What? We're talking in retrospect not in terms of context.
You said "no shit". That means it's obvious, and would have been predicted before it happened. It wasn't.
This is post-Apartheid analysis, we're attributing the current state of Africa to the power vacuum
There wasn't even a power vacuum! The apartheid government didn't just disappear and then different groups fought for control. It was ruled by Mandela and the ANC from day dot!
and we're using history as evidence of reasoning (not that it was obvious Apartheid was going to fail).
If it's not obvious, then don't say "no shit". And it's not apartheid failing that we're talking about, it's post-apartheid south africa declining that we're talking about.
Perhaps it was my fault that I wasn't clear in my phrasing, or perhaps you just misunderstood my point entirely (after all, you've returned to this thread a decade later). Regardless, it should be obvious now that South Africa's current state is due to the power vacuum.
Again,
there was no power vacuum.
The apartheid government existed until the first universal elections took place in 1994, in which the ANC won a majority of the vote and a majority of seats in parliament (members of the national assembly). There was no point at which there was a lack of government or inability to maintain law and order. This was as smooth a transition as one could possibly expect.
Things went bad for South Africa because of chronic government mismanagement and the enactment of bad policy.
I think you've also misunderstood here, my point was that power vacuums are evident historically and can cause issues in development. Sure, East Germany recovered, but they also recovered from WW1 and WW2 quite quickly in comparison to other participating powers. No need to be overly scrupulous about any of the cases anyway because context matters and the outcome wasn't necessarily my point.
Okay, why can Germany recover so easily, when Africans can't? They got the absolute messiah of afro-centric leaders elected, Mandela, they should have thrived post-apartheid.
So because both instances in South Africa were oppressive, Apartheid is justified?
I don't support apartheid and I don't know what being "justified" means in this context. My point is that it's extrememly selective or elextremely ignorant to make a big deal about the apartheid government being "oppressive", as if this is an aberration from the previous state of affairs. It was an improvement.
The institution of Bantustans, low South African wages, legislations restricting Black South Africans from receiving academic education (not taught in english, not taught maths, sciences, taught domestic skills) and a plethora of other policies are all pretty oppressive. To ignore the above and justify the Apartheid is to support industry against oppression.
- Bantus were genocidal imperialists.
- Low wages? They were higher than anywhere else on the continent. It was a developing country.
-Restricting education? These schools didn't exist anywhere else on the continent except for some other colonies. The only reason they existed in South Africa is because of Europeans. And still, South Africans had a higher literacy rate than most of the world at the time. Not learning written language, not learning maths, not learning science, this was the norm for the world, not some unusual restriction imposed on black south africans
My point was simply that apartheid south africa was vastly less oppressive than what came before it, and yet nobody seems to know or care about this.
Ignoring variability and context when using statistics is not a good method of generalisation else we'll end up wondering why the richest populations on Earth end up living in houses built in the 70s.
Like I said, that's because there's a heavily skewed income/wealth distribution. But IQ isn't like this, it's normally distributed. And using these distributions allows us to make very accurate predictions about the world, unlike using average wealth etc.
Extremities tend to conflate averages, in terms of IQ, IQ is greatly influenced by upbringing, schooling, familiarity with the exam, population size, and a plethora of other factors.
Firstly, that's not what "conflate" means.
Secondly, yes yes, those things
can influence IQ, but it doesn't mean that in practice they explain the observed variation. Heritability studies are used to estimate the contribution of genetic variance to the observed variance in IQ, and the answer is around 80%.
For example, being familiar with IQ tests can make you do better on them, but in reality so few people are familiar with them that the contribution to the variance is literally negligible.
NIKE, Nestle etc. are producing more goods than they ever have before, doesn't justify the sweat shops, child labor and cost cutting methods used let alone the low wages. Overall productiveness is not necessarily a sign for overall prosperity. Funds do not necessarily 'trickle down'.
My point is that IQ is very good at predicting the outcomes of a society. Having a high IQ population is not sufficient for having a successful society, but it seems like it is definitely a necessary condition.
pquote]If we're saying that economic results are proof of Apartheid's effectiveness and that the oppression of the Blacks into rural Bantustans (etc.) can be ignored (because of SA's past of genocide), then that's a question of ethics and where your political worldview stand on. If we're saying that the Apartheid is not oppressive, then we're ignoring the numerous oppressive policies, scientific racism, establishment myth of Voortrekkers hinting a superiority, etc. If we're ignoring this, then I guess a decade hasn't done much to change your opinion and perhaps for several more, you'll not be convinced.
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Look, I don't support colonialism. I'm just saying people make out like apartheid was some grave crime against humanity. It wasn't. It's what was needed to regulate the behavior of black south africans to maintain a function society. Now these regulations are gone, crime and anti-social behavior is out of control in south africa. And these policies were so "oppressive" that millions of black africans from across the continent moved to south africa after the establishment of apartheid rule because of how much better the country was compared to everywhere else.