The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption. It's the destroyer of all entrepreneurial and business activity in those countries. Any business is continuously being robbed, ransomed and conned into paying "protection" money by gangs and law enforcement alike. In addition the civil servants demand payment for the most trivial licenses you need to operate your business. These all add up and make any business unprofitable because you cannot pass on those costs to customers.
To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control. The higher up the tree the more severe the punishment should be. Politicians and senior civil servants should always be put to death since their corruption has the greatest impact.
Corruption depends on the rule of law. And you can not have rule of law, when the primary state-forming institution is the clan-family. Its just not possible.
So any culture, that can not produce state-builders, is doomed to fail forever, with the history dotted with failures. Its hard to understand- but these states you see on the map, named and infamed- are not real. The clan who rules and the cityparts and cities they own and live in, that is the state. The rest- is conquered territories, ruled by other clan-families, who are subjugated and extracted from.
Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.
> Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.
That's generally not how colonization worked. Quite often, colonization intentionally created the large scale tribal identities. Allegiance to clans grows because of deep suspicion of extractive governments put in place by outsiders.
The colonial system was meritocratic. It has a lot of bad things, but an absolutely staggering amount of Englishmen and Scotsmen and Welshman got their start and career through their hard work in India. A lot of whom, especially those minorities, would never have had a chance in G.B.
It’s hard to see from a US perspective, but for us in Africa it _is_ an improvement. China is actively growing client economies in a continent that has seen little but exploitation for the longest time. Despite all the fear mongering, they are yet to take adverse possession of a state utility or force the sale of a national asset when loans have defaulted. You know who does do things like that? The world bank and the IMF.
I’m not a big fan of China or their politics, but they have certainly been much more beneficial for Africa than the West has in recent memory.
Lol I don't know if this is a dog whistle so much as a dog call.
There is nothing inherently unique to African culture that means Africans need western saviors to understand why their primitive clannish ways are holding them back. The same social unit is native to all human culture.
The problem is that the rest of the world wants African natural resources and a weak, distributed African power structure is good for that.
Well, a broader interpretation of this idea is that paradoxically there needs to be a certain level of authoritarianism in order to have a civil functioning republic.
In the 1900s this was communism. A lot of people (either disingenuously or not) interpreted this as anti-democratic. But if you look at what actually happened where conditions were right, it turned out to work well- China and Vietnam, and if you just look at authoritarianism, not just communist authoritarianism, then Singapore, S. Korea, Taiwan as well. Some would also argue that the USA falls into this category- that the same arm of the government suppressing corruption is also going after marginalized groups.
There aren't that many examples in history where the ideal balance is actually struck.
When those countries were ruled by outsiders, the people who ran them weren't picking capable locals to have power, they were picking capable outsiders to have power. (And that's in the best case.)
The locals were only used for manual labour and filling out conscript armies (overseen by coloniser officers). This creates societies where, for generations, none of the natives have any experience with doing any of the jobs necessary to actually govern a country.
You do know that Ethiopia wasn't technically colonized ever, right? It had a single 5 year period of military occupation by Mussolini and co around 1936...
And yet, here we are with one of our greatest legacies- The Roman Republic/Empire which did do exactly that. Cleanse a horridly corrupt system with liberal use of the death penalty. "Every man is always thinking of the Roman Empire" except when it explains what we don't want to know.
In South Africa, the gangs infiltrated the government. This isn't just paranoia or extremist political ideology, this was recently exposed in the Madlanga Commission.
> To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control. The higher up the tree the more severe the punishment should be. Politicians and senior civil servants should always be put to death since their corruption has the greatest impact.
Giving the government the power to exert these punishments will only give the corrupt officials the power to legally do this to their enemies.
There is an inverse relationship between capital punishment and how advanced a country is. People who spread nonsense like this should be put to death.
> The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption. The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption.
I disagree with this. The core culprit is that most people in Africa depend on the government, most are employed by it. So effectively the government is just taxing itself with no new money coming in. The solution is a revolution in SMEs, the entrepreneurial spirit and a large private sector. Basically more decentralization.
Most are employed by the government because there's no substantial business activity in those countries. Every successful business gets robbed by both the government and gangsters.
Only menial businesses like supermarkets exist in those countries (people have to eat no matter how corrupt a country is).
As soon as an entrepreneur becomes successful and makes healthy profits they'll get raided by leeches. Usually they'll have to pay government officials for "protection" and politicians demand that their family members become part of the Board or management enabling them to pilfer the company's wealth even further.
>The core culprit is that most people in Africa depend on the government, most are employed by it.
Just curious. What nations are you talking about when you say that "most people in Africa depend on the government"?
Only asking because this has not been my experience at all!
In fact I would say that most people in every nation I visited was dependent on themselves, their family and whatever support they could get from their larger clan. Poverty was rampant. Most of the middle class had clawed their way to that height through creating some kind of business. The degree to which these economies were dependent on remittances was alarming in my uneducated view. I would say far less than .5% of the people I interacted with had a government paycheck or even a government benefit coming in.
That said, I've never been to the wealthier nations like South Africa or Morocco or what have you. Maybe it's different in those places?
I realize now that I phrased it wrong, I should have said the largest employers are the government, with very little private companies. At least in my country (Namibia) this is true. Unemployment is high because the youth is waiting for the government to create jobs.
I've never been to Namibia. (Never been to any SADC nations actually). But I can assure you, other nations don't work like Namibia. In a lot of other African nations, government can be the largest employer and still provide jobs for less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the people. The rest of the people will be completely on their own. These people scratch and struggle for whatever they can get. It's not at all like Namibia from what you're saying.
Who is going to educate the population when the elites in control of the country are fighting amongst themselves due to greed and selfishness?
Corruption isn't even fought by educating the masses, it just happens that at a given time, the country gets a less selfish leader who decides enough is enough and jails the culprits. This is how countries like Korea, Singapore did it
> The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption. It's the destroyer of all entrepreneurial and business activity in those countries. Any business is continuously being robbed, ransomed and conned into paying "protection" money by gangs and law enforcement alike.
Isaac Bacirongo's autobiography, Still a Pygmy, has plenty of interesting comments on this topic. The main business theme seems to be that in Africa it's not really possible to extend (or receive) credit - if someone says they'll pay you later, they won't, and if you were foolish enough to believe them you're going to take a loss.
Educate the populace is not going to work in the short term. What a lot of sub Saharan African countries need right now is a benevolent dictator/king. Strong emphasis on the benevolent part, someone truly looking to improve the countries and their populace. This person needs to put in strong rule of law and build out institutions and crush corruption. Once you have a stable working order, that is a much better time for democracy to be re-introduced. This is how most countries in the world were formed. Unfortunately due to colonization and a later progression, Africans were never able to complete that part of their development cycle.
That being said finding a benevolent dictator is easier said than done. I can’t really think of anyone that has fit that bill over the last 75 years in Africa, the closest might be Paul Kagame in Rwanda.
> To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A lot of people who didn't know how corruption works in practice are getting a crash-course with the second Trump administration: in what order should your recommendations be applied to the Trump admin, and who's going to do it, seeing the DOJ is part of the executive branch and is partisan?
I’m a lot less worried about corruption in a country that has real elections. Trump is corrupt. He is exceptionally corrupt. But he won’t be President forever. If we elect Trump Jr. or something, well, that’s on us.
In Africa, the winner of elections is usually known up front because they’re not real. One clan/party rules until another one stages a successful bloody coup, and repeat on a 1/5/10/20 year cycle depending on the country.
Oh, my bad for not considering that America has never had any attempts to meddle with elections[1][2][3], or a bloody coup attempt. Its institutions are strong and irs system of checks and balances is unimpeachable.
1. One of Jimmy Carter's autobiography mentions how corrupt Georgia's elections were/are
2. Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother
3. America has a long history of disenfranchisement
Yes, in our advanced utopia the winning politician is not known up front, we get to pick from the two politicians who managed to accumulate the most debts to corporate interests! It's much better.
I read that theory multiple times, and on the surface it makes sense, e. g. corrupt oligarchs siphoning away money. But there are countries in Africa not governed by a dictatorship; I think a small country in west/middle Africa led by a woman some years ago. And they still found it close to impossible to break out of the poverty circle. You also can not easily compete with richer countries - they pump more money into their production while also swarming the local market with somewhat semi-affordable stuff that gets subvention from home. You need to re-think the local economy first and foremost and fix that. Granted, that's harder when dictators seize power, getting their weapons from outside factors, but I think it is possible to solve that problem too.
OP is talking about corruption which is orthogonal to being a dictatorship. In fact the least corrupt subsaharan country is (by far) Rwanda, which is a de facto dictatorship.
And the impacts of corruption/cronyism/clientelism are not just money being siphoned at the top. It completely breaks any fair competition wether it's in economic markets or for jobs. Businesses don't succeed based on how competitive or innovative they are, simply based on who their founder knows and how much they're willing to pay in bribes, so your economic development stragnates. Important and influential positions are awarded not to the most competent but to the richest.
Opening a small business requires you to bribe dozens of people, and good luck if you need to import or export goods.
More competitive companies can afford higher bribes (consider Samsung), so corruption doesn't necessarily kill competition. Most African countries manage decent GDP per capita growth rates and ironically Ethiopia is tied with Rwanda for fastest growth at 7%. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat... Certainly it could be faster with less corruption, but at least poor African countries are getting less poor. Maybe it'll also help them get less corrupt over time.
You seem to think corruption is part of local culture. In reality corruption is implemented and maintained by foreign colonialists as a tactic to maintain power over local resources. It is coldly planned for in think tanks and other dark corners of foreign colonial democracies
All of us foreign colonialists would much prefer countries to be run by competent adults. There’s far more wealth to be gotten by trading with a state that functions properly, like say, Australia or even India where plenty of corruption exists but is kept in check… compared to the circus that is countries ruled by warring clans and outright 100% corruption like the worst cases in Africa.
Hang on now: someone breaks into my house, strip mines it for anything valuable I have, takes multiple generations of my offspring out of schooling, beats and kills any offspring that request they stop and leave and it’s my fault the kids struggle to organize? And then when they do get “free”, lacking any example or group memory for how to fairly manage things, the worst of the kids take by strength and starve the rest. That’s my fault too?
Its cultural and scholarly centers were Timbuktu and Djenne. They were effectively inaccessible to Europeans during their golden age, but they had established connections to Morocco and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of historical manuscripts were preserved in Timbuktu. The manuscripts are still largely unstudied, though I guess the digitization efforts should have finished by now.
Does the Songhai empire really have nothing besides size, gold and slave trading? Surely they must have had something. What about architecture? Ancient Greeks, Romans, ancient Chinese, etc., all had impressive achievements, and they were around many centuries before the Songhai empire. Perhaps even Meso-American empires and civilizations had achievements relatively speaking, especially considering that they were much more isolated from the rest of the world than the Songhai empire.
That was back when Aksum had a large Greek minority and other minorities, and even in some periods of time had coinage with Greek writing.
Also, Aksum probably overlaps much more with Eritrea than with Ethiopia. Aksum was also mostly surrounded by desert, mountains, at least one volcano, and the sea, and its territory tended to be close to the sea, also for trade. Surprisingly isolated from the rest of Africa south of the Sahara.
Edited, to tclancy:
Rude.
But also, I made this comment before your comment, check the timestamps.
A large Greek minority? Please share your sources for that because I'd be very interested in reading that.
AFAIU, Greeks were there, but as traders who came because it was a prosperous kingdom. For the same reason other groups from around that region also had a presence, and vice-versa. Prosperous nations tend to exchange populations and build economic, cultural, and political ties.
But if you're implying the presence of Greeks or an adoption of Greek culture was the reason for the rise of the Aksum empire... I'd certainly like to read those sources.
The very early adoption of Christianity might have had something to do with it, at least in terms of creating a unifying identity within and among the broader region. But Greeks weren't the only Christians. Ethiopia already had ties to non-Greek Levante and non-Greek Arabian peninsula communities, and probably Persian traders, as well--Persians were the Greeks of the Indian Ocean. Not coincidentally, the Horn of Africa sits at the nexus of multiple major economic spheres and sea routes. The Aksum Empire originated in the highlands, but for much of their time they controlled or had a strong presence along the coast.
They had coinage with Greek writing in some periods, as I mentioned, which implies that Greeks must have had a very large influence on Aksum. It was only centuries later that they switched to non-Greek, native writing, possibly around the decline of Aksum.
> The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions that the Aksumite state imported brass (Ancient Greek: ὀρείχαλκος, oreíkhalkos), "which they use[d] for ornaments and for cutting as money", and they imported "a little money (denarion) for [use by] foreigners who live there."
Your other comments just seemed uninformed, but the thesis you are actually pushing is white civilizations are inherently better. Stop for a minute and think about other possibilities why you don’t know a lot about an empire that wasn’t part of what we in the west consider our lineage (Greece, Rome); is it not possible we didn’t value keeping other societies’ histories alive in the same way?
I’ll skip pointing out much of what you know about ancient scholars may be due to Arabic countries keeping them alive during the Dark Ages.
Ethiopia has been a great power since then too: under Constantine I (c. 1450) it was the preeminent power in East Africa, and while the kingdom subsequently fragmented it managed to recombine by the 1800s in time to take a stand against European colonialism. None of that was because of a "Greek minority", African people are perfectly capable of governing themselves (with the right social structures in place, as with all people).
I am glad that this topic gets more attention, but the article itself doesn't provide any real analysis and could use some proof-reading. In its current shape, it's borderline engagement farming.
Wars are expensive, and the money has to come from somewhere:
> Lots of countries — including Egypt (the Nile/wider Red Sea supremacy), Eritrea (Ethiopia’s desire for access to the sea), Sudan (Ethiopian support for the RSF), Somalia (historical enmity/Ethiopian support for Somaliland), and Saudi Arabia (as benefactor of Egypt/Sudan/Eritrea axis) — have good reasons to keep Addis Ababa weak and preoccupied with unending domestic wars. These dynamics, coupled with the geography of war in Ethiopia mean that Addis Ababa will struggle to keep arms and fighters from easily moving across its borders with Sudan and Eritrea.
> On its part, the Ethiopian state will likely continue to enjoy support from the United Arab Emirates; and maintain the capacity to produce the weapons needed to keep rebels at bay. Ominously, divisions among elites in Tigray and other regions mean that the rebellion may not clear the threshold needed to incentivize a quick resolution either militarily or at the negotiating table. Therefore, slow-burning, but still catastrophically deadly conflicts may be on the cards.
> …
> Notably, a prolonged conflict will likely also be significantly civilianized. Careful to avoid being overstretched, the Ethiopian state may decide to deputize regional militias and other violence entrepreneurs in its fights against subnational armed groups. To this end, it will lean heavily on divisions across armed groups and within the regional states that have witnessed rebellions.
Part of a unifying the nation will be convincing these players that they will do better with a peaceful, stable Ethiopia.
Both countries are not super-rich and some of the arabic countries constantly destabilize the area - we could see this in Sudan and elsewhere. Ask where all the various terrorist groups got high-quality weapons.
The war between Eritrea is Ethiopia is especially stupid. The main issue is access to the ocean/water which Ethiopia wants. Since it is the bigger country, it wants to bully its way through. Eritrea has only about 6 million people; Ethiopia has almost 140 million people. IMO there should be a diplomatic solution. Give Ethiopia access while not giving up land, negotiate payments (should be reasonable for both sides), invest into the corridor for both sides to profit. To me it seems as if Ethiopia has committed to the decision to wage war though. It's similar to Putin in that he committed to both genocide and expansion of land. Though Eritrea is really very small compared to Ethiopia; I don't see them being able to offset Ethiopia.
From an outsider standpoint it all seems so insane. The water is there — the way we do it in the world I know isn’t to have, say, Czechs slaughter Germans for decades until they get to the sea, in this case they made a deal to be part of a common market which makes it simple. But even in the absence of the EU etc. I still think they’d (at least in this century) negotiate for access to a convenient railroad, offer to pay to expand a port so both sides profit, etc.
Eritrea/ns have historically, significant cost, demonstrated that they will resist Ethiopian occupation (see 1961-1991 and 1998-2000 conflicts). Ethiopia could re-negotiate access (see 1993-1998 agreements), however Ethiopia (state) argues for "access" in English while arguing for "ownership" in Amharic. Eritrea/ns are reasonably suspicious.
That's an outdated take at this point though right?
I mean pretty much everyone, today, (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South sudan, etc etc), has settled on Kenya being the answer to all those questions. No one wants to access the sea in the Eritrea direction anymore since everything going on in Kenya is making Kenyan coastal access such a no-brainer. (And all of that was even before the Iran war showed that making your shipping dependent on the Eritrea route, and mideast chokepoints in general, is just, I mean, I'll be diplomatic and call it "ill-considered"). Now, with the newest attachments being considered for the LAPSSET corridor, going through Eritrea is just insanity by comparison.
So even without the geography problem, there is still war is my point. Now, of course, you could argue it's still a geography problem since the proxy-masters are mostly concerned about getting rid of the dam long term. But that's another issue is all I'm saying.
I maintain that war in Ethiopia (and the wider Horn) is not inevitable. The current outbreak of war reflects the fact that Ethiopian elites keep choosing war over peace. Unfortunately, despite repeatedly choosing war, Ethiopian leaders continue to enjoy support from a cast of warmongering academics, journalists, public intellectuals, civil society actors, and a whole host of foreign actors — all of whom have long taken sides and become cheerleaders for their respective camps.
In name only. But they are actors.
The anti-intellectual movement of the last quarter century is such a perversion of values that I have trouble recognizing the world today. It's a slap in the face to everything that I believe in, and what society used to value when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s.
Reductionism has consumed tech and the scientific community. Because the wrong people won the internet lottery and promoted their brand of anti-intellectualism to the world, gaining esteem from sycophants hoping to ride their coattails and get rich too.
Now those same billionaires actively work to dismantle the institutions which were once heralded as bastions of democracy. Is it any wonder that peace is crumbling as they conspire to hoard the world's remaining resources? Doubling down on colonization, stealing them from developing nations that we've already victimized, without their consent?
Witnessing Elon Musk become a trillionaire at the same moment that a child somewhere died of dehydration was one of the grossest experiences of my life. We're talking Elysium, District 9, but real. Yet Greta Thunberg is mocked for her activism.
Instead of learning from history and doing better, we're papering over our colonizer past and doubling down on our malfeasance.
Musk becoming a trillionaire because people value the shares of his ventures for stupid amounts doesn't actually make the poor poorer. If anything things like starlink help connect the more distant places.
That anti-intellectualism developed because the self proclaimed intellectuals were so persistently, consistently wrong about so many things that many people lost all trust in them. Academia moved away from the foundational principles of the scientific method, that the truth of a model lies in its ability to repeatedly make correct predictions, to treating what they thought sounded morally good as true regardless of how far from reality it was.
I’m in this camp as well. I can’t stand the anti-intellectual trend, but the cultural elites in America got high on their own supply and just untethered themselves from reality, while our economic elites betrayed everyone by changing the economy into a machine that only benefits some people with college degrees while tricking another giant swath into buying useless degrees on credit. It’s more anti-elitism going on than anti-intellectualism. And they brought it on themselves. They should have offered something better.
Seeing my home country at the top of Hacker News is surreal. While I'm glad it’s finally getting some coverage, watching this unfold feels almost hopeless. The previous war in Tigray cost an estimated 600,000 lives, and this new escalation threatens to be even bloodier. It’s heading toward a complete catastrophe
We give attention to things that deserve our attention, i.e., things that affect us. The war in Ethiopia scores very low on that list, to the point of almost complete irrelevance.
other conflicts that to don't have any significant effect get plenty of attention like Ukraine or Palestine. the Russian Ukrainian conflict does have some effect on Europe but Israel Palestine has no tangible effect on the West and people talk about it frequently.
Because of history, how it was founded and people from both sides living in europe?
Germany as an extreme example has the survival of Israel as state doctrin. So that is a hot topic by definition.
Then there are many jews living in the west who sends weapons en masse to Israel - and there are also many Palestinian/Arabs living in the west. All that directly effects us.
Ethopia on the other hand is one of few african countries that was not (really) colonized. So there are not so much ties. The strongest is probably reggae and Haile Selassi chanting in songs, but most have no idea who that was. So, people are less interested naturally.
Speaking as a Jew in the West who is very anti-Israel, I think the weapons being sent to Israel are only partially explained by Jewish pro-Israel lobbies. Zionism happens to go beyond Judaism, and American imperialism, which Israel serves a role in, is a larger project than even that.
Saying that the Ukraine war has no significant effects is like saying that AI has no significant effects.
Europe started rapid remilitarization as a direct response to the war. The increase in military spending in European countries not participating in the war is comparable to worldwide investments in AI data centers and infrastructure.
Then there is the fact that a permanent member of the UN Security Council is waging an old-school war of conquest. If we assume that the post-WW2 world order is gone and wars of conquest are legitimate business again, the world will reassess other aspects of that order as well. Including the idea that people have inherent rights beyond those their government is willing to grant and capable of protecting.
Israel has more impact on the West than any other country (and not in a good way). The Palestinians have brought light to it, but it's Israel's own bribing, blackmailing and industry influence in the US (and other Western countries) that people are upset about.
A constant flow of USA taxpayer dollars, and German taxpayer euros, is the only reason Israel is still afloat. Continuing the war is the decision of US and German voters. Other western countries are also nominal supposed to be stopping their allies from doing this and aren't.
why do we (residents of western countries) pay attention to Israel? There's nothing relevant to our lives happening there. It's not more relevant than Ethiopia or Sudan.
Israel is the world's 7th largest arms exporter but only the 14th largest importer. It in fact sold this year around $8bn to Europe alone (Arrow-3 to Germany, and Achilles Shield missile defense to Greece).
The concept that Israel relies on foreign weapons for its survival is detached from reality. Yes, there are things you can't replace like F35 and submarines, but in drones, missiles, air defence, radars, armored vehicles, communication systems etc - Israel is amongst the worldwide leaders.
History is not on your side. US did not support Israel until the 1970's. Israel is far, far stronger today then it was back then. Israel will always have friends, it has a lot to offer and situated in an interesting area.
It's a completely different situation than South Africa in so many ways. Israel is very well integrated into the global supply chain, has the power of the Jewish diaspora, is majority Jewish (unlike Afrikaners which were a small minority), and is a nuclear power.
Yeah, it's so much worse than South Africa and Israel has had a much larger negative impact on the US and rest of world.
> has the power of the Jewish diaspora, is majority Jewish
Curious what you mean by this since we're told over and over that Israel doesn't represent all Jews? Regardless, it's a tiny country with almost no natural resources that has rapidly accelerating mass opposition. Israel cannot defeat the entire planet.
With all due respect, I think you've been radicalized to the point you think the world is going to come together with the singular goal of destroying Israel. No, it will not. Israel's economy is very strong, in fact it's been getting stronger as the war with the Islamists has gone on. It's a technological and military powerhouse. European skies are defended by Israeli systems. A large part of your iPhone was designed in Israel. If you've been running any workload on Amazon, GCP or Azure, chances are you've been using Israeli tech.
Relax, Israel is not going anywhere :) Yes there is a growing anti-Israeli sentiment, but that will go away with time. The strategic gains Israel has made over the past 3 years, though, may hold.
You're vastly misreading (or more accurately misrepresenting) how angry people are with Israel. Regardless, there's no point in continuing this conversation. The last thing you should be doing is accusing others of being radicalized while you use terms like "Islamists", that's disgusting.
Not really true, first German taxpayer euros don't go to Israel, second without Israel could pay for USA taxpayer dollars from their aid with some debt increase.
Because Israel is manipulating the US. We literally have laws curtailing freedom of speech just to stop people from boycotting Israel. The vast majority of our government is bribed or blackmailed by Israel. We currently have a Zionist hawk consolidating all of our mass media (Larry Ellison). TikTok was forced to move ownership to Zionists in the US due to Israel. Our tax dollars go to Israel. The last two presidents (and probably more) have gone on tv and lied to every US citizen on behalf of Israel...
It's a pressing and important issue, which is why it's getting a lot of attention.
That’s one of the reasons COVID got to spread. People in the West saw it as “a Chinese issue”. Me included. And I work with Chinese people every day. I would see them in lockdown and still think it couldn’t possibly affect me.
Fortunately, multibillion dollar dams can't spread like COVID.
So there isn't one likely to draw global powers to my neighborhood to pit one group of people against another.
/s
Let's be honest man, there's just little chance at all that this issue affects your average San Fran tech guy. Let's not try to shame people because they don't pay attention to those kinds of issues. If you want people to know something about the issue, put it in your comment.
Calling inflation an inconvenience is certainly an opinion. How many people will die across the world because they have to choose between healthcare, food, and rent?
Really bad inflation is obviously a full human catastrophe.
The absolute meltdown post-COVID where we traded moderate inflation in exchange for not having the economy basically seize up was, for most people on HN, an inconvenience.
Inflation in mentioned above example was 3.4% year over year for a professional at the higher end of the income scale. In that case it is inconvenience.
I agree that higher level of inflation might be brutal.
They will eat, they will skip on rent and they will do what they can with healthcare (be that public or NGO healthcare initiatives, or the local "wise person")
"But won't they be evicted?" Is a question that has several answers, but none of which you expect
First worlders perception of how to deal with 3rd world problems are interesting
> the Tigray war in Ethiopia may have killed as many as 600k, yet it barely registered in our public conversation. The same goes for Sudan. Attention is a weird beast.
If there are no white people to blame on either side of the war, nobody cares. It's the same shit with so many conflicts.
Threads attract people with an opinion about the topic, so it's more like HN contains lots of subsets of sensitive people waiting in the wings. But of course, per Marvin Gaye, we're all sensitive people.
Edit: rather oddly I just posted an innocuous comment (a couple of Wikipedia links) and it was immediately dead on arrival. What's going on there? Wild auto-modding.
To be fair to HN, I mean, your comment kind of indicates your own political sensitivity as well right?
I, personally, don't mind political content. I find it interesting. That said, I'm not going to get on fellow HN'ers when they downvote or flag it. That, in and of itself, would be a political act rooted in sensitivities.
If you have reasons, in particular, that posts or comments should not be flagged, I'd personally encourage you to outline them. Then let the chips fall where they may. Getting emotional only decreases the overall quality of the conversation. And, presumably, outlining your own ideas would get whatever viewpoint it is that you wish to push, into the thread.
No I dont think so, Im not being sensitive to anything other than censorship? I believe on total free speech so I think every comment should be visible and I am happy to take offence. I see so many dead comments that are not even rude or offensive, its hard to see why anyone would censor them.
The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption. It's the destroyer of all entrepreneurial and business activity in those countries. Any business is continuously being robbed, ransomed and conned into paying "protection" money by gangs and law enforcement alike. In addition the civil servants demand payment for the most trivial licenses you need to operate your business. These all add up and make any business unprofitable because you cannot pass on those costs to customers.
To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control. The higher up the tree the more severe the punishment should be. Politicians and senior civil servants should always be put to death since their corruption has the greatest impact.
Corruption depends on the rule of law. And you can not have rule of law, when the primary state-forming institution is the clan-family. Its just not possible. So any culture, that can not produce state-builders, is doomed to fail forever, with the history dotted with failures. Its hard to understand- but these states you see on the map, named and infamed- are not real. The clan who rules and the cityparts and cities they own and live in, that is the state. The rest- is conquered territories, ruled by other clan-families, who are subjugated and extracted from.
Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.
> Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.
That's generally not how colonization worked. Quite often, colonization intentionally created the large scale tribal identities. Allegiance to clans grows because of deep suspicion of extractive governments put in place by outsiders.
The colonial system was meritocratic. It has a lot of bad things, but an absolutely staggering amount of Englishmen and Scotsmen and Welshman got their start and career through their hard work in India. A lot of whom, especially those minorities, would never have had a chance in G.B.
Hard to be a true state builder over the past 80 years without being capped by the CIA or else suborned to the soviets/bratva.
Which almost makes China's mercantilist foothold on the continent seem like an improvement.
It’s hard to see from a US perspective, but for us in Africa it _is_ an improvement. China is actively growing client economies in a continent that has seen little but exploitation for the longest time. Despite all the fear mongering, they are yet to take adverse possession of a state utility or force the sale of a national asset when loans have defaulted. You know who does do things like that? The world bank and the IMF.
I’m not a big fan of China or their politics, but they have certainly been much more beneficial for Africa than the West has in recent memory.
Reminds me of the old joke about why communism never works
Why does communism never work?
Because eventually you get overthrown by the CIA
Lol I don't know if this is a dog whistle so much as a dog call.
There is nothing inherently unique to African culture that means Africans need western saviors to understand why their primitive clannish ways are holding them back. The same social unit is native to all human culture.
The problem is that the rest of the world wants African natural resources and a weak, distributed African power structure is good for that.
> And you can not have rule of law, when the primary state-forming institution is the clan-family
You can. See US (Boeing, Rockefeller etc), UK (Royal "family", house of lords, etc), Germany ( Porsche and others)
Well, a broader interpretation of this idea is that paradoxically there needs to be a certain level of authoritarianism in order to have a civil functioning republic.
In the 1900s this was communism. A lot of people (either disingenuously or not) interpreted this as anti-democratic. But if you look at what actually happened where conditions were right, it turned out to work well- China and Vietnam, and if you just look at authoritarianism, not just communist authoritarianism, then Singapore, S. Korea, Taiwan as well. Some would also argue that the USA falls into this category- that the same arm of the government suppressing corruption is also going after marginalized groups.
There aren't that many examples in history where the ideal balance is actually struck.
When those countries were ruled by outsiders, the people who ran them weren't picking capable locals to have power, they were picking capable outsiders to have power. (And that's in the best case.)
The locals were only used for manual labour and filling out conscript armies (overseen by coloniser officers). This creates societies where, for generations, none of the natives have any experience with doing any of the jobs necessary to actually govern a country.
You do know that Ethiopia wasn't technically colonized ever, right? It had a single 5 year period of military occupation by Mussolini and co around 1936...
No, it's problems are largely self-inflicted. But what I said is quite relevant to countries that have been.
Who decides who is corrupt? The dictator that rules the country? You? Every single dictatorships always accuses their political enemies of corruption.
A country with high levels of corruption cannot be trusted to fairly carry out capital punishment.
And yet, here we are with one of our greatest legacies- The Roman Republic/Empire which did do exactly that. Cleanse a horridly corrupt system with liberal use of the death penalty. "Every man is always thinking of the Roman Empire" except when it explains what we don't want to know.
In South Africa, the gangs infiltrated the government. This isn't just paranoia or extremist political ideology, this was recently exposed in the Madlanga Commission.
> To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control. The higher up the tree the more severe the punishment should be. Politicians and senior civil servants should always be put to death since their corruption has the greatest impact.
Giving the government the power to exert these punishments will only give the corrupt officials the power to legally do this to their enemies.
There is no hope for these countries.
There is an inverse relationship between capital punishment and how advanced a country is. People who spread nonsense like this should be put to death.
> The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption. The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption.
I disagree with this. The core culprit is that most people in Africa depend on the government, most are employed by it. So effectively the government is just taxing itself with no new money coming in. The solution is a revolution in SMEs, the entrepreneurial spirit and a large private sector. Basically more decentralization.
Most are employed by the government because there's no substantial business activity in those countries. Every successful business gets robbed by both the government and gangsters.
Only menial businesses like supermarkets exist in those countries (people have to eat no matter how corrupt a country is).
As soon as an entrepreneur becomes successful and makes healthy profits they'll get raided by leeches. Usually they'll have to pay government officials for "protection" and politicians demand that their family members become part of the Board or management enabling them to pilfer the company's wealth even further.
>The core culprit is that most people in Africa depend on the government, most are employed by it.
Just curious. What nations are you talking about when you say that "most people in Africa depend on the government"?
Only asking because this has not been my experience at all!
In fact I would say that most people in every nation I visited was dependent on themselves, their family and whatever support they could get from their larger clan. Poverty was rampant. Most of the middle class had clawed their way to that height through creating some kind of business. The degree to which these economies were dependent on remittances was alarming in my uneducated view. I would say far less than .5% of the people I interacted with had a government paycheck or even a government benefit coming in.
That said, I've never been to the wealthier nations like South Africa or Morocco or what have you. Maybe it's different in those places?
I realize now that I phrased it wrong, I should have said the largest employers are the government, with very little private companies. At least in my country (Namibia) this is true. Unemployment is high because the youth is waiting for the government to create jobs.
Ah.
Namibia is relatively wealthy.
I've never been to Namibia. (Never been to any SADC nations actually). But I can assure you, other nations don't work like Namibia. In a lot of other African nations, government can be the largest employer and still provide jobs for less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the people. The rest of the people will be completely on their own. These people scratch and struggle for whatever they can get. It's not at all like Namibia from what you're saying.
Who is going to educate the population when the elites in control of the country are fighting amongst themselves due to greed and selfishness?
Corruption isn't even fought by educating the masses, it just happens that at a given time, the country gets a less selfish leader who decides enough is enough and jails the culprits. This is how countries like Korea, Singapore did it
Maybe we should educate those corrupt politicians that by "spreading the wealth" they can become even richer. And that's no lie.
> The main culprit of poverty in Africa (and other countries) is the widespread corruption. It's the destroyer of all entrepreneurial and business activity in those countries. Any business is continuously being robbed, ransomed and conned into paying "protection" money by gangs and law enforcement alike.
Isaac Bacirongo's autobiography, Still a Pygmy, has plenty of interesting comments on this topic. The main business theme seems to be that in Africa it's not really possible to extend (or receive) credit - if someone says they'll pay you later, they won't, and if you were foolish enough to believe them you're going to take a loss.
Corruption was a smaller concern.
Educate the populace is not going to work in the short term. What a lot of sub Saharan African countries need right now is a benevolent dictator/king. Strong emphasis on the benevolent part, someone truly looking to improve the countries and their populace. This person needs to put in strong rule of law and build out institutions and crush corruption. Once you have a stable working order, that is a much better time for democracy to be re-introduced. This is how most countries in the world were formed. Unfortunately due to colonization and a later progression, Africans were never able to complete that part of their development cycle.
That being said finding a benevolent dictator is easier said than done. I can’t really think of anyone that has fit that bill over the last 75 years in Africa, the closest might be Paul Kagame in Rwanda.
> To combat corruption these countries need to educate their population of its effects plus hefty penalties, including capital punishment, to get it under control
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A lot of people who didn't know how corruption works in practice are getting a crash-course with the second Trump administration: in what order should your recommendations be applied to the Trump admin, and who's going to do it, seeing the DOJ is part of the executive branch and is partisan?
I’m a lot less worried about corruption in a country that has real elections. Trump is corrupt. He is exceptionally corrupt. But he won’t be President forever. If we elect Trump Jr. or something, well, that’s on us.
In Africa, the winner of elections is usually known up front because they’re not real. One clan/party rules until another one stages a successful bloody coup, and repeat on a 1/5/10/20 year cycle depending on the country.
Oh, my bad for not considering that America has never had any attempts to meddle with elections[1][2][3], or a bloody coup attempt. Its institutions are strong and irs system of checks and balances is unimpeachable.
1. One of Jimmy Carter's autobiography mentions how corrupt Georgia's elections were/are
2. Jeb Bush stole the election for his brother
3. America has a long history of disenfranchisement
Yes, in our advanced utopia the winning politician is not known up front, we get to pick from the two politicians who managed to accumulate the most debts to corporate interests! It's much better.
I read that theory multiple times, and on the surface it makes sense, e. g. corrupt oligarchs siphoning away money. But there are countries in Africa not governed by a dictatorship; I think a small country in west/middle Africa led by a woman some years ago. And they still found it close to impossible to break out of the poverty circle. You also can not easily compete with richer countries - they pump more money into their production while also swarming the local market with somewhat semi-affordable stuff that gets subvention from home. You need to re-think the local economy first and foremost and fix that. Granted, that's harder when dictators seize power, getting their weapons from outside factors, but I think it is possible to solve that problem too.
OP is talking about corruption which is orthogonal to being a dictatorship. In fact the least corrupt subsaharan country is (by far) Rwanda, which is a de facto dictatorship.
And the impacts of corruption/cronyism/clientelism are not just money being siphoned at the top. It completely breaks any fair competition wether it's in economic markets or for jobs. Businesses don't succeed based on how competitive or innovative they are, simply based on who their founder knows and how much they're willing to pay in bribes, so your economic development stragnates. Important and influential positions are awarded not to the most competent but to the richest. Opening a small business requires you to bribe dozens of people, and good luck if you need to import or export goods.
More competitive companies can afford higher bribes (consider Samsung), so corruption doesn't necessarily kill competition. Most African countries manage decent GDP per capita growth rates and ironically Ethiopia is tied with Rwanda for fastest growth at 7%. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat... Certainly it could be faster with less corruption, but at least poor African countries are getting less poor. Maybe it'll also help them get less corrupt over time.
You seem to think corruption is part of local culture. In reality corruption is implemented and maintained by foreign colonialists as a tactic to maintain power over local resources. It is coldly planned for in think tanks and other dark corners of foreign colonial democracies
All of us foreign colonialists would much prefer countries to be run by competent adults. There’s far more wealth to be gotten by trading with a state that functions properly, like say, Australia or even India where plenty of corruption exists but is kept in check… compared to the circus that is countries ruled by warring clans and outright 100% corruption like the worst cases in Africa.
We don't trade with colonialists, that's why you resort to corruption
There is always someone else to blame for your failure.
Hang on now: someone breaks into my house, strip mines it for anything valuable I have, takes multiple generations of my offspring out of schooling, beats and kills any offspring that request they stop and leave and it’s my fault the kids struggle to organize? And then when they do get “free”, lacking any example or group memory for how to fairly manage things, the worst of the kids take by strength and starve the rest. That’s my fault too?
Nice fan fiction, but that never happened in Ethiopia. Ethiopia was never colonized.
This one goes both ways, yeah?
Interestingly, Ethiopia wasn't always poor and backward. Back in the classical era, Ethiopia (then known as Axum or Aksum) was a major power [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Aksum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethio-jazz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-Hewn_Churches,_Lalibela
??? This comment was dead the second I posted it, how/why is that? Oh, visible again now, fair enough.
Maybe I should have included some context: these are a couple of Ethiopian cultural things that I think are neat. Uh, that's about it, really.
Civilizations flourish and falter. Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Egyptians, Romans, …
Given (enough) time, it’ll also happen to the ones at the peak now.
Same is for Songhai empire, a great power most Western people have never heard of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songhai_Empire
What is the Songhai empire known for, apart from size, gold and slave trading? Any great architecture or scientific achievements?
Its cultural and scholarly centers were Timbuktu and Djenne. They were effectively inaccessible to Europeans during their golden age, but they had established connections to Morocco and Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of historical manuscripts were preserved in Timbuktu. The manuscripts are still largely unstudied, though I guess the digitization efforts should have finished by now.
With all due respect, not mentioning applying modern standards to an ancient culture, that sounds as Monthy Python-esque as it can get.
Does the Songhai empire really have nothing besides size, gold and slave trading? Surely they must have had something. What about architecture? Ancient Greeks, Romans, ancient Chinese, etc., all had impressive achievements, and they were around many centuries before the Songhai empire. Perhaps even Meso-American empires and civilizations had achievements relatively speaking, especially considering that they were much more isolated from the rest of the world than the Songhai empire.
That was back when Aksum had a large Greek minority and other minorities, and even in some periods of time had coinage with Greek writing.
Also, Aksum probably overlaps much more with Eritrea than with Ethiopia. Aksum was also mostly surrounded by desert, mountains, at least one volcano, and the sea, and its territory tended to be close to the sea, also for trade. Surprisingly isolated from the rest of Africa south of the Sahara.
Edited, to tclancy:
Rude.
But also, I made this comment before your comment, check the timestamps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945710
And it mentions ancient Chinese and Meso-American civilizations.
A large Greek minority? Please share your sources for that because I'd be very interested in reading that.
AFAIU, Greeks were there, but as traders who came because it was a prosperous kingdom. For the same reason other groups from around that region also had a presence, and vice-versa. Prosperous nations tend to exchange populations and build economic, cultural, and political ties.
But if you're implying the presence of Greeks or an adoption of Greek culture was the reason for the rise of the Aksum empire... I'd certainly like to read those sources.
The very early adoption of Christianity might have had something to do with it, at least in terms of creating a unifying identity within and among the broader region. But Greeks weren't the only Christians. Ethiopia already had ties to non-Greek Levante and non-Greek Arabian peninsula communities, and probably Persian traders, as well--Persians were the Greeks of the Indian Ocean. Not coincidentally, the Horn of Africa sits at the nexus of multiple major economic spheres and sea routes. The Aksum Empire originated in the highlands, but for much of their time they controlled or had a strong presence along the coast.
They had coinage with Greek writing in some periods, as I mentioned, which implies that Greeks must have had a very large influence on Aksum. It was only centuries later that they switched to non-Greek, native writing, possibly around the decline of Aksum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endybis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aksumite_currency
> The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions that the Aksumite state imported brass (Ancient Greek: ὀρείχαλκος, oreíkhalkos), "which they use[d] for ornaments and for cutting as money", and they imported "a little money (denarion) for [use by] foreigners who live there."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Aksum
> Aksum also had a sizeable Greek population, which resided in the cities of Ptolemais Theron and Adulis.[52]
Your other comments just seemed uninformed, but the thesis you are actually pushing is white civilizations are inherently better. Stop for a minute and think about other possibilities why you don’t know a lot about an empire that wasn’t part of what we in the west consider our lineage (Greece, Rome); is it not possible we didn’t value keeping other societies’ histories alive in the same way?
I’ll skip pointing out much of what you know about ancient scholars may be due to Arabic countries keeping them alive during the Dark Ages.
Ethiopia has been a great power since then too: under Constantine I (c. 1450) it was the preeminent power in East Africa, and while the kingdom subsequently fragmented it managed to recombine by the 1800s in time to take a stand against European colonialism. None of that was because of a "Greek minority", African people are perfectly capable of governing themselves (with the right social structures in place, as with all people).
Aksum ≠ Ethiopia. Aksum was a major power of its time, but the Ethiopia of today is very different.
2000 years ago. We are living in the past?
Yeah what is so interesting about the past
I fail to understand what is not interesting about the past. It wont predict the future, but maybe we can learn?
My point exactly. That was sarcasm.
What's your point?
I am glad that this topic gets more attention, but the article itself doesn't provide any real analysis and could use some proof-reading. In its current shape, it's borderline engagement farming.
Wars are expensive, and the money has to come from somewhere:
> Lots of countries — including Egypt (the Nile/wider Red Sea supremacy), Eritrea (Ethiopia’s desire for access to the sea), Sudan (Ethiopian support for the RSF), Somalia (historical enmity/Ethiopian support for Somaliland), and Saudi Arabia (as benefactor of Egypt/Sudan/Eritrea axis) — have good reasons to keep Addis Ababa weak and preoccupied with unending domestic wars. These dynamics, coupled with the geography of war in Ethiopia mean that Addis Ababa will struggle to keep arms and fighters from easily moving across its borders with Sudan and Eritrea.
> On its part, the Ethiopian state will likely continue to enjoy support from the United Arab Emirates; and maintain the capacity to produce the weapons needed to keep rebels at bay. Ominously, divisions among elites in Tigray and other regions mean that the rebellion may not clear the threshold needed to incentivize a quick resolution either militarily or at the negotiating table. Therefore, slow-burning, but still catastrophically deadly conflicts may be on the cards.
> …
> Notably, a prolonged conflict will likely also be significantly civilianized. Careful to avoid being overstretched, the Ethiopian state may decide to deputize regional militias and other violence entrepreneurs in its fights against subnational armed groups. To this end, it will lean heavily on divisions across armed groups and within the regional states that have witnessed rebellions.
Part of a unifying the nation will be convincing these players that they will do better with a peaceful, stable Ethiopia.
Both countries are not super-rich and some of the arabic countries constantly destabilize the area - we could see this in Sudan and elsewhere. Ask where all the various terrorist groups got high-quality weapons.
The war between Eritrea is Ethiopia is especially stupid. The main issue is access to the ocean/water which Ethiopia wants. Since it is the bigger country, it wants to bully its way through. Eritrea has only about 6 million people; Ethiopia has almost 140 million people. IMO there should be a diplomatic solution. Give Ethiopia access while not giving up land, negotiate payments (should be reasonable for both sides), invest into the corridor for both sides to profit. To me it seems as if Ethiopia has committed to the decision to wage war though. It's similar to Putin in that he committed to both genocide and expansion of land. Though Eritrea is really very small compared to Ethiopia; I don't see them being able to offset Ethiopia.
From an outsider standpoint it all seems so insane. The water is there — the way we do it in the world I know isn’t to have, say, Czechs slaughter Germans for decades until they get to the sea, in this case they made a deal to be part of a common market which makes it simple. But even in the absence of the EU etc. I still think they’d (at least in this century) negotiate for access to a convenient railroad, offer to pay to expand a port so both sides profit, etc.
Eritrea/ns have historically, significant cost, demonstrated that they will resist Ethiopian occupation (see 1961-1991 and 1998-2000 conflicts). Ethiopia could re-negotiate access (see 1993-1998 agreements), however Ethiopia (state) argues for "access" in English while arguing for "ownership" in Amharic. Eritrea/ns are reasonably suspicious.
That's an outdated take at this point though right?
I mean pretty much everyone, today, (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South sudan, etc etc), has settled on Kenya being the answer to all those questions. No one wants to access the sea in the Eritrea direction anymore since everything going on in Kenya is making Kenyan coastal access such a no-brainer. (And all of that was even before the Iran war showed that making your shipping dependent on the Eritrea route, and mideast chokepoints in general, is just, I mean, I'll be diplomatic and call it "ill-considered"). Now, with the newest attachments being considered for the LAPSSET corridor, going through Eritrea is just insanity by comparison.
So even without the geography problem, there is still war is my point. Now, of course, you could argue it's still a geography problem since the proxy-masters are mostly concerned about getting rid of the dam long term. But that's another issue is all I'm saying.
I maintain that war in Ethiopia (and the wider Horn) is not inevitable. The current outbreak of war reflects the fact that Ethiopian elites keep choosing war over peace. Unfortunately, despite repeatedly choosing war, Ethiopian leaders continue to enjoy support from a cast of warmongering academics, journalists, public intellectuals, civil society actors, and a whole host of foreign actors — all of whom have long taken sides and become cheerleaders for their respective camps.
In name only. But they are actors.
The anti-intellectual movement of the last quarter century is such a perversion of values that I have trouble recognizing the world today. It's a slap in the face to everything that I believe in, and what society used to value when I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s.
Reductionism has consumed tech and the scientific community. Because the wrong people won the internet lottery and promoted their brand of anti-intellectualism to the world, gaining esteem from sycophants hoping to ride their coattails and get rich too.
Now those same billionaires actively work to dismantle the institutions which were once heralded as bastions of democracy. Is it any wonder that peace is crumbling as they conspire to hoard the world's remaining resources? Doubling down on colonization, stealing them from developing nations that we've already victimized, without their consent?
Witnessing Elon Musk become a trillionaire at the same moment that a child somewhere died of dehydration was one of the grossest experiences of my life. We're talking Elysium, District 9, but real. Yet Greta Thunberg is mocked for her activism.
Instead of learning from history and doing better, we're papering over our colonizer past and doubling down on our malfeasance.
What a sick joke the future has become.
Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, largely through better tech https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-average-life...
Musk becoming a trillionaire because people value the shares of his ventures for stupid amounts doesn't actually make the poor poorer. If anything things like starlink help connect the more distant places.
That anti-intellectualism developed because the self proclaimed intellectuals were so persistently, consistently wrong about so many things that many people lost all trust in them. Academia moved away from the foundational principles of the scientific method, that the truth of a model lies in its ability to repeatedly make correct predictions, to treating what they thought sounded morally good as true regardless of how far from reality it was.
I’m in this camp as well. I can’t stand the anti-intellectual trend, but the cultural elites in America got high on their own supply and just untethered themselves from reality, while our economic elites betrayed everyone by changing the economy into a machine that only benefits some people with college degrees while tricking another giant swath into buying useless degrees on credit. It’s more anti-elitism going on than anti-intellectualism. And they brought it on themselves. They should have offered something better.
Seeing my home country at the top of Hacker News is surreal. While I'm glad it’s finally getting some coverage, watching this unfold feels almost hopeless. The previous war in Tigray cost an estimated 600,000 lives, and this new escalation threatens to be even bloodier. It’s heading toward a complete catastrophe
So many comments sound apocalyptic when they face inconveniences like inflation. See this recent post by a Polish guy:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49905487
Meanwhile, the Tigray war in Ethiopia may have killed as many as 600k, yet it barely registered in our public conversation. The same goes for Sudan.
Attention is a weird beast.
"Attention is a weird beast."
Not nice, but somewhat rational? Inflation where you live affects you directly. A massacre somewhere far away usually not so much.
(But yes, all is connected, people fleeing the wars, then bringing their traumatas with them, etc)
We give attention to things that deserve our attention, i.e., things that affect us. The war in Ethiopia scores very low on that list, to the point of almost complete irrelevance.
Is that really true? Can't we feel compassion and mourn things happening far away? I don't think this is true.
I think the problem is that modern brain is overloaded with information. We can't care about everything fully, or we'd go insane.
other conflicts that to don't have any significant effect get plenty of attention like Ukraine or Palestine. the Russian Ukrainian conflict does have some effect on Europe but Israel Palestine has no tangible effect on the West and people talk about it frequently.
Because of history, how it was founded and people from both sides living in europe?
Germany as an extreme example has the survival of Israel as state doctrin. So that is a hot topic by definition.
Then there are many jews living in the west who sends weapons en masse to Israel - and there are also many Palestinian/Arabs living in the west. All that directly effects us.
Ethopia on the other hand is one of few african countries that was not (really) colonized. So there are not so much ties. The strongest is probably reggae and Haile Selassi chanting in songs, but most have no idea who that was. So, people are less interested naturally.
> Then there are many jews living in the west who sends weapons en masse to Israel
Individuals in the west can't buy and send weapons to other countries.
But they can lobby their government to send them (or not to).
Speaking as a Jew in the West who is very anti-Israel, I think the weapons being sent to Israel are only partially explained by Jewish pro-Israel lobbies. Zionism happens to go beyond Judaism, and American imperialism, which Israel serves a role in, is a larger project than even that.
Sure, there is still a lot of oil in the middle east.
Saying that the Ukraine war has no significant effects is like saying that AI has no significant effects.
Europe started rapid remilitarization as a direct response to the war. The increase in military spending in European countries not participating in the war is comparable to worldwide investments in AI data centers and infrastructure.
Then there is the fact that a permanent member of the UN Security Council is waging an old-school war of conquest. If we assume that the post-WW2 world order is gone and wars of conquest are legitimate business again, the world will reassess other aspects of that order as well. Including the idea that people have inherent rights beyond those their government is willing to grant and capable of protecting.
Israel has more impact on the West than any other country (and not in a good way). The Palestinians have brought light to it, but it's Israel's own bribing, blackmailing and industry influence in the US (and other Western countries) that people are upset about.
Why are we paying so much attention to what's happening in Israel then?
Because it affects gas prices.
Israel's conflict with Iran, maybe. Israel's conflict with Hamas is irrelevant though and that's what people are protesting.
A constant flow of USA taxpayer dollars, and German taxpayer euros, is the only reason Israel is still afloat. Continuing the war is the decision of US and German voters. Other western countries are also nominal supposed to be stopping their allies from doing this and aren't.
That doesn't really answer the question.
why do we (residents of western countries) pay attention to Israel? There's nothing relevant to our lives happening there. It's not more relevant than Ethiopia or Sudan.
Israel is the world's 7th largest arms exporter but only the 14th largest importer. It in fact sold this year around $8bn to Europe alone (Arrow-3 to Germany, and Achilles Shield missile defense to Greece).
The concept that Israel relies on foreign weapons for its survival is detached from reality. Yes, there are things you can't replace like F35 and submarines, but in drones, missiles, air defence, radars, armored vehicles, communication systems etc - Israel is amongst the worldwide leaders.
Israel will cease to exist as soon as the US stops giving it political cover and fighting wars on its behalf.
History is not on your side. US did not support Israel until the 1970's. Israel is far, far stronger today then it was back then. Israel will always have friends, it has a lot to offer and situated in an interesting area.
History is on my side, more and more people stand against Israel every day. It will be like apartheid South Africa soon enough.
It's a completely different situation than South Africa in so many ways. Israel is very well integrated into the global supply chain, has the power of the Jewish diaspora, is majority Jewish (unlike Afrikaners which were a small minority), and is a nuclear power.
I agree with the gist of your statment, but apartheid South Africa was a nuclear power as well
Yeah, it's so much worse than South Africa and Israel has had a much larger negative impact on the US and rest of world.
> has the power of the Jewish diaspora, is majority Jewish
Curious what you mean by this since we're told over and over that Israel doesn't represent all Jews? Regardless, it's a tiny country with almost no natural resources that has rapidly accelerating mass opposition. Israel cannot defeat the entire planet.
With all due respect, I think you've been radicalized to the point you think the world is going to come together with the singular goal of destroying Israel. No, it will not. Israel's economy is very strong, in fact it's been getting stronger as the war with the Islamists has gone on. It's a technological and military powerhouse. European skies are defended by Israeli systems. A large part of your iPhone was designed in Israel. If you've been running any workload on Amazon, GCP or Azure, chances are you've been using Israeli tech.
Relax, Israel is not going anywhere :) Yes there is a growing anti-Israeli sentiment, but that will go away with time. The strategic gains Israel has made over the past 3 years, though, may hold.
You're vastly misreading (or more accurately misrepresenting) how angry people are with Israel. Regardless, there's no point in continuing this conversation. The last thing you should be doing is accusing others of being radicalized while you use terms like "Islamists", that's disgusting.
Not really true, first German taxpayer euros don't go to Israel, second without Israel could pay for USA taxpayer dollars from their aid with some debt increase.
Because Israel is manipulating the US. We literally have laws curtailing freedom of speech just to stop people from boycotting Israel. The vast majority of our government is bribed or blackmailed by Israel. We currently have a Zionist hawk consolidating all of our mass media (Larry Ellison). TikTok was forced to move ownership to Zionists in the US due to Israel. Our tax dollars go to Israel. The last two presidents (and probably more) have gone on tv and lied to every US citizen on behalf of Israel...
It's a pressing and important issue, which is why it's getting a lot of attention.
That’s one of the reasons COVID got to spread. People in the West saw it as “a Chinese issue”. Me included. And I work with Chinese people every day. I would see them in lockdown and still think it couldn’t possibly affect me.
And then… well.
Attention is indeed weird.
Fortunately, multibillion dollar dams can't spread like COVID.
So there isn't one likely to draw global powers to my neighborhood to pit one group of people against another.
/s
Let's be honest man, there's just little chance at all that this issue affects your average San Fran tech guy. Let's not try to shame people because they don't pay attention to those kinds of issues. If you want people to know something about the issue, put it in your comment.
Educate.
Calling inflation an inconvenience is certainly an opinion. How many people will die across the world because they have to choose between healthcare, food, and rent?
Really bad inflation is obviously a full human catastrophe.
The absolute meltdown post-COVID where we traded moderate inflation in exchange for not having the economy basically seize up was, for most people on HN, an inconvenience.
Inflation in mentioned above example was 3.4% year over year for a professional at the higher end of the income scale. In that case it is inconvenience.
I agree that higher level of inflation might be brutal.
Why do they have to choose? That's not a problem of inflation, but of wealth distribution or, if you will, our system of economy.
They will eat, they will skip on rent and they will do what they can with healthcare (be that public or NGO healthcare initiatives, or the local "wise person")
"But won't they be evicted?" Is a question that has several answers, but none of which you expect
First worlders perception of how to deal with 3rd world problems are interesting
Thank you for sharing this.
> the Tigray war in Ethiopia may have killed as many as 600k, yet it barely registered in our public conversation. The same goes for Sudan. Attention is a weird beast.
If there are no white people to blame on either side of the war, nobody cares. It's the same shit with so many conflicts.
> Attention is a weird beast.
Correction: The mass media serving a select few interests is a weird beast.
..well not really weird if you recognize it that way :)
Wow, the percentage of dead comments in this thread is wild. HN is far more politically sensitive than I ever thought it would be.
Threads attract people with an opinion about the topic, so it's more like HN contains lots of subsets of sensitive people waiting in the wings. But of course, per Marvin Gaye, we're all sensitive people.
Edit: rather oddly I just posted an innocuous comment (a couple of Wikipedia links) and it was immediately dead on arrival. What's going on there? Wild auto-modding.
To be fair to HN, I mean, your comment kind of indicates your own political sensitivity as well right?
I, personally, don't mind political content. I find it interesting. That said, I'm not going to get on fellow HN'ers when they downvote or flag it. That, in and of itself, would be a political act rooted in sensitivities.
If you have reasons, in particular, that posts or comments should not be flagged, I'd personally encourage you to outline them. Then let the chips fall where they may. Getting emotional only decreases the overall quality of the conversation. And, presumably, outlining your own ideas would get whatever viewpoint it is that you wish to push, into the thread.
No I dont think so, Im not being sensitive to anything other than censorship? I believe on total free speech so I think every comment should be visible and I am happy to take offence. I see so many dead comments that are not even rude or offensive, its hard to see why anyone would censor them.