Africa Is a Country

This racist stuff has been done before by the Australian's in Korle Lagoon, last time e-waste - https://africasacountry.com/2019/03/six-myths-about-electronic-waste-i… Leave the basement for a while and talk to garment factory workers in a developing country, then go down the road and talk to the hookers. You'll see no difference. The hookers are very practised at seeming happy to keep clients happy. But perhaps after going home you can think logically and see how teens doing fast fashion are better human beings than hippies eating local foods. Sure, recycling clothing, which is the case in this story makes my point worse. But that's how it all is. Complex. Rough guide, if people are doing it, it's the best they have on offer.

> I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent. EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.

Just for the record, J. Philippe Rushton, whom the op-ed draws on as a classic source of this kind of work in psychology, was a white-supremacist race "scientist" who argued, among other things, that black people have narrower hips because they have smaller brains. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a file on him: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/jean… While that doesn't invalidate all the findings outlined in the op-ed, it's not exactly confidence inspiring either, as this essay persuasively argues: http://africasacountry.com/the-racesciencefiles-the-new-york-times-edi…

https://africasacountry.com/2021/03/bill-gates-and-his-technofix-dream… https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/geoengineering/geoengineering…

It might be a good thing for everyone involved to watch this TV show about international NGOs in Africa: http://africasacountry.com/kenyas-first-mockumentary-takes-on-the-ngo-… Funny (if not relevant) quote from the show's creator "What’s the craziest story you’ve heard about an NGO? I heard from someone in the US that an organization was having a charity auction to raise money for endangered rhinos and the prize for this charity auction was to go hunt a rhino in Namibia. [AIAC note: Yes people, this happened. You can even see it on the Colbert Report and CNN]."

Terrible decision. Very bad and sloppy economics, a simplified version of what sociology and political science have been doing much better for over 40 years, as if before these crucial contributions we had no idea that institutions, forms of power and social conflict affect economic outcomes. Branko Milanovic has aptly and rather amusingly defined Acemoglu's naive theorizing as "Wikipedia entries with regressions" https://glineq.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-take-on-acemoglu-robinson-criti… and he is right. Acemoglu's strand of institutional social science is known to be painfully racist and clueless about realities on the ground https://africasacountry.com/2016/09/africa-why-western-economists-get-… The narrative that you can get economic growth with "good institutions" is a fable, and cases like China are also completely outside their narrative. Not only is their narrative historically inaccurate, if not ideological, it can't explain why Western economies like the US have prospered despite being as corrupt as China is today.

This will almost certainly include traditional lands seized or acquired by "paperwork theft" from multi generational family ownership (with no deeds in the western sense). That and land "acquired" by colonial settlement during the past century by equally dubious means. eg: https://africasacountry.com/2018/12/the-battles-over-land-in-namibia and: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/namibian-communities-demand-retur… Fighting the good fight on behalf of benevolant Chinese overlords will no doubt be USofA PMC's (private military contractors) such as Betsy DeVos's brother Erik Prince's Frontier Services Group (or however he's burying his ownerships and interests these days). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Services_Group I have no position here other than recognising that such shady machinations are commonplace and under the carpet in 21st century neo colonialism.

For a long time there was a clear distinction between oral traditions (ranging from the playgrounds' "nu-uh / yeah-huh" to the formality of courtroom argument) and literary traditions (ranging from birdseed journalism to the talmudic structure of scientific publication); has digitalisation blurred the boundary sufficiently that discourse is now in a superposition of worlds: where enthymematic memes can be juxtaposed with links to formal support? (compare https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1702486438-20231213.png ) attempting to translate to my language: the Somali silsilad tradition provides a pseudonymous forum in which posting requires proof-of-work, namely the placing of an argument into poetic form — the nature of this work having been until now substantial, I hope GPT has not lead to silsilad-spam. EDIT: speaking of talmudic: > Second, there is a custom by readers and recorders of poems of providing commentaries in prose, describing the circumstances under which they were composed, explaining obscure passages and allusions to persons, events, or customs that are no longer known to the audience. https://africasacountry.com/2023/12/poetry-nationalism-and-al-shabaab

When Ginsburg was interviewed on Al-Hayat TV in 2012 about where the new Egyptian government should look for inspiration, she cited the South African constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Council on Human Rights positively and said "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution" as a model for establishing a new state: https://africasacountry.com/2012/02/ruthbaderginsburg/ On the matter of free speech, note that the South African and Canadian constitutions, and the ECHR, all protect freedom of expression exclude hate speech as protected speech. It is VERY much in line with modern statecraft to do so, and the doctrinaire approach of the First Amendment (only established in 1969, by the way, before which the USA implemented speech restrictions not dissimilar from those seen elsewhere) is the outlier here. Also note that getting rid of the First Amendment is not getting rid of freedom of expression. Granted, her position was not even as radical as mine, which is that we must rethink the constitution from the ground up and implement a new form of government more resistant to corruption, again drawing from examples of more modern statecraft -- a multiparty parliamentary system, for instance. All she was saying was that new governments should look elsewhere for a template. Ginsburg's views that the U.S. constitution is the supreme law of the land, and must be hewed closely to and not played fast and loose with for as long as it is active, were…