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State of Africa
zepherin
Russian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered User regular
Russian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered User regular
And the ad hom on your part is any better?Lucid wrote:'Most of africa is a shit heap'
Your words. The ad hom on your part is predictable, but unwarranted.
Perhaps my hyperbole was a bit extreme, but the sentiment is true. There are not a lot of African success stories when it comes to nations. South Africa, Egypt and Morocco are really the only places that have had any real success.
zepherin on
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Posts
*pushes up glasses*
So what has Africa done for me lately?
That was the only post I would make in such a thread. So, I'm just gonna let MyDcmbr do my talking for me in here.
*Sits back in chair, widdles some wood*
I think you mean whittle.
I hope you mean whittle.
Anyway, in the War on Women thread, zepherin said that people in Africa should decrease their breeding, and it went downhill from there.
Isn't most of Africa still rather tribal in structure? Where the size of one's tribe is considered a show of strength and power, making pro-creating as much as possible a very desirable thing to do?
Resource curse, bad government, war, malaria, crappy property
Rights, and a world to busy to care.
Bad scene all around.
If you could fix one problem for the most good I would say fixed property rights would have to greatest effect.
Most of Africa is not arable.
Most of populated Africa is limited to a number of relatively dense regions; by percentage of Africa's one-billion-odd people, I suspect they are organized along familiar urban-slum lines, not tribal lines.
Ha, I got quite a kick out of this.
Ghaana, Kenya, Ethiopia to a certain extent, Zimbabwe... Hell, Tanzania is stable and has a functional government. As for failed states, the only current ones I can think of are the DR Congo, Somalia, and Libya. The first is in the middle of civil war constructed by Belgium as an act of national sabotage. The second and third were set up by Italy, which is basically a national death sentence. The first war is being fought over oil fields a precious stones, neither of which are widely consumed in Africa. The second and third are ideological conflicts. In other words, none of Africa's problems have anything to do with population size or domestic resource consumption.
http://www.fundforpeace.org/global/?q=fsi-grid2011
Spouting ignorance until challenged doesn't seem like the most productive way to go about these things however.
Although I spent my time in rural areas, I got the implication that it's kind of like the US was when most ethnic groups could still speak the language of the old country. Towns are mixed, and residents of especially mixed ones seem to genuinely take pride in their cosmopolitan character. People of different ethnicity happily do business with each other at market (some kind of have to, traditionally, with the Maasai only recently adopting the practice of agriculture), although most businesses are single-ethnicity, which I attribute to the nature of family operations and a desire to avoid arguments over the best way to do the jobs. The Women of Phokeng, although massively out of date, seems to depict urban Africans as identifying by the rural home towns they/their families came from.
Of course, this varies by country. Affair in Rwanda were horrible because the British alternated between placing the Tutsis and Hutus in elite positions and police departments to build tensions that would prevent the two from aligning against their colonial overlords.
No, it doesn't, but African men believed it did, and they were willing to go through the (one-time) process for the outcome.
A friend of mine from South Africa said that tribal sentiments are still very strong. His exact words were something like "you will see a lion bang an elephant before you see a Zulu bang a Hutu".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_and_HIV
Wasn't Belgium the one who fucked up the Congo with Leopold 2?
Africa is collections of tribes that were drawn with no knowledge of the ground state. For Sub-Saharan Africa, that line collected different tribes and different religions together. If you take Nigeria, you have multiple different Catholic tribes, and multiple different Islamic tribes. They finally settle on alternating between, but even then, things nearly blow up when the Muslim President dies and the Catholic VP takes over, then runs in the next election.
Instability kills economic progress. The debt ceiling fight in the U.S. absolutely stalled economic progress because businesses can't plan when the government doesn't seem sane and stable.
And ever since. They basically let Leopold take the fall and kept it up. The group the Congo government is still fighting was founded and financed by Belgium, and it is pretty widely accepted that Belgian agents abducted Patrice Lumumba.
Absolutely ridiculous and based on completely junk science. Lets take the very first two paragraphs in the wikipedia entry (my bolding):
and
and then paragraph 4:
Instead we can compare infection rates in developed nations, adults 15-49. Lets say the mainly circumsized US and mainly uncircumsized Western/central Europe as two regions of similar population levels, living standards and economic health:
US: 0.5%
Europe: 0.2%
Numbers from 2009.
Source: http://www.unaids.org/globalreport/documents/20101123_GlobalReport_full_en.pdf.
Par for the course.
Totes refuted the idea with your well though out post though, congrats.
Remember: when in doubt, blame Belgium and Britain. I'm still figuring out how they were involved in Iran/Contra and the current economy, but they were. They were.
To be fair, the British acquitted themselves much better than the French and Belgians in Africa.
The last time we tried to interfere with birth rates on other continents, it led to a nasty gender ratio imbalance. I don't think we should do it again.
Yeah, Botswana is one of those "wait, how are you still in one piece?" mysteries. Although it is worst hit by the HIV epidemic.
Looking at a map of population distribution in Africa today, versus a colonial map of Africa, Britain basically got all the valuable areas not on the north African coastline: the Nile and southern Africa, right up to a nontrivial amount of the Lake Victoria coastline.