Rant-tastic

[keaalu]

I consider myself to be a fairly moderate person; not a lot really shocks me. I used to watch the “VCL Horrors” community out of a sense of sheer morbid fascination, and because it was a source of vague amusement to look at all the atrociously bad porn/angst/whatever, but it was never so OMG VOMIT! as a lot of people tried to make out, so...

This, however, made my blood boil.

I could happily rant for pages about this – not the whole “cutting the human population down to size” thing, but the disgusting way these people were behaving about Africa. Sure, I’m a liberal leftie and I hate to see anyone or anything die needlessly. I’m sure someone must have made an original post with the intention of a joke, even if it WAS in excruciatingly bad taste. It was rather the fact that so many people have agreed that Africans are all lazy useless idiots who DESERVE to starve to death!

If I had said this about New Orleans, I’d have been lynched. If I’d said “well, the people killed by the flooding in America this past few weeks will have helped towards the 2 million!” I’d have been verbally slaughtered. (I hasten to add I don’t mean I wanted to say it, rather am making a comparison.) But because it’s happening in Africa then it’s fine. Who cares about Africa? They don’t make any cool television programs, they don't supply us with inordinately cheap goods, they don’t add to our technological distinctiveness, so they don’t need to be added to the USA-Collective.

The people in VCL Horrors (who I thought were equally moderate, considering individuals) all seem to subscribe to the same “dumb Yank” stereotype – the whole “world outside my borders? Where?” mindset. Nobody seems to have cottoned on to the fact that many of the problems in Africa are of WESTERN ORIGIN. They’re all poor, because they have MASSIVE debts to the “developed countries” (The US and the UK included) which they can’t pay off. What did you think Live8 was for, for chrissake? Did you all just sleep through it? The famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s was probably caused by “global dimming” caused by, guess what! Western pollution. They don’t tend to use condoms and have large families because, guess what! Western religions have indoctrinated them all so much that they believe contraception is a sin and it’s God’s will for them to have large families! That’s if they can even AFFORD them.

No, I'm not trying to say Africa is perfect. I'm not trying to say they're innocent victims. But christ, people, look at the bigger picture for once rather than what YOU can get out of it.

You want 2 million people to die? You want the human race to become extinct? Fine. You start the ball rolling, There’s a razor. Don’t worry about taking your time.

(Apologies to any Americans reading this – I’m not trying to blanket-bomb. It just seems to be US citizens being the most outspoken about “fuck Africa! What about ME?” from where I’m sitting.)

Comments

[keaalu.livejournal.com]

Eh, Rach, Europe IS part of the Western world. ;)

Africa may have a fast-growing population, but it seems like 25% of children there die before their 6th birthday because of various treatable diseases like malaria - at least, treatable in the "developed" world but which they can't afford - or of starvation. And starvation isn't a nice way to go, it takes a looong painful time. That was partly what made me angriest, the way they were insinuating we should just let them all starve.

[admiralmemo.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. That aspect. I'm not currently trying to think about the problems that giving them cures to such diseases would have on population, as well. Not that I believe anyone should suffer when there's no good reason to, but fixing that one problem woutld exacerbate the other. The mindset in Africa is to have many children due to the fact that if you have ten children, the probability is good that one will survive all the diseases of childhood to be an adult that can take care of you when you grow old. Curing illness and allowing the children to grow up so all of them live to be adults doesn't change the mindset. You just end up with people who have big families because that was the way they'd always done it. You need to fix the mindset to fix the population problem. Plus, if you fix the population growth, you're a step closer to fixing the starvation problem, since there wouldn't be nearly as many people to feed.

As for the previous comment on religion, I wouldn't blame the religion itself, but the ones spreading it. The missionaries probably all injected all their own ideas into it and, since they were the only source for it in the area, everyone took it that that was how the religion was supposed to go.

As for China, the law is a good one to curb population growth, but coupled with that culture, it ends up terrible that so many girls get abandoned and/or killed. That's a flaw in the combination of the two, but the law itself isn't bad. Also, not that I think valuing one person over another is much of a good thing, but if you're going to do it, do it more like it was done in the Voyager episode "Critical Care," and base it on what people's accomplishments and not simply something like sex, skin color, or so forth. Therefore, a baby girl and a baby boy would be equal in that they haven't accomplished much of anything. (No, this is not the way I want to see the world going, since I see all human life as sacred, but I see it as a better system than some things I've seen in the world.)