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I consider it extremely unlikely that all prior history will turn out to be a fluke, and a continent with an average IQ of like 70 will suddenly get really good at warfare now that it's more complicated than ever. Pointing out the handful of times in the last ten-thousand years that anyone from there defeated an army that wasn't barefoot doesn't really change the equation. Africa sucks at everything and the reasons aren't actually mysterious.
Yes but as pointed out in Argument 1, there have been long periods of history where particular groups of people also had bad track records in warfare then at some point turn things around, it seems to me that it would have been just as easy to point to "ancestry" then too. It seems easy then that the same mistake is being made now. I will always remember this comment on /r/WarCollege that argues Paul Kagame is one of the most notable military leader alive and I always wonder how a person of that skill and intellect would have fared in a non-African conflict.
Listen, you claim not to be an HBD coper and I guess I believe you, but that just leaves me wondering exactly what you're coping so hard for. There's no amount of re-litigating the military historical record that's going to turn Sub-Saharan Africa into anything but a collection of primitive tribal civilizations that mostly get stepped on by everyone who comes along.
Like deadass, how much am I supposed to believe better geography or something would really do for a population missing two SD worth of average IQ?
You mean you wonder what this one outlier smart guy might have done if he had existed among a population capable of maintaining an advanced civilization. Yeah that's kind of the whole point.
After this thread, I think what I will do is wait 1 year and re-visit this topic. Personally, I have an ideological attachment to "all men are created equal" and an emotional attachment to the underdog story. And yes, that's coping, but I don't think it's yet "copium".
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If you're talking about the entire continent, I think it's worth observing that Cannae is generally considered to be one of the most tactically successful battles in recorded history.
Yeah, the Arabs/Berbers did manage to conquer the Spanish, the Tunisians did manage to go around slave-raiding and raping the Mediterranean (they even got to Iceland at one point IIRC), the Moroccans managed to beat Portugal badly at one point... but really he means sub-Saharan Africa not North Africa or Phoenicians in Africa. It's tedious to constantly add sub-Saharan though.
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Africa almost always means Subsaharan Africa. Carthage was a Phonecian (Lebanese) settlement. The more meaningful division between Europe and Africa isn't the Mediterranean, it's the Sahara.
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