Crime is bad, war is bad. Sure.
But to bring it up in this way, as a way to say "see! it's not just us!" is just a distraction that has very little to do with the fact that a member of the armed police killed a man for no reason, or that the Europeans colonized the entire continent with disastrous consequences for the population.
I find the "iron age" comments to be especially hilarious given that they completely ignore African civilizations that gave much to Europe: such as the vaunted Ancient Egyptians, to much less well known Malians, famous for their gold routes and libraries, to the Ethiopians, who represented "bastions of Christianity" when Christianity was still being repressed in the Roman Empire.
And the point of my reference was to show that Africa was not this idyllic utopia before Europeans came. So I oppose your viewpoint that colonialism have been any more disastrous than the normal state of affairs in Africa would have been.
That's not at all what this discussion is about. The racist charge above was, and let me quote:
> Africa today would in large part still be in the iron age.
To charge that this racist view about the ability of the inhabitants of the African continent is racist, says nothing about idyllic utopias. That you seem to think that any challenge to that racist view, is aloof and removed from reality, shows that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Or you're just really, really sloppy with your argument...
And to explain my analogy, as a service to you, I will quote to you from Wikipedia [0]
> Analogy [..] is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another
In this case the "analogue or source" was the fact that whenever there is a well publicized fatal shooting of a black person, there are people in the US media who go and look up if the killed person had a criminal record, and the publish it. This despite the fact, that this has nothing to do with the incident at hand. Someone who has been stopped by police 32 times and has been to jail for a year for theft, can, under the laws that govern the US, not be executed on the street by an officer of the law because their tail-light is out. It's completely and utterly irrelevant, whether the dead person was a criminal or not. That has nothing to do with the fact that the police executed him for having a broken taillight. To bring up his criminal history anyhow, means that the person doing so is looking for other justification for the execution in order to discredit the victim.
The "information or meaning" here is: The action of the perpetrator which we are discussing is logically unconnected to the reputation of the victim. Therefore the reputation of the victim is irrelevant, and to bring it up means you have ulterior motives.
The other subject we are talking about takes the "information or meaning" and applies it to the subject we are talking about. In out case the action is colonialism, Europeans are the perpetrator,and the victim is the African people. Bringing up any wrongs that happened on the African country to try and justify colonialism is logically incorrect, and thus, hints at a different motive.
This is how an analogy works: You take a situation familiar to the addressee, lift the principle governing the situation, and use it to explain a situation less familiar to the addressee.
This has very little to do with my personal "troubles", but rather, it's a rhetorical device employed to make a point.
If you're gonna be racist on the internet, at least don't fail at simple logic.
"In 1988, Rhodes University professor Julian Cobbing advanced a controversial new hypothesis on the rise of the Zulu state; he contended the accounts of the Mfecane were a self-serving, constructed product of apartheid politicians and historians. According to Cobbing, apartheid historians had mischaracterised the Mfecane as a period of internally induced black-on-black destruction. Instead, Cobbing argued that the roots of the conflicts could be found exclusively in the labour needs of the Portuguese slave traders operating out of Delagoa Bay, in modern-day Mozambique, and of the British colonists in the Cape. The resulting pressures led to massive displacement, famine, and war in the interior, allowing later Afrikaner settlers to seize control of most land.[11] Among those involved were European adventurers such as Nathaniel Isaacs (who was later accused of slave trading)[12]"
Do you understand that Cobbin's claim is that existing understanding of the event is revisionist? That is different from saying that HIS hypothesis is revisionist.
I think you do understand these things; it's just that you put blinders on in certain situations. Don't worry -- I do it too.
