What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then the Reconquistanever happens. Spain and Portugal don't kickstart Europe's colonization of other continents. And this is what Africa might have looked like.
The map – upside down, to skew our traditional eurocentric point of view – shows an Africa dominated by Islamic states, and native kingdoms and federations. All have at least some basis in history, linguistics or ethnography. None of their borders is concurrent with any of the straight lines imposed on the continent by European powers, during the 1884-85 Berlin Conference and in the subsequent Scramble for Africa. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of Africa's land mass. Only the Abyssinian Empire (modern-day Ethiopia) and Liberia (founded in 1847 as a haven for freed African-American slaves) remained independent.
This map is the result of an entirely different course of history. The continent depicted here isn't even called Africa [1] but Alkebu-Lan, supposedly Arabic for 'Land of the Blacks' [2]. That name is sometimes used by those who reject even the name 'Africa' as a European imposition. It is therefore an ideal title for this thought experiment by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon. Essentially, it formulates a cartographic answer to the question: What would Africa have looked like if Europe hadn't become a colonizing power?
To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death [3] wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe's population. It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. That was terrible enough. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover?
To read more - http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/africa-uncolonized
Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, beard-stroking philosophers, Jay-Z, and True Detective.
Today on Radiolab, a puzzle. Jad’s brother-in-law wrote a book called 'In The Dust of This Planet'.
We talk nihilism with Eugene Thacker & Simon Critchley, leather jackets with June Ambrose, climate change with David Victor, and hope with the father of Transcendental Black Metal - Hunter Hunt Hendrix of the band Liturgy. Special thanks to Thrill Jockey for use of the Liturgy song 'Generation'. It's from their album Aesthetica, out now, which is highly recommended listening for the end times.
The idea of a special subgroup of humans being singled out by the less-special majority is not a new concept. The mind immediately jumps to X-Men, in which mutants with superpowers are mistrusted and feared, but there is still a semblance of struggle to integrate mutants with the rest of society. I think it’s safe to say that as the audience, though, we are generally expected to see the mutants as “better” than non-mutants. They are humans-plus.
Another version is the world of Harry Potter, where witches and wizards aren’t persecuted because they’re not known, other than to a handful of people. Magical folk, again, are presented as “better” than non-magical people who don’t get the benefit of amazing powers or insight into a universe beyond their graps. They even get a kid of abysmal name, “muggles.” Again, wizards and witches are humans-plus...
So why am I hung up on the presentation of normals in these worlds? Perhaps I have some kind of paranoia that the creators of these worlds see either themselves or some other group in the real world as being analogous to these humans-plus. There would be some subset of people in real society who have an ability or an insight that the masses do not possess, and are as a result either reviled and persecuted, or at least forced into total secrecy....
“Goddammit!” “God bless you!” “For God’s sake!” “God forbid!”
My children have heard me take “the Lord’s name in vain.” These expressions slip out as easily as expletives and are part of my vernacular, even though I don’t believe in God.
God is not exactly welcome in our home.
I’m not a hater (at least not anymore). I’m an atheist. My daughters know I’m the tooth fairy; they have no use for Santa Claus; and would consider the Bible a collection of boring, inaccessible stories (at worst) or fables on par with Greek and Roman mythology (at best).
I’m raising good kids. They are good without God. They will not go to hell … because there is no hell. Neither will they go to heaven … because there is no heaven. I have taught my girls that “heaven” and “hell” are what we humans create for ourselves and each other right here on earth.
Atheist. Say it over and over again and it sounds like a meaningless label. I prefer to call myself a humanist, which expresses what I embrace rather than what I reject. Humanism is my religion. I have faith in the higher power of people – our capacity, indeed our yearning, to do good. If you think sustaining faith in an invisible God or his sacrificial dead son is challenging, try being a spiritual humanist. People fuck up all the time: We disappoint, we hurt each other, we fail miserably. To err is human. But to forgive at least feels divine.
Kansas resident Amy Grant noticed that every time she went to her local prayer booth to pray, she would suddenly develop ‘intense migraine’ pain. New revelations from Edward Snowden reveal how Obama and the NSA have developed a way to ‘wiretap’ the prayers of all Christians and archive what people have been praying for in a large database.
The END TIMES are truly upon us, my friends. The Age of Liberal Darkness is here. The Bible warns that the day shall come when Christians will be hunted down and persecuted by non-believers, forced to accept the Mark of the Beast lest they get tortured.
Today when I woke up, I prayed for the usual: 1) Obama to get impeached 2) The Atlanta Falcons to win the Super Bowl 3) A safe upcoming school year without any tragic stories 4) China’s economic demise 5) A good breakfast.
It is terrifying for me to know that my simple prayer, which maybe lasted about 2 minutes, was probably wiretapped by Agents of Obama and there is some government database that has an archived recording of my conversation with God.
For more - http://christwire.org/2014/08/obama-nsa-now-wiretapping-the-prayers-of-all-christians/
