>It is official: for only the third time in the past 20 years, the un has declared a full-blown famine.
Looking into this, it's because the UN will only declare a famine if there's no functioning government. If there is one, they have the government declare a famine.
Presumably that's why the UN declared a famine at the refugee camp, not the country or region.
As per the submitted article, famine is also only declared in the refugee "camp" (which houses about 500.000 people as per this article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqv5nvq69lwo) because the UN doesn't have enough information about other parts of the country.
The article you linked to says famine was declared in Sudan on 2017. But the situation on 2017 is different from nowadays (to keep it short, at least on 2017, Sudan had a president, and that means a lot in such a country)
> to keep it short, at least on 2017, Sudan had a president, and that means a lot in such a country
Importantly, he's the shit stain most responsible for the current situation. He was your traditional shitty dictator for a few decades but went further - incited a genocide, created a two power structure system (army and a militia, headed by two men that hate each other) to ensure the army isn't strong enough to overthrow him. Well they both worked together to overthrow him, surrendered him to the ICC, and have been at a civil war with bonus genocide ever since.
NYT ran a recent 'splainer on the who and why of declaring famines as well:
Food insecurity experts working on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., an initiative controlled by U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, identify a famine in an area on the basis of three conditions: 1. At least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food. 2. At least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition. 3. At least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.
I spent 3 weeks driving my 4x4 through Sudan in early 2019 [1], just a month before they finally got rid of Al-Bashir, and it was incredible.
The people of Sudan were some of the kindest and friendliest I have ever encountered on the planet. When I asked for directions to buy bread and it turned out to be complicated, the following morning locals brought a bag of fresh-baked bread to my campsite and refused to let me pay for it no matter how much I insisted.
Their currency was already falling so fast I was getting a better rate for USD cash every day.
Gas at the time was $0.35USD / gallon - though the lineups were days long. The locals never let me wait in line and insisted I skip it every time.
Later in the North I met a very kind man who invited me for delicious coffee every day just to sit and talk. He again refused to let me pay for it and was clearly very proud of his country and people. On the second and third day I brought pastries to share. He said for decades it would have been unthinkable to talk out loud about getting rid of Al-Bashir, but during my visit it was starting to almost be acceptable. He did warn me to keep my voice down and leave my big camera in my 4x4 - people were edgy.
Sudan is on the list of 5 "evil" countries, just because I visited for three weeks I can never again get an ESTA (visa waiver) to enter the USA. It makes crossing the border much harder, especially when I live in Canada (not yet a Canadian citizen).
This ESTA thing is weird. I had to go through Syria many times in transit to Jordan when it was cheaper to drive than to fly, but I never thought this will cause problems in the future. Same for Iran and Iraq, lots of Romanians used to work there in electricity projects. Iran is still a destination for motorcycle rides, I have a friend who was married to an Iranian woman and we had plans to go there with the bikes, he was traveling regularly to visit his wife's family. But I guess these exceptions are rare enough to be ignored.
While your experience sounds exceptional, tourism used to be like that before it went mainstream. Essentially, normal people (not traders) will travel with very little resources. There are no credit cards or international banking. So they had to rely on strangers for food and housing.
Still cannot get the images of the Ethiopian famine out of my head - truly horrific stuff. I’ll let people smarter and more powerful than me debate what could/should be done - I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects. It seems like there are enough resources in the world to prevent things like this, at least for now - and if not, a conversation needs to be had very soon how this should be handled because I don’t think this will become a situation that becomes less common.
I guess the problem is nobody wants to "own" countries anymore. Probably for good reason, colonization caused a lot of evil. However if you want to make a country do what you want, you can't just blow it up and then expect them to listen to you. Controlling people requires actually controlling them, and that is icky.
While the old prememant ownership thing has gone out of fashion, maybe we could have something like a 20 year lease where the Brits go in again and bring law and order? This kind of thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Egyptian_Sudan
Yeah maybe something like that. You'd want some international body to give it legitimacy, maybe have it run by the scandinavians as the British track record and some have mentioned has its blemishes, and you'd need some amount of western military so if local warlords started killing people they could retaliate with himars or fighter jets or some such. And an understanding that they'd support local democracy and be prepared to go home when no longer wanted. Perhaps by referendum - if 50% of the locals wanted the foreigners gone it would be done. Rather than say the Afghan situation where they just disappear at some random point leaving a mess.
Are you sure the Scandinavian countries would volunteer? They have an increasing Russian threat close to home. And none of them have expeditionary militaries. Any deployment to Africa would require extensive assistance from USA/UK/France for logistics, intelligence, communications, and fires. And how would you even conduct a referendum in a conflict zone with no effective civil institutions?
A foreign intervention isn't necessarily a bad idea but doing it effectively would be far more complex than you imagine.
> I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this
Please don't guess, then? The famine started because of a military intervention gone south. The reality is that the Sudanese are a victim of circumstance. A war between some Arab rulers over who controls the Sudan.
That the people shipping weapons to one side or another are not merely vultures but foreigners who nonetheless have an interest in the civil war's outcome, making it not solely Sudanese vs Sudanese
How much personal responsibility do you assign, then? Perhaps if you're handed a gun by an arms executive and go and shoot your neighbour did you shoot them because A: you are diminished and suggestible and couldn't help but be influenced by the vulture B: you had planned to do that anyway but lacked the tools to.
It's interesting where to draw the line though, because it's relevant in the context of violent/-ist content as well - Relevant to the BS going on in the UK atm; we can claim that a "call to violence" is illegal as it well should be, but there is also the personal responsibility of those involved and that is why they're receiving sentences for participating in violent riots.
Pretty much every nation on earth contains multiple ethnicities. That's the reality but generally foreigners are ignorant of these sorts of details for faraway places - eg: Sami in Sweden, Druze in Israel, Catalonians in Spain, and on and on.
So, as far as I am aware, any nation that is currently at peace can serve as an example.
Maybe it's the other way around: the more any two groups get along, the less we consider them meaningfully distinct.
War or genocide is just an end, not some perpetual state of affairs. The negative effects of diversity can be seen everywhere, and in places where it’s not seen there is no real diversity— as in the seemingly distinguishing traits of the parties are significantly overridden by commonalities.
Plenty of countries and societies have a mix of different cultures and religions without it triggering a war anything like what Sudan is going through today.
I have lived in the US and the Netherlands. I can say both have a mix of both cultures and religions without widespread famine and bloody civil wars.
There’s no critique though - simply tone policing while trying to push another argument entirely. I’m not even making whatever argument is being “critiqued” here. It’s simply bad posting.
but there was a critique, your proposal was "something something let an army fix it" and they provided context "something something various armies caused it."
Then that would be an unrelated critique/strawman that doesn't accurately respond to what they said.
They did not propose to fix it via an army. Instead they said "nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this" That is not a recommendation. Instead it is describing how difficult the problem is to solve.
They then followed it up by saying "but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects". This is significantly hedging the claim, saying that the military could actually make things worse!
Maybe one of the side effects that he is saying could happen is exactly the issue brought up, meaning that the famine would get worse. Therefore bringing this up as a possibility is not a critique, and actually agrees with the original statement.
And they also previously had said "I’ll let people smarter and more powerful than me debate what could/should be done". That statement explicitly saying that they aren't proposing things.
They even finished up the statement by saying "a conversation needs to be had very soon how this should be handled ", which only suggesting that this should be talked about, because he quite clearly thinks that this is a complicated and difficult problem to solve, for which a military intervention could very well not be a good idea!
If you actually read the original statement it is extremely conservative in its statements, and you have to almost intentionally be obtuse to attack such a hedging non recommendation that merely describes how bad and hard it is to solve!
Ethiopian famine was linked with previous massive deforestation projects. No trees = no water and no water = no food. War was a logical consequence of that. After several decades they finally grasp the idea, and are trying to bring the trees again with the "green legacy" project.
> I’d personally hazard a guess nothing short of military intervention can stop something like this but that has its whole slew of unintended side effects
Military interventions most often fail to secure a country than the opposite. Haiti had a long peacekeeping mission from the UN and fell back into anarchy, Sudan has also had a military intervention. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. are other examples of interventions gone south.
Probably one of the few more successful interventions was the Yugoslavian Civil War, nowadays the appetite of the world for NATO bombing a country isn't really there.
No one has figured out how to do nation building from the outside, that often has come from the people in those nations themselves.
According to the Wikipedia link you sent the marxist Leninist state was set up in 1987 and inherited the problems caused by the previous military junta including the aftermath of the 1983-1985 famine.
I also donate regularly. It is a great organization. Also other great charities in this space is Médecins Sans Frontières and World Food Program and of course the Red Cross.
It may not be anarchism as professed by anarchists (which is itself a broad and fractious array of philosophies generally having to do with abolishing involuntary hierarchies, related to classical libertarianism), but it is a form of anarchy, at least as it is popularly understood. Terminology fails here; at this point any serious anarchists need to come to grips with the fact that this sort of "chaotic anarchy" is what people think of when they hear "anarchy", and that trying to reclaim the word is pointless.
1. I agree that anarchists probably need to grapple with the fact that people think of this as a first association...
2. ...but terminology does not at all fail here, there is a separate term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie which describes a breakdown in order and social function.
is a good example why anomie and anarchy probably _should_ be distinct concepts, as there's probably plenty of hierarchy, localized state power and centralized
decision making going on in Sudan, while e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Lib... appear to have done absolutely fine keeping and improving a social fabric for the last 30 yeras (until recently, gangs arrived and brought the anomie that comes with organized crime).
Again, I don't think it's a winning strategy for political anarchists to try and convince people that "acshually it's anomie, not anarchy", but I think on this page, peoples professed self-identity makes sharing out this separation of concept worth it
On the contrary, the article's use of the word is what is pointless.
At no point, besides the title, does the article make mention of anarchy or chaos. Rather, the article pretty clearly states that the famine is a result of a civil war between the government and a paramilitary group that was previously given weapons by the government.
Liberal politicians (and less commonly journalists) like to latch onto the words anarchy and chaos to fear monger and dramatize, but often the so-called anarchy and chaos they call out is a direct result of their own ruthless attempts to keep order.
Neither the article author, nor you, have shown that the situation here is caused by a lack of government. In fact the article explicitly states that an important agricultural region is governed by one of the warring factions.
That's because you're misunderstanding what "governed" means here. In the context of the article, it basically means that there are armed men there exercising control over the area, and that's it.
There is no actual governance of the land, agricultural exploitation or oversight, basic services, or anything else.
Just armed men plundering, which is not any actual government control, hence the anarchy there and all around the country. There is a power structure in some places, but only insofar as military control and plunder; everything else is left to its own devices, hence chaotic anarchy.
I assumed the nuance there would be nitpicked (as the thread proves) which is why I didn’t post this but I’m glad you did.
This famine is the expected result of 20 years of post-colonialist civil war, which the article goes on to explain lightly.
The economist is a capitalist magazine, so they of course are going to choose terms which resonate with capitalists.
The majority in this thread look at this situation as a failure of “valid liberal government” rather than the results of capitalist colonialism, which is what it is.
Colonialist resource extraction by Western powers, exemplified by companies like Chevron, exacerbated ethnic and regional tensions in Sudan and Darfur by prioritizing profits over local communities.
Specifically Chevron's involvement in Sudan's oil industry during the 1970s and 80s led to the displacement of populations and the allocation of resources to specific ethnic groups, heightening grievances and competition over land and wealth.
The infrastructure and political systems left by colonial powers were designed to facilitate such extraction, rather than fostering equitable development, creating a legacy of economic disparity and weak governance. This upended centuries of pastoral farming, and created conditions for this massive civil war, as marginalized groups rebelled against a state that was perceived as both complicit in and shaped by foreign exploitation.
"The blockade of Ukrainian ports by the Black Sea Fleet in the first weeks of the invasion interrupted grain exports, rapidly increasing global food prices and fueling food crises, greatly increasing the risk of famine in the poorest countries"
"the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme, has estimated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed around 70 million people to the brink of starvation worldwide"
There's this awful semi-famous photograph online of a previous African famine that depicts a man walking past a child who he stole U.N supplied foodstuffs from.
This might be naive but what's stopping the U.S, Russia, E.U, China or any capable world power from just air dropping tons of food onto Sudans population centers? You can't tell me Sudan's military has the ability to shoot down advanced aircraft. Am I missing something? The country has no government currently so claiming it's a violation of sovereignty would also be questionable imo.
> just air dropping tons of food onto Sudans population centers?
Super inefficient, but makes for great photos. Good piece on NPR US airdrops of food into Gaza here:
"the first thing to understand about airdrops is they are probably the most inefficient possible way to deliver aid. So they're used very, very sparingly and only when there is truly no other way to get aid in.
"...ballpark eight to 10 times as expensive logistically to deliver by air as by overland transport"
Basically because of the logistical nightmare it is to airdrop food, there is no way that you can feed millions in famine with it. You need trucks on the ground bringing in food.
Air drops might be cheaper than boots on the ground, if that's what it really takes.
I'm not seriously advocating anything. It's a pretty hard problem to solve. Famine in itself, is not so hard, we can solve that with money -- the civil war thing is difficult though.
Airdropping "tons of food" wouldn't move the needle.
Airdropping thousands of tons of food per day, every day, for years on end would temporarily reduce famine. It wouldn't prevent famine (armed groupings who would gain control over of the airdrops wouldn't necessarily share), and would destroy local farming, and would be horrendously expensive but it's possible (see e.g. Berlin airlift) if someone major really wanted to dedicate all their airforce (again, see e.g. Berlin airlift for what it takes) to that.
The US Air Force Air Mobility Command is the only organization in the world which has a significant number of long-range cargo aircraft and the associated logistics train capable of delivering large amounts of food into contested territory. Russia, the EU, and China have only a tiny fraction of the capability and wouldn't be able to sustain it beyond a temporary symbolic effort. The Russian military is also otherwise occupied at the moment.
While the AMC has the capability it isn't unlimited. They are already stretched thin delivering on other taskings, so if they have to pick up a new humanitarian aid mission then other missions will have to be postponed. Perhaps you should ask the Houthis and Iranians to suspend their terrorist activities in the Middle East in order to reduce the current workload.
Unlikely. That didn't happen in response to the failure to intervene to prevent the Darfur genocide before it started rather than just patrolling afterward to keep violence "to a minimum", the "Effacer le tableau", the massacre of the Hutus, the Rwandan genocide, the Gukurahundi, or the Cambodian genocide.
I think this is closer to the Onion story about American mass shootings: people shake their heads with sorrow while asserting nothing can be done.
War and conflict and the resulting devastation is part of human nature, as it has been for all of our species' history. Why would you expect that to have changed in the last 20 years?
Humanity has reduced famine dramatically over the past 100+ years. If Sudan famine ends up having the higher end of the estimate for deaths, it will likely reverse the clear downward trend, which should be alarming.
We've managed to generally stop doing lots of things that one might say are 'part of human nature' - because the most important part of human nature is our ability to reflect on our nature and improve it.
It is not that we've stopped, we've made it harder in some parts of the world, by adopting a liberal form of government and splitting powers. Remember what happened just few years back with Trump and the assault on congress.
Or extremists gaining power, it's not that we've improved, it's that people had enough to eat. But it's slowly changed also here, you can be pragmatic or starving, but not both.
But other democracies and governments are not as strong, and of course, in the west we're enjoying some level of stability that also is a result of exploitation of other parts of the world that is then fighting over a limited amount of remaining resources
How about going in the other direction? Completely stay out of their business and let whatever emerges from the chaos develop on its own?
Central planning of societies doesn't have a good track record, especially when there are competing external interests. Look at the horrific consequences of the American meddling in geopolitics of the third world over the last 100 years. The CIA and war industry is responsible for the destruction of countless traditional cultures and the lives of hundreds of millions worldwide.
Not to excuse the various bad decisions and bungled coups supported by the US during the Cold War, but – had they just "completely stayed out of their business" then the Soviets merely would have intervened (as they actually did in many, many places). In real life, geopolitics is a complex game theory problem.
I suppose the status quo is an inevitable consequence of technology expanding the practical spheres of influence of world powers. It sure would be nice though to have a world without globalization, still full of cultural diversity.
But only the good and inoffensive parts of cultural diversity, right? Not the parts that involve misogyny or patriarchy or homophobia or beheading apostates? When people advocate against globalization and for cultural diversity they're usually only in favor of the most shallow aspects: food, clothes, entertainment, architecture, etc. Not the stuff that actually matters for safety and quality of life in other countries.
And to be clear I'm not advocating for forcibly imposing our cultural values on those other countries. But let's not have an overly romanticized view of cultural diversity.
Works for natural ecosystems because we accept that mass casualties is "normal" in the natural world; if some species doesn't survive a mass fire/drought/etc, welp, that's nature. When millions of people starve to death, we don't accept that.
(lol, well, we do accept it, as history has shown us time and time again, but we tend to not want to do nothing)
Agreed. Parent is ignoring the positive effects of intervention while highlighting the negative.
USAID funds USD$50b / year, and the US funds UNICEF to the tune of USD$1.4b / year.
Which, among other things, supports the polio vaccination campaign being rolled out in Gaza, to prevent a public health catastrophe and possible resurgence of polio in the Middle East.
It's easy to say "Let them eat cake" when one is sitting in the palace and opining about CIA boondoggles.
In the real world, that means people are starving and children are crippled.
We can (and should) strive for better than nasty, brutish, and short lives, regardless of a person's nationality.
The US may not be restraining them sufficiently, inasmuch as any country can another, but it's kind of a weird question.
Israeli is more than capable of bombing Gaza into the stone age even absent US military aid.
The broader finger pointing should be that, as always, nobody actually cares about the Palestinians.
The West doesn't care, because Israel. The East doesn't care, because why would they? And the Middle East doesn't care, because as much as they trumpet the Palestinian cause to boost domestic popularity, none of them are actually willing to suffer consequences for the benefit of Palestinians.
Which leaves... the Houthis and Iran, neither of which are very linked to the global economic network at this point, and so have little to lose.
Israeli is more than capable of bombing Gaza into the stone age even absent US military aid.
That's not true at all.
Israel's military machine is far more self-sufficient than it was 20+ years ago. But over time, its capabilities would be significantly hobbled without U.S.-supplied parts and munitions. Don't forget those two aircraft carriers parked offshore, either.
Losing access to U.S. military aid, weapons sales, and strategic backing would definitely hurt. Given that it has now chosen to expand the war to 3 fronts, it really doesn't want to put itself in that box.
The Israelis have always been realistic about the fact that their access to US arms might be cut off. Hence why they (alone?) negotiated integration rights for their F-35s with domestic systems and munitions.
The greatest loss to Israel if the US were to withdraw aid would be in air defense -- specifically the US leaning on its allies in the region (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt) to quietly use airspace and basing to defend Israel from missile barrages.
At this point, it seems like Netanyahu doesn't much care what happens in the future, as long as his short-term political survival continues.
We'll see if the hostage death protests change anything, since the Israeli public seems like the only entity that can prompt policy change.
The current chaos is a result of UAE and Saudi having a proxy war there. Basically the developed world stepping out to let these countries figure shit out for themselves just led to another group of countries stepping in.
If we look at the havoc of any conflict region (Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia,...) we can see that both engaging in the conflict and staying out of it is tremendously expensive.
Paying Turkey to hold the Syrian refugees back and housing those that passed through costs Europe tens of billions each year. Engagement would have been hard, but one is left to wonder if we shouldn't try harder for own benefit.
Central planning has an extremely bad record in China, especially when it comes to famine.
During the Great Leap forward, the central planners demanded the implementation of new Lysenkoist farming practices that were reportedly a great success and on track to deliver a record harvest. The central planners then dispensed generous daily rations from the granaries, so that everyone could eat their fill, causing farmers to spend less effort on the side crops they had been growing in addition to working on the state farms. The central planners decided that they didn't need quite so many agricultural workers, so they redirected the labor surplus to increasing steel production in order to catch up with the British Empire and overtake the United States. And they also increased food exports to other countries.
Then it all came crashing down: the reports of huge productivity increases were made up, the record harvest was a record low, the surplus was a deficit, tens of millions of people starved. (Steel production did not meaningfully increase either.)
You could argue that it was just a very expensive beginner's mistake because they'd only been doing the central planning thing for about a decade at that point, but then after Mao's death less than two decades later, the first big economic reform was the Household Responsibility System where farmers would decide for themselves what to grow, and the state would just buy it from them.
So I think the verdict from the world's greatest experts in agricultural central planning is clear: don't do it.
I have mentioned this elsewhere as well, no kind of planning saves one from bad economic policy. Post Deng China has a very very good record of bringing prosperity (and China still central planning).
Every country has some central planning, China doesn't have much more central planning today than your average European country. Or do you believe some CCP central planner decided to put in scantily clad anime girls in games from China?
China today is very capitalist, they lack democracy, not capitalism.
I would probably focus on the government-mandated construction of new cities and control over which citizens go to university and where they can live, and that there is a wide spectrum of control between the USA and central planners managing the graphics in video game production.
> control over which citizens go to university and where they can live
I am pretty sure Chinese citizens are allowed to live where they can afford and they are allowed to go to university if they score well enough on the public tests. Just like in Europe.
If you are talking about the random arrests that happens in China, that is due to the undemocratic authoritarian regime and corruption, not due to central planning.
That has already ended, there is no such discrimination any longer, the Hokou now is just a way to track people. Loosening that up is a big contributor to the Chinese miracle.
Edit: Also class based societies are typically not called central planning, it is lack of human rights.
Western nations do similar levels of planning just by deciding how many new houses are allowed to be built, you need a permit for every business to ensure you don't take too much electricity etc, tons of central planning everywhere.
Having worked at a school in China in which a large number of the students were there because their nonlocal hukou didn't entitle them to attend local public schools, it's pretty surreal to see someone claiming that the hukou controls where people are allowed to live. How are you imagining that happens?
> I am pretty sure Chinese citizens are allowed to [...] go to university if they score well enough on the public tests. Just like in Europe.
China implements a comprehensive system of geographic affirmative action to prevent universities from being taken over by southerners. A school participating in this system will publish a plan stating how many students it will enroll on a province-by-province basis. (It's also divided by whether the students will major in science or humanities.)
Once the tests are scored, the students in a particular province are assigned in top-down order of score to the school of their choice, as long as that school's quota for accepting students from that province is not yet full. If your school of choice has filled its quota, technically you can have listed a second-choice school, but this is widely viewed as a disaster for the student. You need to get in to your first-choice school, or take a year off and try again next year.
What's happening in admissions cells for other provinces at the school you apply to is not relevant to you. You can outscore 90% of students who get admitted that way and it won't matter.
And this is not an especially unlikely scenario, because Chinese policy is that schools have much larger quotas for local students than otherwise. I think you need to score at about the 1 in 60 level, top 1.66%, to get into a top Shanghai university from Shanghai; you need to do a lot better than that to get in from outside Shanghai.
Sanity checking that, the admission table for Fudan University in 2018 is here: https://ao.fudan.edu.cn/a7/19/c36333a435993/page.htm . This contains some annotations that I don't understand, but let's say you want to be admitted as a math major. The score threshold if you're coming from Shanghai appears to be 586 ("选考科目999"?); 586 on the Shanghai 2017 gaokao is top 1.1%, or in perfect detail the top 473 people out of 43,103 who took the test. ( https://news.koolearn.com/20170623/1127786.html )
The score threshold if you're coming from Fujian appears to be 680 on the science test. A 680 on the 2017 science test in Fujian means you were one of the top 72 scorers out of 86,368 people who took the test, or the top 0.00083%. ( https://max.book118.com/html/2021/0817/8104004033003135.shtm )
That admissions table for Fudan is divided into two categories, 提前批 ("advance admission"?) and 本一批 ("freshman admission"??). I'm not sure what they mean; I used the 本一批 numbers, which are stricter.
Relevant here, I knew someone who attended a high school affiliated with Fudan (a lot of Chinese universities have these), and she informed me that before taking the gaokao, she had an interview with someone at Fudan, and their approval of her meant that she needed a lower score for admission to Fudan than would otherwise have been necessary. I suspect that this may be related to the difference between "advance admission" and "freshman admission".
(There is also affirmative action given for non-geographic reasons. Sometimes they combine in interesting ways. A friend of mine who was admitted to 上海财经大学 benefited from a program for minorities. She was a Mongol, and would have been given a direct bonus to her gaokao score for that reason, but this program additionally involved (1) attending a special high school in Beijing, and (2) counting as a resident of Beijing, and therefore also benefiting from the geographic scheme, for admissions purposes.)
You do know that Europe and USA has similar systems, just more spots? Local students are prioritized almost everywhere, in Europe it is by country, in USA it is by state.
I'm not sure China is a good example of it working, unless you limit it to the past couple decades and ignore the human rights issues. South Korea may be a decent example, but also has some possible indirect negative effects, given all the protests, urban/rural divide, and social/birthrate issues. Sure they have the whole not starving thing handled, but so do the majority of countries regardless of central planning or not.
Do you realise you are commenting in the context of a massive famine and millions of lives lost? All the countries in Africa and almost any non developed country will gladly take post Mao Chinese leadership and there current status quo over their current lives.
Human rights don't come before people have a certain dignity to live. Trying to preach human rights to a starving population is just .....
Do you realize we're talking about approaches that work? What stages did China and South Korea go through to get to today? The 40s and 50s were pretty bad in either country. Show me a prosperous centralized government that didn't have some ethnic or political cleansing at it's roots.
Or you could not red herring me and supply a proposed solution that could work instead of painting my opposition to central planning as an opposition to fixing famine in an emotional appeal.
>Central planning has a very good record in countries like China
It's got a very terrible track record in China; the government caused tens of millions of its own people to starve to death, and set the economic development back decades. The GDP per capita in Taiwan is more than double that of China currently, but both started at a similar position. If China had had a similar political system to Taiwan, its people's standard of living would be much better.
> If China had had a similar political system to Taiwan, its people's standard of living would be much better.
This is just absurd. Taiwan's entire economy is TSMC + some small things. Copying political systems doesn't get you per capita standard of living.
Yes Mao's China did stupid things but post Mao China has done well economically atleast. They had an enviable job of bringing so many people out of extreme poverty and have done well.
Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well. Main reason why EU won't ever compete with US economically, while being also very rich and actually more populous.
You should also compare it to situation where those countries wouldn't be centrally planned. Not so possible without time machine, so let's leave out measuring of efficiency of such systems. Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed and fell down overnight, literally all those economies experienced massive boosts. I know I've lived through such transition there, hard to describe with words.
With regards to central planning, neither China nor the US is fully in or out of it.
China still has Five Year Plans and some central planning, but Deng Xioping took steps away from it in the 1980s.
There's a mythology the US has no central planning, but it has had a lot of central planning since 1932 and certainly since 1941. Market makers watch for the presidentially nominated Powell to come out and announce the fed funds rate for our fiat currency, and the economy either speeds up or slows down in response. We are typing on a network the government paid BBN and other companies to create, on chips descended from the Fairchild chips that Air Force contracts funded. For various historical reasons, much of the central planning in the US is done via its very well funded military (then well funded military contractors pay think tanks and politicians to go out and say they're not so well funded)
That is not the main reason. Not even close. Here’s a list of main reasons, in no particular order:
- 8 different currencies across EU member states
- 24 languages
- 27 sovereign countries with wildly different economic, social, foreign, military … policies
- laws and regulations are only slowly harmonised across the board
- deep seating historic prejudices (which lead to major wars in the past)
- unfriendly and downright hostile neighbours
- a smaller amount of natural resources to exploit
- etc etc
> Ie when in Eastern Europe communism and central planning failed
I am not saying central planning is a cure all. Trying a bad economic system with any kind of planning will fail.
> Maybe but its doesn't work in democracies well.
Correct, in the absence of strong top down rule (whether democracy or not), social changes are just going to be very slow (this doesn't mean strong top down rule will result in good changes, just that otherwise it is slow). The US needed a civil war to abolish slavery and two world wars for many other social changes (similar to most of western Europe).
I am not saying A or B is better. But without central planning the chances of any big cultural changes in Sudan type countries happening in the next 50 or even 100 years is very remote.
Other countries such as some middle-eastern states and Russia are already intervening in the conflict, often not entirely with the more purest of intentions, or with the interests of the Sudanese people at heart.
So "let the chaos develop on its own" reasons from a situation that simply does not exist.
Because humans feel compassion for their fellow human beings and if we don’t then what’s the point? It doesn’t cost that much to feed a famine to be honest, much less than blowing up the same country when it’s starts hosting a terrorist org that makes you the next great Satan to blow up because you exist?
Maybe that's something. Maybe goodwill would be more effective when laundered through existing family connections. Surely someone in the midst of the famine has family in the US. Maybe support groups should be working directly with family members in wealthier countries, and then resources hand delivered to family members living in impoverished areas who can then distribute the resources through their local networks. Rather than just drop shipping a bunch of boxes full of food or whatever.
Let the heroes be local heroes, not just some abstract alien organization that no one has any social connection to.
This has a diagram showing the funding structure with 5 layers of bureaucracy between donors and the recipients of aid. This organization reduces that to 3 (The “coalition” that owns the website -> financial service providers -> mutual aid societies -> actual people in need).
So I ask again, have these people actually requested your help? How do you know what they actually need? Maybe the best solution is a way to gtfo of Sudan and let it collapse. Maybe they want weapons or chickens. I don’t know!
"Security" as provided by the Pentagon/MIL complex is an evolution of what the Brits used to do to maintain order across the Empire. After the Empire fell, the Americans basically cut and paste that policy, where the goal is mainly about protecting the flows of capital and trade. Colonial legacy and thinking needs a total reboot. Will die out naturally as boomers trained in that kind of thinking pre-globalization die out.
Cultures that were colonized may have other ways of conceptualizing power, for example as multigenerational stewardship. Because I am unable to think outside colonial ways doesn't mean other ways don't exist.
Look at the Brits. The current gen can't play the same games their grand parents did even if they are well programmed and super ambitious. They have to invent new games. And agree mindless ambition is a big issue.
Other countries didn’t exactly stay out of their business - the WW1 allies were demanding unsustainably large war reparations paid in gold, rather than a currency they had control over the supply of. My understanding is that this directly led to their hyperinflation, massive amounts of resentment, and the eventual fall of the Weimar Republic. And everyone knows the rest.
> Completely stay out of their business and let whatever emerges from the chaos develop on its own?
This simply never happens. The developed world is constantly putting its nose into everyone else’s business, and through globalization and industrialization, there’s nothing on this world that the Western economy doesn’t touch.
"episode"? You're casually dismissing the Cultural Revolution to argue for non-interference. I don't think you're making the point you hope to make.
Absolutely somebody should have intervened if possible to halt that madness.
Things got so bad that people actually ate human flesh, not because they were starving, but to demonstrate unquestionable loyalty to the party. Students literally ate their teachers.
I’m not actually sure which universe you’re referring to, in which the West does not constantly try to interfere with China/Russia and their activities.
This is an excellent option if you are willing to accept hundreds of millions of people will die in the process and that it will take a hundred years or more for that to happen. Development does not happen overnight and it takes a toll.
That being said, my impression is that the people leaning left in politics are strongly against non-interventionism. This means it will become a political issue in the countries that can help (or intervene), especially because most of these countries have a very strong left leaning. Sudan will become ammunition in electoral fights in elections, politics will win and interventions will happen just because of that, not because the interventionists care in any way about people of Sudan, they are just simple pawns on their chess board.
I think you’ll find it is the right wing who find themselves invariably attracted to war.
Unless you’re using “the left” to mean “neoliberals”, as seems to be common among the American right, in which case let me refer you to the first paragraph (since the American Democratic Party is by all measures a right wing party).
Interventionism refers to foreign policy. The right wing is also statist, they’d just prefer to use the power of the state to hammer others down rather than lift them up.
Like colonialism? Can't get much more radical than that, and some implementations actually worked pretty well to build up some countries, to the point where those countries are now major players in the world, like India. In others, it failed, either due to the brutality of the colonists or the pride of the colonized.
Could just leave these people alone though.
Many of these peoples have deeply-embedded cultural traits that prohibit them from establishing the standard of living that many of us take for granted. These debilitating cultural traits are likely a product of the harsh climates these people reside in, but only in part. Much more effective cultural traits could be introduced to and imposed on them (colonialism), and in exchange they'd receive the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the regional and even global economy, as well as benefit from mitigations against things like famine.
But maybe we should just leave them alone. Tikkun olam is noble indeed, but many peoples are just completely unreceptive to it, and many adherents of this ideal have no business worrying about other people's trash when their own backyards are a mess.
Would the other approaches be any better, or just a trade off of evils. Sounds like white savior complex to think we can go in and just fix everything.
You suggestion below is getting downvoted which isn't that surprising given the general tilt of HN. But I think there is a related question that's a bit better to ask.
What are the social, political, cultural and intellectual preconditions of a free society? What ideals and values does the culture need to hold before you can have a stable government that in a general way - values liberty for its citizens?
While I'd love to see many parts of Africa and the mideast embrace the enlightenment values that have created our modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc. I don't think those cultural values are in place. And yes, you can shake a finger at your choice of western country and point out the many ways they fall short of those ideals and you'd be right, but I think you're missing the forest for a diseased tree.
So what to do? Provide free resources until they figure it out? Not sure that's worked out. Ignore them? Lecture them?
How do you change a culture that in some ways doesn't want to change?
> What are the social, political, cultural and intellectual preconditions of a free society?
I think societies don't become free before they get prosperous. Having lived in dirt poor societies and posh societies, individual freedoms culturally seem to have a strong tie to prosperity. When you are so inter dependent for survival on your social network, the concept of freedom or individual dignity seems so distant. When everyone has more than enough resources for their own prosperous survival, the individual freedoms come to the forefront.
Another problem is that countries and societies are almost always resistant to change in absence of a large event. It took WW1 to get women voting rights (and several other social changes) in the west for example.
Sadly there is no magic potion to transform societies in absence of large scale events or them lucking out on a good dictator (LKY, Deng)
> How do you change a culture that in some ways doesn't want to change?
I think across history I find only two ways this happens, either very very slowly, or strongly pushed top down by an authority with the power and willingness to enforce.
>I think societies don't become free before they get prosperous.
Put more bluntly: Freedoms don't put food on your table, but killing the bastard next door so you can use his land might. Guess what hungry people will do.
So you are quite right; freedoms only become a concern once the people have most if not all their immediate needs satisfied. People need to enjoy life first before they will start caring about freedoms.
Of course, the vicious cycle is that being poor is expensive. It's not easy to break it and start accumulating societal prosperity.
I am confused. In the past decades free society is not the direction of the governments, things like free speech are regressing a lot in Anglophone countries (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland) and even Germany. Are you talking about free society in terms of classical liberalism or modern governments that look more like China? Because Europe and down under are going in the direction of China, not freedom. So what do you want to see in Sudan, a China-like "democracy" or an US-style with 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments?
One can easily find examples in all countries. These countries do not have a free speech right in their Constitutions, for example, and no plans to include it.
But that’s good. In cases where your freedom to say whatever you want is used to incite hatred and abuse of others, this freedom is restricted by society. I would say that’s a better system than the US.
Canada does indeed have free speech (expression) in its constitution.
There are limits to speech, but that is true in every country, including the USA (if you dont believe me, try yelling "i have a bomb" in an american airport and see what happens next)
Which abuses specificly do you think section 33 enabled between 2020 to 2022?
Or if its all section 1, do you feel that any country at all has freedom of speech? I can't think of any country that doesn't have something equivalent to section 1, even if only implicitly. Different countries draw the line somewhat differently, but there are none that dont have some sort of similar limited limits to freedom of speech.
For the 2020-2022 situation, I see Section 1 as the problem.
But Quebec, for example, has repeatedly invoked Section 33 over the years, including for legislation limiting expression in non-French languages, among other matters.
Any country that imposes limits on expression simply doesn't have free expression. That would include Canada and the US, and like you say, probably most every other country.
As a Canadian, I can't honestly claim to have constitutionally-protected free expression when I know I could be prosecuted merely for expressing certain ideas.
> What do you mean by free speech is regressing in anglophone countries? That seems like a weird opinion to have? Do you have a particular example?
In the US at least, I'd say for most of the existence of the web, the prevalent idea was that the best way to counter 'bad' speech was more speech.
The concern over 'misinformation' has resulted in a lot of people, whom previously had advocated for unrestricted speech, calling for regulation or removal of section 230.
Like many Zeitgeist trends, it is difficult to measure concretely and objectively, especially if it hasn't been tracked in the past. Especially when people's understanding of what constitutes "free" speech shifts over time.
My take is that we should leave them alone and try to keep others from meddling. They have to figure this out on their own. The idea that European enlightenment values are the only path to success is part of the problem though: they have a different culture and success will look different for them than it does for us. Look at China, Japan and other successful Asian countries: they are each different and it’s hard for people of European cultures to judge them without judging them for not being European enough. They have to evolve out of the aftermath of imperialism just like Europe did after the Roman Empire collapsed. We were able to do it on our own and thinking they need us to help them is pretty demeaning IMO.
Your take sounds reasonable and might be the best idea, but it means change will be very very slow (if at all) and millions of lives will be lost to famine and civil wars.
> China, Japan and other successful Asian countries:
Japan was kinda occupied by the Americans post WW2 and had an American dictated constitution, with a very American influenced society and everything.
The Chinese after years of socialism copied western capitalism (and lots of other things) with a very strong government being the only difference. And before that change they too kept having their share of extreme poverty and famines.
> just like Europe did after the Roman Empire collapsed.
Sadly this might mean waiting for a millennia which might have an unacceptable cost.
> We were able to do it on our own and thinking they need us to help them is pretty demeaning IMO.
Yes but in a millennia in which rest of the world made much less industrial progress than happens in less than a century now.
I have no solutions in mind here. Just highlighting some points to think about.
> While I'd love to see many parts of Africa and the mideast embrace the enlightenment values that have created our modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc. I don't think those cultural values are in place.
Anyone who knows the history of the past decades and centuries of western interaction with the Middle East and Africa knows what a laugh this is.
The US is currently paying Egypt's current rulers billions a year to prevent and violently crack down on anyone who wants "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state". I watched former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd question whether it was wise for Obama to allow the Arab Spring to push out the violent dictator Mubarak. Speaking of capability for "enlightenment values" - the citizens risk their bodies and lives to go out in the street and fight for free elections and such, while the US arms the dictator fighting against those values.
And what would a free Egypt do? It certainly would not be as cooperative of these people "making aliyah" and then slaughtering Palestinians on Egypt's border in Gaza, that's for sure.
As you mention Africa, I think back to when I watched Reagan cooperating with the apartheid South African government, again fighting against those who wanted "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state, etc."
I could go on and on over the past decades - speaking of rule of law and all of that, I won't even go into what Israel is doing right now - they're showing Israeli soldiers raping Palestinians on Israeli TV now (and on Twitter too, for now at least) - nor will I go.into the US support of all of this.
Yeah, the Muslim Brotherhood was such a swell brand, just tell the Copts that. Transnational Islamism doesn't make any trouble either. And to be frank, the US didn't want communism to take over after apartheid. One Mugabe was bad enough, and an even more badly mismanaged SA would be a disaster. On all issues you mention, the choices were often unpleasant, but always had their reasons.
So what you're saying is the West wanted (and funded and armed) tough governments that kept a lid on things as opposed to "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state".
People can be on your side or not, but at least you are rooted in the real world and actual history.
Egypt elected the Muslim Brotherhood into power. There's nothing about the Muslim Brotherhood pertaining to "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state".
Better to deal with a secular dictator than an elected religious extremist. Elected Islamists always crap on democracy once they're elected.
> There's nothing about the Muslim Brotherhood pertaining to "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties..."...Better to deal with a secular dictator
The Muslim Brotherhood has no appreciation for multiple political parties in Egypt. Nor do you, as you are openly supportive of a dictatorship.
You and yyyk both support my point - the West does not support for Egypt what the original poster called "modern governments built around such ideals as individual rights, rule of law, checks and balances, multiple political parties, free speech, independent court systems, a secular state".
Sudan is in a civil war that is being used as a proxy war by Iran, UAE, Egypt, Saudi, Ethiopia, and other regional states is NOT caused by issues with donors
There are Russian/Wagner troops present and most likely a USSOF detachment as well, but the actual enablement, training, and impetus is driven by regional states now.
The era of "superpower" is over, and there are multiple proxy wars now like this (Syrian Civil War, Yemeni Civil War, Ethiopian Civil War, Myanmar Civil War, Libyan Civil War, etc)
Bring back colonization for limited amount of time ie 50years. During that time establish government, educational, civil structures and start the economy. Re-educate the society, instill the values of high-trust society. Pull out of the country gradually replacing foreigners with local population. The name 'colonization' might evoke some sentiments, but we can call this some other name.
Just for a context here: I actually live in almost-third-world country. Thankfully no famine and loss of live but extremely dysfunctional state and society and with educational system collapsing - probably no future. My countrymen, we, could not govern ourselves. I wish this country was occupied and someone built better society!
I am from a third-world country that has its own set of problems. To believe that an outside party will come in a build a "better society" for the inhabitants papers over recent history and is almost comical.
"we could not govern ourselves" really belies how young many countries are and the unique challenges they face w.r.t. interference from developed nations. Nation building takes _time_ and I would implore you to think about the historical events that have shaped your nation.
Not even pretending to make a rational reply here, but I've seen a lot of despicable stuff on the internet and this comment may be the one that made me the angriest. I really hope this is some sort of satire because my blood is about to evaporate. Jesus fucking Christ
I'm from a dysfunctional third-world country, too (Nigeria), and I agree with the GP. Our population lacks the ability to cooperate for the greater good. Politics here is insanely tribal and corrupt. We're heading for the tatters, except something miraculous happens.
If you've never lived in a poor, corrupt, dysfunctional place, you'll not understand how bad life is that'll make someone wish to be occupied.
You should spend a few years in a third world country. Your righteous liberal rage will evaporate as quickly as your feeling of safety (which you take for granted).
Because colonists are totally expected to do a good job this time, not just pillaging resources, setting new apartheid systems, generating even greater famines like what UK did in India and doubling down on the lazy job of drawing straight line borders not taking in consideration the human gropings in the land, what generated a lot of the current conflicts, by splitting affine people in different countries and bunching together rival groups under the same borders. As example of colonist promoted famine, if the one currently unfolding in Gaza not enough, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
The previous colonial/imperial regime of the Mughal Empire was just as much a burden on the population.
The main reason India is able to feed its population today is the green revolution post WW2, especially the work of Dr. Swaminathan in India. Without it I think we would still see massive famines in India.
Won't work. Loyalties are family, village, tribe, city, etc. There is no "State loyalty" in these countries to build democratic institutions on. One group will take power and then use that power to benefit their group. Sudan is a tribal war in everything but name. I think the best you can hope for is a beneficent dictator.
In short term if you want to stop this particular war make UAE and Egypt hurt as they are funding the groups.
Wasn't that basically what Ian Smith suggested for Rhodesia? His argument was that the native Africans didn't have the education level or the experience required to run a "civil" society. So the white Rhodesians should do it for a number of years. I believe his target was the late 1980s, after which everyone would have the same rights.
Hard to say if it would have worked, Ian Smiths comments was mostly made after Mugabe took over, so it was never tested if it would work, or if Smith was even sincere in his statements.
That is, to some extent, what happened in South Africa. Of course, the whites didn't give power over easily, and the road since has not been smooth. There's no reason to think the Rhodesians would have handed it over any easier, when the time came.
South Africa today is simultaneously a troubled place and yet doing well compared to many of its peers. Violent crime is very high, for example, but similar to 19th/early 20th century USA.
We didn't do what throwaway3521 said, though. We tried to do it "on the cheap", just occupying, not actually transforming the society, and not staying for 50 years.
For context: We occupied Japan for, what, 12 years? We technically occupied Germany longer, but practically it was about the same (I think - from memory and not researched). In that time, we transformed them from violent, racially superior, conquer-the-world militarists to more-or-less western-values democracies. But we put a lot of people in there, and we controlled every aspect of their society.
Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to do it with half-measures rather than a complete rebuild. And it failed.
I would assume a more important factor was that Germany and Japan were both very organized, successful industrialized societies long before facing their respective downfalls in the wars. Iraq and Afghanistan both had a very, very different starting position and it would be unreasonable to expect a similar outcome.
Other relevant context includes the fact that it was actually West Germany, with the East providing strong incentives to both the US and the West Germans to make it work, and that this was not the first attempt to turn the successful, industrialized and well educated Germany into a democracy with peaceful relations with its neighbours...
One thing to consider is that you have to have very functional central government to be able to execute types of wars of conquest that likes of them and USA did... So simply moderating them is often sufficient to keep stability.
For context, one of those events started in 1945, and one in 2003.
One started because we won a decisive war against the nation, in the other we invaded the country on a flimsy excuse.
We have entirely different cultures, times, mores, media landscapes, and different series of occupations, modern weaponry, 4th generation warefare (post vietnam) tactics, the list goes on.
Why would "oh we didn't waste enough money occupying a country that we gained little from" be the right choice? How do we magically know that?
While I don't agree with the parent comment, 20 years is just nowhere enough for his strategy. Mullah Omar himself was alive for almost half of those. Something like 50 years where the old regime leaders completely vanish can only work. Again I am not saying whether it is practical or whether it is even a good idea at all.
I find this idea perplexing. Even if you were to put emotions and politics aside, colonization doesn’t have a very good track record for the colonized people.
I am not advocating for colonisation, but most of human history has no good track record for the ruled people. Colonisation was able to uproot some very bad social evils by fiat which would be just very hard to remove in a democratic society (for good or bad). Colonisation might be a very bad idea maybe even the worst, but when no solution is working and none in sight, people might want to throw anything they can on the table and restart debating all approaches.
I think the parent comment has shared their experience which makes them think this idea might be better than status quo in their country.
If the west keeps allowing the best people from third world countries to immigrate, it’s removing the business, political and social leaders who have the potential to improve their country.
Come to the west, get trained and return home and build something better. Doctors and engineers driving a cab in New York is so broken.
Doctors and engineers drive a cab in New York because, for them, it's better than home.
It's broken, all right, but what's broken is "home", not the west. (All right, the west is broken too, but in this situation the brokenness of the west is not the primary issue.) And they didn't that they could fix "home", so they left, and for the most part they aren't interested in going back and trying to fix it. They probably have a better perception of how hard it would be to fix than we do.
I understand why they do it, but I also understand it’s short sighted for both nations.
Best to ensure developing nations have their best talent to DEVELOP the nation rather to deprive them of the best people and hinder development and improvement. You take out the best people and what’s left, poverty, corruption and conflict that forces more people to leave and requires more outside aid.
> I suspect all the aid and help over the decades has really just prolonged things
Can you be more specific about the counterfactual? I’m assuming you’re not imagining that the country’s population would have just fallen to 0 absent aid, but I can’t figure out how you’re so sure things would have been better run
I didn’t write the comment you replied to but often what happens is that politicians in Wealthy Country send aid to Poor Country so they can say they did something. The aid often props up the Baddies in Poor Country and doesn’t reach the people who need it most.
The Dictator’s Handbook covers this topic I think.
Treating “Sudan” as an actual entity to be helped. Consider it has failed as a political concept (the state of Sudan) and allow the people that inhabit it figure out what the borders and political entities actually are. By delivering aid to Sudan and treating it like a real entity you only prolong suffering in the region as factions fight over control of it.
You know the deal about unnatural borders people keep saying? This is actually true regarding Sudan. South Sudan didn't want to be a part and didn't get its autonomy, and Darfur was internal colonialism in all but name. Sudan had to create a big military sector and militias to try to keep them, with the result of said militias later turning on each other.
I think ultimately pink washing Israeli war crimes and colonisation with appeals to open lesbianism on the streets of Tel Aviv is a dead end. The point is in the end that human rights are inalienable and not transactional. You don't get to treat the Sudanese worse because they're crap on gay rights and nor should we give Israelis an easier time because they're better on gay rights. How many gay marriages in Tel Aviv does it take to cancel out an ethnic cleansing in the West Bank? It's just stupid.
The Nile. basically everyone lives within walking distance of the river, and it very clearly brings life.
When I was there it was incredible to see all the (basic) farming and houses and people living in the river valley, and less than 5km away have nothing but blowing sand for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
> Did the famine in Sudan suddenly get worse, or do social media networks not properly represent world issues?
This thread is going nowhere pretty. But if you want an honest answer to this, the answer is obviously no social networks don’t properly represent world issues.
There are a myriad of reasons for this in the case of the Gaza famine some legitimate and some illegitimate, but one I would call fairly legitimate is that the US provides vast support to one side of the conflict as an ally so it is very natural for it to be a hotter talking point than the famine in Sudan. People feel they are complicit in what happens in Gaza.
This is flame bait: the sentence before the one you replied to clearly explains why they wouldn’t - both are tragedies, but the U.S. doesn’t give military support to Hamas or intervene to shield them from repercussions.
Gaza is not just about the suffering but also the fact that the suffering is directly caused by a rich Western nation enabled by all other rich Western nations.
As far as I can tell the US is not supplying the army of Sudan with billions of cash, munition, weapons and unconditionally political backing.
I seriously doubt the indirect support for the war in Yemen or in Sudan through proxies even comes close to the direct support for Israel.
Also please dont dismiss opposing views as irrelevant copy pastas. Im not blind to your argument either. If you have sources that say the level of support is similar after all ill consider them.
> In the five years before the war, U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia amounted to $3 billion; between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. agreed to sell over $64.1 billion worth of weapons to Riyadh, averaging $10.7 billion per year. Sales to other belligerents in the war, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), also rose exponentially.
Not sure about the quality of these sources, but these seem to not be complete garbage and they suggest at least comparable volumes of weapons export.
The logical implication of your reasoning is that if the U.S. were to drop 5 bombs on the people of Sudan, that killed a few dozen people, US involvement would be even more direct and therefore that would make protesting the deaths of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of people morally justified?
As long as the US does not drop bombs, however, it’s completely moral to ignore these deaths altogether?
Labelling support for one as "indirect" and the other as "direct" is begging the question via rhetorical framing. The Saudis wouldn't have a functioning military if it wasn't for US support, they receive more weapons as a percentage of their arms from the US than Israel does.
I don't want to split hairs and do bean counting. But the level of passion surrounding the war in Gaza and the level of detachment surrounding the war in Yemen is a contrast that can't be explained by your hypothesis. There's a mental fixation and a level of moralizing that tells me other factors are more salient.
You're drastically underselling your point: the US didn't just passively sell arms to the Saudis—US foreign policy deliberately supported their bombing campaign in Yemen, since the Houthi group is a common enemy to both (and to most of the world, really). It was only very late into the Saudi atrocities that the US government started to balk—late, because, as is our topic, US domestic media narratives entirely ignored the civilian consequences of what the Saudis did in Yemen.
There's an entire Wiki entry devoted to this question,
(It might be clarifying to remember that the start of this conflict, the Saudis weren't the aggressors. The Houthis (at least from the US PoV) were the aggressors. The US (and others) viewed this as a defensive war against the Houthi rebellion, in which war the Saudis were allies and partners in defending the legitimate Yemeni government against a violent, Iran-backed, terroristic insurgency. This was the context in which the US sided with the Saudi military).
The famine in Gaza generates a lot of outrage because there was a line of trucks loaded with food rotting outside, as there is an apartheid system in place actively withholding food to generate said famine. We have even instances were soldiers were caught in camera gunning down starving people trying to get food, like the infamous flour massacre: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_massacre
>The famine in Gaza generates a lot of outrage because there was a line of trucks loaded with food rotting outside, as there is an apartheid system in place actively withholding food to generate said famine.
That sounds... pretty similar to what's happening in Sudan? From the OP:
>[...] Some of the shortage is down to theft and damage by the RSF and other militias. But much blame lies also with the SAF, which is loth to allow food into areas, including most of Darfur, under the control of the RSF.
>A single convoy of aid trucks can wait six weeks or more in Port Sudan to be cleared by the SAF for onward travel. Even then, almost all of it goes to SAF-controlled areas. Only a tiny fraction has reached Darfur. [...]
> Why was the famine in Gaza so hot when Sudan's famine is two orders of magnitude worse?
The proclamation by UN is regarding a specific refugee camp (Zamzam) that doesn't have any governance, not Sudan as a whole. Gaza has governance, so any famine in Gaza would be announced by the government there, not UN, as far as I understand things.
No, what happened was that the UN made much noise about a famine in Gaza without actually declaring a famine. This went on from the beginning of the war in October (before Israeli ground operations began) until about April or maybe May. Then, an investigation was conducted, found no famine, and declared how important it is to prevent famine.
It wasn't "noise", it was perfectly legitimate concern about the intentional deprivation of food and other essential supplies by the occupying forces.
Per the precious words of their so-called Defense Minister:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba.
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.
And of their National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir:
As long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands - the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.
Whether the situation ultimately met the technical definition of "famine" or not by the time Biden successfully twisted Netanyahu's arm to compel the establishment some form of humanitarian aid to flow into the territory -- is basically a matter of splitting hairs.
Yes the situation in Sudan got worse so that it exceeded the situation in Gaza. It has been deteriorating for many months since April 2023.
The collapse of the Sudan is not directly being enflamed directly by any western power compared to the Gaza collapse. So the Sudan conflict is less interesting to us.
The Sudan collapse is being enflamed by regional powers where the UAE is funding the Janjaweed (who are officially declared a g*nocidal outfit) whereas the Sudan government actual is being supported by Iran.
The UAE might be considered a proxy for the US though but this kind of indirection makes the conflict too complicated talk about in the general media i guess.
Analysts have spoken about the situation in Sudan over time and the Risks. The talk of a real critical famine being in effect is recent.
Just to be clear the famine is deliberately being caused by occupying g*nocidal Janjaweed army (the RSF), they are besieging towns across the region destroy to prevent food production, blocking supplies and trade.
Famine is always deliberate and caused by military and political decisions.
UAE 100% will get permission (if not direction) from state department! before they start throwing arms (bought from the US) into middle eastern conflicts
It’s just that my ability and will to do anything more than care is lacking.
Presumably if I cared enough I’d donate to some charity, but I feel fixing this kind of stuff is why we have governments with humanitarian aid programmes (which I happily pay for through taxes), which should theoretically be a thousand times more effective.
I reiterate that I can't care because my capacity to do so is limited:
* First priority is caring for myself. I can't care for anyone if I don't.
* Next is immediate family.
* Then it's my closest friends.
* Followed by my other friends and extended/distant family.
* After that are my professional connections: Co-workers, bosses, subordinates, clients, suppliers, and so on. They are who I derive a living from.
* Now I get to strangers I happen to meet during my life. This is actually an important group as, indeed, most if not all friendships, professional connections, and even family originate here.
* Finally, after all that, I can maybe care about strangers I have not met and will never meet during my life.
I'm sorry, my damns ran dry somewhere in "strangers in my life" before I got through them and I think that's actually being generous. I don't have any left for someone on the other god damn side of the world who is literally meaningless to me.
It’s also worth noting that many times we simply cannot do anything about it. Gaza does not have a food shortage because there are huge amounts of aid ready to be distributed, it’s because there’s a hot war and the Israeli government strictly controls access. Someone like Jeff Bezos could give the Red Cross a billion dollars and it wouldn’t matter unless that came with something only governments can arrange like a cease fire or military escort.
One part of the answer is it's taken decades of organizing to get this much attention for Palestine and Gaza, throughout which a bad situation has gotten steadily worse.
When people bring this up, why does it always seem to be to suggest we should not care about anything, instead of to wonder how we can build more action (just attention alone does not do anything) on more disasters?
This is a good point. I try to check out Wikipedia's league tables[0] now and again to put things in perspective.
Of course raw death toll isn't the only way to judge the newsworthiness of a story, but it is illumiating how things (presumably via trad media, social media, psyops) either enter public conciousness or don't.
Particularly I find it absurd how little I hear about the Yemeni civil war.
This is far too strong a claim to make without support. You have no evidence of that and a huge unquestioned assumption that it’s impossible to have criticism of Israel decoupled from anti-Jewish sentiment, which would need at the very least to account for the many Jews whose opposition to what’s happened in Gaza is rooted in their faith. Given that Netanyahu has consistently had roughly ⅔ of Israelis disapproving of his decisions, I would especially need you to show your work explaining how your claim is compatible with the observable data.
Before the 2020 election, troll farms controlled by the Internet Research Agency ran almost half of the largest BLM and conservative Christian Facebook groups in America, serving impressions to more than 140 million per month.
Something similar is happening here. The goal being twofold, to create divisions and infighting within the rival, and to undermine the rival's soft power on the world stage.
The formula is displaying an emotional trauma inducing anecdote on mass media coupled with a narrative suggesting action that must be taken to prevent future trauma to the viewer, and then inflicting that trauma and followup narrative repeatedly that as many times as possible through all available media channels. There are hundred of thousands of things that occur on a daily basis all over the world that would induce trauma by viewing or even knowing about them, but if you own TikTok, you can show violent civilian deaths in Gaza instead of Xinjiang prison camps, or Sudan or wherever.
This formula can switch people from fearing to go outside to rioting in the streets in a weekend with enough media power. Anyone who explains what's going on with data and statistics, and doesn't almost involuntarily go along with the trauma conditioning, for better or for worse, is considered to be defective emotionally and an outcast.
> This kind of sensational event is what social media was designed for
I agree with you!
It's much harder to do viral tictoks with harmed israelis, because they built a marvelous defense system, so palestinian rockets (or terrorists) just don't get through.
I feel like that’s a bit like saying it’s fine for an adult to kick a kid. The kid was asking for it after all, even if the adult was never in any danger.
So you say that palestinians as a society are politically incapacitated like kids, and should be governed by some external authority until their society matures enough to self-govern?
> Child protective services (CPS) is the name of an agency responsible for providing child protection
> Child
(c) wiki
Well, if you compare them to kids, doesn't it mean that they don't have the right of self-governance, as kids don't have full legal rights/responsibilities?
Resolutions to the conflicts Israel has with its neighbors are complicated for many reasons. Lasting peace requires a willingness to compromise and to stick to agreements made, which is extremely difficult politically. The moral questions are not that difficult. Do Jewish and Palestinian people have a right to live in their holy land? Yes. Do they have the right to unlawfully occupy land, murder or terrorize or torture their neighbors? No.
You can't prove "who shot first" because the answer depends entirely on where history starts. People who want to argue about unanswerable questions like these don't want peace. They just seek justifications for further bloodshed. The actual moral questions are not difficult if you believe a Palestinian life is worth as much as any other life.
Israel has “new historians”, legit society polarisation due to its conduct and handling of the conflict, and over 500.000 demonstrations against Netanyahu’s demonic government.
What do Palestinians have that shows their will to believe an Israeli life is worth as much as any other life? (and Palestinian lives also, especially their children’s)
I applaud your good-fauth engagement with GP. Honestly I thought that calling conflict in the middle east "black and white" had to be either subtle humour or outright trolling.
It's been going on ever since at least Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been warring over who controls the Holy Land. Remember the Crusades? Or the Holocaust?
I'm not sure if it's even worth going all the way back to ancient Egypt's involvement even further back seeing as there's so much on the dinner table already.
> They just want to permanently make life of people in Gaza - at least for a generation - a living hell to teach them a lesson to never try Oct. 7 again.
Nothing fair about that. Most of the people suffering had nothing to do with the events they're being punished for.
Most Americans supported or voted for presidents that bombed innocent people. Does that mean Americans therefore “deserved” 9/11? According to your moral logic any action against American civilians is tragically justified retaliation for their support of warmongering US presidents. It’s surprising how easily people justify bombing others when they would never apply those standards to themselves.
American civvies have a role and blame in everything America does since we vote for our President and Congress, regardless which way anyone votes (or doesn't vote). The price for our freedom and power is responsibility.
So yes: 9/11 was quite deserved in the sense that we poke(d) our dirty noses in other peoples' (Middle East's) business. This is separate from civvies getting caught in the crossfire, which is tragic regardless of blame; there is a reason deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime.
For another example: Germans who ultimately voted for Hitler and the Nazi party and thus played a role in the Holocaust, among many other travesties.
Consider reading what you just wrote, perhaps looking in the mirror, and reevaluating your thought process. Even for Hacker News I expect better than this.
I am annoyed and bored by this rhetoric, when something doesn't suit you, try to attack, the truth is you're starving and bombing people and journalists for "teaching them for next time", there's no look in the mirror, you're criminals. The journalists supported Hamas too?
I realize that many commenters have been egregiously breaking HN's guidelines in this thread, but calling for expulsion of populations is unacceptable. We ban accounts that post such things. No more of this, please.
We've had to warn you many times over the years not to post flamewar comments to HN but this is a degree of shocking I wouldn't have expected from you or any other longstanding HN user.
There was a total blockade of all food. They waited until the stockpiles were down to zero and people started dying, then they let more food in.
Be wary of "insufficient evidence", because there are few people on the ground to collect evidence. The total number of deaths has been fixed at "about 40,000" since about March, because the institution that was counting the deaths got destroyed and never released a new count.
They have been independent since 1956. Other (majority non-European) British colonies/protectorates as diverse as Singapore (ind. 1965), Belize (ind. 1981), India (ind. 1947) and UAE (ind. 1971) managed to build peaceful societies.
We need to recognize that the people of countries like Sudan are not children who don't know any better, contrary to European leftists' views. They are fully functioning adults who made a series of choices that led to the present situation.
On gaining independence in 1956 Sudan endured two civil wars with up to a million deaths in the first civil war and between one and two million deaths in the second civil war.
Colonial governments like the British often (almost always) left a mess behind them.
Comparing Sudan to Singapore, India and the UAE is comical. This level of analysis on HackerNews, that ignores the realities of how different countries evolve / are influenced is why we cannot have an honest conversation.
Please enlighten us why it's comical. Economically, Sudan was richer per capita than India in 1960 and even as recently as 2017 [1][2]. It had, and still has, a more homogeneous population ethnically and linguistically. Yet India manages to keep things mostly calm while Sudan can't.
Not relevant as the partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 which created the constitutions. The Act was agreed upon by the legislature representatives of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh community with Lord Mountbatten.
The point stands that decolonisation was a mess and the colonisers played a large part in it.
I think the point is in spite of decolonization being orders of magnitude more messy countries like India have established fully functioning peaceful societies.
Every single piece of land on Earth has been attacked and colonized at least once. Why have some peoples managed to do well and others so bad? I think there's something more to learn.
It's the British Isles. Scotland joined England in the United Kingdom.
This is just one where you're clearly incorrect.
Colonialism developed as a concept describing European colonial empires of the modern era, which spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century.
That kills off almost all of your examples.
That people in the comments aren't even taking the time to check the definition of terms is sad. The statements pro colonialism reek of racism and white supremacy.
> Colonialism developed as a concept describing European colonial empires of the modern era, which spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century.
The concept was developed from European colonial empires, but it describes more than just them.
The way Muslims invaded Portugal and Spain, established their strongholds, exploited native population and maintained their rule for several centuries until kicked out fits the same mold, as do countless other examples, from Northern Crusades a thousand years ago to Soviet Union's domination of Central and Eastern Europe just a few decades ago.
If you think that European nations do not have a long history of being invaded by foreigners, seeing their land taken away and given to settlers while being made inferior and exploited, then you are very wrong and I encourage you to pick up a history book on any smaller European nation.
The British Isles is a geographic term. It includes(&always has) Ireland given that Ireland is a part of the British Isles but has never been part of Great Britain (the land mass).
The United Kingdom you refer to has a fuller name - "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" (past) replaced by "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) (present).
I assume you're familiar enough with history to recognise that Ireland(landmass/people/culture) was a colony of the British (with or without your pedantry)?
I live in the former Roman province of Hispania. We were at least colonized by Romans, then by Saxons and then by Arabs.
The Arab imperialists left here 500 years ago.
If I were to live further to the East in many of today’s EU/European countries, I could very well live in places where Ottoman imperialists left only 100 years ago.
Sudan is now free of imperialists for 70 years. Only 30 years less than countries like Greece, Slovenia, Croatia and a few others in Europe.
The Celts were colonized by Romans and then colonized again by Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans. Western Slavs, Balts, and Estonians were colonized by Germans. Parts of Balkans (esp. Greece) were colonized by the Ottomans.
Nationalism did lot in this regard. But really when you consider it Ukraine is just continuation of European nations conquering lands from each other. Which has been going on for well probably before Romans...
Are you perhaps assuming they have no chance of learning to govern themselves peacefully?
I don't subscribe to this fixed mindset. I believe all peoples can learn to do well. It's hard, but possible. So the lack of conolialism isn't the answer, but lack of learning.
Perhaps they can, but there’s 0 evidence for it. Regardless my point was that they have had tremendous suffering since being decolonized. Endless conflict with external meddling from all over. I suspect that had they been under colonial rule since then they’d have significantly less suffering and stable. But what can you do because that ship sailed.
They’ve had endless civil war essentially for 70 years. Maybe “Sudan” isn’t a real place and the people inhabiting those lands need to sort it out and figure out who rules what. The UN should stop recognizing Sudan as a state as it’s obviously failed. Remove itself from the region and let the people there figure out borders. Rip the Bandai’s off instead of prolonging this idea of Sudan that obviously isn’t real.
People need to be ruled to maintain order. The alternative is chaos which leads to suffering until order is restored. The colonists ruled competently and maintained order even if your social justice reflex doesn’t feel good about it. What they left, decolonization, is a soft colonization from afar, managed by entities with no skin in it. This is why it’s disorderly and chaos reigns and suffering is a way of life for the people of those lands.
Colonization is preferable to that. However, because that’s not a palatable form of social order today the next best thing is complete abandonment and true self determination to discover where the borders are and who rules them. This will be bloody, yes, but have an outcome that leads to order if not tampered with. That’s preferable to the last 70 years.
Just a reminder that all famine is political. The world, as a whole, produces more than it consumes. Famine is a political willingness to let certain people starve and die. It could be one internal group in a country willing to starve another. It could be entities external to the country willing to let it starve.
Functionally, famine is little different to death squads.
Further to this, we have a sanitized term in the modern era for intentionally starving people to death. It's called "economic sanctions" [1].
It's odd how many people pay attention to a few big crises -- Ukraine, Gaza, etc -- when there are many other crises which are, by most measures, more important.
For instance, current major crises are ongoing in (per Wikipedia) the DRC, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Yemen, Sudan (of course), the Sahel, Somalia, Syria, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Haiti, and South Sudan -- but most of those are rarely mentioned in the media.
The Gaza war is of course a major humanitarian crisis, but it's not as important as many of the other things. All of Gaza, for instance, has around 2 million people; the whole of Palestine has a population of under 6 million. Assuming a horrific genocide with a death rate of 100 percent, the number of deaths is still less than the optimistic scenario in Sudan of 6 million excess deaths. I wouldn't be surprised if other regions (the Sahel, Yemen, Nigeria, the DRC and Ethiopia, in rough order of likelihood) also likely have expected number of deaths greater than the population of Palestine; the first two because of major crises, the last three because of crises but also because they have so many people (all over 100 million).
I get why Ukraine gets more attention than Somalia (racism), but why would Gaza get more attention than, say, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Syria? All are somewhat Middle Eastern, after all, so it would be hard for racism to be as much of a factor, if at all.
Ukraine gets attention because it's happening in Europe, next to NATO countries, with nuclear weapons lurking in the shadows, and it happened as a result of filthy policy decisions by four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council in the 1990s and now. Nothing remotely related to 'racism'.
And turn this around: how much attention is Somalia, or Sudan, getting on the African continent? Do events in either of those two countries make it to national headlines?
Partly because it's happening in Europe and the nuclear context, yes.
But not simply because of that. It gets attention because the nature of the aggression is extremely clear, and highly unusual (in its brazenness and openness); and due to the clear and present threat to the (at least approximately) rule-based world order that human beings have been trying to keep in place since 1945. And it "happened" because the regime currently installed in the aggressor country chose to take the action that it did (and falsely calculated that the invasion would be a brilliant success, and face very little effective resistance).
Not because of anything that went down in the 1990s.
Nothing remotely related to 'racism'.
On the contrary -- this decision was intimately tied to Putin's racist conception of Ukrainians as a people (and his supremacist views of his own people, or what he believes to be "his" people anyway). This is eminently clear from his own statements and numerous other indications.
If you wish to explore this topic further, then I invite you to consider the writings of e.g. Terrell Jermaine Starr:
However you choose to ignore these indications and the openly available history of the region, and build your narratives accordingly -- that's up to you.
I think it's because the Russia vs Ukraine is more consequential for the country you live in as the outcome could cause a switch to multi polar world.
As for Gaza, well it's good old fashioned anti semitism. People love to hate the Jews. It's shown in the double standards, e.g. the insane levels to which Israel has gone to reduce collateral damage that no other country has ever tried to do vs an enemy that deliberately seeks to increase collateral damage in both targeting Israeli citizens and using it's own citizens in ways that ensure their deaths.
> why would Gaza get more attention than, say, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Syria? All are somewhat Middle Eastern, after all, so it would be hard for racism to be as much of a factor, if at all.
The Palestinian crisis has always gotten more attention in the US because of Israel's close political relationship with the US and Jews having a strong cultural influence in the US especially since WW2. It's similar to the reason why almost no one in the US knows about the Nazi's oppression and genocide of the Roma.
Also, tragically, the US has never cared about how many people die in Africa. We're so used to hearing about "hundreds of thousands dying of X" in Africa that we're completely desensitized to it, whereas one American hostage dying will be major headlines for weeks.
I don't know who we is but an enormous amount of aid makes it from US to Africa so I don't know how you get by saying we don't care, it's merely not news.
The stuff that makes news is that stuff that people care about (papers report on what matters to their readers). So news coverage acts as a pretty good proxy for either how important or interesting a matter is to a population.
~60% of Ethiopia's population have a cell phone contract. Given how among the poorer parts of society, only one person in a family has one, that's near 100% penetration.
Correct. I should have expressed myself better. They have phones but don't use it to post on internet. 80% of the population don't have internet, and of those that have it, only 5,5% use social media. This is the people that could be recording videos and sending it to the world.
