Posted on 05/29/2015 7:39:48 AM PDT by bob_denard
When I think of Brazil, what comes to mind initially is Aquarelo Do Brazil [Water Color of Brazil], an absolutely glorious samba written by Ary Barroso in 1939, which went international when Walt Disney made a breathtaking cartoon in 1942 using the song as backdrop. The animation begs description, and one finds it hard to believe that it could have been made decades before computer graphics. The song is hypnotic and beguiling, like Brazil itself. However, the image is deceptive, as is much of Brazil.
In 2012, Brazil surpassed Britain in economic output to become the sixth biggest economy in the world. However, with five times as many people as Britain, that achievement is not as impressive as it seemed in the headlines. In reality, Britain has a 5 to 1 advantage in per capita income.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Interesting article and it invites very uncomfortable questions.
Somewhat uncomfortable questions, but the music and art... Wow.
How did I miss that all these years?
/johnny
Good article. It’s all rather “Captain Obvious” stuff. Incompatible is the way it always was and always will be.
Walt Disney - Aquarela do Brasil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR8bAgkQwIo
Yes, but one has to ask why certain cultures are more successful than others.
I remember riding in a hot jeep in Mexico and being lectured by a Dutch guy on how miserable we Americans were to the Indians. I looked the idiot in the eye and told him, “If the Sioux won, then I would be walking the Great Plains following the buffalo herd, dragging a teepee behind me with a papoose strapped to my back and instructing my children to pick up only the biggest dried up buffalo piles instead of talking to you.” He just looked at me. I stand by what I said 30 years ago to that Dutch Guy.
Odd how it makes absolutely no mention of the Nazi influences in Brazil (both pre-war and post-war) particularly the strong Nazi presence in the Sao Paolo are.
/johnny
The questions are answered in places like the book “The Bell Curve”.
It’s not the questions that are uncomfortable. It’s the answers.
Birds of feather flock together. Interact, don’t integrate.
Hmmm. Shoulda asked him how the Afrikaners treated the South Africans...
The Nazis knew of and took advantage of the South American Latin Laze fare attitude.
The sad facts are people either adapt to a superior culture or wither away. There was no way the primitive hunter-gatherer cultures of the Indians were going to stand in the way of the superior European culture.
Even many conservatives fail to understand that basic fact. Some peoples can adapt to civilization, and some can't. I read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" where Diamond promotes the silly idea that the people of Papua New Guinea are just as intelligent as the people of northern Europe.
Diamond believes it's simply a matter of Europeans living in a geographically favorable area compared to New Guinea that explains why Europeans live much better, richer lives.
I'd like to conduct an IQ test to test Diamond's ridiculous theory. I think we'd find out the people of PNG have IQs far below northern Europeans. Which would explain why Europeans live first world lives while the people of PNG live in the third world.
Guilty pleasure:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/MoreCannibals.shtml
Well yeah, at a basic level, it's kinda hard to disagree with you there.
But on the other hand, I submit that "interesting" and "uncomfortable" aren't really enough to make for a worthwhile essay. My gripe is that after all the semi-cataclysmic hand-wringing indulged in by the author, his bottom line falls distinctly flat:
"As lovely as the multicultural dream was -- and still is -- it may prove yet to be a phantasm."
Big deal!
PS: Next time this American (yours truly) sees an article from American Thinker with such an interesting headline, he'll suspect click-bait and will think twice before wasting time on the matter!
>> I think we’d find out the people of PNG have IQs far below northern Europeans <<
Probably so. But why are the IQ’s lower? I submit that perhaps it’s because the colder climates of northern Europe required the northern peoples to be “smarter” on the average than their tropical cousins, simply in order to survive.
Therefore, I think it’s possible that once upon a time, the people who moved north may have had average IQ’s more-or-less equal to those of the tropical folk.
But then, the rigors of living in cold climates could have been too much for people with “below average” IQs — meaning that the genes of the lower IQed folks got weeded out of the gene pool over the centuries, leaving the ultimate surviving northerners with higher average IQs than the averages found in the tropics.
If this explanation is correct, then perhaps Diamond’s geographic determinism doesn’t look so bad after all.
And he believes if you transplanted the New Guineans to Europe, they'd quickly adapt to modern civilization and be as productive as modern Europeans.
Of course, Diamond's views are very popular with people of a left wing persuasion who believe it's just luck that some people live a first world life and some a third.
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