He asserts that I ‘offer no evidence’ for my claim that China was very far from being economically neck to neck with the West in 1800. In fact, the point is footnoted and the work of two Chinese scholars, Guan Hanhui and Li Daokui, clearly referenced; I also provide Angus Maddison’s figures for per capita income.
Correction: no evidence that is not speculative artifice
Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First World War had encouraged political assertiveness among subjugated peoples from Egypt to China. Unlike other popular racists, who parsed the differences between Nordic and Latin peoples, Stoddard proposed a straightforward division of the world into white and coloured races. He also invested early in Islamophobia, arguing in The New World of Islam (1921) that Muslims posed a sinister threat to a hopelessly fractious and confused West. Like many respectable eugenicists of his time, Stoddard later found much to like about the Nazis, which marked him out for instant superannuation following the exposure of Nazi crimes in 1945.
I thought it was interesting that there is historical precedent that pan-white (white=European, Europe=non-Islamicized West) solidarity is basically founded on anti-Islamic racializing. Europe's existence as such is fundamentally racist and Islamophobic
TED-wonks who think that things like microcredits, charter cities, and virtual schools will change the world are now considered serious thinkers in the American intellectual landscape.
MadMedico posted:
This guy is considered an intellectual and his books are required reading in American universities, why? Well he uses software marketing jargon a metaphor for historical developments (And Thomas Friedman already beat him to that years ago)
TED-wonks who think that things like microcredits, charter cities, and virtual schools will change the world are now considered serious thinkers in the American intellectual landscape.
is it not this psheudo-intellectualism of late capitalism, full of marketing buzzshwords, comparing civilizational traits to shmartphone applications and whatever, *pulls shirt* that most clearly shignifies that we live now more than ever in an age of ideology, *snorts* that one can not really live outside of ideology *rubs face*
Europeans 'left to their own devices' die covered in their own shit and filth, literally
He says it like it's a bad thing.
christmas_cheer posted:
dont post white supremacist bullshit here thanks
babyfinland posted:MadMedico posted:
This guy is considered an intellectual and his books are required reading in American universities, why? Well he uses software marketing jargon a metaphor for historical developments (And Thomas Friedman already beat him to that years ago)
TED-wonks who think that things like microcredits, charter cities, and virtual schools will change the world are now considered serious thinkers in the American intellectual landscape.is it not this psheudo-intellectualism of late capitalism, full of marketing buzzshwords, comparing civilizational traits to shmartphone applications and whatever, *pulls shirt* that most clearly shignifies that we live now more than ever in an age of ideology, *snorts* that one can not really live outside of ideology *rubs face*
littlegreenpills posted:
this is a fantastic profit avenue for the petty bourgeois of the third world: by hook or crook enter the West and then write letters to the press enthusiastically proclaiming how everyone you ever knew or loved is in fact a savage bestial subhuman
See also: Álvaro Vargas Llosa
discipline posted:
lmao why did nobody tell me this guy is married to ayaan hirsi ali
In the past couple of years, Ferguson's professional interest in civilisations and the relations between them has intersected intriguingly with his private life, thanks to his relationship with the dedicatee of Civilization, who is identified in the book only as "Ayaan". In his preface, Ferguson writes that she "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world".
"Ayaan" is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born writer, activist and former Dutch MP who has emerged as one of the west's most strident critics of Islam, especially its treatment of women. Ferguson met her in May 2009, at Time magazine's annual "100 most influential people in the world" party. (Both Ferguson and Hirsi Ali have previously appeared on this list, in 2004 and 2005 respectively.) They embarked on their relationship a few months later, shortly after his separation from his wife of 16 years, Sue Douglas, a former editor of the Sunday Express. Their affair soon prompted a storm of gossip and the publication of several muck-raking articles.
As soon as he starts talking about Hirsi Ali, Ferguson's demeanour changes. His voice becomes softer, infused with feeling. Suddenly, he is no longer the super-confident scholar; he seems almost humble. "Ayaan comes from a completely different civilisation," he says, explaining what he meant by saying she knows what western civilisation "really means". "She grew up in the Muslim world, was born in Somalia, spent time in Saudi Arabia, was a fundamentalist as a teenager. Her journey from the world of her childhood and family to where she is today is an odyssey that's extremely hard for you or I to imagine. To see and hear how she understands western philosophy, how she understands the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, of the 19th-century liberal era, is a great privilege, because she sees it with a clarity and freshness of perspective that's really hard for us to match. So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization
lol europeans declared their negro court jester one of the most influential people in the world
MadMedico posted:littlegreenpills posted:
this is a fantastic profit avenue for the petty bourgeois of the third world: by hook or crook enter the West and then write letters to the press enthusiastically proclaiming how everyone you ever knew or loved is in fact a savage bestial subhumanSee also: Álvaro Vargas Llosa
VS Naipul
Salman Rushdie
Noam Chomsky
babyfinland posted:discipline posted:
lmao why did nobody tell me this guy is married to ayaan hirsi ali
In the past couple of years, Ferguson's professional interest in civilisations and the relations between them has intersected intriguingly with his private life, thanks to his relationship with the dedicatee of Civilization, who is identified in the book only as "Ayaan". In his preface, Ferguson writes that she "understands better than anyone I know what Western civilisation really means – and what it still has to offer the world".
"Ayaan" is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born writer, activist and former Dutch MP who has emerged as one of the west's most strident critics of Islam, especially its treatment of women. Ferguson met her in May 2009, at Time magazine's annual "100 most influential people in the world" party. (Both Ferguson and Hirsi Ali have previously appeared on this list, in 2004 and 2005 respectively.) They embarked on their relationship a few months later, shortly after his separation from his wife of 16 years, Sue Douglas, a former editor of the Sunday Express. Their affair soon prompted a storm of gossip and the publication of several muck-raking articles.
As soon as he starts talking about Hirsi Ali, Ferguson's demeanour changes. His voice becomes softer, infused with feeling. Suddenly, he is no longer the super-confident scholar; he seems almost humble. "Ayaan comes from a completely different civilisation," he says, explaining what he meant by saying she knows what western civilisation "really means". "She grew up in the Muslim world, was born in Somalia, spent time in Saudi Arabia, was a fundamentalist as a teenager. Her journey from the world of her childhood and family to where she is today is an odyssey that's extremely hard for you or I to imagine. To see and hear how she understands western philosophy, how she understands the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, of the 19th-century liberal era, is a great privilege, because she sees it with a clarity and freshness of perspective that's really hard for us to match. So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization
lol europeans declared their negro court jester one of the most influential people in the world
hahaha THIS infuses me with great Will... I feel a great power in my hands and its telling me to destroy the first world!!
The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:
1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations.
2. The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe.
3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures.
4. Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.
5. The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.
6. The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.
For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world.
In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese. Westerners not only grew richer than “Resterners.” They grew taller, healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.