novacole's comments

I don’t think so. When I read that I don’t substitute the proper words in my head as I would with jawn. Also, “whatever” sounds negative to my ear, whereas jawn would be taken neutrally.

As a Philadelphian, i can sum up the usage of jawn as: a place, a thing or a girl/woman.

For example this is a valid sentence:

“Person 1: I was at the jawn down the street when that bad jawn from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.

Person 2: oh that’s a bad jawn”

Translation:

“Person 1: I was at the place down the street when that pretty woman from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.

Person 2: oh that sucks”

Hmm, This reminds me a lot like Zenos paradox.

Also, I’d like to understand how if we can say 99.999... is = 100, wouldn’t we also be able to say 99.9999888999... = 99.9999..., and therefore also just 100? And so on?

So 99.999..% of the speed of light is just the speed of light?

Look at a light bulb when the filament is heated and is emitting light. Then look at it when it is not. The only people who can’t see the difference are blind, literally.

What does this atom look like? Do you see an atom or do you see light? Of course, all pictures are pictures of light. But there’s a difference between taking a picture of the light coming from a light bulb and a picture of a light bulb, as I am sure you’re aware.

It’s not an atom, it’s a picture of the light emitted from an atom. So it’s a picture of light.

Yes, but Rome isn’t Western Europe. So western Europe’s entire history is a “dark age” before the Age of Enlightenment.

(Edit: incorrectly said renaissance instead of Age of Enlightenment... the renaissance wasn’t Western European either)

I’ve been using Jawn since I was a child in the early 90s. I remember my grandfather who was born in the 30s using it.

As a black Philadelphian I have to disagree. I use Jawn all the time (in non professional all settings). And so does every other black person I know. Most of the black people I know are working class and they from my estimation use Jawn the most.

Now to proper usages. It’s true you can use Jawn as a replacement for “thing”. However, you can also you it (as bad as it sounds) for women. So a common phase is “Did you get the Jawn from the Jawn?” Meaning “did you get the thing from the woman?” Or “The Jawn told me to come up to the Jawn down the street” meaning “the woman told me to go to the place down the street”. Succinctly Jawn is a person, place, thing or woman. There is no way you can overstate the usage of Jawn. I’ve used it and heard it my entire life from almost everyone I know.

For some reason this makes me think these bacteria or the mechanism behind them are the biological precursors to neurons.

The phrase pure-blooded when referring to humans is utter nonsense.

His politics are more closely aligned with the right. In fact I can’t think of one thing that’s liberal about him.

> Great contribution. Allow me to expand. The known world to you consists of various tribes of humans who all share rather similar physical phenotypes (white skin, soft, slightly curly to straight hair, similar facial features), with reasonably similar technology (metalworking, beasts of burden, farming, government of some sort, written language, the wheel) and suddenly you discover a group of beings with none of these things - no written language, no cultivated land, no domesticated animals, no wheel, no metalworking, and on top of all this, they look totally different from anyone you've ever seen.

The problem with this is that it is 100% incorrect. After 1492 (and to a lesser extent before then), Western Europeans were fully aware of African Civilization, particularly those in West Africa.. They traded with them. They wrote correspondences to them, see: "Letters to the King of Portugal" [0]. Africans obviously farmed, starting between the years 8000 and 6000 BCE [1], the metalworking of West Africans is and was well known [1]. During the Iron Age "A profitable trade had developed by which West Africans exported gold, cotton cloth, metal ornaments, and leather goods north across the trans-Saharan trade routes, in exchange for copper, horses, salt, textiles, and beads. Later, ivory, slaves, and kola nuts were also traded" [2]. They had governments obviously (see reference [0]). They had the wheel "Nubians from after about 400 BCE used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels. It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven" [3]. Heck, even the largest university of the middle ages (12th century) was located in Mali, in West Africa, and it wasn't even something that was unknown to Europeans [4] & [5]. I could go on and on.

So all of what you are saying is based totally off of what _you_ think and not any facts, or even what Europeans that encountered Africans thought. What you are saying is entirely based off of your lack of knowledge of African and apparently even European history.

The inferiority idea developed later, specifically in America as a rationalization of the slave trade. It was literally something that was made up to justify what they were doing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afonso_I_of_Kongo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_West_Africa#Prehist... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_West_Africa#Iron_Ag... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel#History [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#Education [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Timbuktu

--edited for clarity

>and looked like different creatures

These are your words. These are your thoughts.

Putting people in Zoos is a good thing? It dehumanizes Europeans to say that it is sick to put people in Zoos?

Also, I never said anything about white people. I was talking specifically about the Western Europeans who put people in Zoos.

I think your comment perfectly illustrates the lengths people will go to and the ways in which they will contort their minds in order to uphold an strange idea that is dear to their hearts, however...

I think you underestimate the sickness of the people and culture of said people who would put people in zoos.

If you can do that, you can’t put anything past that person/culture.

The only reason there is any confusion about this is because the modern day Egyptian looks non African. And the only reason for this is because the indigenous population was displaced by Arab people during the spread of Islam.

Whether or not the noses were intentionally destroyed or not it is most parsimonious to believe that the indigenous people of Egypt were African people. Thinking they werent would be like looking at the population of The United States today and believing the Native Americans were white (and if we didn’t have photographic evidence of the natives we can be sure that would have been suggested, and if anyone suggested otherwise they would have been met with “what a crackpot theory!”).

In either case, the Europeans revered ancient Egypt for sure. But this is only because of their mention in the Bible and their interaction with the Ancient Greeks. But when Western Europeans got there, the people who lived in Egypt looked more like them than Africans. But this is only because of the displacement of the indigenous population serval centuries earlier.

Why would it be a crackpot theory to suggest that for Western Europeans, whose civilization as we know it starts in the late 1400s, who convinced themselves of African inferiority for the purpose of justifying their theft, rape, and murder of those people, upon seeing Black looking people in Egypt from thousands of years before their civilization started, would want to erase signs of it? Sounds just about right to me.

> the surviving representations of noses in statuary don't look particularly "black"

I think this says the exact opposite of what you want it to say. The fact that they survived, may be that they were sufficiently non-"black" looking to leave them alone. Phenotypes come in ranges especially for black people, so a "black" nose is anything from the nose of a random Scandinavian to that of a Sudanese persons.