapped girls, Anti-Slavery International had warned that Nigerian businessmen were buying “fifth wives”—concubines alongside the four wives permitted by Islam—from neighboring Niger.

Gulf states insist they are dealing with the problem. In June Kuwait’s parliament granted domestic servants labor rights, the first Gulf state to do so. It is also the only Gulf state to have opened a refuge for female migrants. Qatar, fearful that reported abuses might upset its hosting of the World Cup in 2022, has promised to improve migrant housing.

And earlier this year Mauritania’s government ordered preachers at Friday prayers to publicize a fatwa by the country’s leading clerics declaring: “Slavery has no legal foundation in sharia law.” Observers fear, though, that this is window-dressing. And Kuwait’s emir has yet to ratify the new labour-rights law.

Rather than stop the abuse, Gulf officials prefer to round on their critics, accusing them of Islamophobia just as their forebears did. Oman and Saudi Arabia have long been closed to Western human-rights groups investigating the treatment of migrants. Now the UAE and Qatar, under pressure after a wave of fatalities among workers building venues for the 2022 World Cup, are keeping them out, too.

Internal protests are even riskier. Over the past two years hundreds of migrant laborers building Abu Dhabi’s Guggenheim and Louvre Museums have been detained, roughed up and deported, says Human Rights Watch, after strikes over unpaid wages. Aminetou Mint Moctar, a rare Mauritanian Arab on the board of SOS Esclaves, a local association campaigning for the rights of haratin, or descendants of black slaves, has received death threats.

Is it too much to hope that the Islamic clerics denouncing slavery might also condemn other instances of forced and abusive labor? Activists and Gulf migrants are doubtful. Even migrants’ own embassies can be strangely mute, not wanting criticism to curb the vital flow of remittances. When Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, visited the UAE this week, his nationals there complained that migrant rights were last on his list. Western governments generally have other priorities. One is simply to defeat IS, whose extreme revival of slavery owes at least something to the region’s persistent and pervasive tolerance of servitude.

An Alternate View on US Tourism to Nigeria

Tulio writes:

I still don’t buy it. I can go on expat forums and find plenty of people who had no issues in West Africa and enjoy living there. I trust people who actually LIVE there *long-term* and have to actually deal with normal people on a regular basis than someone dealing with scammers or someone flying there short-term to collect money. http://www.expatarrivals.com/article/interview-with-trish-an-canadian-expat-living-in-ghana http://www.expatarrivals.com/article/interview-with-carsten-a-german-student-in-ghana

Tell you what. I will be completely honest. I read a story on the monger forums about a White guy who went to a village in Nigeria and had the time of his life with 10-15 rotating women all fucking him the whole time he was there. They were very sweet, feminine and kind. I guess they wanted marriage. He experienced no crime, problems or anything like that. Understand that rural life in parts of Nigeria has not yet been destroyed. And the North was always a safe place to go, except now there is a war on. But before the war was on, the North was a very safe place, almost no crime, no corruption. It’s the polar opposite of the Christian and animist South which is pretty much morally nuked. I also went to some cool pickup forums – really monger forums (these were really cool places just full of regular guys, often single, roaming around the world trying to get laid). I believe they are still around if anyone wants a cool PUA site that’s not ruined by the recent Manosphere PUA types. There was virtually no Roissy/Roosh dickery/assholery going on, and why should there be anyway? We are all just guys trying to get laid, come on. Why fight? There was a section on Nigeria, and I went there out of curiosity. There were some Black men in the US who were very street-smart fellows (draw whatever conclusions that you will), and they could handle themselves very well in dangerous US Black ghetto situations and had been doing so for many years. They admitted that Nigeria was a highly dangerous and chaotic place but said that if you were Black and street-smart, tough, and knew what you were doing, it was doable. But even these men admitted that from the time you stepped out of the airport, people will try to rip you off and scam you right and left. Most if not all recommended that no White men go to Nigeria, but that Black men could visit a lot there easier than White men. These Black guys had figured out the games, culture and rhythm of the streets of Nigeria, and they were able to travel there regularly with minimal problems. But it was not for the naive or people who were not hard and tough-minded. These Black guys were really into Black women, and they said there were many beautiful Black women in Nigeria ripe for the picking. I would say that if you are very tough and street smart US Black man who wants an adventure, you might be able to do Nigeria with minimal problems. But I would not recommend that any White man go there. For one thing, Nigerian Blacks are unbelievably racist against White people. Remember Band on the Run?

Four Friends of Mine Who Went to West Africa

Steve writes:

RL: ‘People act like there is a difference between “a few Nigerian scammers” and “the vast majority of the good Nigerian people.” As far as I can tell, most of the people in that part of the world are liars, thieves, scammers, criminals and morally depraved lowlifes. “West African scammer” just means “normal West African person.”’ I’m willing to believe the truth is somewhere in between but this last statement can’t be true. There’s no way the norm is to be engaged in scamming. I don’t believe it. I’d love to see you travel to Nigeria and India and spend some time there and see if your opinion changes.

I would not go to any of those countries, especially Ghana or Nigeria, if my life depended on it. Way to chaotic and dangerous. I am not particularly interested in visiting shitholes full of dangerous psychopaths. I will never go to India. A good friend of mine, a young woman, went there, and she was terrified the whole time as guys creeped on her in a horrible way 24-7. She stupidly went home with two Indian animals, and the guys spent the whole night trying to rape her. Would not take no for an answer. Half the time she was there, she was sick as Hell. People say that most travelers to India get sick. I have heard of US Indians who say that every time they go home to India they get sick. Fuck that country. If I went to either of those shitholes, I am sure that I would hate them even worse than I do now as seeing is believing. I know four people who went to Nigeria or that general region.

  1. One man went there on safari and also to track down a woman who had ripped him off. She stole $2,300 from him and didn’t pay back any of it when he visited.
  2. A woman I know went to one of those shitholes, I forget which, and she had 24-48 hours of total nightmare. I believe she went there to try to track down some guy who stole money from her. There were repeated attempts to steal from her, kidnap her, assault her and rape her. She kept trying to find people she could trust, but they always turned out to be criminals too. Finally she ended up at a police station, but they were worse than useless as they were basically criminals too. Somehow she found some people she could trust and managed to get out of the country. She said she was lucky to get out alive.
  3. I know a woman who went to Nigeria, and nearly as soon as she stepped off the plane, a Nigerian woman assaulted her in the bathroom and tried to rob her. She said the you can smell the city all the way up in the air, and the whole place smells like rotting garbage.
  4. My friend, a Black attorney, spent some time in Nigeria and Ghana trying to invest in factories with local partners. I am not sure how it all worked out. He absolutely hated West Africans and said 9

I did hear of several women who traveled to Ghana for whatever reason and apparently did not have many problems. However, they all said that the poverty was horrible.

The Attitude Towards Fraud Shows the Difference Between a Civilized Country and a Shithole

Actually that kind of sociopathy where locals make fun of idiots is common everywhere. People will cock off to you saying the most rude things, and nobody cares about your side of the story. Certainly there are many Americans who will ridicule anyone who gets caught in a scam. As a rule, these folks are simply potential victims who have not yet been nailed! In our anti-scammer group, it is more or less a rule that if the person had not been scammed themselves, their attitude was, “How could these people be so stupid?” There were almost no exceptions to this rule. Almost no one who had never been scammed a lot of sympathy for victims. It got to be a real problem in the group that we started making rules saying no attacking victims, etc. The only people who really showed any sympathy for victims were people who had been nailed themselves. I think this is a basic rule of human nature. I also met quite a few people outside the group who had zero sympathy for the victims, but it was not universal. And that really is the difference between civilized people and uncivilized barbarians and animals. The difference between a civilized country full of civilized people and a Turd World shithole full of animals and scumbags is in part due to the feeling people have about scams and fraud. For instance, the US is very civilized, mostly because its culture is Western and Northern European culture which is extremely hostile to scammers and fraudsters. US prosecutors go after scammers and fraudsters very aggressively. Most DA’s are aggressive in pursuing fraudulent businessmen. They throw these people in jail and prison where they belong all the time. Also, many Americans think scammers and fraudsters are bottom of the barrel garbage scum. I found that in Nigeria, that attitude was very uncommon. Very few people thought that scammers and fraudsters were scum, and most of them thought they were very admirable people. This is why I think you have whole nations of sociopaths in some parts of the world – their biggest heroes are dirty criminals. If you go to police in the US as a victim of a fraud or a scam, the officer is not supposed to laugh you out of his office. In fact, most large police departments have specific, well-staffed offices devoted exclusively to fraud. If they laughed all the victims out of the office, they wouldn’t have any work to do.

Experiences with Nigerians and Other West Africans on the Internet

Tulio writes:

The only Nigerians I’ve met have been just normal people. I recall you saying you were in some group that fought Nigerian email scammers. Well yeah, obviously if you focused on that, you’re going to walk around with a bad impression of them. But I guarantee you that the entire nation of 170 million people isn’t sitting around writing email scams. You’re way too smart to be acting this prejudiced and irrational.

About those normal, regular Nigerians. We heard many stories about US and Canadian women (always White) who married West Africans, almost all Nigerians. They may have been what we called “marriage scammers.” In almost 10 The guys refused to work and opted to live off the woman (Sound familiar?). They cheated compulsively and continuously (Sound familiar?). Instead of looking for work, most of them would spend all their time scamming or involved in crime of some sort while the woman was off at work (Sound familiar?). They were extremely possessive, aggressive, controlling and even violent (Sound familiar?), demanded to control all aspects of the women’s lives and granted them essentially zero rights. I knew a regular Nigerian. He had an advanced degree, worked as a Physician’s Assistant and was very smart. I also think he was a good man. I talked to him one day and said something like, “You know seem like a good guy, but why is your country full of liars, thieves, scammers and human scum?” Not in those words of course, and I said it very nicely in this querying, confused and mystified way like someone who just got hit over the head and was wondering what hit him. The guy admitted that his country was the worst shithole on Earth, and he seemed depressed about it. He also said that back in ~1960, Nigeria was actually a decent and functional place with a village tribal society. This village he came from had almost no crime, but they also punished crime very severely. With urbanization, traditional village and tribal life and mores had utterly collapsed, and an anarchic holocaust of a Hell had taken over. He had gone back to Nigeria some time ago and tried to do business. He and a partner invested in a medical office building or some such, possibly to run a medical clinic. He went back to the US for a while, and when he went back to Nigeria, the supposedly real brick and mortar medical clinic with monthly income reports didn’t even exist, and his partner who he thought he knew really well had cleaned him out totally and vanished. He had lost tens of thousands of dollars. He acted like Nigeria was beyond hopeless. We were not fighting email scammers in that group. We were fighting mostly Nigerian romance scammers. A lot of people got taken because while people had heard of Nigerian email scammers, no one had heard of the romance scamming until years after they started. The Nigerians are always changing their scams, so it is really hard to be aware of the latest one, but a good rule of thumb is that if you come across anyone with any kind of a West African connection who is talking about anything related to money, drop whatever you are doing and start running away. Most of these criminals are now pretending to be from other places like England and the US. Not sure how they are doing it, but they are routing calls out of Nigeria to make you think the call is coming from UK or wherever. As soon as you meet anyone on the Net who has a West African connection and you don’t know them well, stop talking to them right away, block them and never talk to them again. Do not order anything from this part of the world. You should not have anything shipped from this part of the world either. I would be very wary about doing any sort of business with people from that part of the world. It sounds like a very bad idea. If I am prejudiced and irrational, then that is just fine! I am ok with that. Worse, I am proud! People act like there is a difference between “a few Nigerian scammers” and “the vast majority of the good Nigerian people.” As far as I can tell, most of the people in that part of the world are liars, thieves, scammers, criminals and morally depraved lowlifes. “West African scammer” just means “normal West African person.” We heard that the romance scammers told everyone they knew what they were doing – parents, siblings, relatives, friends – and everyone supported their being criminals. An 18 year old boy stole from a woman in the group (she actually got him arrested and thrown in prison), and he went out and bought an expensive car and told everyone how he got it. There was a huge crowd of fellow students, male and female, swarming around the car and treating him like a hero. The girls were treating him like he was Stud of the Year. They either didn’t care that he was a criminal, or they thought he was cool. The overwhelming attitude of West Africans was that any money you could make by scamming was a good thing and a source of laughter. This is because almost all West Africans have this attitude that anyone who gets taken in any scam is an idiot who deserves to get ripped off. This is why the police never investigate these crimes either. Even the cops think it is acceptable to “rip off idiots.” You might laugh at that rationale, but that is exactly the rationale that sociopaths have. Sociopaths think that the rest of are stupid, and we deserve to get taken for being idiots. It’s not really a crime to con people because victims deserve what they get. So what you see here is that most West Africans have a moral structure that resembles the morality of a sociopath. And you have a whole part of the world where much of the population seems at least somewhat sociopathic. So really, if they are not stealing from you, they are cheering on and laughing about those who do, which means almost all of them are scumbags if you ask me. We also ran across stories about West Africans, mostly Nigerians, who were living in all parts of the world – the Arab world, North Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and especially Europe. Everywhere where there were a significant number of these people, they were involved in cons and crime to a high degree. It’s as if crime in the national sport. We also had a few decent Nigerians who lived in these countries, and they told us that just about everyone they knew was trying to scam Americans on the Internet. One very good Nigerian who worked with us said you would walk into an Internet cafe, and out of 40 people, 37 of them would be sitting there for hours on end trying to scam Americans in all sorts of fancy ways. One time he went into a typical cafe where 9 And it’s not just “email scams” either. There is every ripoff and scam in the world coming out of that place. Many ships coming into Lagos Harbor are have a significant load of stolen goods. A number of online stores used to accept purchases from Nigeria, but most online stores now ban 10 One businessman said out of 1,000 Nigerian customers on his online stores, 999 of them were criminals using stolen credit cards. There are also many mail order scams coming out of that place, including from nearby countries. I was on a beetle forum once, and a whole lot of people had been ripped off buying beetles from Africa. They have many cool beetles (other for the West Africans themselves, who in my opinion are nothing but stinkbugs) over there in Africa, and there is a lot of demand for them. Well, these African sellers were selling all of these rare and exotic beetles. The sellers were out of Cameroon. Not sure if they were Nigerians or not, but Cameroon is right next to Nigeria. Well, they stole a ton of money from these collectors. I also met some Africans from other parts of the continent, including Black South Africans. A Black South African told me that Nigerians are regarded as lying, cheating, thieving crooks all over Black Africa and they are widely hated by their fellow African Blacks, with some countries even trying to keep them from immigrating to the country. Ebay was nearly destroyed by fake Nigerian and Gypsy sellers selling nonexistent products. Nearly 10 Many social networking sites have been overwhelmed by Nigerian scammers, and they have been all but destroyed. For instance, Badoo has been completely nuked by Nigerian human locusts. Almost all of the online dating sites are seriously ruined or completely destroyed by Nigerian and to a lesser extent Russian romance scammers. There was a vast amount of rental scamming going on recently. Not sure exactly how it works. They either pretend to rent a place or pretend to be renting some place out. The room, apartment or house doesn’t even exist, and the whole thing is a ruse to drain your bank account. Law enforcement is worthless in that part of the world. A lot of people in our group tried to get cops involved, but the police departments appeared dysfunctional, nonoperative, or run by criminals themselves. Up to the north around Sierra Leone or wherever the gold mining is going on now, there are a lot of people selling gold coins, nuggets, and bars. They advertise overseas. Almost 10 I honestly think that 5

Tribalism and Chieftainship: Why the Modern African State Fails

Jason Y writes:

A tiny elite steals from people in many nations, not just African (or New World African) states.

The Blacks generally just sit there and take it though in Africa. And in Africa it is particularly nasty because of the dire poverty of so many of the people. For instance, Gabon has a per capita income of $20,000/yr. Should be a nice place. But the malnutrition rate is sky high, most of the people are horribly poor and/or starving and the health indicators are complete shit. Apparently some little elite, probably one tribe, monopolizes the state and steals all the money leaving everyone else with jack. With all that oil wealth, Nigeria should be a rich country. Instead it’s one of the most nightmarish places on Earth with horrific poverty and crime. You want to know why Blacks just sit there and take it in Africa? Because they are used to this crap! African Blacks have always lived in tribes under a chief. Generally the chief and his pals monopolized most of the best women and apparently a lot of the money, but I would assume that they doled out enough for the tribe to live by. They still sort of do that in a way. One tribe gets into office and steals all the money and gives it to their tribe and all the other tribes get jack. The other tribes don’t revolt because they are used a thieving all powerful chief. Instead they plot for their tribe to take over public office so that they can enrich their tribe and fuck over everyone else! I will say that I like what Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe though. The capital society is pretty peaceful and nice and even the slums are not that bad by African standards. Mugabe is a populist and a socialist, and he has done a lot of great things for his people. Botswana is said to more or less function also. The takeaway point is that Africans don’t rebel against their leaders even when they suck because they are used to living under an autocratic thieving chief who could not be challenged. Instead they opt for zero-sum games of replacing one tribe’s oppression with another’s. I do not know about this tropical diseases holding Africans back thing. There are a lot of tropical diseases in the Caribbean, Brazil, Vietnam and Singapore and those places are doing all right. It is not at all typical for a small oligarchic elite to steal everything and leave everyone else with jack. It’s hardly the case in Europe except maybe in the Ukraine and possibly in Russia and Kazakhstan. That model does exist in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Burma. Further east, this is the model in Indonesia and the Philippines. This is also the typical model in most of Latin America, though things are finally changing now. However, in India, Nepal, Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines and now most of Latin America, one can at least say that there is a loud and angry Left made of the masses who are getting screwed by the oligarchs. In a number of places, the Left is even armed. But there seems to be no such thing in most African states. It is if Africans simply expect to be ruled by a thieving autocratic bastard and do not see any other alternative. In most of Asia it is not the case – Mongolia, China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Taiwan are relatively equitable places. The entire Arab world is more or less run according to a socialist model as is Iran. Most of the former SSR’s are relatively socialist places such as Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kirghistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The oligarchic model is pretty much nonexistent in traditional Europe and in the Anglosphere of the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, though the US is starting to resemble the model somewhat. Trust me that nowhere else on Earth would you find a country that had a PCI of $20K/yr where the majority of the people wallowed in horrific poverty, starving and sickly. That sort of lunacy would only be found in Africa. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Alt Left: The Collapse of Post-Colonial Africa, or What Went Wrong?

Jason Y writes:

A lot of the problems of US blacks are caused by one parent homes. However, I’m not sure about Africa. I do know that many Africans have been orphaned because of AIDS. Could this relate to the problem?

Although traditional life in much of Africa was reportedly short, nasty and brutish as reported by early White travelers to the region (see Negroes in Negroland, available on the web), in the 20th Century, it was not all bad. As you can see below, traditional Nigerian village life had little crime.

I knew a very smart and honest Nigerian man who came from a small village. He himself admitted that his country was a failed state. He said that in his village there was almost no crime. There were very strict rules against every sort of legal transgression and the punishments were very serious. You could be banned from the village, beaten up, or tortured. In many cases of more serious crime such as rape or homicide, you were simply killed, just like that. So the death penalty was in force for much crime.

I read once on a forum about a guy who went and lived in a Nigerian village for a while. There was almost no crime there, and people were very nice. The women are all super horny and he was a single White man. Half the women in the village wanted him. So he entertained one after the other of these women sexually. They all knew what was going on and did not mind being one of many although they all hoped to nab him. The women were also very feminine, submissive and even shy, which shows that there is no biological imperative for Black women to be highly masculine compared to females of other races.

Almost all of the crime and chaos coming out of Nigeria is from the Christian South. In the North, although there is a terrorist problem, there is reportedly almost zero crime. Almost no Internet scamming whatsoever takes place in the Muslim North. Furthermore, most politicians in the North are comparatively honest, while finding an honest politician from the Christian South is so impossible that it would probably violate a law of physics to find one.

Traditional village life in Nigeria before 1960 had very little crime. There were very strict rules that had to be obeyed and they had the Asian “do not bring shame on your family” thing. Village life has now broken down and West African villages are often frighteningly poor. So many have moved to the cities of Africa. The poverty and squalor in these cities is simply insane.

Traditional culture has for all intents and purposes collapsed and the rest has been chaos, anarchy, massive corruption, a phenomenal crime rate, and overall extreme dysfunction. Most African large cities are simply flat out dangerous. I would not advise anyone to go there.

Possible Environmental Factors in the Black IQ

Johan Mayer writes:

Have you tried correlating the IQ scores with local lead poisoning? The main gains from the Flynn effect ended by the late 1970s (birth years), suggesting that fuel lead didn’t play a role (as both whites and blacks would experience higher intelligence, thus raising the intelligence that 100 represents—rather, it was probably the elimination of malnutrition), and that some of the remaining gap should arise from differential lead paint. The calculation might look as follows: Deficit = sum(over n) Distribution of lead level(n) x IQ_deficit_from_lead(n)for each neighborhood. Add the deficit to the mean IQ calculated from the composition of the neighborhood, then re-estimate the (before lead) IQ of each group, fitting to composition and reevaluated IQ; re-normalize the black IQ to the white (raised) IQ. Elevated black blood lead (much more common than elevated white blood lead) suggests that at least another 3 IQ points can be gained for blacks on that count, using Detroit data. I did a similar calculation for national IQ and malnutrition (using 1991 data), on the basis that malnutrition knocks off about a standard deviation of IQ (15 points, although I also found a source that claimed 11), multiplying by the malnourished proportion of the population. This pushes sub-Saharan African National IQ to the range upper 60’s to upper 70’s. Black African skin bleaching tends to be between 30 and 7 African leaded fuel use will also greatly harm urban populations (who will dominate National IQ estimates), although they were phased out by 2006; the time to affect primary schools is about nine years, although the IQ estimates are based on the the 90’s. South Africa should suffer 7 points, and Nigeria probably the same. Thus the pre-environmental expected IQ of blacks is well within a standard deviation of whites. East Asian cities are often near coasts, and historically held much smaller portions of their respective countries’ populations, as elsewhere. Thus their early (for the third world) industrialization would tend to have a lower impact on IQ. Lead has been studied, and childhood lead is substantially lower than adult lead, which may account for much of the national IQ achievement of Chinese versus other societies; child rearing practices that avoid putting unknown objects in the mouth might play a role, but then again, given the relatively small family sizes and involvement of grandparents, more supervision might also play a role. As to the topic of your post, another possible cause for the lack of black achievement considering IQ is racism.

The author makes a strong case that US Black IQ’s can increase 3 points and African Black IQ’s can increase 10 points due to environmental interventions. This is certainly plausible. I have no problems with any of these environmental efforts. All the power to them. A gain of even 3 IQ points for Detroit Blacks would be a fantastic thing indeed. A 10-point IQ gain for African Blacks would be a great thing for them and for Africa as a whole. Many of Africa’s most serious problems would surely ameliorate with a 10-point IQ gain. An IQ in the upper 70’s would put Africa on a par with the IQ’s of some Gulf states such as Qatar that have created highly evolved civilizations. However, even US Blacks with IQ’s a full 9 points higher than the Qataris fail miserably at creating the highly evolved society that the Qataris created. One argument is that Qatar only exists in its current form due to oil wealth. Give Black people oil wealth, and they will create a Qatar. However, this has not happened in Africa. Nigeria has tremendous oil wealth, and it is one of the evil and diabolically failed states on Earth. Nearly all of the wealth has been stolen by a tiny elite and the rest of the population flounders in monstrous poverty. Gabon is a much better case, and oil wealth has allowed them to have a $20,000 per capita income. Gabon is  basically a middle income country. However, almost all of the wealth has been stolen by a tiny elite, ~5 Give a Black society money, and the most cruel and sociopathic Blacks will steal almost all of it for a small elite group, leaving the vast majority of the population to suffer in terrible poverty (the African model). Alternatively, give another Black society money, and income will be much better distributed, but the most cruel and sociopathic Blacks will create in monstrous violent crime rate, destabilizing a prosperous society. The African wealth distribution style is also seen in Haiti and was seen until the 1960’s in the Dominican Republic. The rest of the Caribbean has a much more equitable distribution system. Trinidad and Tobago has a PCI or $20,000/yr due to oil wealth, but they have one of the highest violent crime and homicide rates on Earth. A Trinidadian woman I spoke to said it was because local young men had imported gang culture from the US, and it was now spread all through the country. Still, a country with a $20,000 PCI and that high of a homicide rate nearly qualifies as something like a failed state right there, at least on that one variable. Although we have shown that Blacks can create wealthy societies (at least in the case of oil), those societies show significant problems either in democratization or extremely high violent crime. In the African model, a tiny elite will steal all the oil wealth and leave most of the people scrounging for scraps. In the Caribbean model, wealth will be distributed much better, but society will still be saddled with a horrific violent crime rate. As the comparison with Qatar and the US shows, there is a lot more holding Black people back than just a low IQ. With an IQ of ~83, the Arabs can create Dubai, along with a highly civilized state with a shockingly low crime rate. With an IQ of 87, US Blacks still cannot create anything like Dubai even with an IQ advantage. So obviously the problems of Black people extend beyond IQ, and a rising Black IQ is not a cure-all. What these problems are is unknown, but there appear to be genetic factors predisposing Blacks to greater crime and antisociality. What these factors are is unknown, but I am convinced that they exist. Antisociality will create thieving elites in Africa and Caribbean societies with better income distribution but extremely high violent crime rates. Getting a handle around Black problems involves not only raising Black IQ but dealing conclusively with whatever it is that is crimogenic or psychopathogenic in Black biology or Black genes. Once IQ is high enough though, whatever Black criminogenic issues are involved tend to wash out. I have read that setting Black IQ at ~113, the Black and White crime rates are equal. High intelligence often washes out criminal tendencies due to greater forward thinking, possibly greater empathy, guilt and worry and lessened impulsiveness. As IQ rises in any race of humans, empathy, guilt and worry tend to rise and impulsiveness tends to decline. I do not agree that racism affects Black IQ scores very much. Instead, moving from a non-racist country (Jamaica) to a racist country (the UK) results in a gain of up to 14  IQ points in the second generation. Blacks living in “highly racist” White societies typically have IQ’s ~13-18 points higher than Blacks living in non-racist societies such as the Caribbean and Africa. Skin bleaching products sold in the US probably do not have much mercury in them.

Is Wurzel English a Separate Language?

Warren Port writes about Somerset English. See the link for a baffling sample of this strange form of English.

Admittedly it is a very bad English, and he is exaggerating for effect but I understand most of it except for the odd word. When I was twelve we moved from London to a tiny village called Cattcott ten miles from the Mendips where this recording is from. In the eighties there were some people who spoke that way, probably more diluted now.

I am a linguist. We don’t really call anything “bad English.” All dialects are as good as any other. I just figure if you can’t understand it, it’s a foreign language. I would like to split English into some separate languages because some of them pretty much are. Really Wurzel is just as much of a valid way to speak English as any others. This man speaks Wurzel, and he is able to communicate just fine with other folks who also speak it, so it is a valid lect. The only problem is that rest of us English speakers speak another English language that is very far removed from this English language, so we can’t understand him. Someone ought to write this language down. It’s cool because it seems like it has a lot of new words that I don’t have in the English language that I speak. At a minimum, as separate languages, I would probably split off: Scots. There appears to be more more than one language inside Scots. Scots itself is already split off as a separate language. There appear to be 4 separate languages inside of Scots. Doric Scots. Doric is spoken in the northeast of Scotland in Aberdeen, Banff and Buchan, Moray and the Nairn. It has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Scots. Lallans Scots. This form of Scots is spoken in the south and central part of Scotland. This is the most common form of spoken Scots. Difficult intelligibility with the other lects. Ulster Scots. This is the form of the Scots language spoken in North Ireland, mostly by Protestants. It has many dialects and has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Scots. Insular Scots. Includes the Shetlandic and Orcadian dialects. Spoken on some Scottish islands and is reportedly even hard for other Scots speakers to understand. Of all of the Scots lects, this one is the farthest from the others. Scottish English. We can probably split this off as well because it is probable that there are Scottish English speakers who can’t understand pure Scots very well. While some British English speakers can understand this lect well, others have problems with it. In particular, the dialect of Glascow is said to be hard to understand for many Londoners. Hibernian English. English spoken in Ireland. There seem to be some forms of Irish English such as the hard lect spoken by the spokespeople for the IRA and its political wing like Gerry Adams, that are very hard for Americans to understand. Some English people also have a hard time with Ulster English. Geordie and related lects from the far north of England up around Scotland. These lects are spoken around Newcastle in the far north of England on the east coast. Even the rest of the English often have a hard time with Geordie, and when people talk about multiple languages inside English, Geordie is often the first one they bring up. Scouse. Really hard Scouse is barely even intelligible outside of Liverpool, not even in the suburbs. There is a report of an American who lived in Liverpool for a long period of time, and after 8 years, she still could not understand the very hard Scouse spoken by young working class Liverpool women. While some speakers of British English can understand Scouse, this is mostly due to bilingual learning. Other speakers of British English have a hard time with Scouse. Potteries. Spoken almost exclusively in and around the city of Stoke on Trent in northern West Midlands. The hard form is not readily understood outside the city itself. The dialect is dying out. Welsh English. The hard forms of Welsh English are not readily understood outside the region. There are at least 4 separate languages inside Welsh English. South Welsh English.Welsh English is not a single language but actually appears to be four separate languages. The varieties of South Welsh English spoken in Cardiff and West Glamorgan (Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot) cannot be understood outside the region. It is not known if West Glamorgan English and Cardiff English can understand each other well. North Welsh English, South Welsh English and West Welsh English are as far apart as Newcastle, Cornwall and Birmingham; therefore, all three of them are separate languages. North Welsh English. This language is spoken in areas such as Anglesy and Llanberis. It often has a soft lilt to it that people find pleasant and soothing. Probably poor intelligibility with West and South Welsh English. West Welsh English. This is spoken in places such as Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire. Those two dialects are said to be particularly pleasant sounding. Probably poor intelligibility with North and South Welsh English. Monmouth English. This form of Welsh English reportedly cannot be understood outside of Monmouth itself. Monmouth is a city on the eastern edge of Wales towards the south. Wurzel. In particular the hard Wurzel form of West Country English spoken in Somerset at least until very recently is not well understood outside of Somerset. In addition, many younger residents of Somerset do not understand it completely. It sounds similar to Irish and has a lot of new words for things. Hard Wurzel is dying out, and its speakers are mostly elderly. The language of Bristol may be possibly be included here. Weald Sussex English. A variety of Sussex English spoken in the Weald region of Sussex was traditionally very hard for outsiders to understand. It is dying out now, but it still has a few speakers. Newfoundland English. There are reportedly some hard forms of Newfie English spoken by older fishermen on the coast of the island that are very hard for other North Americans to understand. Appalachian English. Some forms of Appalachian English from the deep hollows of West Virginia are hard for other Americans to understand. Mulungeon English. Some of the English lects spoken by Mulungeon groups in central Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, particularly the lect spoken by the Monacan Indians living near Lynchburg, are very hard for other Americans to understand. They seem to have an archaic character and use a lot of new words for things that I could not identify when I heard it. This may be a type of English often said to be archaic from centuries ago that is still spoken in the mountains. The degree to which this is intelligible with the rest of Appalachian English is uncertain. Tangier English. Spoken on an island off the coast of Virginia by fishermen, this is a relatively pure West Country English lect from 1680 or so that has survived more or less intact. When they speak among themselves, they are hard for other Americans to understand. The degree to which this can be understood by West Country English speakers in England is not known. Unknown intelligibility with Harkers Island English. Harkers Island English. Spoken on Harkers Island off the coast of North Carolina on the Outer Banks. Has a similar origin to Tangier English. It is hard for outsiders to understand. The degree of intelligibility between Tangier English and Harkers Island English is not known. New York English. There is a hard form of New York English, not much spoken anymore, that cannot be well understood at least here on the West Coast. Tends to be spoken by working class Whites especially in the Bronx. In general, this lect is dying out. In my region of California, we recently had a man who moved here from the Bronx, a young working class White man. Even after 2-3 months here, people still had a hard time understanding him. He did not seem to be able to modify his speech so he could be understood better, which usually means someone is speaking another language, not a dialect. Finally he learned California English dialect well enough so that he could make himself understood. Nonatum English or Lake Talk. Spoken only in Nonatum, Massachusetts, one of 13 villages of the city of Newton, mostly by Italian-Americans. Many residents came from a certain village in the Lazio region of Italy. It appears to be a mixture of Italian and Romani, the language of the Gypsies. Not intelligible to those outside the village. Yooper. Spoken mostly in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, this lect is also spoken in the northern parts of the Lower Peninsula and in parts of northeast Wisconsin. Heavily influenced by Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Flemish and French, this lect is hard for outsiders to understand largely due to the influence of these other European languages. African American Vernacular English or Ebonics. This lect is spoken by many Black people in the US, often lower class people in ghettos or in the country. The hard forms of it cannot be understood at all by other Americans. I once had two Black women in my car for an hour or so. They were speaking AAVE. Over that hour, I do not believe that I understood a single word they said. They may as well have been speaking Greek. Forms spoken in the ghettos of Memphis and in the Mississippi Delta by rural Blacks may be particularly hard to understand. South African English. While some Americans can understand this hard dialect well, though with difficulty, others cannot understand it. It is not known how well speakers of other Englishes such as British and Australian English can understand this lect. Jamaican Creole English. Jamaican English Creole is already split off as a separate language. At any rate, in its hard form, it is nearly unintelligible to Americans. Gullah English Creole is a creole spoken on the Gullah Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Already split off into a separate language. Not intelligible to American English speakers. Nigerian Pidgin English. The harder forms of this may be rather hard to Americans to understand, but this needs further investigation. The hard forms are definitely quite divergent and seem odd to many Americans. Already split off as a separate language. Australian English. Some forms of Australian English can be hard to understand for people outside the continent. I found that a form spoken in rural Tasmania was particularly hard to understand. I even have a hard time understanding Helen Caldicott, the famous physician. Other forms spoken more in the rural areas of the main island can also be rather hard to understand. Nevertheless, I can understand “TV Australian” well. However, speakers of British English are able to understand Australian English well, so it is not a language but rather a dialect of British English. New Zealand English. This is similar but different from Australian English. While most New Zealand English is readily understandable to Americans, some of it can be a bit hard to hear. In the video below, the announcer speaks in TV New Zealand English, which I actually found a bit hard to understand, but I could make out most of it. The comedians spoke in a strong rural New Zealand accent. I could make out a lot of it, but not all of it for sure. However, British English speakers can understand all of the dialogue in this video. New Zealand English is not a language but is instead a dialect of British English. Indian English. Some of the Indian English spoken by speakers in India can be quite hard to Americans to understand. What we need to know is whether this is a first or second language for them. If they were brought up speaking this Indian English, then it is a separate language. If it is simply English spoken as a second language by a native speaker of Hindi or another Indian language then it is not a separate language. Requires further investigation. In conclusion, it seems that there are at least 25 separate languages and 3 creoles/pidgins inside of macro-English. 1 other case is uncertain.

There Be Cannibals!

Repost from the old site. My understanding of cannibalism is not good. It’s well-known that starving people in just about any society will eat their own dead. Clearly, the Anasazi Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians, engaged in cannibalism during the 1300’s. I don’t care what the Indians say. Indian tribes are notorious liars when it comes to denying anything that makes them look bad. The cannibals and head-hunters of New Guinea are well-known, and some were said to continue to engage in the practice until the mid-1960’s. Cannibalism was well-known in other parts of the world, especially Polynesia and Fiji. It was legendary in New Guinea and widely practiced in Australia too. The cannibals of the Congo below were not the only ones in Africa, just some of the more notorious. There were also cannibals in the Brazilian Amazon and a few in North America here and there. But Polynesia, especially New Zealand, had some of the worst cannibals of all. A Maori wife of a chief killed in combat would offer herself to be killed and eaten by her enemies, becoming dinner to show her love for her husband. A Fijian husband’s power over his wife was such that he could kill her and eat her at any time for any or no reason at all. In some societies, people were eaten if they were loved. In Australia, people ate the corpses of their relatives and friends in order to pay tribute to their lives. In New Guinea, old folks, having a hard time straggling through life, were hanged from trees or killed in other ways, often by their own kids, in a big party with the whole village gathered around. After they were dead, they were chopped up and eaten. Beats mortgaging your house for Mom’s nursing home, eh? Smoking a fish is a good way of making it more flavorful, and logically it follows that it adds a little zest to roast human. Humans waiting to be eaten were “tenderized” in water or other liquids to make the flesh less beef jerky-like. Tribes from Africa to Polynesia went out on hunting parties, like armies of Jeffrey Dahmers, looking for human prey to kill and cook up. Although women definitely are better looking then men, some cannibals insist that we guys are more delectable. Others prized female flesh most of all and went to great woman-chasing lengths to obtain it. Dying in battle is bad enough if you are to be a meal afterwards, but being wounded and then hauled away to be served on the dinner table must have been a particular horror. Slaves were captured, kept in chains and horribly mistreated for long periods, knowing all the while that one day that would serve as a main course. What is interesting is that so many cannibal societies insist that Roast Human tastes great, even better than many or most domesticated or wild animals. One wonders why we taste so great. Did we evolve to be good eatin’? In many places, White explorers were told, “Of course we eat people! Don’t you?” One New Guinea tribe had a legend about how they became cannibals. One day the men went out hunting. They came back with some wild pigs and whatnot. The women berated them, “Is that all you can give us – that lousy stuff? The humiliated men, their masculinity at risk, figured that the women wanted people to eat, not some dirty animals. So they took off to a neighboring village and came back. They came back with humans to eat, the women danced all around and their manliness was intact. Biting off the nose of a corpse is pretty horrible, and cannibals deny that they do this. They only bite off the noses of those others kill, not those they kill themselves! They do have some class. If boiling a dead man’s heart is too much for you, just get your daughter to do it, and then drink the delicious juice. A rack of rib sounds pretty good, but would you eat it if it came from a seven year old girl? Now, I like pork myself, but “long pig” is said to be more delicate, and it never makes you so full you feel ill. We all like to get together with the family for Thanksgiving, but how about the New Guineans, a woman and her two daughters, who dug up the corpse of one of the daughter’s baby and consumed it? Gives a new meaning to three generations at the table for dinner, eh? The Dobudura in New Guinea liked to keep a fresh supply of meat on hand. So they would capture a man and keep him alive for up to a week, cutting off bits of his flesh any time they felt hungry. They used a plant medicine to keep the food supply from bleeding to death. When he is nearly dead, they would poke a hole in his skull and scoop the brains out with a spoon, brains being a major delicacy and all. One way to ensure a delicious meal is to roast a man while still alive, for the meat tastes better when prepared this way. Deboning a chicken makes for better eating, and humans may be similarly deboned. What to do with the giblets? Well, with human giblets, just give them to the kids, who roast them in the fire and eat them up. With the coming of “evil Western colonialist missionaries” all of this quaint “indigenous” cultural behavior was laid to rest once and for all, or so we thought (but see below). Many cultures became ashamed of their former cannibalism and refused to discuss it. The Aborigines were puzzled at why it had been outlawed. Why were we not allowed to eat our friends anymore, to have a party and say what a great guy he was? None of it made sense. I suppose the Cultural Leftists, in love with all cultures, wicked, sublime and in between, as long as they are not White and Christian or Jewish, want to resurrect all this delectable human-chomping. As the Congo War devolves, we are receiving reports that Congolese militias are once again reverting to old habits of cannibalism. In particular, they are killing the Pygmies (the Bantus have waged a long genocidal campaign against both Bushmen and Pygmies) and cooking them up for chow. Almost all roads in the Congo built by those evil colonialists are now in disrepair – not due to weather or abuse, that is normal. It is that in the Congo now, when a road falls apart, no one ever fixes it. Never. Ever. Hence, roads just pretty much do not exist. The apartheid Whites of Southern Africa, of paternalistic mind, always said that when the White man left Africa, Africans would “go back to the bush”, in every conceivable way. That’s not necessarily the case in all Africa. See an optimistic post about a disaster zone called Nigeria, and note the good economic growth the continent has been experiencing, with the sole exception of Zimbabwe, which is disgustingly tossed out by White racists as an exemplar of all of Africa. Yet in Congo, it appears that this depressing forecast is being borne out. Delicious quotes follow, from Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. Check out the title – I suppose the anti-racists assume it must be “racist”, no? Dark continent, heart of darkness, the horror, the horror, and all that? Racists salivating over this post as an exemplar of “nigger innate savagery” be warned: cannibalism was not generalized over all of Africa. It was a cultural phenomenon primarily confined to the Congo, which then grew, strangely, in the 1800’s, to encompass more of the colony via cultural transmission.

For their part, the Malela were delighted by their diet of human flesh, describing it as “saltish in flavour, and requiring little condiment.” Unfortunately for their neighbors, their search for human flesh led to widespread slaughter. Edgerton, 85 But the Basongye, or Zappo Zaps as they were often known, sold slaves to their neighbors knowing that they would be eaten; they also ate their own dead. Soon after the end of the Arab War, they would work for the Free State and spread cannibalistic terror across the Congo. Other societies such as the Baluba, for example, ate the hearts of virtuous or brave people to gain their strength, but they also ate the bodies of criminals and slaves to prevent them from doing evil to their masters or haunting them. Ibid, 86 In some Congolese societies, people ate human flesh only occasionally to mark a particularly significant ritual occasion, but in other societies in the Congo, perhaps even a majority by the late nineteenth century, people ate human flesh whenever they could, saying it was far tastier than other meat and, perhaps surprisingly, that male human flesh tasted better than female. Persons to be eaten often had both of their arms and legs broken and were made to sit up to their necks in a stream for three days, a practice said to make their flesh more tender, before they were killed and cooked. Teeth filed to sharp points were widely thought by Europeans to be the mark of cannibals, but in some societies whose people actually were cannibals, teeth were not filed at all, and in others that did not practice cannibalism, people nevertheless filed their teeth to sharp points. As Sydney L. Hinde noted during the Arab War, the Batetela were such devoted cannibals that children actually killed and ate their parents “at the first sign of their decrepitude,” but they did not file their teeth. Ibid. In 1907, the Bankutu people were seen by a European traveler to hunt people for food as other Congolese hunted animals. They served human flesh in “little rolls like bacon.” As late as 1923, American traveler Hermann Norden reported that cannibalism was commonplace. One Congolese man reprovingly scolded him for not eating some human flesh when he was offered it: “You know the flesh of man tastes better than the flesh of a goat.” A Belgian companion of Norden’s admitted that he had probably been served human flesh and had eaten it unknowingly. In 1925, Hungarian anthropologist Emil Torday reported an encounter with a Muyanzi man who boasted about cooking human brains with a pinch of salt and red peppers, then dipping his bread in it. “Then he would smack his lips and run away like an imp.” Missionary and explorer A.L. Lloyd reported that when a European told a Bangwa tribesperson that eating human flesh was a “degrading habit,” the man answered, “Why degraded? You people eat sheep and cows and fowls, which are all animals of a far lower order, and we eat man, who is great and above all; it is you who are degraded.” Ibid, 86 While in the Congo, Livingstone saw human parts being cooked with bananas, and many other Europeans reported seeing cooked human remains lying around abandoned fires. British captain and medical officer Sydney L. Hinde, who would take part in the Free State’s war with the Arabs in 1892-93, reported an incident in which a Basongo chief asked a Belgian officer’s tent to cut the throat of a little slave girl he owned. He was cooking her when soldiers seized him. British adventurer Herbert E. Ward once asked a group of Congo tribespeople whether they ate human flesh. Their immediate answer was “Yes, don’t you?” Later, Ward witnessed cannibalism on numerous occasions and was often offered human flesh to eat. He recalled an occasion when a young Bangala slave was killed. Soon after, the chief’s son, a boy of sixteen or so, “nonchalantly” said, “That slave boy was very good eating – he was nice and fat.” Ibid, 88 Several European officers in the Force noted with a mixture of horror and approval that because Congolese on both sides of such battles cooked and ate all of the dead and wounded, burial parties were unnecessary and diseases were kept under control. Cannibalism had become so routine that one Force Publique officer admitted he had become quite “bland” about it.” Ibid, 100 At least a thousand Arabs were killed – then smoked and eaten. Ibid, 102 While some Free State officials were exploiting Congolese and others tried to care for them, a constant concern of these Europeans was cannibalism. It was not simply the eating of human flesh that repelled them, but that so many people were murdered expressly so that others might feast upon their bodies. Early in the 1660s, Englishmen Andrew Battell escaped the Portuguese who had enslaved him, to spend sixteen months among the Jaga people near the Congo’s Atlantic coast. He reported that they preferred human flesh to their own cattle. Later, as we have seen, healthy children were stabbed to death to provide a feast for their owners, and men were known to help sick coworkers “die,” then smoke their body parts for later consumption. Six Bangala men on the Stanley, a thirty-ton, stern-wheel steamer, were suspected by the ship’s captain of killing two crewmen who fell ill. They pleaded innocence, but smoked human body parts were found hidden in their lockers. Some men showed no restraint in their appetite for human flesh. When one of Gongo Lutete’s wives was killed in battle, his own men ate her. Enraged, Lutete ordered these men killed the next day and eaten. None of the Europeans were surprised that Africans on both sides of the war with the Arabs routinely cooked and ate not only the dead they found on the battlefield, but the wounded as well.” Ibid, 108

References

Edgerton, Robert B., The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.  Harris, Marvin, Cannibals and Kings: The Origin of Cultures. Glasgow, 1978, p. 69. Hogg, Garry, Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, quoting The Rev. James Chalmers, Life and Work in New Guinea. RTS, 1895. Lange, Algot, In the Amazon Jungle. Putnam, New York, 1912. MacGregor, Sir William, Foreword to Murray, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Maynard, Dr. Felix & Dumas, Alexandre, The Whalers. Hutchinson, 1937. Métraux, Alfred, Easter Island. André Deutsch, 1957. Murray, J. H. P., Lieutenant-Governor and Chief Judicial Officer, “Papua”, Papua, or British New Guinea. Faber Unwin, 1912. Rice, A. P., in The American Antiquarian vol. XXXII, 1910. Seligmann, C. G., “South-eastern New Guinea”, in The Melanesians of British New Guinea. Cambridge University Press, 1910. Simpson, Colin, Adam in Ochre . Angus & Robertson, 1938. St Johnston, Alfred, Traveller, Fiji Islands, Camping Among Cannibals. Macmillan, 1883. Walker, H. W., FRGS, Wanderings among South Sea Savages. Witherby, 1909. Wallace, A. Russel, Travels on the Amazon. Ward Lock, 1853. Williams, F. E., Orikaiva Society. Clarendon Press, 1930.

White Women and Black Men: An Object Lesson

A Black commenter takes issue with my point that White women have a thing for Black men:

Dude, you’re crazy. 9

No way is it 9

Anyway, White women don’t marry Blacks or have kids with them, they just have sex with them.

Let me tell you a story. I used to be friends with this Black guy who had schizophrenia. For about a year or so, I hung out with the guy every single day. He would show up over at my place, and we would go do whatever. Eventually I had to cut it off with the guy because he had too many problems, but I still feel bad about that.

The illness was in the early phases, but it was paranoid schizophrenia, which is milder and preserves the personality more, and he had a great personality and good ego before, so he was yet well-preserved. He was ~28 years old.

We went all over the place in a rural White town, very conservative. Everywhere we went, young White women came right up to the guy and smiled and started talking to him. Or he would walk up to them and talk them up, and they all just loved him to death. Young White chicks were checking him out and smiling everywhere we went. The guy was a chick magnet. He was very goodlooking, but he was also 1/2 Black. OTOH, not one of those young White women would give me the time of day, look at me, smile at me, anything. They all wanted my Black friend. And he had schizophrenia for Chrissake!

I learned something then about the animal appeal that a Black man has for a White woman.

Also, I run a Yahoo group for people who either want to stop or were victims of the burgeoning Internet romance scams. At least half the group are women, mostly middle aged.

A very large

Some of these middle aged White women used to throw “Internet parties” where they would have “Check Out the Big Black Cock” voice conferences. They would invite these young African men into the conferences and get them to whip it out on cam. Supposedly these guys were pretty big. The chicks would sit around and look at the big Black cocks, and I guess ooh and ahh. Now these were nice, respectable, middle class, middle aged White women.

Quite a few of them followed the scammers all the way over to Nigeria to try to marry them. Some even married their scammers.

There’s clearly something going on with White women and Black men.

The Southerners were apparently aware of the Manichean spark that could launch an interracial prairie fire and simply banned Black male-White female sex altogether.

It was cruel, but I see their point.

A race that can’t protect its women anymore is pretty much through. That’s an essential Darwinian imperative.

The “Hugo Chavez is a Dictator” Lie

Commenter tulio repeats many MSM lies about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It’s understandable that he’s mistaken, since if all you read is the lying US press, you would come away with exactly the opinion that tulio has:

As for Venezuela’s supposed prosperity. It’s nothing more than riding the tide of rising oil. Venezuela would be doing better no matter what if their number one export is oil and it cost 3x as much as it did a decade ago. I don’t give any great accolades to Chavez for it.

All during the oil boom, 8

So, yeah, the economy might have grown without Chavez, but all of the growth would have gone to the top 2

Also we need to look around the world at oil-rich lands that are well and truly fucked, even during this recent massive oil boom. The economies of Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Angola, Colombia and Mexico have all reaped massive benefits from the oil boom. Where has all the money gone in these places? Not to the people. A tiny elite just steals every last nickel.

In Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Angola, the conditions of the population are appalling, with tens of millions living in absolute poverty, with no running water, electricity, plumbing, sewage treatment, roads, schools, nothing. Furthermore, many even lack food to eat – there is tremendous malnutrition in all those places. Health figures in terms of longevity, infant mortality and maternal mortality are off the charts. So really, just having oil wealth is no guarantee that you have a decent country.

It’s not true that Venezuela a dictatorship. It’s probably the freest democracy in Latin America. The opposition has 2/3 of the airwaves, all of cable and most of the newspapers and magazines. They use this to blast Chavez with the most insane and outrageous lies 24-7. It would be like Fox News X 10.

Further, the opposition, including the opposition media, are all traitors. They all supported the coup in 2002 which was organized by the US. Those traitors are lucky to not be in prison, or even to still be alive. I think Chavez should have executed them for treason, but that’s just me. The opposition media, in addition to their mind-boggling and constant lying, regularly advocates assassinating Chavez and staging another military coup.

Chavez is finally starting to have it with these threats, so a few of those outlets got shut down, but I think they just went to cable. These fuckers are really playing with fire, trying to provoke a response.

A few years back, the opposition was having regular “demonstrations” around the clock, day in and day out, to try to topple the regime. These were more like violent riots. Chavez’ cops mostly just let these idiots riot, block roads, throw rocks, set tires on fire, etc. They barely even arrested people. In the US, there would have been a massive police response at the very least.

The US has repeatedly tried to overthrow Chavez through all sorts of legal and extralegal means. All of “liberal” Obama’s fancy new military bases in Colombia are meant to threaten Chavez militarily. Chavez is right to be paranoid about US invasion, but I’m not sure if we are going to do it.

It’s often said that Chavez is a dictator because, why? He wins elections. He’s won something like eight elections so far. Why is that? Because the low income population, neglected for decades, keeps voting for him. It’s said he’s a dictator because his party controls the Legislative Branch. That’s right, they do, because the same people keep re-electing them by huge margins. It’s said Chavez is a dictator because his party has most of the mayoral, gubernatorial and city council seats. True, that’s because the same people keep voting them in.

He’s said to be a dictator for “packing the Supreme Court” but Roosevelt did the same thing, and anyway, that Court was corrupt to the core. The entire Court supported and gave legal approval to the US coup in 2002! They’re lucky they weren’t executed.

The crap you read all the time about Chavez “shutting down the media.” Recall that the entire private media was intimately involved in the 2002 coup, from planning to execution stages to everything in between. They’re lucky to be alive. Despite that, Chavez kept all the stations running.

But in addition to their lies, they’re always advocating assassinating Chavez and promoting another coup. Chavez has finally had it with this crap and he’s starting to shut them down for that. But then they just go to cable which is unregulated. And the opposition still has 2/3 of the public airwaves anyway.

Also, the government announced some new licensing rules, which involved a bunch of routine paperwork the stations had to fill in by deadline or have their licenses revoked. To provoke a crisis, a lot of these asshole opposition radio and TV stations simply refused to fill out the papers! Then when the deadline came, the government went around and shut down some of the idiots who pulled this stunt. As you can see, they are engaging in a totally provocative behavior to try to make Chavez look like a dictator and provoke a crisis.

Islam As A “Super Culture”

In the post Race, Crime, Genes, Culture, Capitalism, Urbanization: Some Puzzles (How is that for a title?), I discussed the possibilities that “super-cultures” may exist that exert incredible influence on the genes of the persons living in those cultures. Super-cultures have “gene-warping effects, such that gene expression is warped in a profound way, often for the better.

The example of the Moriori was given, at first one of the most ferociously evil people on Earth, transformed via a Superculture into one of the most pacifistic people on Earth, so pacifist, that they got almost completely genocided due to their inability to fight back when faced with the true Maori who attacked them in the 1800’s.

I also suggested that Islam is a Superculture. Blacks living under Islam have a fairly low crime rate rate, including a violent crime rate, and they have a relatively low level of the social pathologies that we have come to associate with Blacks all over the world. Something about Islam is so gene-warping that it is modifying typical gene expression in Blacks.

A commenter, who opposes Islam, comments below. I agree with his comments in many ways. Let us say that I do not think that the West is compatible with Islam. We can handle a few of them, but once we get over a certain tipping point it is not going to be a tea party anymore. Here in the secular, let it all hang out West, Islam is pretty much the opposite of what we want in a society.

On the other hand, I believe in people’s rights to live how they choose, and if Muslim countries wish to live under Islam, so be it. This goes along with the principle of self-determination that we advocate here on this blog. Muslims can be Muslims all they want to in Muslim countries.

Nevertheless, Muslims do not seem to do so well as minorities in non-Muslim nations. There is a sense that Muslims are not required to live under infidel rule, and in fact, they seem to bristle at the very notion. Never mind that there are correlates in Islamic Law that state that Muslims in infidel countries must follow infidel law, else just go home. This is a more liberal reading of Islamic Law. It is rather disturbing that once they get to around 3-

And once you get a large Muslim minority, you usually have some sort of an insurgency, often a separatist one, on your hands. Philippines, Thailand, India, China, Russia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Israel are good examples. While some of these are justified, the take home point, if you are a non-Muslim country, seems to be to not allow large Muslim minorities to even get started in the first place.

That word super culture. I don’t think it should be used to describe Islam…I don’t even think Islam is a culture. In fact, Islam is anti culture. Think about it. All the demands Muslims make around the world in non-Muslim countries they live in…which actually have culture…are subtractive.

They are against dance, music, mixing of genders, fashion, women, gays, sex, alcohol, etc…they offer no replacement for the things they want to subtract…except prayer and boring lifeless existence. They are anti-culture…and culture can not survive Islam…at least not without going underground.

I don’t think Islam is a religion either…not as much as it is a regimented way of life and control…those are its key elements…with fear of violent punishments for the slightest dissent…that’s why in Black Islamic communities, Blacks cannot be violent and criminal…because the consequences are basically…death.

Yes it’s a gene warping thing…un-natural selection…sticking to the system without deviating one inch…ensures survival and breeding…making each next generation more genetically fanatically religious. Gradually the power of rational thinking and logic and ability to question dogma is bred out altogether.

The "Negro" – A Product of 300 Years in America

A commenter argues that American Blacks (Negroes*) were bred with brawn and not brains and this explains a lot of their problems:

The US only imports the top tier of, for instance, Indian and Chinese immigrants. So from an American perspective, Indians and Chinese seem very clever, even though in their home countries there is a broad variety of ability. It’s the same with Africans. Just look at Obama’s father. But Africans descended from slaves had a different selection criteria – physical ability. Not only were they selected for this, but they were bred for this. The Atlantic passage weeded out the weak ones, the institution of slavery encouraged physicality over intellect. The results, in both culture and gene expression, are plain to see. Robert Lindsay often claims that the mere presence of blacks degrades a society. However, would it not be better to import University-level Africans to raise the standard of American blacks? Any white would be happy to live in a suburb of Obamas.

This doesn’t make the tiniest bit of sense. Negroes have IQ’s vastly higher than the Blacks of the Caribbean or Africa, so your thesis doesn’t add up at all. Plus, I think they are a lot more civilized to boot. I don’t think that Negroes are capable of the mass insanity of The Lord’s Army in Uganda, Charles Taylor’s rebels, the horrors of Zaire where 4 million have died and mass rapes often with extreme violence, are committed against women, where cannibalism is still common especially in the context of war where one’s enemies are eaten after being killed, where humans are murdered for being witches, where people are murdered to get body parts for witchcraft ceremonies! Good God! Whether they are less criminal in general is up for grabs, but South African Blacks seem to be much more criminal than Negroes, just looking at figures. Further, many African cities are virtual no-go zones for Whites. A friend used to work for the UN in Nairobi. They had high fences topped with razor wire and armed guards to keep the rabble at bay, plus strict rules about going outside. I also think that Negroes are less corrupt than Africans. Africans do not seem to be capable of creating a non-corrupt society. Even in Equatorial Guinea, which is wealthy at $21,000 PCI, most of the people are horribly poor, malnourished, and the maternal mortality rate is insanely high. Nigeria is a a very oil-rich nation. Any other country, especially an Arab country, should have made something decent of the place. Yet a tiny elite has stolen every other nickel and left the average Joe with pennies. The maternal mortality rate is ridiculous, the poverty and crime is horrible, and the place is basically a failed state. The corruption experiment can be done by looking at the Obama Administration. He’s a Negro President, and he has lots of Negro staffers. Further, reporters on his campaign noted a “basic Black mindset” about the Obama campaign that differed from your typical White POTUS campaign. So, in many ways, the Obama Administration really is a Black administration. If Negroes were naturally corrupt, it should show through. Yet the Administration seems to have markedly low levels of corruption. Along with corruption, we also find in Africa what seems to be a very low rate of altruistic behavior at the societal level. African states simply don’t do the slightest damned thing for their people. The leadership steals nearly everything, lives in gilded palaces with multiple wives and leaves the populace to sicken and die. On the other hand, the Obama Administration seems to be quite altruistic. Many of their projects seem intended to provide for the betterment of all, in particular the workers, the low-income, the poor and the most vulnerable. The assumption is that Negroes have culturally evolved a higher level of altruism than their African brethren, possibly from a being discriminated minority that relied on mutual aid and self-help to get by, and the resulting sympathy for the underdog and the oppressed – the preterit as it were. I have no doubt that Negroes used to act in these ways (see description of Africa above) when they were in Africa, and that they would still act like Africans if they were there. The 1 A good argument can be made that Negro is a product of US civilization, which has always been a White civilization. 300 years of this have changed Negroes, probably culturally in the main, and apparently also in terms of intelligence. Living in the US has been great for the Negro’s brain. He is remarkably more intelligent than his Caribbean and African cousins. An 87 IQ (average IQ of Negroes) is not particularly high, but it’s not that low either. It’s just a bit below the world average of 90. Further,many states with average IQ’s of 87 and even a bit lower have created quite nice and civilized countries. On an intelligence basis alone, Negroes are certainly intelligent enough to create a nice, civilized society. That they often do not is a bit of a mystery, but it’s not because they are stupid! Give a basically decent Negro man a good job, a suit and a tie and a nice car, and he often acts pretty darn good. You see him walking down the sidewalk and he’s just another regular guy. Negroes and Whites have co-evolved in the US whether we like it or not. Negroes are culturally part White, and surely we Whites are culturally part-Negro. We’re like an old married couple whether we like it or not. Old married couples sometimes fight a lot, but they’re stuck with each other and neither one is going anywhere, besides, they are sort of part of one another by now. Race relations in the US cannot be properly analyzed until we realize the extent to which Negroes are part Whitened and US Whites are part-Negrified. Like the old married couple, we are now part of each other. *I will use the often-racist term “Negro” here to distinguish US Blacks from African Blacks.

Is There a Black Intelligence?

Richard Hoste, a White nationalist commenter, takes issue with my comments about a <70 IQ in Blacks just not being the same as a <70 IQ in a White. He repeats the standard line from Jensen and Rushton that a White with <70 IQ usually is genetically diseased in some way that effects the way they walk and talk. The Black with the same IQ is not. That’s why they seem different. This is the typical line that I keep hearing, but it still doesn’t make sense. In the US, Whites with IQ’s <70 are generally living in group homes, are not allowed to have kids or marry, have poor social skills, poor judgment, generally do not work or work only at specialized jobs, have their finances monitored by someone, and are not allowed to drive cars. In other words, they just can’t live on their own and make it. And it’s not just because they walk and talk funny. It’s because in many important ways, they are dumb as doorknobs, and we don’t trust them to make sensible decisions. Nevertheless, in Africa, Blacks with <70 IQ’s drive vehicles, work at regular jobs, live on their own, have excellent social skills, marry and raise children, live on their own or own a home, pay their bills and manage their finances, etc. They don’t need supervision. They can do it on their own. I imagine something similar is going on with Papuans (IQ 64), Aborigines (IQ 62), Bushmen (IQ 54) and Pygmies (IQ 60?). All these folks can live quite well on their own with little or no supervision. In addition, we have first hand reports. I spoke with an anthropologist who works in Africa. He told me that the Africans he works with do not seem stupid. A similar statement was made by Jared Diamond about the Papuans he worked with and by a man who worked with Bushmen. Yet if you meet an American White with an IQ <70 like these native peoples, they will appear to be dumb as a rock, and not just because they can’t walk or talk right. I know, I have spent a lot of time with the local retarded adults, and I made friends with quite a few of them. Further, we have the examples of the 67 IQ Nigerian scammers who ran circles around the American scam victims I worked with who had IQ’s of 65-73. One of these women walked and talked normally, but these Nigerian foxes just had her running around like a chicken with her head cut off with all their endless tricks and games. When it came to “con artist IQ,” these guys had genius IQ’s, over 140. They were expert manipulators, experts at human psychology, and they knew how to mimic and play-act emotions and push people’s emotional buttons like few people do. They were like expert actors, except they were evil. In some very important ways, these Nigerians were much smarter than the Americans who had the same or even slightly higher IQ’s. Further, Hoste notes that 1 I’ve also met some very smart Blacks who seemed kind of “dumb” in some ways. One guy says he has an IQ of 185. He has a PhD and is a professor at a university. Yet he misspells words and is sloppy with his sentences. It’s like he doesn’t give a damn about things like that. I recently found the blog of a famous Black scholar, and the same thing was going on. Great mind, brilliant thinker, very creative, very nice sentences in an artsy way, but often sloppy. Misspellings, poor sentence construction, poor punctuation. I sent him a mail telling him he needed an editor but he never wrote back. Once again, there was a brilliant sloppiness about him and a feeling that about certain things, he didn’t care and was just going to blow it off. The end result was that to me his writing looked sort of stupid due to his errors, but I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way. I’m going to tie together these examples of very high and very low IQ Blacks by suggesting that maybe there is a “Black intelligence” that differs from “White intelligence” and that these tests may not be measuring properly. I realize that’s a subjective judgment, and I don’t have much to back it up except intuitive hunches and “general feeling,” but that’s what I’m concluding after thinking hard about this stuff for a couple of years now. By the way, this conclusion is also consistent with race realism. If Blacks and Whites are different racially in more than obvious ways, a specific “Black intelligence” that differs from the White kind is a possibility.

Alt Left: A Clash of Civilizations?

Note: Repost from the old blog.

There has been much talk lately of Islam clashing with non-Muslim European culture and civilization. Starting in the 1960’s or so, Europe began importing a lot of North Africans and other Muslims as a source of cheap labor.

Moroccans went to Netherlands and Spain; Tunisians and Algerians to France; Pakistanis to Britain; Turks, Kurds and Syrians to Germany; Libyans to Italy; and Iraqis to Norway and Denmark. Over 40 years, the Left in Europe has tried multiculturalism with the Muslim immigrants, an approach which has completely failed.

Large populations of angry young Muslims who completely reject European civilization can now be found in many of Europe’s cities. Many of the Muslim immigrants are hostile to open, Western, secular European values, especially women’s rights, gay liberation, pornography and open sexual expression, revealing clothing on women, and women’s sexual freedom.

Many are upset that it is illegal to beat your wife or to menace, beat or kill your female relatives for being “sexually loose.”

At the same time, it is true that there are a large percentage of mostly young Muslims (especially females) who are crafting a new, more open and tolerant view of Islam.

This hopeful view can be seen in the French Muslim Women’s Movement called “Neither Submissives Nor Whores” (loose translation). Many young Muslim women in Britain are refusing to wear the hijab while citing perfectly reasonable Koranic views that say that the hijab is not mandatory.

In fact, after Mohammad’s death, Fatima, Mohammad’s daughter, often preached in the mosque and never wore the hijab. One can make a case that only the prophets’ wives were required to wear the hijab.

One can also make the case that the hijab was only meant to cover a women’s breasts or her private parts – the Koranic wording is very loose and non-specific – it says a woman should cover her “ornaments” and her bosom.

Over centuries, however, Islamic scholars, operating merely on such loose phrases as “Men and women should dress modestly”, have elaborated a strict dress code that applied mostly to women, little to men, and ended up saying that most of a woman’s body should be almost completely covered. These scholars have had little Koranic basis making such a determination.

For centuries in Islam under the Ottomans, most women did not wear the hijab – it was mostly worn by upper-class women as a symbol of their wealth and status.

The “mandatory hijab” came about more with the anti-colonial movements in the Muslim World at the turn of the century as people turned inwards towards the more fundamentalist and reactionary versions of their cultures as an anti-colonial statement.

Country by Country

Multiculturalism has completely failed in Denmark. The Left pushed it for years and all it has created is a Muslim community largely hostile to secular Danish society at large and openly refusing to assimilate.

In the 1970’s and 80’s, many wealthy Iraqis and Iranians came to Denmark – those who could afford to get out. Many of their children – young people in their teens and 20’s, acted like spoiled brats. They were angry at having to leave their countries, and they despised Denmark.

The Danes set up taxpayer-funded programs to teach them Danish so they could get a job. Many of them attended classes but openly refused to learn Danish. Many of them still do not know Danish and are largely unemployable. When the teachers went home, they would destroy the libraries in the schools where they were being taught.

A combination of upper-class spoiled brattism plus Eastern contempt for the secular West proved to be a bad combination. After decades of multiculturalism, Netherlands and Denmark are hanging up the towel and demanding that new immigrants either assimilate to the culture or take off. Radical imams who are not citizens are being summarily deported.

The consequences of the failure to assimilate are clear: one consequence is gang rapes. Gang rapes by young Muslim men of non-Muslim European women have been reported in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia, France, and Indonesia.

There has been an epidemic of gang rapes in French Muslim ghettos also. Outrageously, in many cases, the police do not even prosecute these rapes because the gangs run roughshod over the neighborhoods, and the female victims are too terrified to testify. For their part, most of the rapists insist that they did nothing wrong.

In the Muslim neighborhoods of Malmo, Sweden, there is a horrendous crime epidemic by Muslim youth gangs who rule the area and utterly despise Swedish society. Threats against crime witnesses, robberies, rapes of minors, and gang rapes have all exploded in Malmo. In the schools, where most students are Muslim immigrants, there is widespread anti-Semitism. Malmo is the face of catastrophic Muslim failure to assimilate to European society.

A similar picture haunts Denmark, where an astounding 6

In Britain, there is a notable incidence of rape by Muslims of non-Muslim White British girls. In Denmark, eight Muslim Danish girls were killed by Muslim fundamentalist Medievalists for either leaving Islam or for honor crimes.

There is a ready explanation for the high rape rate amongst Muslims in Europe. In their home countries, the crime rate in general and the rape rate in particular is often quite low, Pakistan being an exception.

Muslims are most comfortable living in Muslim societies. Living as a Muslim minority under the rule of infidels is insulting and hurtful to the unfortunately supremacist mindset of most Muslims.

Living under Muslim rule accords well with such supremacism. Islam is meant to dominate, and the word itself means to submit. In Europe, young Muslim men are outraged at the scanty clothing and loose sexual mores of many European White non-Muslim women.

In their way of thinking, such women are whores, and they are more or less for the taking. It is permissible to rape them, since they are making themselves readily available. In their home countries, there are not many women walking around clothed like that, and women’s sexual freedom is an underground thing, so their mores are not so offended.

Furthermore, there is stigma attached to being a criminal in an Islamic society, whereas as a Muslim minority under the rule of infidels, perhaps there is less stigma, and possibly criminal behavior is even seen as appropriate rebellion.

We should note here that many of the young Muslim criminals in Europe are not especially religious, and most are actually turned off by radical Islam. There is something else going on here – a profound sense of alienation and rage.

The problems of Muslims in France are particularly acute, where they make up about 1

But all of the usual signs are there. In French Muslim ghettos, the insanity of Left multiculturalism has left Islamic fundamentalist  morals police to roam the French ghettos harassing and attacking women who are not veiled.

There is an ongoing disaster in French schools, where the schools have been taken over by male Islamists who act as “big brothers” and enforce “Islamic morals” on Muslim girls. Makeup, dresses, and skirts are banned, and girls are not allowed to go to the movies, to the gym, or go swimming. These rules are enforced by these fundamentalists via beatings and intimidation.

But the situation in the schools is actually better than the scene outside of school, where the backwards custom of forcing unwilling girls into marriage at only age 14 or 15 is common.

Muslim students are in open rebellion against French society – they frequently refuse to read Voltaire and Madame Bovary, acknowledge the existence of other religions, sing, dance, or draw pictures of faces or anything that contains a right angle because it looks like a cross.

In my opinion, students who refuse to practice these basic normal scholastic activities due to their preposterous religion should simply be given an “F” in that subject, if only due to their sheer contemptuous defiance.

Muslim students, heads swollen with liberal “equal rights” bullshit, demand their own tables and bathrooms so they will not have to share them with infidels, the right to not come to school during Muslim holidays, and the right to get served halal food. It is almost impossible for secular or non-practicing Muslim students to avoid the Islamic dictates in these schools. For example, even non-Muslims are forced to fast during Ramadan.

The Muslim students voice a lot of support of Islamist terrorism, are frighteningly anti-Semitic, and engage in lots of aggressive Islamic proselytization. Jewish kids are subject to continuous anti-Semitic abuse, and freedom of religious choice for minors can no longer be protected.

The lunacy has reached the point where the French now have almost separate facilities in their schools for Muslim and non-Muslim students, a Kafkaesque joke that makes a mockery of French Republicanism.

The new generation of French Muslims, born and raised in France, is being raised by their twisted culture to see themselves a separate nation opposed to everything the West stands for. In this group, anti-democratic views and support for Osama bin Laden were widespread.

Similar disaster looms elsewhere in the West. In Holland, you can see pitiful Moroccan girls with a smiley – their throats slashed (non-fatally), cut from mouth to ear with a knife for not wearing a veil. In Sweden, the charming folks at CAIR (the largest US Islamic organization) objected to prosecuting two Muslim men for the  honor killing of a Swedish girl.

Prisons house disproportionately Muslim populations, and they are serving as an incubator for radical Islamists in Europe. Australia has also seen its share of the nightmare of Muslims refusing to assimilate to the West. In large Australian cities, many Lebanese have immigrated in recent years. Although many were Muslims, many more were Lebanese Christians.

For those Identity Politics Leftists who complain that this is due to anti-Arab racism by White Australians, the fact that Lebanese Christians have caused almost no problems at all in Australia is a slap in the face to their theory.

The usual symptoms of the nightmare afflict these areas of Australia, with Muslim gangs taking over Muslim districts, high crime rates, gang rapes of White Australian women by Muslim men, with the added outrage that the gang rapes are both condoned by their backwards Muslim society and excused by morally twisted reactionary mullahs.

In one particularly outrageous case, the In barbarian Muslim Northern Nigeria, for instance, women who are raped by a family member are often Jihad Watch, a site pretty much devoted to bashing Muslims, does have an interesting and thought-provoking article here called What Is a Moderate Muslim? Those who desire to refute Spencer need to put their money where their mouth is and offer reasonable, coherent arguments refuting his points. Simple insults like “Islamophobe” or “bigot” will not cut it.

Most reasonable progressives should agree that all forms of fundamentalism are examples of cretinism and obscurantism at best. This surely applies to Islam as well as Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. Salafism is extremist fundamentalist Islam, and it can be reasonably attacked on many fronts.

It shares much in common with both the Wahhabism of the reactionary Saudis and with Qutbism, the philosophy of Al Qaeda. Many Western progressives are getting sucked into the vortex of backwards Sunni fundamentalists, especially the Salafists. One argument is that some Salafists are peaceful, while the armed ones tend to resemble Mssrs. Zarqawi and Bin Laden. I have always felt that peaceful Salafism is hate speech, kind of like the KKK without guns. In other words, it sucks. This blog post goes a long way towards fleshing that out.

This post has probably been a pretty depressing read for any Muslims or anyone sympathetic to Islam. Hence, we ought to end on a bright note.

A ME Times is a good progressive Middle Eastern publication, opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, Arab backwardness, along with US imperialism and Zionism.

It’s a welcome anecdote from the usual Arab nationalist and pro- Arab regime junk you get from the Arab press, much of which is funded with Saudi money.

Muslims in the Middle East appear to be better behaved than the Muslims in Europe. However, they are the same people. Let us face it – Islam wants to dominate; it is a supremacist religion.

In some places where Islam dominates, other religions are sometimes treated fairly well. Christians are treated with at least some degree of decency in Morocco, Iran, Uzbekistan, Albania, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. Even Jews are treated fairly well in Iran, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, and Albania.

Where Islam dominates, Muslims relax and can often treat other religions well.

And they can also also be moderately tolerant of sinful behavior. Many women in Lebanon and Egypt do not wear the hijab, and the hijab is almost banned in public places in Turkey and Tunisia. Prostitution and nightclubs are common in Beirut, Cairo, and the UAE.

Mini-skirted upper class women are commonly seen on university campuses in Kuwait. Pre- and extramarital sex is common in Cairo. There are discreet underground male gay scenes in Cairo and Upper Egypt in Egypt and in Morocco, Arabia, and Kuwait. There is quite a bit of lesbianism in Arabia in girls schools and amongst the frustrated wives of the royalty. Gay male pornography is available to anyone in Arabia with a satellite dish, which just about everyone has.

There is a lot of illegal drinking in Kuwait and probably other places in the Arab World.

I could go on.

But in Europe, Muslims are a widely-despised minority, and more importantly, they are being ruled by infidels. Islam wants to dominate, and Muslims rebel when ruled by infidels. The open sexuality, alcohol, drugs, prostitution, pornography, gay populations, and feminism contrasts with the discretion with which such things are treated back home under Islam.

This is the crux of the matter.

But those Western Muslims who are unable to assimilate to Western societies need to consider going somewhere else. Muslims who consistently violate and show contempt for Western norms and continue to espouse backwards fundamentalist values – for instance, Muslims who believe that those who insult Islam or women who preach in mosques should be killed – need to be removed from Western societies if possible, hopefully via deportation.

Update: This post has received accolades from a conservative blogger at Pleasant Misery. Although we certainly disagree with conservatives on most things, in the fight against Muslim fundamentalist idiots, we will take any reasonable allies that we can find.

Bad Place to Visit, Wouldn't Want To Live There

Repost from the old site. This article has produced a tremendous amount of controversy, angry comments, and even, oddly enough, virulent hate mail. I guess I hit some raw nerves. I stand by my comments that these cities are some of the worst in the world, and, in doing further research on the Net, have found only further support for my thesis. Some of these cities, such as Bogotá, for instance, have large wealthy districts that are apparently quite pleasant. If one is rich, one can make a nice life just about anywhere on the globe. But this is not important – what is important is how the majority live. The title is a play on the line, “Nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there”, said about many less-than-desirable tourist locales. This post is about the worst places on Earth to visit, and probably to live too. The ratings were based on research done on the Internet in various places, including here and here. I’m going to focus on the places that are dirty, smelly, crime-ridden, trashy, rip-off havens, unsanitary and dangerous (Third World), and avoid places that are merely depressing, unsightly, rude, etc. (First World). Why? Because I live in the US, and those Third World qualities are going to be the most disturbing to me. I’m also avoiding active war zones because everyone knows they are horrible. To be fair to the “Third Worldists” out there, I noted that many people slammed various places in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, Ireland Italy, the US, Great Britain and Australia for various reasons, mostly because they are said to be unfriendly, depressing, tacky, cheesy, boring, etc. Detroit seemed to top the list as worst US city, along with Newark (though it had one fan), East St. Louis and New Haven (though some liked New Haven) were runners-up. Various small towns in the Rockies (especially Idaho) and Texas also were listed. For some reason, a lot of people hate Vancouver, BC in Canada. To my thinking, many of the horrible cities below point out the catastrophe of Latin American, Indian, Indonesian and Philippine capitalism. In much of Africa, capitalism doesn’t seem to working very well. For all its faults, impoverished Cuba certainly does not resemble any of these Latin American hellholes in any way, shape or form. I don’t think that capitalism in the First World is failing, but looking at many of the cities below, it’s hard to argue that capitalism is doing anything but failing in those places. Some of the winners in the Loser Destination Contest: Colon, Panama: A dirty, crime-ridden disaster of a city. The most dangerous city in Latin America, full of residents who seem like they would just as soon knife you as say hello. Other than the free trade zone, the entire city seems to be sprawling slum. Colon has no redeeming qualities. This city topped many worst lists. Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador: Guayaquil is horrible. A stinking, steaming, downright dangerous heap of a city with miles of slums. With armies of glowering gang members, this place is dangerous even in mid-day. There are garbage dumps everywhere with corpses laying out in plain sight and guns going off all the time. Quito is similar. Guayaquil topped many worst city lists. Johannesburg, South Africa: How sad that this country now has one of the worst violent crime rates on Earth. Although popular with tourists, this city is downright dangerous. This city also topped many worst lists. This blog supports the Mandela government, but the problems of this tragic nation seem insurmountable. ***** Lagos, Nigeria, or the whole country: This city, and even the whole country, seems to top everyone’s list. Garbage is everywhere, the city stinks, the poverty is horrible, animals are slaughtered on the streets, and it seems that at least half the population wakes up every morning thinking, “Who can I rip off today?” Up to 9 Nigeria has what must be the worst government on Earth and the country is rated the second most corrupt on Earth. The national airlines are dangerous and not recommended. The ripoff attempts often start as soon as you land at the airport and won’t let up until you leave. It’s best to assume that most, if not all, Nigerians you meet in Lagos are out to rip you off in some way or another and then proceed from there. The city is full of impostors, and you really do not know if anyone is really who they say they are. The police and Customs officials are all crooks and so is 9 Most bank and post office employees are also crooked. Imagine waiting in line at the post office, and a group of swaggering gangsters with fake ID’s strut in to pick up their stolen goods reshipped from overseas. They go straight to the front of the line ahead of everyone else, pick up their stolen property, and walk away laughing, having paid off the Post Office clerks. Welcome to Nigeria. There are Internet cafes all over the city, where 150,000 full-time Internet scammers ply their trade in plain view of anyone to see, and the government doesn’t bat an eye or lift one finger to stop them. In many cafes, 8 The scammers started out with the famous 419 email scams but have now branched out into lottery, romance, auction, roommate, orphanage and check-cashing scams. The scams are continuously evolving, and Nigerian con artists are widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the world, as they have been practicing the art for decades now. On highways outside of Lagos, you can see numerous vehicles wrecked on the side of the road, or even in the middle of the road, some with dead bodies still in them or beside them. Thieves pick through the wreckage and rifle the corpses looking for stuff to steal. All of the roads are dangerous, as armed robbers often set up roadblocks to shake down travelers. Nigeria is now a world center for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, credit card fraud and drug dealing, and a district of Lagos, Oluwole, is now a world center for top-notch forgery. The FBI and the US Merchant Risk Council recently came to Nigeria and inspected 40 packages coming into the country from the US to check for stolen goods. 39 of the 40 packages contained stolen property. When the agents arrived at a Lagos neighborhood and tried to arrest an 18-year-old boy for reshipping scams that targeted US merchants, much of the neighborhood – up to 100 people – rushed out of their homes to defend the local punk from Big Bad Whitey. Although the country is awash in oil, the power goes out all the time because the government power company is so crooked. The power company has either stolen all of its own budget money or the power comes in, but the crooked company resells it on the side. As with elsewhere in Africa, Whitey is blamed for all the troubles here. Hatred of Whitey is higher in Nigeria than in much of the rest of Black Africa and the White visitor will definitely feel it. The degeneration of Nigerian society is complete, and the culture appears near collapse. Mobs lynch thieves in the street and kill them in public for as meager a crime as stealing a cellphone, yet crime rages on anyway. Anyone can just up and say they own your house, put it on the market and sell it and you are out a house. Law enforcement, courts and anything resembling government seem to be nonexistent. ****** ****** Lima, Peru: When they tell you to visit Peru, they don’t mean the nightmarish capital. There are teeming slums as far as the eye can see, horrible crime (although not a lot of violent crime), pickpockets everywhere, and on top of all that, the sun never comes out. The fog mixes with the smog and the filthy streets to make a toxic brew. Lima made many worst lists. But it has its fans, and the upscale Miraflores district is said to be nice. The execrable Shining Path took up their nihilistic, deranged war in this country for a reason – because Peru is a rotten heap of a country. ****** ****** Medan (Sumatra), Jakarta, Surabaya, Indonesia: Jakarta is a reeking city with terrible pollution, open sewers and wrenching poverty. Medan seemed to top many lists for worst city on Earth, though it has a few fans. It’s hot, dirty and polluted, with factories, thieves and leering, menacing men everywhere. There is also nowhere to stay, not that you would want to stay anyway. Besides Medan, the rest of Sumatra is much better. The river running through Surabaya is so polluted you might vomit walking across the bridge. As you suppress your gag reflex, you will look down and notice that people are actually washing their clothes in this river. ***** ***** Mumbai, Patna (Bihar), Calcutta, all large Indian cities, India: Indian cities are very dirty and teeming with some of the most miserably poor and wretched people you will ever see, but at least there is not a lot of crime. The Hindu religion keeps crime down because believers fear they will be punished by returning in the next life as something terrible, like one of the huge rats you see scurrying about. Mumbai has pollution that is so bad that people actually get lung cancer from breathing the air. Mumbai, a stinking and sometimes dangerous city, made many worst city lists. Patna is the sorry capital of Bihar, the poorest state in India. It’s dirty and miserable, and it’s almost impossible to even get a taxi to get you out of town, which means it’s hard to leave the place. Calcutta is generally agreed to be one of the worst cities in India. ***** Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang, China: Deadly pollution, mostly from coal. Bucharest, all of Romania: Stalinist pollution covers the whole country and everyone seems depressed. Bali (in particular Kuta Beach), Indonesia: Hopes so high, reality so low. It seems everyone is out to rip you off. Surly locals hungry for money. Dangerous roads, nightmarish traffic, rude, leering men. When it rains, the sewers flood into the streets. Very high crime rate, hustlers everywhere. Most of the rest of Indonesia is pretty nice. Kuta is a tourist trap gone to Hell. **** Manila, Philippines: A crime-ridden hellhole. There are armed guards everywhere, especially in front of banks due to constant bank robberies. Their nemeses, criminal gangs armed to the teeth, roam streets filled with prostitutes and transvestites. It’s a town where everyone seems like they are out to rip you off in one way or other, and the hotel workers and cab drivers are all crooked. The latest advice is to have your Filipino friend meet you at the airport and head straight to their place, thereby avoiding all the ripoffs and con artists that seem to descend on every tourist. Traffic is horrible, and pollution is so bad it kills people. But some people don’t mind it. **** Gdansk, Poland: Combine a high crime rate and daylight robberies with totally crooked, thieving officials, and you get this Polish city. However, a number of others said it’s just fine. **** Mexico City, Villahermosa, Mexico: Mexico City is a dirty, polluted city suffering an insane, surreal epidemic of street crime, especially violent crime. Add 20 million people, stir well, bring to a boil, cover with a lid of otherworldly smog, and simmer. Reportedly, tons of human waste are blown into the air every day, and much of the population has constant respiratory infections. The sewer system is reportedly above ground and more or less runs through lots of neighborhoods where many people are residing. Villahermosa is a Mad Max-style, violent, crime-ridden disgrace of a city. There are stabbings and shootings galore here, even with a 10 PM curfew in place. ***** Tangier, Morocco: This is a dangerous place with lots of street crime. That’s unusual for a North African country, but Tangier is so close to Europe that it is almost a part of Europe. ***** Cairo, Egypt: Cairo has horrible pollution, smells terrible, there is trash everywhere, nothing works, there are armies of miserably poor people and it boasts some outrageously awful traffic. In the souks there are huge rats and wild, mangy scavenging dogs running about in plain sight. There seems no escape from aggressive, pestering hawkers. On top of all that, all the Customs officials are criminals. The crime rate is fairly low, though. Thank President Hosni Mubarak. 25 years ago, Cairo was one of the great world cities. ***** Bangkok, Thailand: This gigantic city has pollution so bad you need to wear a mask over your face. However, some folks like this city and say it has many positive attributes. ***** Brindisi, Naples, Italy: No one seems to like Brindisi. It’s a sad, dirty, polluted and ugly city, with hostile, brawling, drunken locals, hungry stray dogs, belligerent drivers, horrible traffic, and miles of soul-killing tenements. You would think that despite all of that, being genuine Italians, they could still manage to make a decent pizza. Forget it: even the pizza is terrible. Brindisi topped many worst lists, although it has a couple of fans. I had never even heard of Brindisi and had to look it up on a map. It’s located in southern Italy on the East Coast, southeast of Naples. Naples has a great deal of crime, and many think this city is overrated as a tourist destination, although others say that, despite the drawbacks, it has its joys. All of southern Italy has a lot of crime, but it’s mostly property crime. ***** ***** Athens, Piraeus, or the whole country, Greece: Greece, especially Athens, gets mixed reviews. A lot of people really hate Athens; others don’t. The detractors say the city is dirty, ugly, depressing, polluted, and covered with garbage and traffic. I was surprised that Athens made the list, as I had always thought it was a wonderful city. The port city of Piraeus is a nasty place. The whole city smells like a giant sewage treatment plant, and the ocean offshore has a sickening color to it. ***** **** Suburbs of Paris, France: These tragic towns, full of hostile Arab immigrants angrily refusing to assimilate to French culture or join French society, are a sign that the French model is not working well, at least for some folks. There is a terribly high crime rate here, and cops and firemen often won’t go there because they get attacked as soon as they show up. These mournful towns are packed with angry, unemployed young Arab men who like to seriously riot every year or so, or even more often if the mood strikes them. Lately, they have been staging mini-riots every night. If only 100 cars are burned, that’s a good night. Otherwise, Paris, of course, is one of the world’s great cities. But that doesn’t mean you might not walk into a subway station reeking of urine and see junkies shooting up in plain sight. But still, Paris is a must on any serious travelers’ list. ****** Brussels, Belgium: As with Paris, the districts with many Arab immigrants are quite dangerous and unpleasant, but the rest of the city is as nice as any big city. Abidjan, Ivory Coast: With one of the worst crime rates in Africa (although it has plenty of competition), this city topped many worst lists. ***** Bangui, Central African Republic: One of the worst cities in Africa, as bad as Lagos. The crime rate is totally insane. The locals will try to steal everything you own and even a contingent of armed guards will not be enough to protect you. Your hotel room will feel like a war zone. This fiendish city made a number of worst city lists. Lonely Planet’s guidebook more or less tells you to avoid this city altogether. Here is a harrowing report of a visit to Bangui. ***** Bamako, Mali: Mali has one of the worst governments in Africa, admittedly a race with a lot of competition. Bamako is a sick joke of a town, where the tourist surcharge is rigorously enforced, and the ridiculous, potholed streets are undriveable by any vehicle. Guatemala City, Guatemala: A totally dangerous, dirty, polluted, terminal patient of a city, full of scary, heavily armed teenage soldiers. The soldiers are there to keep the teeming, crime-ridden slums that stretch as far as the eye can see, from overrunning the place. But this city has a few fans. Belize City, Belize: This sweltering, miserable, impoverished, crime-ridden, very dangerous city is built on a swamp, with a jungle for a backyard. The beggars are aggressive and even menacing, and shady characters shadow you on the streets as you walk about. Cops are nowhere to be seen. This is one of the worst cities in the Americas. But the rest of the country is a great place to vacation. ***** Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Sao Paulo is the industrial engine of Brazil. This major city is full of garbage and very dangerous. There are hustlers as far as the eye can see, chaotic streets that render maps useless, not enough cops and Godawful traffic. Rio de Janeiro, the popular tourist destination with the killer skyline perfect for any postcard, is a deceptive place. It’s a very dangerous city with lots of violent crime. Street gangs armed to the teeth regularly shoot it out in military-style wars with the cops. Death squads of off-duty cops funded by local businessmen roam the streets at night, murdering homeless, drug-addicted street kids and petty criminals with impunity in a sickening “social cleanup” campaign. There are pickpockets and muggers all about, often in menacing, youthful gangs (especially on the famous beach) and they frequently operate in broad daylight. A dystopian horrorshow of a city. ****** Nairobi, Kenya: Unfortunately, this city is seriously crime-ridden. Even locals admit that violent crime has reached catastrophic proportions. Caracas, Barquisimeto, or the whole country, Venezuela: The crime is very bad here, sadly, and there is garbage everywhere you look. This blog supports Hugo Chavez, but crime in Venezuela is a tragic, long-standing problem with no quick fixes. Guinea-Bissau: There is no water, no electricity, no place to stay, and the only hotel is half-demolished. San‘a’, Yemen: In a Dickensenian touch, children are actually chained up here in order to beg! Moynaq and Nukus, Uzbekistan: These two cities broiling in a merciless desert have been ruined and turned into ecological dead zones by Stalinist pollution. ***** San Pedro Sulu, Honduras: This sad town has a horrible amount of crime. Swarms of locals will attack you on the bus, trying to steal your luggage. You will have to fight them off if you wish to retain your suitcase. Like the rest of this wreck of a country, it’s full of US gang members gone home to Honduras. People here are very poor and desperate. If you can make it to the nice part of town and afford to stay there, though, you can be quite safe. ***** ***** Dakar, Senegal: According to some, this large West African city has horrible street crime – it is very dangerous. They say if you don’t have armed guards with you, don’t even go outside your hotel room. However, others report that they spent a week there and found it to be safe, in fact safer than many American cities. Violent crime is reportedly rare, and the country is one of the most stable in Africa, and has been that way since independence. ***** Port Au Prince, Haiti: This filthy, degraded, extremely dangerous and desperately poor mess of a city is best avoided at all costs. It sports open sewers, enslaved children, riots, killings and lots of other fun things. This blog did support President Aristide’s efforts to improve the tragedy of a nation called Haiti. Lome, Togo: Criminals are as common as mosquitoes here, walking around fearlessly in broad daylight in this terrible city full of miserable people and crooked taxi drivers. ***** Istanbul, Turkey: The 20 The rest of the country is a great place to visit, has many fans and is one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Best bet for Turkey is just to head to the tourist spots and blow off Istanbul altogether. ***** Phnom Penh, Kampuchea: This city has become a very dangerous, crime-ridden place. The gangs of little girl prostitutes add a particularly poignant touch. ***** Bogotá, Colombia or really the whole country: Bogotá is one of the most dangerous places in the Americas but there seems to be agreement that Colon, Lima and Guayaquil are worse. Really, all of Colombia is dangerous as Hell, to be honest. This comment about Bogotá was recently rebutted by a Bogotán blogger, with more comments here. His post aggressively taking issue with this entry is in Spanish, but my Spanish is good enough to get the gist of it. Also I am getting a lot of comments coming in from Bogotáns on the Internet aggressively objecting to the content. The sole issue that these Defenders of Bogotá are taking issue with is my contention that the city is a very dangerous place. To be honest, Bogotá used to have a truly horrible reputation for crime, but in recent years, there has been a huge effort put into cracking down on street crime. For some more agreement that Bogota is dangerous, see Bogotá is scopolamine. This drug is used by crooks to disable their victims so they can rip them off. It is sprayed in the face, dumped in your drink or spiked into a cigarette. Bogotá hospitals receive an incredible 2,000 scopolamine victims every month, or an astounding 66 a day. The drug knocks you out and can cause medical problems. Colombia has one of the world’s worst road systems. Many roads are not even marked. Drivers are reckless and many cars don’t have headlights at night. Cows have a tendency to wander into the road. Taxis are totally dangerous and are best avoided, if possible. Women are advised to avoid all taxis at night. Anyone is advised to avoid any taxi that already has someone in it. In many cases, this is a criminal accomplice of the thuggish driver. In addition to getting scopolamine sprayed in your face, another popular scam is the “jump-start”: you are told that the taxi has stalled and asked to get out and help push. As you do so, the taxi driver leaves with your luggage. Buses are also best avoided. Thieves haunt the buses, waiting for you to fall asleep, at which point, they rip you off. Certain bus lines are frequented by thieves offering drugged gum, sweets, food and cigarettes. After the drug knocks you out, they rob you blind. In addition to theft and druggings, kidnapping and extortion are also rife on buses. In view of all of the above, it is nothing short of amazing that all of these Colombians are angrily protesting my characterization of their country as dangerous. Or perhaps they doth protest too much? ***** Managua, Nicaragua: This dirty, crime-ridden, dangerous disaster of a city has a bombed-out look about it. This blog supports Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista Party and prays that they can ameliorate this mess. ***** San Salvador, El Salvador: See Managua. Full of dangerous former LA gang members. Death squads roam the streets, slaughtering gangsters by the dozen, but for every one you kill, it seems five more pop up in his place. This blog supports the FMLN’s efforts to reform this ruined land, but the crime here has become so terrible, one wonders if anything short of an act of God could make things better. In fact, I used to make contributions too the FMLN’s weapons fund via an FMLN agent in Los Angeles during the 1980’s. ***** ***** Detroit, New Haven, Newark, Gary (Indiana), Hammond (Indiana), USA: Detroit topped all lists as the worst city in the US. An ugly, dangerous, depressing and filthy city with a downtown that looks like a war zone – a despairing district surrounded by miles of crumbling, abandoned industrial buildings, torn-down fences and rusting cars. Newark is similar, with few to no redeeming qualities. It’s a frightening, polluted city with a postwar look of miles of weedy, trash-strewn vacant lots where crumbling apartment buildings have been torn down. It’s also a dangerous city with a high crime rate. New Haven, despite the presence of Yale University, is similar. There are legions of homeless, begging drug users clogging the streets, and the crime rate is very high due to hordes of crack-dealing gangs shooting it out on the streets. Congress and Columbus Avenues are notorious for drive-by shootings, drug dealing and muggings. It is reportedly the HIV capital of the East Coast due to IV drug use. A lot of the more respectable people have been moving out for some time now. Although much of the city is quite ugly, New Haven does have its bright spots, thanks to Yale. There are nice parts of town, parks, trees, etc. Gary is yet another postindustrial Rust Belt train wreck of a town. A grimy town full of abandoned factories, overgrown lots, rusting fences, graffiti, barred windows and vomit. Go downtown and see tall buildings all boarded up, with no vehicles in sight and unhinged stoplights swaying in the wind – for all practical purposes, a ghost town. This was once a vibrant, working-class city, and now it looks like Road Warrior. Hammond is similar, a suicidally depressing city lined with shuttered factories on the shores of Lake Michigan. Yet another Rust Belt post-industrial ruin. ***** Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: A collapsing, dirty, crime-ridden hellhole. Osaka, Japan: I never would have thought that this city would make the list but according to my friend Tumerica, she says it is the worst city she has ever lived in. I tagged her with the title of this story. In blogging, tagging mean you are supposed to write on the topic – kind of like, “Tag, you’re it.” I will let her explain why Osaka is such a crappy place in her post here.

Life in Urban Southern Nigeria

As a followup to my post on Internet scams, let us take a look at urban Southern Nigeria, possibly the most crime-ridden place on the planet. We know a lot about the place because we have been fighting the scammers out of there for years. Nigeria and related places are hellholes, they are extremely dangerous, and the few Westerners crazy enough to go there lived in armed compounds with barbed wire around them and almost never go outside. That’s what the oil company compounds look like. The Secret Service was over there for a while working with the Nigerian government but they finally left. The government would not cooperate and the living conditions were so horrible that the agents could not stand it. Probably 9 It is much different in the Muslim north and the rural areas of the South may be ok. If you go to Lagos, as soon as you hit the airport, people will probably start trying to steal from you. Some of them will probably be workers at the airport. The first thing that hits you is the smell of garbage. The whole city smells like garbage, they just throw it everywhere. The roads are lawless, the cops are mostly crooks, and there are armed robbers on all the highways. There are crashes all the time on the highways due to crazy driving and useless roads, and if you go driving you will probably see flaming wrecks with bodies still in them. It takes hours for an ambulance to show up. As soon as a crash happens, people swarm all over it and steal everything they can and drive away.

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