No one can claim having more superior jeans. Even the feared Mongols fell out of fashion.

Where did I applaud the Mongols? Also, they burned the Library of Baghdad.

My Jeans have an elastic waist. Do I have the superior jeans now ?

I have Jack and Jones jeans for years and haven't had a problem with them. They still look as new as on the day I bought them. Plus they're more affordable.

I have some AE jeans that are made out of some kind of stretchy shit that are pretty great. Can't speak to the durability because I mostly wear them to my office job so they're not getting a ton of wear and tear but they're pretty old at this point and no real signs of wear on them from that.

I like Edwin.

Plaque isn't spread by corpses, but by fleas

"White" is sort of inferior as a concept of a race, because it's not even a single race. Just whatever is convenient for racism. Sometimes, Jewish people are white, and sometimes they aren't, for example.

I have worn Levi for forever, and you aren't wrong. They used to be great, but for many years now, they've been garbage. I gotta find a better brand.

It is a fascinating question, isn't it? Why specifically did the left edge of Europe, and basically no one else, take over the world?

I totally get that the New World just didn't stand a chance because by some quirk there are basically no domesticatable animals native to the Western hemisphere. Imagine trying to bootstrap yourself to the iron age without the horse, cow, pig, chicken, sheep, goat, donkey, dog or cat. So when Cortez landed on the Yucatan with steel weapons and armor, firearms, horses etc. he encountered civilizations on par with the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, and that was the most advanced it got in the New World.

But the Old World, AfroEurAsia, had been in contact with each other basically forever. Why was it that Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain became world dominating global superpowers when, say, Japan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia or India didn't? I can understand why the coastal and island nations on the left edge of the "world" might invest in sea power and start sailing the world...why didn't the coastal and island nations on the right edge do the same?

Yeah the Western empires grew to global supremacy via colonization which is still echoed in the present day, the United States of America, former colony of Great Britain, is still the most powerful and influential nation on Earth. Britain sailed so we could fly. Why didn't anyone else in the world do the same?

Well, it seems that Western Europe had a lethal combination of three things that no one else in the world had:

• Vested interest in sea power. Relatively small home countries with huge amounts of coastline, boats are important.
• Knowledge of, and desire for, foreign made goods. They knew of the existence of Asia, knew of silk, porcelain, spices etc. And wanted to go get them for themselves. Meanwhile the Asians didn't really want anything from Europe they didn't already have.
• Extroverts. Everybody else was focusing on their own territories and consolidating internal power, maybe duking it out with neighbors. The Japanese, a race of people congenitally incapable of doing anything halfway, took their isolationism to such an extreme that travel abroad was outright illegal. Meanwhile in Britain, traveling abroad was a possible punishment for a crime.

So it turns out that in the entire world, only the Western Europeans had the means, motive and personality to travel the world by ship. Asians and Africans had the means, but not the motive or personality, and nobody in the New World had the means. Fast forward a few centuries and the result is the petrodollar.

It was the black death.

It caused wages to rise due to the reduction in available labour force, and increased social mobility (through the amount of positions it left available) and personal wealth of the survivors (through inheritance and looting), kick-starting the renaissance.

From there, it was all dominoes. More wealth allowed more commerce and innovation (here's where the naval technology comes in), which led to the discovery and ransacking (and eventual colonisation of America) which led to more wealth and commerce and innovation and social mobility, which led to less social stability, wars, more innovation, a series of political, social, and industrial revolutions, a vicious circle of runaway capitalism devouring everything in its path, the ideal of eternal growth, and the raping to death of the only world we have.

No black death, we'd probably still be living in the middle ages (with better plows and bigger cathedrals, sure, there was still plenty of innovation back then), and complaining about the cold instead of the ever rising heat.

I don't know about the Slavs, but tbf, the "white" race and the categorisation and conceptualisation of race itself has been arbitrary from the beginning. Not long ago, the Italians and Irish weren't considered white. Who goes where depends on the person making the categorisation. The English despised the Irish and Iberians, so both were lumped together as "Irish Iberian".

And "Jews aren't white" while we're at it.

yep. correct.

why , why would it be desired for slavs to be counted as white?

Behold the power of my ancestors to...digest lactose into adulthood.

The lesson was supposed to be "Son, races aren't actually a thing, they're a categorical method of sorting people into groups based on variable forms of bigotry. Where one race begins and another ends is as arbitrary as the lines we draw in the sand."

Not turning the white supremacy around into some kind of self-hating racism. That makes about as much sense as the white supremacy. And progresses the human race about as far.

Have you ever heard of the history of Asia?

If the Aztecs had sea worthy warships they probably would have tried to conquer North America as well.

People are people. We are more a product of our environments than any innate differences.

Europeans and their descendants have had environmental pressures that led to certain advantages which they were willing to capitalize on globally. The inhumanity involved was predicated on dehumanizing other peoples and cultures, giving birth to white supremacy. The resultant industrialization they sought after has wreaked havoc on our planet and may bring our species to extinction through climate change.

I appreciate where your dad was coming from. It's disappointing that we live in a world where your father even had to challenge such a proposterous notion (racial superiority).

But white people are not more violent. In the same way, I don't see any accomplishment by a white person as unique to their race. They are human accomplishments first and, in my view, could have been achieved by any person in the same environmental circumstances.

I don't even see white people as an amalgamation anymore. Or any 'race' for that matter. My ancestors are Indian so you can imagine we don't all see or refer to ourselves as just Indian (an identity that within it holds 1500 dialects). I don't think it's a meaningful designation. It's happenstance.

I'm much more interested in the specifics. Particularily, defining and understanding a persons worldview. If youre a person that tries to put people on a hierarchical ladder based on arbitrary physical traits, we're probably not going to vibe. If you're someone that understands that identity is fluid and evolves over time (just as our values might) and have a goal of making life better for ourselves and others then I would reassert what I said earlier. We are more similar than we are different.

They're an existential threat to our species so I'm totally ok with giving them their own nation as a quarantine measure. They would immediately declare war when they realize their society/economy is dysfunctional either due to global ostracization or not having access to legacy wealth accruing mechanisms created during colonial times. The question is if America would come to their rescue as they have for the worlds other "favorite" ethnostate.

Does Nazi Fascistostan have a right to exist?

So what about all the other racists? You might be shocked but lots of other countries are very racist and they're not white either.

"If you had not committed such great sins, Heaven would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."

Yes

The language used on the ad isn’t racist.

Using language that sounds just like racist eugenics being told to viewers by a beautiful blond haired, blue eyed woman is a little suspicious or tone deaf.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say with a self-administered grain of salt that colonialism didn't really matter that much to European development in the grand scheme of things. Really we're looking at the Renaissance and the beginnings of capitalism here. The only contemporary society that could've competed on both fronts was the formerly-Abbasid, formerly-proto-capitalist Middle East, but the Mongols heavily derailed that. I'm not sure how correct the post is in general, but it does bear thinking how the Renaissance would've went had Florence met a fate similar to Baghdad.

This sentence is upsetting for multiple reasons

IMO the Mongols would have eventually adapted if they get into Vienna or in other major European cities. The Mongols under Genghis Khan also did not have siege equipment when they invaded the Jin dynasty. But after conquering the Jin, they acquired the Chinese engineers who built siege equipment for them.

I was confused about this etymology since I was a kid. I was taught there was one race - the human race - referring to the species. Oh well. Language gets misunderstood, learning it gets half-baked, it's misused and finally transformed over time. Whether it's wrong or stupid is neither here nor there, I suppose.

deterministic theorizing without peer reviewed does not a proof make.

Ignoring that trash book.

One thing I read is that a major factor that drove western Europeans to be so dominant worldwide is that their North Atlantic ocean fishing vessel tradition resulted in them being faster and more capable than most other vessels in the world, initially proving superior to the typically Roman-esque rowing-focused designs of the Mediterranean.

GGS is pop-sci. The author had a conclusion and worked backwards to justify it. It's not academically respected in the slightest.

Luckier then Palestinians tho 'eh?

For sub-Saharan Africans, their equivalent of the Mongols is either the Bantu or Europeans, or both.

After the slow drip feed expansion of the Bantus, but before the sudden colonisation of Europe, many African societies were doing well in their own right. Timbuktu was a literal gold mine and the centre of learning. There was also the Great Zimbabwe, the ruins of buildings so great and impressive that 19th century European archaeologists initially could not believe Africans built them. West Africa had been flourishing trading hubs for early European explorers and traders.

africans were spared of the mongols as well, and yet…

What exactly is being said here?

Finish the thought.