New South African president wants to seize land from white farmers without compensation

Actually, the timelines don't work. The Nok disappeared around 300AD and the earliest date given for Nsibidi is 400AD

The Nok didn't have writing.

 

I am not shifting the goalposts, Nsibidi is not associated with Nok by any scholar and for the very good reason I gave in my previous post: the timelines don't match.

 

That you FAILED to comprehend the text provided with the link is not my problem.

Here it is AGAIN!

More than ample time to cover the Nok civilization.

 

Wrong!

The timelines I provided do match.

 

The Ikom monoliths are a series of volcanic-stone monoliths from the area of Ikom, Cross River State, Nigeria. They are estimated to have been made between 200 and 1850 AD.

The timelines do not match. The Nok didn't make the monoliths, in all probability.

 

Of course. That's who they are. They overlook killings of Whites by calling them 'robberies'.

 

Whites are the ones who need their property rights protected

 

I don't really disagree with you, and, I hope that you are right. For many years South Africa has been a relatively prosperous, peaceful country that has been something of a model for how White and Black populations can live together throughout the vast Sub-Saharan region of Africa. If all this confiscation talk by radicals is just a lot of ebullient nonsense then let's hope that it is nothing worse than an exercise in bad taste and belligerent bullshit -- without theft and murder of anyone there.

 

The white population in SA refused to give property rights to the black community. Hence they are in this situation.

 

Thanks for the kind compliment.

I think it's almost impossible, literally impossible, for intelligent people today to objectively look at the 'race and intelligence' issue. The non-existence of differentially-distributed genetic bases for desirable human mental qualities has become a matter of religious faith. And it's understandable, given what horrible things advanced peoples are able to do to groups weaker than them, with a bit of race-based ideology to spur them on. People like Nicholas Wade (and most of the cognitive psychologists who look into intelligence) have to speak almost in code, or else be charged with Thoughtcrime. (I was amused to see Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, endorse the idea that one human tribe could be more intelligent than another for genetic reasons, but to do it in way that meant that the Leftist Thought Police would overlook it, which they did.)

Having said that, I believe that, even if those gene-variants that do favor higher intelligence are distributed unevenly among the different tribes of mankind, that social environment, admittedly a vague term, is far more important in determining how a people advance, or don't. It's just that the factors determining whether a civilization falls into backwardness, or moves forward, are too difficult to tease out.

And speaking of race and intelligence and Africa ... it looks like it's the black Africans (or the smart ones) who are trying to get out of Africa and come to the US and Europe, an intelligent move, whereas the white Afrikaaners are sitting waiting for ... their collective posthumous Darwin Award. (A friend of mine, referring to what some relatives of hers were supposed to have said when, in 1938, they were asked when they didn't leave Germany: "We can't bear to leave behind our grand piano." So she calls such behavior "Grand Piano Syndrome". Well, those genes tend to be eliminated.)

 

Denial on your part does not alter the factual timelines. It is not possible to date when a carving was made on a stone so your probability assumption has an equal probability of being wrong.

 

The property rights are protected for everyone irrespective of race. Minority blacks have just as much at risk since their lands could be confiscated under the same repeal of those rights.

 

I agree. Radicals make a lot of noise but seldom accomplish their nefarious goals. For the sake of all of the people of South Africa I wish them peace and prosperity.

 

The apartheid regime collapsed and was replaced by a modern Constitution that protects the property rights of everyone.

 

This is really much ado about nothing at this point. They voted to study the possibility of a land redistribution of disputed lands. Not all farmers affected. For example. If I bought a farm 12 years ago it is clear that I obtained the land legally and would be unaffected.
At this point it is simply a study due to report back in 8 months. Given the recent change in government it very well may be just window dressing to indicate to the population that the new admin is going to make changes.

 

Yes, there is a brain drain to an extent but many Africans choose to stay or return. For example, I have 4 Congolese in my circle of friends with Phd's from European universities, one even has a post-doc degree. They are here because they want to see their country advance. No matter how messed up things get here the people still identify themselves as Congolese. I have a former student who is now working on a masters in IT and U of Chicago and Harvard have profs encouraging him to do a PhD in political economics. He will come back, I am sure, as I've reminded him I don't need a visa to go hunt him down if he doesn't. The goal is for him to bring that education back to universities here.

 

That's heartening to hear. (You're living in the Congo? Whoa. As many deaths as the Holocaust, and almost totally ignored by the world.)

My only successfully-supervised PhD student, from St Lucia, chose to remain in the UK where he has had a very successful academic career. And I can understand his decision, but it represents a transfer of social capital from St Lucia to the UK.

Perhaps one way to help combat this drain would be to grant legal immigration status to professionals from underdeveloped countries under the condition that they take part in efforts to extend education in their countries -- perhaps as teachers or professors in internationally-sponsored schools and universities in those countries. It should also be made as easy as possible for them to return for extended periods without jeopardizing their status in the country they've immigrated to.

The biggest crime of the colonialists in Africa, after that of cramming together hostile tribes in single 'nations', thus guaranteeing endless civil conflict, was to just walk out of the place and turn it over to the kleptomaniacs. Perhaps that was inevitable, but in an ideal world -- ha! -- the UN would have put in place transitional regimes, with appointed indigenous leaders, perhaps staffed (in terms of the police and military as well as civil servants) by non-whites from the advanced countries. It took the European tribes millennia to go from mud huts to advanced societies, and it's actually a kind of compliment to the Africans to expect them to make the transition in a few years.

Modern technology ought to make it possible to greatly extend educational opportunities also. If I were a billionaire, I wouldn't send sports cars to Mars, but would try to start a massive on-line educational system, from Kindergarten to Graduate School, created by the sort of technically-savvy idealists who 'staff' the Open Source systems, with the One Laptop Per Child program underlying it. I don't see why this hasn't been tried in the right way yet. (One Per Child was the right idea, but like a lot of such programs, it missed out on most of the necessary non-hardware 'infrastructure'.)

From what I've read of South Africa, the state education system is very poor. The short summary in Wikipedia:

"An independent study by Stellenbosch University researchers found that undue union influence and "critical educational factors", including weak institutional functionality, uneducated teachers, and insufficient learning time, were responsible for the poor state of South Africa.

Violence
The South African Human Rights Commission has found that 40% of children interviewed said they had been the victims of crime at school. More than a fifth of sexual assaults on South African children were found to have taken place in schools."

And South Africa would be the place to focus on. As someone else noted, it could be the powerhouse for the surrounding region. So long as they don't fall under the sway of ignorant demagogues, which, thank God, we in the advanced countries never do.

 

Land redistribution, with or without compensation, is common in history. It was one of the ways to destroy the old feudal or semi-feudal order, and begin the development of capitalism. Although conservatives have a natural (and well-founded, in my opinion) repugnance towards the state forcibly seizing, or forcing the sale of, private property, they should note that it can turn a land-hungry peasantry, susceptible to radical demagogues, into a conservative property-owning pillar of the social order. This is what happened in France, to Marx's dismay.

The American government, having learned, dimly, something from the Chinese Revolution, encouraged land reform in their anti-Communist 'allies' in Taiwain and South Korea, and elsewhere. To quote from the Wiki article on the subject:
"South Korea
From 1945 to 1950, United States and South Korean authorities carried out a land reform that retained the institution of private property. They confiscated and redistributed all land held by the Japanese colonial government, Japanese companies, and individual Japanese colonists. The Korean government carried out a reform whereby Koreans with large landholdings were obliged to divest most of their land. A new class of independent, family proprietors was created.

Taiwan

In the 1950s, after the Nationalist government came to Taiwan, land reform and community development was carried out by the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction. This course of action was made attractive, in part, by the fact that many of the large landowners were Japanese who had fled, and the other large landowners were compensated with Japanese commercial and industrial properties seized after Taiwan reverted from Japanese rule in 1945. The land program succeeded also because the Kuomintang were mostly from the mainland and had few ties to the remaining indigenous landowners."

What South Africa -- what all countries need -- is a vigorous capitalism, sustained by the rule of law, but one in which the great majority of the population -- who are NOT going to create start-ups or become doctors -- feels that they have a material stake. You don't have to be a leftist or a rightist to understand that propertyless, impoverished people are not a stable base for a decent society.

Giving them that material stake may require, in countries just emerging from backwardness, a more robust state than we would consider desirable in more advanced countries.

 

Dont be silly

The black government is taking land only from white farmers

 

The black government in Zimbabwe oppressed the minority black tribe and stole whatever they wanted from them because there was nothing to stop them.

Minority blacks in South Africa don't trust the ANC so they want to keep the Constitutional protection of property ownership in place so that they won't be victimized after the whites. In essence it is in the interests of the black minorities to form an alliance with the whites to preserve their own constitutional rights.

FTR the South African Zulus, who are the largest tribe, are closely related to the Ndebele who are the majority tribe in Zimbabwe who are oppressing the minority tribe.

 

I dont care who blacks in south africa trust or dont trust

The fact is that the majority black population and black government is confiscating land from white farmers only

 

There are some cool things out there. An Indian firm has a computer lab in a container that you drop it off, open the solar panels and raise the wimax antenna and away you go. Inside the container are computer stations and the wimax connects to a central point with internet. A few thousand dollars and it's good to go.
Another one I'm messing with is using raspberryPis with Kiwix installed. Kiwix allows you to use the RaspberryPi as a data server that anyone that with a wifi device can connect to. On one I put an offline copy of French Wikipedia and some French science TV programs, How Does That Work and It's not Magic. Dozens of episodes. For $300 I can set up a rural school with this including a solar panel and battery for power.
And never forget the Barefoot University in India. They bring in village women from around the world, preferably widows and others with no means of support, and give them hands on solar installation training. The trainers are very adept at teaching women with little formal education and no common language. When they finish they are given a few kits to take back to install and hopefully set up a business.

 

They are not confiscating anyone's land yet. In Zimbabwe they really ****ed up and didn't keep the farming sector alive but they did indeed take land from blacks as well as whites. I highly doubt South Africa will follow suit because they saw first hand the consequences. I think this study is to get the big landowners to come up with palatable plans that would work to everyone's benefit.

 

Whoa. Te salud!

There must be a hundred thousand young people, all over the world, who are idealistic and intelligent and want to do something about the Third World. Surely there should be a way to funnel and focus all that idealism and energy into projects like this.

One objection that will be raised is that the people who take advantage of these things are the ones who are upwardly-mobile already, not the very bottom of society, who really need basic literacy before all else. And there is a good deal of truth to that -- but the reality is, a society needs its 'talented tenth' to open businesses, to become teachers, to become electricians and auto mechanics, because they will then pull the ones below them up.

Anyone reading this thread who understands the importance of pulling up the Third World should look at this website: If you've got a young person you want to give a gift to -- who is old enough to understand it -- registering them an account with Kiva and putting a hundred dollars into it might be the beginning of an education in the real world: they get to choose to whom to loan to, and learn something about the world and economics. And they'll be doing some good as well.

 

Factually WRONG!

That is NOT happening because it is illegal under their Constitution.