Outcast9428 wrote: ↑February 16th, 2023, 11:31 pm
Pixel--Dude wrote: ↑February 16th, 2023, 1:51 am
No country has ideal living conditions. Technological advancements do not always equate to happiness and decent standards of living. Look how many people on this very site embrace the Happierabroad philosophy now and want to escape the dystopia of America. There are always problems. But to say colonialism rescued these foreign countries and made everything better is just ignorant and naive as f**k. The Romans did the same thing. They brought many countries better sanitation and all the rest of it, but you condemn the Roman Empire as barbaric.
You still haven't learned anything at all about nuances, have you?
I do think that the Romans were barbaric, but I don’t believe their enemies were necessarily any better. There is evidence the Carthaginians practiced human sacrifice. They definitely performed animal sacrifices. The Huns were mass murderers who slaughtered dozens of cities full of people and thought nothing of killing their own family members for the sake of power.
I don’t view the Roman Empire as uniquely evil. I just think that virtually all societies in the pre-Christian era of humanity were extremely savage and violent except for the Athenians in Greece. Even the Athenians however had normalized slavery, animal sacrifice, and committed mass murder in order to keep conquered cities in line during the Peloponnesian war.
Homosexual type perversion was also widespread in ancient Greece at certain times, including in Athens, though some Athenians considered it to be immoral.
Christianity ended slavery, ended animal sacrifice, made mass murder during warfare much more uncommon then before, stigmatized mass rape which used to be considered an inevitable aspect of war, taught people to care about what’s right and wrong and not to simply admire people who have power because they have power but rather to admire what’s right.
I do not consider animal sacrifice to be inherently evil. It is wrong to sacrifice to spirits other than the most high God. God had the Israelites in the desert bring certain animals to the priest for sacrifice rather than slaughtering themselves, but allowed them to slaughter them themselves if they lived far from the tabernacle after they settled in the land of Israel. They were going to slaughter animals anyway. We still do today. But in that circumstance, they were required to have them slaughtered by the priest as a sacrifice. If priestly sacrifice was anything like current Jewish slaughtering requirements, they would have taken care to minimize the pain the animal felt, a very sharp blade with one quick slit of the throat.
The Europeans didn’t just bring technology and improved living standards to Africa. They also brought human rights to Africa. Human life was cheap and people thought nothing of murdering their own tribespeople if somebody died of an illness because the Africans believed that disease was the result of witchcraft. Yes I know the Europeans believed in witchcraft too at certain points but not to the same severity. In Africa, almost every time somebody died of an illness, somebody in the tribe got accused of witchcraft and was killed. Sometimes it was multiple people accused and there was no effort at all put into figuring out if they were guilty or not. An accusation of witchcraft from anyone, even if it’s just someone you had an argument with who still holds a grudge against you for it, was a death sentence.
Africa is a huge diverse place with many customs. Btw, whose to say that witchcraft has nothing to do with at least some illnesses? An expat I knew in Indonesia had horrible problems with kidney stones. Somehow, I looked at the ventilation space above the doorframe of his room and saw a bag of urine over it. That's the sort of thing that is done for witchcraft over there. He suspected the maid, of course. He said he was friendly all the time. Maybe she thought he was flirting. I don't know if he accused her or asked her about it.
This is just scratching the surface of what a nightmare Africa was before the Europeans brought relative civilization to the continent.
It was a mixed bag. Overall, missionaries seemed to have been a positive influence during the colonial time, though some of them certainly had the political nations of their home nation in mind, in the case of the British empire. There were also Europeans looking for money. Some of the fighting and capturing other tribes that occurred in parts of Africa was motivated by the fact that there was a supply chain, with English ships hauling them as slaves to the Americas.
This is why people need to have higher IQs and why the intelligent look down on low IQ people so much because stupidity is really dangerous and widespread stupidity in a society can make life unlivable and extremely dangerous. Low IQ people cannot synthesize coherent moral values as well as more intelligent people can which is why they are much more prone to violence.
There is high IQ violence. Nuclear bombs and drones require some IQ points.