From: jmm@world.std.com (Jones M Murphy)
Subject: Re: Pride goeth before the fall (and hopefully Jones Murphy will too)
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 00:49:33 GMT

casper@vxcrna.cern.ch (CASPER,DAVI./PPE) writes:

>>You might as well. I know it distresses you no end that a black man makes so
>>much more than you, but just deal with it, man.

>Wrongo.  Of course, we only have your word for that anyway.  What distresses me
>is that a black man who claims to be educated, who claims to be eloquent, and
>who claims to care about morality could manage to make education, eloquence,
>and morality all look so bad.

>>>Which I suppose makes you well-deserving of your self-proclaimed title as its
>>>king ...
>> 
>>I've never claimed to be king of Amerikkka, or anywhere else. No thank you.

>No, but you live in a dream world where you're smarter and wiser than everyone
>else.  A dream world where generations of history can be dismissed with
>sweeping generalizations.  A dream world where no one is responsible for
>what happens in their own lives because it is all the fault of somebody who
>oppressed their ancestors centuries ago.  That's the universe you live in, and
>that's the one I was talking about.

Yes, because it certainly has nothing to do with anything I talked about. I'm
glad you admit to completely fabricating this.

>>The Bible was written by a bunch of people as dark-skinned as I am. Their
>>whiteness is questionable, to say the least. But you once again reveal your
>>proclivity for putting the cultural accomplishments of other peoples(in this
>>case middle Easterners who spoke a language with roots in Ethiopia) under the
>>umbrella of Western Civilization.

>Since you have previously described the Bible in extremely negative terms, I
>did not expect you to hold it up as a cultural accomplishment to be admired.

I didn't. It is nonetheless a monumental document which has endured for 
millenia.

>Cultures of the Mediterranean littoral, including the Greeks and Judeans, are
>commonly considered part of Western civilization.

By Eurocentrists, surely. By your definition, Egypt, which is certainly on
the Mediterranean littoral, is part of Western Civilization! How stupid can you
get?

Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic language. Greek is Indo-European, but at least 30% of
it's higher vocabulary is Afro-Asiatic, mostly from Egyptic borrowings. The
Greek alphabet is Semitic, and definitely Afro-Asiatic.

How Western is that?

>OK, how's this.  I don't believe you.  If you, Jones Murphy, will mail me proof
>that your SAT scores were 800/800, I, Dave Casper, will mail you $100 and a
>signed letter affirming that you are smarter than me.  Deal?  (I won't be
>expecting that letter anytime soon, of course).

Not for $100, that's for sure.You'll have to pony up a great deal more than
that to feast your eyes on my full intellectual penis length. And how much will
you pay to see my U.S. Chess Federation National Master's certificate? In any
event, since you're the one who started making claims about relative SAT scores
why don't you tell us your pitiful totals?

>>....I see you get such a kick out of the 30,000 babies who die each day of
>>starvation in post-colonial AFrica. Party on, dude.

>Like hell.  I'm saying the solutions for these problems are to be found in the
>present.

So am I. So what's your beef?

>  A whole lot of the trouble in the world is caused by extremists who
>ideologically simplify things into neat and tidy packages instead of dealing
>with the complexity of the problems.  I think it is you who are more cynical
>about Africa's troubles.  You seem to be saying Africans didn't, don't, and
>won't ever have the ability to deal with their own problems, since they will
>eternally be helpless victims.

Now where the hell did that come from? Africans will hardly eternally be 
helpless victims. I for one am no one's helpless victim, as those who've tried
to victimize me have learned to their chagrin.

>worked for what we have and it is rightfully ours.  If we are extremely generous
>we give 5 or 10% of what we earn to the needy.  Does this make everyone
>fortunate enough to be born into a wealthier society "criminals"?  That just
>seems to naive and too simple.  There is just no way to change the past, even
>if there we as a society decided to do it at this moment.

People are criminal if they participate in organized crime. That's been less
and less an overt preoccupation of Europe with respect to Africans, but there's
a long way to go to undo the suffering of people *now* due to the past. Look,
I accept that my slavemaster ancestors were crooks and scoundrels. Now why won't
you simply take my word for it?

>What we can hope to do is avoid the mistakes of past though.  And one of the
>mistakes of the past was the sweeping generalization that the "the [insert
>non-European race of your choice] will never be the equal of the white man."
>This was taken by many to be a obvious truth, and never questioned.  You are
>trying to advance a similar sweeping generalization.  The world has never been
>that simple and never will be.

I never said it was.

>>Italy was not an industrialized country when it attacked Ethiopia. 
>>Germany had barely begun.

>>I[n] any case, you asked if these countries had colonies
>>nd I proved that they'd engaged in rampant theft and slaughter.

>We were discussing (I use the term loosely) a particular, if somewhat hazily
>defined, period of history.  These events clearly fell outside that period of
>time.  I'm suprised you didn't mention Rome's colonies as a counter-example
>for Italy.

Actually, now that you mentioned it,....(insert long diatribe about Carthage,
etc...here)

You get the idea.

>>The fact of the matter remains that European commerce experienced a tremendous
>>influx of stolen goods from colonialism, and that that is what catalyzed 
>>the Industrial Revolution in England. This in turn was imitated by Britain's
>>neighbors.

>This is a long way from saying colonial booty fueled industrialization.  You
>make it sound like supertankers filled with oil and trainloads of iron-ore
>were pulling up to newly built factories which would have been idle otherwise.
>That's just not so.

And that's not what I said. There was a great deal of ingenuity and invention
that went into industrialization. There was also a great deal of wealth and
leisure time that made the ingenuity available. I argue that colonialism was
a major part of that equation. That's why Napoleon was willing to lose 60,000
men in a futile effort to reimpose slavery on Haiti, which was then a 
lucrative source of cash for then-industrializing France.

>I said then, and I still say, that colonialism and slavery were much more a
>_result_ of industrialization and the differential advantage it gave the
>Europeans to impose their will on other parts of the world, rather than the
>other way around.  History is replete with other examples of economic and
>structural advantages fueling expansion and aggression.

History is also replete with examples of aggression and expansion fueling
economic advantages. I disagree with you.

>How, I mean, how, can you argue this point?  Most of the universities in the
>world were in the West, up until the middle of this century and probably even
>today.  The scientific method, peer review of research, and all the other
>infrastructure needed to do successful research were all largely, and I never
>said totally, developed in the West.  The Arabs made contributions, the Chinese,
>the Africans (after all the first heart transplant was performed by a South
>African), and others too.

The most seminal university in Western Civ was in Africa! It was in the city
later renamed Alexandria, and that was where the early Greek philosophers and
mathematicians studied.

I'm not going to deny that during a period when whites made it a capital offense
for non-whites in their empires to read or write, whites produced superior 
scholarship. It is a bloodstained achievement, though.

>Even so, your inability to concede even so trivial a point, and to ascribe it to
>a white conspiracy to rewrite history shows that you have ideological blinders
>on.

I concede that while enslaving blacks, whites did better academically than
their victims. But I always have.

>Even if you were smarter and better educated (about as likely as your
>historical theories), I still wouldn't envy you.   You're rude, boorish,
>and hateful.  You have no respect for the opinions of others.  It is a shame
>too, because if you weren't such a pathological jerk, you might actually be a
>little interesting. 

And who do I hate, pray tell?

>Truly laughable.  I was telling people here they were giving slavery and its
>evils short shrift before you ever got here.  It is a tribute to your
>closed-mindedness that you could alienate me.

Yes, I'm closed to the notion that theft did not benefit the thieves who did
it on such a grand scale. I thank you for your support, but I don't need it.
I'll be just fine, whether you're an alien or not.

>1)   Avoid disparaging the intelligence of people who disagree with you.
>1a)  Avoid calling yourself smarter, more educated, more eloquent, etc. than
>     everyone else.
>1b)  Avoid nit-picking dissection of word use, whose sole purpose is to
>     circumvent 1 and 1a.
>2)   Avoid use of inflammatory racial labels in a manner designed to offend or
>     shock.
>2a)  Avoid referring to other posters by using racial labels.
>3)   Avoid trivializing or demeaning references to ethnic or cultural groups.

Wow. We may never hear from you again, under these constraints. I began my
postings here in a factual tone. I continue to interact in a factual tone
whenever that is appropriate. If I'm insulted, I'll respond in kind.
Jones
-- 
********************************************************************************

Jones M Murphy, Jr
Associate, Derivative Products Group
Newsgroups: alt.war.civil.usa