debtcollector said:
Therumancer said:
I've had very similar thoughts over the years, especially when dealing with second and third world countries, where at one point you might have been able to give them excuse of ignorance, but a lot of time and effort has been put into educating these people. When you still see them overpopulating in famine afflicted areas, rebuilding villages and towns right on top of fault lines and flood prone areas, and similar things, it becomes harder and harder to be sympathetic. Especially when in some cases if you dig you might find that X nation's ruling "government" just bought a bunch of military surplus from a nation like Russia and has been busy polishing it's 2-3 generation old tanks and MIG variants to bother constructing proper safeguards. The way I see things is if people are dying by the tens of thousands in preventable national disasters anyway, the people should be rebelling against their government, especially in nations where they can outnumber government troops hundreds to one, sure a lot of people might die, but eventually if they just keep coming the oppressive militaries will run out of bullets before the rebels run out of bodies (sort of like Zulus fighting British colonial troops, or Muslims overrunning the Foreign Legion). Beyond a certain point it takes a very "special" kind of people to keep letting this status quo exist and dying by the thousands anyway.
This....this is a joke, right? You're just a very subtle troll, right? Because, if not, this is a fucking terrifying attitude for a human being to have.
It's so damn easy for people who've never had to struggle for anything to say "well, they should fight back", "they should have known better", "well, they let it happen" when confronted with the ugliest parts of life. It's a sort of venomous apathy that simply calls anything outside one's sphere of experience "not my problem". And, true, there's only so much one can care about anything, particularly things halfway around the world but....Christ.
Do you honestly believe these people
wanted this? Do you think that people living in a famine-stricken area made a conscious decision to live in a place where they couldn't feed themselves or their families? If this is how you think the world works, then grow the fuck up and get out of the schoolyard, because you are sorely mistaken. These people would just love to fight back against their corrupt regimes, and will, just as soon as they get enough food to feed their families. Which they'll get as soon as they can get money, which they'll get as soon as their country's infrastructure becomes even remotely stable. It's not a case of "Oh, well our city was just destroyed, guess we'll just live here until the next earthquake kills us for good" it's a case of
not having fucking anywhere else to go. The city is the only chance they have to get fed at all, and if they'll have to deal with another disaster somewhere down the road, whatever. They're trying to live day-to-day, they don't have the luxury of worrying about the future. And it's not like they can just get out of the country, since immigration costs money, and we all know how that goes.
But no, you're right, it's their own damn fault they were born in the most impoverished part of the world, that their own government repeatedly shits on them, that they're too busy getting fucked over by their own damn circumstances to even begin to fight back. How fucking dare they.
At the same time however, understand that the first world has spent literally trillions of dollars, and thousands upon thousands of lives trying to solve these problems. All we have done is make the problem worse in many cases by causing the people to rely on us, and come running to the UN or wealthy countries like the US with their hands out when something goes wrong, like it's some kind of obligation on our part. We've trained and educated people in these regions and then seen them simply turn around and use what we've taught them to take over, and become a new, more cunning breed of warlord that are better able to exploit UN policy.
Don't get me wrong, I understand where your coming from, but over the years I've gradually come to the conclusion that at the end of the day some problems cannot be solved from the outside, no matter how much you might wish otherwise. A country like the US can say destroy a nation or terrorize it for it's own protection or gains, go in, kill lots of people/destroy stuff/get out, but as much as we might like to think otherwise we cannot change who a people are on a fundamental level. This was the big folly of the so called "War On Terror" which was never a war, we decided to go into these countries, some of the poorest on earth, and instead of wiping them out so they would no longer be a threat we decided to "win the peace" which means we rolled around in a decade long police action, providing charity, infrastructure, and all kinds of things to improve conditions only to have the people themselves tear it down. We give them the ability to create a new government and the first thing they do is declare themselves an Islamic state (theocratic) in their new constitutions. We go in with the ambition of women's rights, and we fail that right from the get go because the people themselves fundamentally do not want to change, a decade later we still have to force our women in positions of authority to pretend they are subservient to men in meetings to avoid offense. The same basic logic applies to disasters and other extremely poor regions, except in their cae they haven't presented a threat where we've needed to consider military action for our own reason. We can give them tons of resources, send in military peacekeepers, and do all kinds of other garbage, like we've been doing for even longer than "The War On Terror" but at the end of the day unless the people themselves change the problem isn't going to get better, all it's going to be is a resource sink.
This is why I mentioned Darwinism, what your looking at is basically social Darwinism in action, as ugly as it is, with societies and the people that make them slowly dying out due to their inability to cope. It's not their fault, no more than it is when nature causes a creature unable to deal with other more adaptive species to go extinct. It's not the fault of these wretched people they were born where they were, or that their society is such a mess, and your right maybe they couldn't change it if they wanted to (though in many cases I think they could, they have just gotten too used to the handouts and outside support, which has increasingly been demanded as an obligation on the part of the first world rather than an act of charity and temporary assistance), but at the same time when the first world is itself suffering we cannot be expected to break our own countries because someone else has it worse than we do. Again, the US has 17 trillion bloody dollars in debt, and we have people still unable to feed themselves here, pardon me if it sounds "heartless" but we do kind of have our own mess to deal with. It's not like the US is sitting on top of this massive surplus we're hoarding and refusing to share, then I might agree with you, but face it, that's not reality.
As I've said before, and will say again, the world sucks. It's not nice, but yeah, at this point my basic attitude is "deal with your own problems, we have ours" if the people manage to (and I think a lot can if they were forced to and didn't lean so heavily on foreign aid) that's a great thing, if some just die out with a whimper... well, it won't be the first time in human history, and it won't be like we didn't put in one hell of an effort before it got to this point.
Besides, understand my entire attitude is even more terrifying than what I'm presenting here. At the end of the day I believe for humanity to survive 90% of the population needs to die, and the remaining 10% need to be assembled into a single nation/culture with tight population regulation. I've written some detailed explanations of this in other posts, and it ultimately comes down to resource depletion and the needs of being able to get into space seriously to expand and obtain more resources, I won't bother to go into the details here. Needless to say I'm such realist nowadays, and realism is so close to being nihilistic, that I see situations like this as part of the equasion to begin with. Too many people, not enough resources. If humanity as a whole is going to survive 90% of the population needs to pretty much die off and we need to get into space within a couple of decades (Steven Hawking more or less seems to agree with me on the time table and resource issues, though he doesn't seem to ponder the ugly sociological realities), so since I'm pretty much convinced that depressing truth is the only hope, it's hard to really be sympathetic in situations like this... and no, it's not fair, and it's all kinds of messed up, but hey... that's our sucky world.
