Good read, sent it to my Kindle.
It was the CIA who messed up that country in the modern era.
Glad they found oil and now have insane GDP growth.
Hope they don't ruin the Amazon rainforest nearby.
Hope the racial tensions ease down and infrastructure is built up, so I can visit one day.
> Glad they found oil and now have insane GDP growth.
Guyana has weak political institutions and high corruption & tribalism. It’s more likely to become a poor resource-cursed nation than a successful one.
I truly hope this isn’t the case, but if history teaches us a lesson..
I can't speak to western europe, but the clear devotion the US and Canada have to capital makes this difficult to buy as a general difference. I suspect the distinction in corruption between the west and the rest of the world must come from a working person's perspective.
And I would love to hear from any non-westerners here as I suspect it's impossible to get a meaningful evaluation from the west.
I’m a non-Westerner (Nigerian in particular). Corruption in developing/underdeveloped countries is extremely worse than in developed countries.
My country is a fitting example. Most citizens (of all classes) don’t pay taxes, people pay petty bribes to violate laws, government officers request for bribes to carry out mundane activities like getting a driver’s license or passport, and citizens are happy to oblige.
Everyone wants to bypass the law and feel smart, not realizing that it makes the whole system terrible and everyone poorer in the long run (people generally don’t want to make long-term capital investments in corrupt countries, so that’s why most of Africa struggles to get foreign investment).
This kind of petty corruption is hard to explain to a Westerner who hasn’t experienced it. And it’s no surprise that corruption is keeping African nations (and many nations from other continents) behind.
I appreciate your comment. I presume you prefer the west (at least in terms of political and economic stability) to your home country from your comment. Do you have any concerns about how capital openly purchases the interests of politicians in the us? I guess I had written off the difference in citizen comfort to the mountains of cash americans roll around on.
> Do you have any concerns about how capital openly purchases the interests of politicians in the us?
The U.S. and the West at large aren’t perfect, but it fairs much better than most of the world in preventing corruption.
Capital also purchases influence in developing/underdeveloped countries, but in a much worse way. It’s often very cheap because desperate locals are willing to sell out their country for any meager amount.
Here’s a fitting example: Benny Steinmetz (a mining tycoon) paid $8.5 million in bribes to the spouse of Guinea’s former President to obtain exploration permits for a mine [1].
Steinmetz sold 51% of the mine shortly after for $2.5 billion [2]. In other words, he extracted 300x the bribe, and the Guinean official never bothered to think her country was being robbed in broad daylight by the bribe she received.
Many similar cases occur in Africa, wherein foreign companies pay cheap bribes to rob countries of their resources.
The African leaders (and populace) are often willing to part with their resources for cash rather than harnessing it for internal development (this part is difficult, unlike the easy way of collecting cash and spending it foolishly).
Add in endless petty corruption, and the result is the mediocrity of many countries that we see.
You right corruption happen in 100% countries at a level or another.
GP says that looking at history, oil in a country soil seems correlated with more corruption.
I a way, you could see oil as a curse. I bet some locals does, I would if I’d face the political, societal and environmental drawbacks without much benefits.
Not OP but converting the page to PDF in reading mode (with Firefox) then using Amazon's sendtokindle[0] feature yielded decent results. Now I just use an e-reader that can read PDFs natively.
It's weird how these headlines are written in the passive voice and as to blame Hezbollah. "At least 20 dead as walkie-talkies explode in Lebanon as Israel declares ‘new phase of war’ against Hezbollah"
How about Israel detonates 3000 explosives in Lebanon.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for terrorists who's lives are spent working out how to murder and blow people up, then when they get blown up with minimal collateral damage caused, what?
Honestly, I'm surprised at how great these people are at invoking emotional responses in their favor. It's incredible. They're certainly smashing the information war.
When the 11 kids got actually blown up by a missile strike while attending a soccer game in Israel, where was all the sympathy then? Do people even know about this?
I think your first point could plausibly be made by either side, not just about this specific incident. I don't think killing people is ever a justifiable solution to any issue and almost always makes things worse.
I think, no matter who the perpetrator is, it's undeniable that exploding electrical items on this scale, is an act of terror and aggression.
If you ask engineers who work for Tesla to review the Tesla Cyber Truck, they will tell you it's genius and amazing in every way because they don't want to get fired and they are likely also Tesla shareholders.
If you ask engineers who work for Toyota about the Tesla cyber truck, they have the expertise to identify all of the problems with the design and they are not going to get fired for telling you the truth.
Who would you rather listen to? It is the same situation when we are talking about Western journalists vs. Arab journalists.
I disagree because western journalists are often from secular society where telling the truth is more acceptable and encouraged. You're certainly not going to get thrown off a building for reporting some facts.
What happened to Salmon Rusdhie? He was almost murdered over publishing an image of the prophet.
Look up Yasmine Mohammed, she's an ex-Muslim who constant experiences death threats for her beliefs, or lack of there of.
My friend, I suggest you try some stronger arguments.
Your error is that you are thinking about journalism in idealistic terms, when in reality journalism does not operate on idealistic principals. Journalists are lying scoundrels who knowingly deceive people. They do this without any emotion in the same way that lion rips the guts out of a young gazelle. In their minds, it is OK to lie to cover up war crimes. It never occurs to them that people are going to take their word as the truth, because they do not care. They lie about everything because they are incompetent, craven, selfish, and so on. This is the mindset of a war criminal who commits genocide.
When Israel executes an air strike to kill the terrorists that are killing their civilians for no reason, your lot howl at the moon about "indiscriminate" "disproportionate" "genocide".
But when Israel ingeniously figures out a way to detonate explosives only on the terrorists bodies, you call that indiscriminate too?
It's pretty obvious that you just hate Israel. No matter what Israel does, you will never be happy.
Israel is here to stay. When people like you make peace with that, we will be able to live in peace.
Because they're the ones who ordered the pagers for their specific use.
Not to hand out like candy.
Obviously not All people injured are Hizbollah, however the vast majority are.
From some interviews I saw they claimed that the majority of patients at the hospitals were military aged men.
Perhaps more reliable info will come out to clarify the number, we will have to see.
Okay I will play this game without a crawler. i looked up UFC fighter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khabib_Nurmagomedov.
Then you see oh his personal life says he's a Muslim, that leads to islam article, Quran, religious text, religions, Philosophy of religion,Ethics, then philosophy!
