Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germans.
And speaking of kind individuals, you are no longer in the competition.
It was meant as a joke. I live in Germany and I'm very happy here, and they even joke about that.
Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
311–320 of 415 posts
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
> Will die out naturally as boomers trained in that kind of thinking pre-globalization die out. I don't think it will. There will always be powerful people who want to maintain that power, and wannabe powerful people who want to get that power. So long as that way of thinking leads to power, there will be people who will follow it. The problem is not that people are tainted by colonial thinking - its that humans are…
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.
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.)
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#315Ah yes, blame the lack of rulers and not colonialism or war.
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…
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.
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps they can, but there’s 0 evidence for it. Wouldn't this way of thinking prevent any improvement at all? If I must have accomplished something before believing I may be able to accomplish, how am I even going to try?
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.
That's way different from something like 'what's missing in Sudan is a colonial power to rule them'.
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where is the colonialism within Europe? If you see colonialism as a foreign group establishing control over a people and region over a long time, then: * The Roman Empire colonized Europe for hundreds of years * Napoleon colonized most of continental Europe (this one might be debatable) * The British colonized Ireland and Scotland * The Ottomans colonized the Balkans * Muslim Caliphates colonized Spain/Al-Andalus *…
> The British colonized Ireland and Scotland 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…
> Scotland joined England in the United Kingdom.
Sure, they "chose" to joined Brits over being decapitated. Great choice for them!
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sudan+nominal+gdp+per+c... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=india+nominal+gdp+per+c...
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#319It'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.
Re: Anarchy in Sudan has spawned the world’s worst famine in 40 years
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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?
> 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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/opinion/misinformation-di...
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.