Plenty of room inside the African Malthusia express
It is on record that none of the contributors to this blog have much time for recently elected French President Emmnuel Macron. We have dubbed the former Goldman Sachs executive a ‘grandmotherfucker’ and dismissed him as just another globalist appartchik who will do the bidding of the faceless people who run the financial cartels. However we should always give credit where it is due and, fair play to the lad, he is the first European leader to publicly utter the truth about why the problems of that dysfunctional continent, Africa, are insoluble.
Macron has been criticised for claiming Africa’s perpetual humanitarian crisis is due to ‘civilizational problems’ and women in tribal societies having “seven or eight children” hampering social and economic development in African nations.
Addressing a session of the the G20 summit, the French President was questioned by a reporter from former French colony Ivory Coast on the possibility of implementing a policy like America’s Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after the Second World War to kick start economic development in African nations.
“The problems Africa faces today are completely different {to those of Europe after World War Two] and are civilizational”, Mr Macron told the journalist. “What are the problems?” he went on. “Failed states, tribalism and extremely difficult demographic transitions.”
Only through by a more rigorous form of governance, a fight against corruption, a fight for rule of law, a successful demographic transition when countries today have seven or eight children per woman, can change be achieved,” Mr Macron added. “At the moment, spending billions of Euros outright would stablise nothing. So the transformation plan that we have to conduct together must be developed according to African interests by and with African leaders.”
In a far reaching reply, Mr Macron also identified issues such as Islamist terrorism, drugs and weapons trafficking and human trafficking.
He said that although France had controlled dozens of colonial territories across Africa and accepted responsibility to help with infrastructure, education and heath, a simple money transfer was not the answer. Again he is correct, billions of Dollars, Pounds, Euros, Francs, and Marks have been thrown at Africa’s problems since the end of colonialism and yet the crises only ever seem to get worse.
He is absolutely right of course, Africa’s population explosion is unsustainable. Nigeria is on course to be the world’s third most populated nation by 2050, passing Russia, Brazil, Indonesia and the USA. With a population estimated at 195million, Nigeria has seen a 200% growth in population since 1967. Ethiopia, where a famine that threatened the lives of millions of a population that stod at 40 million triggered the ‘Live Aid’ relief effort in 1985 is now over 100million. And yet there has been no agrarian or industrial revolution in Africa in that time, attempts to encourage the use of contraception have been resisted and many tribal communities simply refuse to adapt their traditional lifestyles to changing conditions.
At the time of writing, Ethiopia, with a population three times larger than last time, is facing a famine caused by prolonged drought again.
Not only is hunger an ever greater problem in some parts of Africa, with vast numbers of people dependent on aid agencies for food, there are also crises arising from shortages of drinking water in drier regions. With economic development not just stalled but propped up on bricks at the roadside because the wheels have been stolen, there is little to invest in infrastructure projects such as a water distribution grid.
To make matters worse global corporations, having no doubt bribed government officials, are privatising water supplies so in future only those who can afford to pay for water will be able to drink safely., (To do your bit about this, ask your readers to boycott Nestle products)
The excerpt of Macron’s speech published on Saturday went largely unnoticed during the G20 summit, where saw violent protests by ‘anti – capitalist’ protesters disrupted life in Hamburg and effectively distracted the media from important news. But an edited clip of his response being shared on social media has since provoked outrage, with the kind of left wing activists who set Hamburg alight accusing the French President of blaming women for poverty, being a Nazi and, inevitably, racism.
Media figures also criticised Mr Macron for referring only to “Africa”, rather than specific nations, ignoring huge differences across the world’s second largest continent. Writing for South Africa’s Daily Vox website, Mishka Wazar said: Africa is not a country. You cannot, as a world leader (or even an ordinary person on the streets with no political ambitions) conflate African nations with Africa.
Siddhartha Mitter, writing for Quartz Africa, commented: Macron’s remarks fall into a tradition of grandiloquent and condescending statements about Africa that point to every cause of the continent’s difficulties other than colonialism and its enduring trace, he wrote. £There is a long history of population panic and its use in racist ideology.”
Mr Macron called colonisation a during his election campaign called colonialism crime against humanity but has been quiet on France’s troubled legacy since his election victory.
He visited Mali, where thousands of French troops are bolstering local forces against an Islamist and separatist insurgency, during his first foreign tour in May and has restated France’s commitment to military intervention in the Sahel region.
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Liberté, égalité, fraternité, inshallah?
by Ian Thorpe May 7, 2017
If, as now looks certain, ‘the empty suit’ Emmanel Macron, the candidate with no party, no philosophy and no policies becomes President of France when the official announcement of the result is made, what will become of those French people who do not want Islamification to continue.
Apart from his being a globalist, pro European integration, mass immigration supporting apparatchik of the banking cartel, who knows what kind of France Marcon’s government will deliver? Macron doesn’t, that’s for sure. That’s if he is able to govern effectively at all.
French investor and political pundit Charles Gave, commented when asked what Macron’s agenda would look like, said:
“Well, first, nobody knows. Because during the whole campaign, all these talks were on one hand, on the other. I’m in favor of apple pie, and motherhood, you see. Basically he has, to my knowledge, very little program. So he’s running. That is what Hollande said. That he was going to make some fundamental changes without hurting people. And so Macron is a big, empty suit. That’s what he is. You did the right curriculum vitae, he went to the right schools. And you have the feeling that the guy never had an original idea in his life. He was always a good student.”
In other circles there is a strong feeling that Macron is a kind of golem created by Hollande, a globalist, federalist mini – me forged in the hope that at least a couple of socialist fingers would remain on the helm of the French state. They knew they were going to lose the election, and that a socialist candidate would suffer a heavy defeat so they created a sort of hologram candidate (we must not forget that before quitting to form his new centre left popular movement, Macron had a senior position in the socialist government under Hollande.
The idea, according to cynics – and there are a lot of cynics in France, was Macron would run for them and prevent the pro – EU, pro – Federalism party from losing power. It appears then that, the French political system has been taken over by the the Technocratic / Managerialist class. And this Technocratic class is presenting Macron as something new but in reality he represents business as usual except that the seat of power will be even more remote and detached from the working and middle classes. The pro – EU elite have been in power for 50 years, they have not survived that long without learning a thing or to about using propaganda to manipulate public opinion.
The biggest problem, barring terrorist outrages, that Macron will faceing in the French national assembly to enable him to get laws through. As stated above, he has no party, no base of support, and in the assembly elections, due in a few weeks, the socialist party where he might have expected to find most support, is likely to suffer heavy losses. The conservatives will not support him unless they dictate policy. In a sense Le Pen has really won the day because the worst case scenario for her, that she will have to tun again in the 2022 elections, is still achievable. As for the parliamentary elections, Le Pen could reasonably expect to have anywhere between 40 to 100 MP’s if the results bear out polls as accurately as in the presidential vote, and thus could effectively ally with the conservatives to block most of Macron’s likely measures…. which would be a total disaster for the ruling class.”
In other words, assuming Macron triumphs and is president elect tomorrow, the National Front isn’t going anywhere. And its rising star Le Pen’s niece Marion, has a distinct advantage over her astringent aunt:
Marion, is very young, 28; probably too young to be a candidate in 2022. She is already an MP in the French Parliament. She’s extremely pretty, which will win the votes of French males, and she represents the family oriented values of the French Catholic Right, which is where most Republican and Socialist votes come from. 2022 is going to be interesting.
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Champagne Socialists?
by Ian Thorpe Apr 28, 2017
I was once told by somebody who identifies herself as a supporter of the progressive left that giving dictionary definitions when a “progressive” uses a word or phrase wrongly is “something conservatives do.”
Strange, because not only I have often been corrected and told I am a typical neo – con extremist by supporters of big government, big science, big Pharma, big education and big everything, those who usually ‘identify’ as progressive, but I have never voted for a Conservative candidate in my life. Unfortunately the people who corrected me were invariably wrong because rather than looking in Webster’s or the Oxford English Dictionary they look only in Wiktionary. which at best only gives a part definition.
I happen to think dictionary definitions are important. If we humans are to communicate those who share a language must all have the same understanding of what words in that language mean. Thus when one comes across people who style themselves liberals advocating Stalinist policies of authoritarian central government, social engineering and state ownership of all enterprises one is duty bound to try to enlighten that person about political philosophy and particularly the fact that variants on Marxism like socialism, Stalinism and Maoism are the antithesis of Liberalism which is as close as any workable system can get to anarchism.
Most of the leading advocates of such “progressive” politics are left wing elitists who operate a double standard, not inflicting on their own privileged social class the privations they would visit upon the masses. There is a name for this political sub culture, Champagne Socialists.
Here, because purpose of this post is to annoy lefties a dictionary definition of Champagne Socialists may be of use to Cultural Marxists, New World Order global government supporters and all the academics, public employees, special advisers and other ‘tax eaters’ (h/t William Cobbett) who enjoy the high life at the expense of Joe the Punter.
champagne socialist n. deprecative (orig. and chiefly Brit.) a person who espouses socialist ideals but enjoys a wealthy and luxurious lifestyle.
Lefties claim there is no such thing as a champagne socialist even as the guzzle Bollinger and Lanson paid for either directly or indirectly by you and me and eat in the kind of restaurants where a main course costs the equivalent of a weeks earning for a minimum wage worker.
One of the UK’s leading left wing newspaper’s journalists recently outed herself as exactly that: a bubbly-guzzling hypocrite who, though writing about education for the privileged with a definite collectivist bias and posing for years as a chippy, radical socialist, has actually been sending her daughter to a private school, fancy uniform, straw boater hat, jolly hockey sticks and all. So how does she square that with her demands to abolish private education?
Given the views of many of her readers expressed in comment threads where they enthusiastically call for the death penalty for parents who choose private education, anyone who goes to church, and anyone who does not support same sex marriage, 1 million per cent taxes and a totalitarian global government you might expect Janet Murray’s article to be a letter of resignation – or, if she was feeling more courageous, a grovelling apology to all the private school parents who she “resented” for “buying privilege through private education”.
But it’s neither. Instead, it’s a kind of weaselish justification for being what she terms an “‘accidental’ private school parent”.
It was, she whines,just that “the local private school for under thirteens offered 8am-6pm hours and holiday care”. And what she “hadn’t appreciated was just how much the nursery was part of the school”.
Then, weirdly, it becomes a ‘J’accuse’ style diatribe, addressed to parents of children at comprehensives:
The state sector in education is full of parents buying advantage. They kid themselves that what they are doing is somehow morally superior. The truth is that every person who moves house to get into the catchment area of a better school, or suddenly develops an interest in religion to get their kids into a Church School rather than having to mix with the chavs at the local state school is using private wealth to play the system.
Needless to say, even the ‘oligarchical collectivists’ (see ‘1984’ bu George Orwell,) who are her readers have managed to spot her hypocrisy. One comment read “I don’t get it Janet. You justify your own choice by criticising others who do the kind of thing you have done,” says one. Another adds: “the writer is making lots of money and is writing this piece to justify her snobbery.”
Elitist Lefties never turn on their own however, their belief in their own moral superiority is such that they see no contradiction in their raging against conservatives doing the very things they are busy doing themselves (Ah, but we are doing it for the right reasons,” they will argue): once Janet’s colleagues have come to terms with her defection to The Dark Side, many of them will stand by her. For, as much maligned Education Secretary Michael Gove pointed out when his education policy had been savaged by an editorial in The Guardian:
“…the Guardian has been edited by privately educated men for the last 60 years. But then, many of our most prominent contemporary radical and activist writers are also privately educated, at the most exclusive schools” he said. “George Monbiot the Marxist Environmentalist commentator was at Stowe, (according to my friend Colin who was also attented the school, the model for the school in Mervyn Peake’s surreal and subversive novel Gormenghast – made into a TV series in 2001, box sets available, Seumas Milne of the leading advocate of a single European superstate run by appointed bureaucrats as a stepping stone to global government was at Winchester and perhaps the most radical new voice of all, the feminist and ‘Yooman Rites’ ranter – Laurie Penny (a nanocelebrity according to right wing magazine The Spectator – was educated at Brighton College, an exclusive girls school.
I know it’s embarrassing for Ms Murray to be caught out in her one rule for me another for the proles* hypocrisy, but at least one socialist Member Of Parliament will offer her a shoulder to cry on. Yes, little Miss “Everything is about race because I’se black” herself, Diane Abbot, after spending two decades denouncing private education as evil and (white, conservative) parents who choose private education as earthly manifestations of Enochian demons, sent her own son to private school, justifying her choice by saying the state system could not meet his needs.
Trouble is, from the illiteracy and innumeracy rates we are seeing and the levels of juvenile delinquency, state schools are not meeting very many pupils needs.
* This of course is the guiding principle of all socialist governments.
NB: this is an old article, updated somewhat, that is worth a rerun because the fragmentation of societies in the developed world is becoming extremely destructive.
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Leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) have made astonishing claim that Prime Minister Teresa May’s move to call an early General Election in June this year was done to preempt a series of by-elections that could be called following a police investigation into alleged electoral fraud. Accusing May and the Conservative government she leads of “putting party before country”, UKIP front man Paul Nuttall appeared to suggest an electoral fraud scandal and the ensuing disqualification of sitting members of The House of Commons could rob the government of its slender majority in parliament.
Oops, that’s Teresa May the porn star, not Teresa May the British politician
Mrs. May strongly denied she would call a snap election after being chosen, unopposed, as the Conservative leader following the resignation of David Cameron after he was humiliated when the country voted to leave the EU (Brexit). After parliament approved the invocation of the Article 50 Bill with a massive majority, with many of the unelected members of the House of Lords, along with a large section of Labour MPs, the Scottish Nationalists and Liberal Democrats along with a rebel faction in her own party promising they would prevent Brexit going ahead (in defiance of the democratic will,) The Prime minister today claimed she had “reluctantly” changed her mind.
Her U-turn also comes exactly a month after reports suggested Conservative Party figures were fearful of a series of by-elections that could be called after up to 20 of their MPs were alleged to have broken electoral law in the 2015 campaign, mostly in seats UKIP had a good chance of winning.
More than ten police forces have referred cases to the Crown Prosecution Service and lawyers are now considering whether to charge the MPs or their agents after a year long investigation.
“…The prospect of a slew of Tory-held by-elections caused by the seeming systematic breach of electoral law at the last election, predominantly in places where UKIP were pressing the Conservatives hard” could have influenced the decision to hold an election now, suggested Nuttall in a press statement.
Deputy UKIP leader Peter Whittle also said the decision was “utterly cynical”, adding: “But we’re having [a general election] now and my party is actually quite excited about it.” Speaking on the BBC’s Daily Politics, he said there was “no question” the Tories were acting in their own self-interest.
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The title is a phrase used to sum up the philosophy of Dr. Pangloss. “Dr. who?” you might well ask because few people today are likely to be familiar with Pangloss or his philosophies. Dr. Pangloss, you see, is a fictional character, friend and mentor to the main character in Voltaire’s novel “Candide”.
Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694 – 1778) known simply as Voltaire was destined for a career in law but found formal study “too disgusting” and gave it up to become a philosopher and man of letters among the Bohemian community of Paris’s left bank. Quickly becoming known for his wit, intelligence and decadent lifestyle he was accepted by other French radicals, writers, thinkers and political reformers.
Voltaire was a satirist best known for his religious polemic against the Roman Catholic Church, corrupt but al powerful at the time, but he did not spare the tight lipped protestants of his day from being pricked or beaten by his favourite weapons, sarcasm, ridicule and parody. Because so much of his work , particularly in early writing, targeted religion is common to dismiss him as a biter and resentful atheist, but to do so is intellectually lazy and exhibits ignorance. Discarding revelation and divine mystery, he steadily upheld the truths of natural religion, and was, in fact, a Deist. There is possibly no greater a master of stylish and polished ridicule in the literature of any language.
Through the course of his long (by the standards of his day) life Voltaire wrote ninety books and it is perhaps a measure of the man’s talent as a satirist that the best known, Candide or The Optimist is in fact a satire of philosophy, a subject he loved dearly. (Voltaire biography)
The novel tells in desultory fashion the story of Candide and his philosopher friend Dr. Pangloss as they embark on a ridiculously optimistic quest to prove the world is essentially a perfect environment and that everything in it that seems bad, brutal and evil is necessary as a stepping stone to a greater good.
Dr. Pangloss and his philosophy are the principal focus of Voltaire’s satire. Dr. Pangloss, Candide’s tutor and mentor, teaches that “in this best of all possible worlds, everything happens because no other course of events is possible and therefore everything happens for the best.” The philosophy of Pangloss parodies the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz, an Enlightenment era philosopher (the term ‘existentialist had not been coined at that point,) who posited that the world was perfect and its evil were simply a path to achieving “the greatest good of the greatest number.” A philosophy which, it may occur to you, has much in common with Barack Obama’s “hope and change” (all hold hands and sing Kumbiya to create Utopia) campaign of 2008.
Each twist in the plot, each natural disaster, disease, and misfortune that befalls Candide is intended by Voltaire to show the perpetual optimism of Pangloss’s thinking to be utterly absurd and detached from reality. Pangloss’s personal sufferings alone are unusually extreme. In regard to his own misfortune however, Pangloss convinces himself that his suffering is necessary for the greater good. The result is that the philosopher appears lost in his intellectual ramblings and thus utterly blind to his own experiences as well as the horrors endured by his friends.
At one point Pangloss contracts syphilis. Candide suggests they seek a doctor to cure the potentially deadly disease but the sufferer insists on philosophising about it to convince himself his infection is in fact “for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.
“Oh, Pangloss!” cried Candide, “what a strange genealogy! Is not the Devil the original stock of it?”
“Not at all,” replied this great man, “it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal. We are also to observe that upon our continent, this distemper is like religious controversy, confined to a particular spot. The Turks, the Indians, the Persians, the Chinese, the Siamese, the Japanese, know nothing of it; but there is a sufficient reason for believing that they will know it in their turn in a few centuries. In the meantime, it has made marvelous progress among us, especially in those great armies composed of honest hirelings, who decide the destiny of states; for we may safely affirm that when an army of thirty thousand men fights another of an equal number, there are about twenty thousand of them poxed on each side.”
Voltaire also uses Dr. Pangloss as a metaphor for what he considers useless, impractical metaphysical speculations on unknowable topics. Hence the philosopher is described as a tutor of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology.” Such scholars, according to Voltaire, waster their lives talking instead of doing (note that “pangloss,” derived from two Greek words, means “all-tongue”). At one point Candide is on the verge of death but rather than get him water which he is asking for, Pangloss carries on talking, analyzing the situation. Or when everyone ought be tending the garden (a metaphor for life), Pangloss instead wants everyone to talk, or rather to listen to him talking. Following the aforementioned earthquake, Pangloss also tries to reassure people by…talking. Pangloss is always so intent on talking about circumstances he is quite unable to heed good advice when it slaps him round the cheeks with a big dead fish.
In addition to his high irritant factor, Pangloss’s way of living is impractical. Completely absorbed in analyzing and theorizing, Pangloss and his student are unable to live their lives. It may have been Voltaire’s intention in ridiculing not only Pangloss’s particular philosophy that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds and his obsession with philosophy in general to satirize the work of his contemporary Jean – Jaques Rousseau. Much of Rousseau’s work focused strongly on the subjectivity and introspection that has come characterized modern writing.
The Scottish philosopher, David Hume “professed no surprise when he learned that Rousseau’s books had been banned in Geneva and elsewhere” (Wikipedia). Hume wrote of Rousseau, “he has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and, as he scorns to dissemble his contempt for established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country… as not to render such an open attack on popular prejudice somewhat dangerous.”
Scientific research was fresh and exciting in Voltaire’s lifetime which overlapped with those of Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestly and Robert Boyle acknowledged as the founder of mordern chemistry a colleague of Isaac Newton, Christian Wolff in Germany , who revolutionised the teaching of natural sciences, Edwald von Kleist invented his Leyden (or Leiden) Jar, effectively the first capacitor and Benjamin Franklin proved lightening was electrical. In biology Anton van Leeuwenhoek used a microscope and discovered red blood cells, bacteria, and protozoa and Edward Jenner invented vaccination after discovering the relationship between cowpox and smallpox, just a few of the developments. Religious thinking however was stagnant under the dead hand of clerical bureaucracy that lay on the Catholic faith, the traditionalism of the Orthodox churches and the Bible literalism of Protestants.
Things have turned round now, with scientific triumphs in the practical field becoming harder to achieve and the dead hand of orthodoxy suffocating much original thought and experiment while those engaged in the futile quest for mathematical elegance in nature and the universe stretch their equations and torture their data in futile attempts to prove there is no more to life than mathematical formulae.
It is the scientists now who fill the shoes of Dr. Pangloss, claiming with unjustified enthusiasm that every blip in the electromagnetic radiation coming in from space is some enormously significant breakthrough in the search for alien life or every quirky and unpredicted reaction from an atom bombarded with a beam of sub atomic particles heralds the revelation by scientists of the secrets of the universe. These modern exponents of Panglossism are every bit as foolish as Voltaire’s creation, observe how they avoid addressing the problems of an ageing population, overpopulation, impending food shortages and an ongoing debt crisis while philosophising endlessly about problems that only exist in the virtual world of their mathematical models while reciting statistics to prove that ‘the truth is out there’ or that medical science can find a cure for death.
It is then, is it not, these inexhaustible enthusiasts for the science of speculation who are out of touch with reality, not the people who might believe in God, gods, nature, meditation or metaphysics but who do not let their beliefs get in the way of focusing on what must be done. Dreaming of exploring the galaxies does not grow any grain and the $billions being spent on searching for and trying to contact alien life forms when for all we know these aliens might be total bastards who want to kill us all is sheer folly.
In Voltaire’s novel Candide does eventually seem to renounce philosophy in favor of activity and work and learns the importance of staying in contact with reality, of tending our gardens (does that metaphor come from The Bible I wonder?) He takes Pangloss with him but the philosopher is never completely cured of his addiction. On the final page of the book we read:
Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:
“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunégonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbéd the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts.”
“All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.”
For references to Voltaire’s text I have used my own dog – eared and heavily annotated copy of Candide, anyone interested in the book can find free e-book versions (Kindle, epub, pdf and raw text formats at Project Gutenberg)
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Comments
“Failed states, tribalism and extremely difficult demographic transitions”
What a fucking asshole. Old military colonization has been replaced by economic colonization and exploitation as it ever was. Resources.
That idiot is too stupid or too young to see that ALL presidents of francophone Africa from Senghor to Eyadema to Nguesso to Compaore to Biya are and were French bought puppet regimes.
I don’t even discuss that shit anymore.
Ask IMF/World Bank and WEF about the practices on how they plunder the continent. In Africa, every country is in fact 2 countries: Customs and government are one, the people are the other.
has restated France’s commitment to military intervention in the Sahel region
What did I say before ? The French are the same as the US or the Brits. Desperately trying to preserve power over regions they don’t have ANYTHING to do.
What can an American do when he has an intruder on his property by law ? Shoot him…
Dino
Good ideas, but Africans can NOT decide. As Europe can not decide as well. It’s the US who decides, because the US$ is still world currency and linked to oil. That’s what the intention of BRICS is: To break the $ hegemony. Before, nothing will change.
Simple as that.
HL
it looks like you own IT firms in Africa
LOL Not quite, My IT “firm” is actually an NGO, and the new company SW@XE is a consulting firm. We connect businesses from Europe to businesses in Africa. The goal is not exploitation but actively trying to help developing the local job market. But we just started really.
And I have and am living with the people not in a white luxury slum. I don’t have more money than the people I work with.
Believe it or not.
BTW: Instead of lamenting about economic refugees in Europe people should better start doing such stuff. After all, WE are responsible for that situation by simply exploiting Africa and not giving a shit about their development.
I don’t know ONE African who has left his family for other reasons than finding work in Europe and supporting his family from there.
Family and clan are holy in Africa. Nobody leaves if not absolutely neccessary.
John
Right on.
Anybody with a many brain cells as they have tits or testicles would understand the ability of a nation to support a growing population is not dependent on physical space but having the economy and infrastructure to support its population. Only somebody who has been completely brainwashed by left wing propaganda would put forward the “there’s plenty of room” argument, and as for you “economic colonialism” argument, the African tribal leaders who sold out their people for corporate money are as much to blame as any western interests.
Ian
the African tribal leaders who sold out their people for corporate money are as much to blame as any western interests.
Admitted, true. Keeps being forgotten here, or PC forbids it. On the contrary, in Africa people point that out too. They’re a lot more rational than our “free press”.
BTW: The birth rate is alarming. Why ? Because the more kids a family has the better the chance that one or two of them find a job, and in certain countries the governments pay a very modest sum for each kid. When you have 10 kids in Mali, that’s the equivalent of a monthly workers’ salary……
It’s not about religion. It’s about economy, stupid LOL
JOBS. When there would be enough, most problems would be solved.
African leaders, with very few exceptions, are not puppets, they are bought and paid for assets who don’t give a flying fuck about the people they govern because they are only interested in lining their own pockets and looking after their friends and the military they rely on to keep them in power.
And you of all people should know that because Swiss banks facilitate the corrupt deals between corporate pirates and African tyrants.
I do feel for the people of Africa who are abused and exploited by both their own leaders and the west, but a few years ago I read an essay by Dambesa Moyo, an academic from Zambia I think. She argued that before African can begin to solve its problems the addiction to western aid must be broken because ‘dead aid‘ as she called it simply does not work.
Recall how left wing activists in the west idolised Winnie Mandela in the 1980s, before it emerged that Mrs. Mandela was running organised crime networks in the townships and had known of executions by various tortures including necklacing.
Ian
African leaders, with very few exceptions, are not puppets, they are bought and paid for assets who don’t give a flying fuck about the people they govern because they are only interested in lining their own pockets and looking after their friends and the military they rely on to keep them in power.
I know. Fact. But when the West would stop to employ them…….the problem is that these countries are too poor, too little educated and too little organized to enable an effective change by people pressure.
And the well-meaning ones are killed or imprisoned. Take Sankara, Nkrumah, …. Kennedy LOL
Yeah but you’d already mentioned them 🙂
And then there are suspicions that he’d followed Saddam Hussein in accepting payment for oil in currencies other than the petrodollar.
And then there are suspicions that he’d followed Saddam Hussein in accepting payment for oil in currencies other than the petrodollar.
That’s the point, really. And it was one of the triggers for the creation of BRICS.
John
Hmm…….I missed that 😉 True, the same actually, is it not, Ian ?
Saddam and Gadhafi were killed because they wanted to sell their oil independently of the $ binding. Easy as that. And every African leader who doesn’t follow orders of their old colonial powers (NATO -> US) is potentially dead. As are European leaders as well. But here in Europe they aren’t killed, but disposed of. See Yanukovich in Ukraine as the latest example.
Some remarked that – and that was the birth of BRICS. But … I see no future for them as long as Uncle Sam is the master of Uncle Ben and Salam Aleikum.
John
You’re right, that’s only a part of it. He was forcing African unity, and his country was well organized. A brother of my wife worked in Tripoli for 2 years and he said it was a superb expericence, good pay and no problems.
On the way back to Bamako he was attacked and the robbers (probably Touaregs) took all what he had and wanted to bring back to Mali.
He died in 2007 in London of AIDS. I was with him those last weeks in Hammersmith hospital. It was cruel. He didn’t support the meds, and the skin just peeled off his whole body.
Life is shit.
Bruce Cockburn ??
I mean, sure, in the hot sun in Mali I could burn my cock easily…
BTW: Didn’t know he was so good. He should have played with Ali Farka Touré. He really can play the style.
Thanks a lot. A brother in mind.
Jeff
Fathering children earns males of Africa respect, but taking care of them is nothing they need be concerned about
It may vary in different countries, but in West Africa a woman gains status with the number of children she has. But ONLY when she’s married. When she’s got 2 kids and is not married she’ll have a hard time. But you’re right about the men not taking care of them. I can confirm that through my own adoptive family in Cameroon, where my dear friend raises 10 kids of which half of the fathers simply quit the mothers and abandoned them with the child.
Jeff
It also has an economic background. 10 kids give a better chance to have 2 kids working later than 1 or 2 kids. Education is expensive. And in some countries the government pays per child per month a very modest sum. So the calculation is:
10 kids is the equivalent of a worker’s salary for the father given he finds a job…
Yeah, starving kids is excellent socio-economic policy.
Keynes would have gladly approved . . . of course, only if the kids came from working class families. That’s why he was head of the Eugenics Society from 1937-1944 promoting the blessings of contraception as a way of keeping the numbers of the “drunken” working classes down.
Thanks for reminding the resident loony leftie of one of the left’s dirty little secrets.
I’ll try to preempt an outburst from any Trots still in the thread, by pointing out this does not exclude people on low to middle incomes from having five or six children. There are people who love family life and choose to go without a car, 60″ plasma TV, foreign holidays etc. to live a different kind of life.
There is a family in the town where my mother lives, Morecambe, where the Radford family consist of two parents and 16 (maybe 17 now) children. They’re not rich but the father runs a bakery business so they’re not dependent on benefits. And in a TV documentary (linked) featuring them, they appear very happy. The parents have made their choices for non economic reasons and that’s their right.
When people are having children for economic gain, that’s going to be a bad start for the children.
Anyone offering unmoderated comment threads is going to attract a number of bottom feeders of course, but tolerance of out and out insults, with no point relating to the thread being made, has attracted a even more unpleasant kind of vermin, those repulsive creatures that live up the bottom feeders’ bottoms. It only needs one or two of those to drive away good content and good readers.
Ian
That’s life. I don’t take that too seriously and usually comment to articles which I think have value, are personal and where I sense the person behind it. Not necessarily the subject.
Ian
I agree, although for me it’s entertainment also. No worse than watching TV. And at the same time, by being here, I could improve my English a hell of a lot in terms of “good” English but also in street “talk.” So in some ways, it has educational value for me LOL,
Jackson the racist doesn’t like the label. His comments betray him.
John G the communist hyper-inflationist doesn’t like the label. His comments betray him.
African woman generally have too many children
Women in all poor countries (that aren’t outright communist totalitarian) generally have many children. They always have fewer children as, and if, they become more affluent.
The way for Africa to quickly become more affluent is to abandon tribalism and nationalism and open its doors to foreign capital investments.
who wants to invest in an unstable economy?
Then maybe the west should help stabilize it.
I spent 2004 in East Africa as an activated Army Reservist as Part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
It is an incredibly rugged and an incredibly poor part of the World.
However, I have the strong impression that Africa will be the Asia of the 21st Century.
They have a large population that has next to nothing and needs almost everything. They are not tied to the past and not having land line phones, Cellphone use has exploded since 2000, for example, generally on a more advanced level than in the US.
There is a large population and little to employ them (yet). There are vast natural resources. the entrepreneurial potential of the Merchants can be see (albeit in a negative way) by the efforts of Nigerian scammers.
The PRC is there in a big way.
When you are in the boonies in Ethiopia, you see PRC companies employing Africans to build roads. Is it exploitation? Maybe. In Asia, the same kind of thing put the PRC & Japan & the “Dragons” at the center of world industrial production in 50 years.
There are vast problems . . . but there is also vast potential. I suspect it will be realized and I suspect that France (and the US) will be the ones left behind.
A century from now, if the PRC’s New Silk Road/One Belt-One Road idea works, I think the main beneficiary will be Africa.
“Saint George, the doors are open to foreign investments but who wants to invest in an unstable economy?”
So far, the PRC . . . .
“That idiot is too stupid or too young to see that ALL presidents of francophone Africa from Senghor to Eyadema to Nguesso to Compaore to Biya are and were French bought puppet regimes.”
The French are still there in a substantial way.
I remember seeing French junior soldiers (boule à zéro and being pushed around a bit, so I assume recruits) being sent further south in Dijbouti years ago.
“And I have and am living with the people not in a white luxury slum. I don’t have more money than the people I work with.”
Which seems in my limited experience, the only thing that really works there.
I still can’t get over the fact that people thought Macron was a left-winger and Le Pen a right-winger. Since when did immigration policy become the litmus test?
Macron is a business-friendly moderate who is capable of criticizing faulty cultures without hating people who look different. He’s a common sense guy.
Le Pen is a National Socialist. She’s an honest version of Bernie Sanders.
The Chinese are making capital investments with relatively fair terms.
The Chinese have done impressively stupid things like building “Mega Cities” that nobody wants to live in. Those are not “investments” but represent pure “consumption”. It’s no different in principle from building a million franchise restaurants that prepares food nobody wants to buy or eat. Pure consumption waste.
“The Chinese have done impressively stupid things like building “Mega Cities” that nobody wants to live in.”
I think John G is talking specifically of Africa. The PRC seems to have a longer time horizon than Western Companies, which makes it easier to invest in Africa, where everything is longer term due to the underdevelopment.
I have always wondered if those cities were pure pump-priming or if they also represent stockpiled resources that they thought might become unavailable.
AMERIKKKA FUCK YEAH!!!!!”Given the new PRC base in Djibouti and the PRC’s greater economic presence in Africa, I’m not sure AFRICOM, which is still in Europe will do much at all.
“The PRC seems to have a longer time horizon than Western Companies”
Correct, Chinese and other eastern businesses and governments appear to think generations ahead, western businesses don’t think beyond next year’s profit and loss account, governments don’t think beyond the next election cycle.
Ian
Exactly. I’ve been Swiss businesses for the last 20 years to invest in Africa, but they don’t listen. No risk, no gain – and after – complain…..
Chinese and other eastern businesses and governments appear to think generations ahead
They think one bribe ahead.
“Chinese companies in Africa are also able to offer the bribes that are usually crucial to securing large contracts in the region. By contrast, American companies are prohibited from engaging in these practices by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
Bingo.
British companies and businessmen have also faced prosecution for paying the bribes demanded in order to obtain orders / contracts, not just in Africa but throughout the third world.
How many bankers went to gaol over the GFC?””And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law! . . . . Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons
The question is not “How many bankers went to gaol over the GFC.” It is should any of them have gone based on the laws existing at the time.
That is the difference between a republic, “a government of laws and not of men” and something else.
“Margaret More: Father, that man’s bad.
Sir Thomas More: There’s no law against that.
William Roper: There is: God’s law.
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.” Id