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Thread 4460

Thread ID: 4460 | Posts: 18 | Started: 2003-01-15

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Hereward [OP]

2003-01-15 16:22 | User Profile

The basket case continent. And countries generously subsidized by big-hearted European leftists - like Tanzania - are just as screwed up as the others.

[url=http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5552]http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadA...cle.asp?ID=5552[/url]

African Nightmare By Michael Radu FrontPageMagazine.com | January 15, 2003

“Fears of famine in Ethiopia,” says the New York Times; “Mugabe’s “surreal” policies ravage Zimbabwe’s economy,” adds the Washington Post--and those headlines are just from the past two weeks. Meanwhile, a civil war rages in the Ivory Coast, and generalized famine threatens most of Southern Africa—Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, and Malawi. And in the continent’s most populous country, Nigeria, fundamentalist Islam, complete with the stoning to death of adulterers and the chopping off of thieves’ hands, is on the march.

All that in countries which still have governments, because places—one cannot call them states in any meaningful sense—like Somalia, Sierra Leone, or “The Democratic Republic of Congo” (formerly known as Zaire) do not enjoy even that dubious advantage. And then there are the civil wars: in the Sudan, between Arab Muslims and black Christians; and in Zaire, between Ugandans and Rwandans on the one side (or are there two?) and Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia on the other. Al Qaeda has a presence in Somalia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Burkina Fasso, and Liberia, and Libyan troops operate in Central Africa and run interference in West Africa. And, last but far from least, up to 40% percent of the adult population in countries like Lesotho and Zambia, to name but a few, are suffering from HIV/AIDS.

The more recent AIDS pandemic aside, and with a few names changed, similarly depressing headlines could have been read twenty years ago: let us remember Idi Amin, the cannibal ruler of Uganda; Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the convicted cannibal and emperor of Central Africa; Francisco Macias Nguema, the self-described “sole miracle” of Equatorial Guinea, who publicly shot most of his ministers as the band played “Happy Days are Here Again”—all prior to 1979.

It would seem that subsaharan Africa today, just as yesterday, remains behind all other areas of the world—in economic, political and social terms. There are many reasons for this, and, one must say, there are a few flickerings of light at the end of the tunnel.

To begin with, most of the continent’s problems today are inherited from the time of independence. With the exceptions of Liberia, Ethiopia and South Africa, not one of the contemporary subsaharan countries has any history of independent statehood. They are all creations of European rivalries and European bureaucrats in London, Paris or Lisbon. Nor, again with a few exceptions (Botswana, Somalia, and the island states), do they have any pre-independence sentiment of nationhood, divided as they were and are along ethnic and linguistic lines. Declaring the former colonial language the official one is recognition of this reality: only a foreign language could provide a minimum of internal unity.

Once independent, in many cases without any popular demand for independence, country after country fell under the control of European-educated (at the Sorbonne or the London School of Economics) and influenced (naturally enough, by the leftist ideas prevailing there) elites. Socialism, occasionally Marxism-Leninism, was the favorite among the various ideologies that failed in richer countries but devastated Africa. All this was encouraged by Western intellectuals and often paid for by Western taxpayers.

Thus, for decades, Tanzania’s ruinous experiment with socialism was subsidized—at the highest per capita rate in Africa—by the Scandinavian countries. Julius Nyerere, the country’s first president and “father” of African socialism, admitted upon retirement that “We failed.”

And then there was the Cold War. The countries under Soviet rule aside, no other region has lost more during it than Africa. Non-viable country after non-viable country had muddled through for four decades because outside support kept them together: Western economic and military aid; East German, Cuban, or Soviet arms, secret police advisers, and political support. Fear of some marginal state going to the other side attracted attention and support out of proportion, in many cases, to the state’s importance in the larger scheme of things. By 1989 it all came crashing down, and Africa was faced with the unpleasant reality of its actual status in the world. It turned out that the emperor had no clothes. Their vision no longer clouded by perceived geopolitical or strategic interests, outsiders began to see Africa in its real dimensions.

In fact, with some 650 million people, subsaharan Africa’s combined GNP is somewhat smaller than that of Belgium (population: 10 million). As for per capita income ($474 in 2000), it had a negative growth rate of 0.6 percent over the years 1988-2000- or 0.3 percent excluding the region’s economic superpower, South Africa. All this despite the fact that a few, usually small countries (Saõ Tomé and Principe, Equatorial Guinea) are experiencing a major oil boom, and a handful (Botswana, Uganda and Mauritius, e.g.) have competent and successful economic policies and healthy growth rates. Simply put, in the new world of globalization, a few commodities aside, Africa isn’t a significant market, competitor or exporter.

Nor has Africa’s longstanding ability to exploit Western guilt over colonialism retained its potency. Increasingly, taxpayers in the West, if not many intellectuals and the Left, find it harder and harder to attribute 40 years of post-independence decay to 80 years of colonialism—especially since in many countries the statistics suggest that the majority were worse off in 1990 than at the end of the colonial era.

The fiasco of the 2001 UN Conference on Racism in Durban was both significant and, in some ways, encouraging. It was significant because it demonstrated that attempts to mine Western guilt, at the cost of insulting both history and common sense, are still popular in some quarters; encouraging because the most vocal advocates of the most preposterous ideas advanced— “reparations for slavery” and open anti-Semitism—were American racial demagogues and Arabs, rather than Africans.

This is not to say that Africans did not engage in racism, often with economically suicidal consequences. In the 1970s Ida Amin expelled the prosperous Indian community of Uganda and stole their property; Lebanese in West Africa have occasionally been expelled and their property confiscated; and today Comrade Mugabe in Zimbabwe is engaged in a massive ethnic cleansing of whites and Asians and stealing their property, with dire consequences for most black Zimbabweans. A case could be made that Mugabe is a Stalinist dinosaur and Idi Amin was certifiably unhinged, but the fact remains that there was no pan-African condemnation of their actions.

All of which should bring to light the obvious fact, avoided for decades by both African elites and well intentioned Westerners, that outside the conceptual framework of racism there is no such thing as “Africa.” Yes, there is the creation in 2002, through Muammar Qaddaffi’s brainstorm and oil dollars, of the African Union, successor to the famously irrelevant Organization of African Unity, likely to make the latter an example of effectiveness. But to understand how shallow the concept of African unity is in the real world one only has to look at the post-1994 events in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa.

In 1994 the ruling Hutu regime in Rwanda engaged in the world’s most obvious case of genocide since the Holocaust, with as many as 750,000 minority Tutsis murdered in a matter of weeks. An invading force of Uganda-based Tutsis then took power and the defeated perpetrators fled to Zaire. The Rwandans pursued them, and the result was an all-African free-for-all war that, for once, involved only African armies (at least six of them) and their local proxies. It would be hard indeed to blame that war, fought over diamonds, titanium, manganese and copper as much as over territory, on Belgian colonialism. Nor is it easier to blame the recent Ethiopia-Eritrea war over a few patches of bush, with up to a million casualties, on Mussolini’s Italy.

All of these are tragedies, but they are strictly African-made tragedies, and the good news is that Africans and outsiders alike are coming to see them as such. After decades of lies, blaming others, and irresponsible elites and outsider interveners, today Africa is forced to live in a global environment in which responsibility is what matters.

In economic terms, some African states are fighting to erase their well deserved reputation of corruption and bureaucratic red tape and attract foreign investment. Many are oil producing countries, but Uganda and Mauritius are succeeding even without oil. And West African oil is not to be sneezed at: it is clean, offshore (thus minimizing frictions with the locals) and abundant. Though hopelessly corrupt, divided and increasingly threatened by Islamic fundamentalism, Nigeria is for now the major producer. That will change in favor of small states with a need for protection against the likes of Nigeria—which is where U.S. technology, power projection capabilities and capital could come in.

If there is any positive political sign coming from Africa, it is that democracy is making some progress after decades of dictatorships and kleptocracies. A number of the continent’s “big men” have lost elections (Kaunda in Zambia, Diouf in Senegal, Ratsiraka in Madagascar) or have retired voluntarily: Moi in Kenya, Rawlings in Ghana, soon Chissano in Mozambique. That does not a democratic march from Dakar to Khartoum or from Bamako to Harare make, but at least the signs are not all negative.

Because subsaharan Africa is, and is likely to remain, marginal in economic, political and strategic terms, regional self-sufficiency is the key to progress. To a decisive extent, that means South African supremacy. South Africa is the only country in the region with the capital, technological and professional resources and the obvious interest (dictated by its location and experience) to help the entire region, or at least the southern and central areas of Africa. It controls the transportation hubs (ports and railroads all the way to Zaire); it produces the bulk of manufactured goods and energy; and it has a still large (albeit diminishing due to massive emigration) professional and technical mass of qualified experts. If South Africa fails politically or economically, subsaharan Africa has no future outside a few isolated oil enclaves.

The problem is that South Africa does not play the role one would expect or hope. The case of Zimbabwe is a good example. While Mandela or Tutu pontificate about U.S. imperialism and cruelty in using the death penalty, their country’s labor minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, just claimed that South Africa “has a lot to learn” from Mugabe’s Stalinist “land reform,” which has destroyed the economy one of Africa’s few formerly prosperous countries. The minister’s opinions may have been disavowed by his government, but the fact remains that it is Pretoria’s tolerance and indeed active political and economic support that keeps Mugabe’s criminal regime afloat.

Nor is Pretoria the only one at fault. The African Union itself had nothing to say about Zimbabwe’s self-immolation - naturally enough, since Mugabe’s financial sponsor, Muammar Qaddafi, is also the Union’s promoter. And African members of the Commonwealth blocked efforts to suspend Zimbabwe’s membership. Racial solidarity, once again, as in the cases of Bokassa, Idi Amin, etc., trumped decency and indeed rational self-interest.

If there is any problem that attracts the same old tired and demonstrably ineffective calls for more aid, more sympathy and more misguided and indiscriminate outside interference in Africa, is the issue of AIDS. Since the pandemic originated in Africa, the continent has suffered longer than any other part of the world from its impact. Today, although subsaharan Africa represents only 10 percent of the world’s population, it has 67 percent of known AIDS/HIV cases.

There are many reasons for this, and objective causes why it is so difficult to cope with the problem, some independent of whatever African governments could do. A very young population (in some cases 50 percent under the age of 20) means that the most irresponsible age group is unusually large; mass illiteracy and poor infrastructure make education and prevention difficult; and poor health services make treatment almost impossible. More important, however, is the attitude of African governments. With the laudable exception of Uganda, for years they have denied the very existence of an AIDS problem. Even today, the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, denies that AIDS is the result of a virus, and thus provides the worst possible example to other, far less developed, countries in the region.

Western pharmaceutical companies have given up their patents for AIDS medication, and relatively cheap generics exist—enriching Indian and Brazilian manufacturers. Massive Western infusions of medicines, medical personnel and funds are now available, but, as is the case with aid in general, these only lead to waste, corruption and demands for more.

Massive amounts of free U.S. food aid to southern African countries afflicted by famine are being rejected by Zambia and Malawi because they are genetically modified types of corn or wheat. Suddenly, starving people are denied food because, under the influence of paranoiac European Greens, their governments have decided to be politically correct.

All of this raises the question, is Africa going anywhere? The answer is unclear, and it all depends on how African states and Western partners treat each others. If African states finally decide that they have distinct interests, rather than pretending to belong to a non-existent “Africa,” they could enjoy the fruits of their sound decisions—where those decisions are sound. If not, they should pay the price of failure, just like any other country, whether Bolivia, Nepal or Romania. As for the West, it should finally stop its irresponsibly paternalistic treatment of “Africa” as a perennial victim of everyone except its own rulers, reward the successful and leave the failed to pay the price.

Ed Toner

2003-01-15 17:03 | User Profile

I subscribe to the IOL newslatter, a daily that deals with African news.

It's free, and has a lot of good stuff.

[url=http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=31&click_id=2547]http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=31&click_id=2547[/url]

Hereward

2003-01-15 17:18 | User Profile

Thanks for the heads-up, Ed. I just signed on.

il ragno

2003-01-15 17:22 | User Profile

All of the above is true and troubling; but for that little [color=green]extra [/color]angle of perspective that makes Africa Today understandable to the white Westerner, stories like the one below are invaluable.

BLANTYRE, Malawi (Reuters) - Hundreds of angry Malawians hounded a senior political figure from his house and stoned him late Wednesday, accusing him of harboring vampires. Blantire Urban Governor Eric Chiwaya, a member of the ruling United Democratic Front, was the latest victim of a bizarre rumor that the country's government is colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies.

Bearing severe cuts to his face and body, he told Reuters from his hospital bed that a crowd had hailed him with stones and other missiles, chanting "vampire" and threatening to kill him.

Chiwaya said he knew some of his assailants, adding that political opponents were trying to discredit him and the government.

The vampire rumors have sparked several vigilante attacks on suspected bloodsuckers in recent weeks, despite official attempts to stop the rumor. One man was stoned to death, and three priests were attacked by angry villagers in the south.

Political tensions are already high in Malawi. President Bakili Muluzi's attempts to stay in office for another five-year term have already sparked protests, while many face starvation in the face of a regional food crisis.

Texas Dissident

2003-01-15 17:58 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@Jan 15 2003, 11:22 ** The vampire rumors have sparked several vigilante attacks on suspected bloodsuckers in recent weeks, despite official attempts to stop the rumor. **

LOOK OUT CHUPACABRA !

skemper

2003-01-15 20:12 | User Profile

Thanks, Ed. I also signed up for the IOL newletter.

xmetalhead

2003-01-15 20:43 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@Jan 15 2003, 12:22 ** All of the above is true and troubling; but for that little [color=green]extra [/color]angle of perspective that makes Africa Today understandable to the white Westerner, stories like the one below are invaluable.

BLANTYRE, Malawi (Reuters) - Hundreds of angry Malawians hounded a senior political figure from his house and stoned him late Wednesday, accusing him of harboring vampires. Blantire Urban Governor Eric Chiwaya, a member of the ruling United Democratic Front, was the latest victim of a bizarre rumor that the country's government is colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies.

Bearing severe cuts to his face and body, he told Reuters from his hospital bed that a crowd had hailed him with stones and other missiles, chanting "vampire" and threatening to kill him.

Chiwaya said he knew some of his assailants, adding that political opponents were trying to discredit him and the government.

The vampire rumors have sparked several vigilante attacks on suspected bloodsuckers in recent weeks, despite official attempts to stop the rumor. One man was stoned to death, and three priests were attacked by angry villagers in the south.

Political tensions are already high in Malawi. President Bakili Muluzi's attempts to stay in office for another five-year term have already sparked protests, while many face starvation in the face of a regional food crisis. **

Great find Il Ragno! Thing is, the United States has vampires as well, sucking our life blood from us. The Africans at least attempt to stone the SOB vampires!

edward gibbon

2003-01-15 21:28 | User Profile

As I have posted on this topic many times before, I ask each and everyone of you to develop hard stomachs, calloused consciences and cynical snideness. The starving natives will soon be on television 7 days and nights. They will be getting what they have long deserved. Under their dogma they took great pains and efforts to drive from their lands those who fed them.

Perhaps in a few months time we will be exchanging laughs and satisfied smirking posts on those with ribs showing and gruel coming from their mouths. No sympathy from this quarter. Bleep them.

Roy Batty

2003-01-15 21:46 | User Profile

Edward, the "Vampire" story is an example of what I always say will happen to most of the third world once there is the big collapse in the ol' U.S.A. F*ck 'em is right. Once white aid stops flowing, tribal warfare, witchcraft rituals, animals, disease, all manner of standard third world activities and environs will kick in to do their part and reset the populations to their normal levels. This includes places like Mexico.

Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or throw peanuts, eh?

Hereward

2003-01-15 22:43 | User Profile

Speaking for myself, I'm more moved by appeals from the S.P.C.A. than by images of black scarecrows with flies crawling over their eyeballs. Does that make me a wicked person? My dog doesn't think so.

naBaron

2003-01-16 03:40 | User Profile

I agree with Hereward. Dogs can be trained to do things. :D

Seriously, I've got a few of my friends reading an article here and there- "Let Africa Sink" in particular made an impression. Just the other day, while I was fetching a soda, I heard them say in unison "Africa wins again!!" :lol:

Walter Yannis

2003-01-16 06:59 | User Profile

This is a good article but it avoids the obvious root of the problem spelled out in the "Bell Curve" - that average black African IQ = 73, and thus (assuming a regular distribution) half of all black Africans are mentally retarded by white standards, only 2% are at or above the white mean of IQ = 100, that only a passingly small number would qualify for "good college material" at IQ = 115, that black Africans would produce extremely few top college material at IQ = 130, and finally that black Africa would likely produce ZERO geniuses (by white standards) in any generation.

As a result, black Africa is incapable of producing enough engineers, doctors, teachers and trained technicians to maintain any semblence of a technoligical civilization. Black Africa's nearly complete absence of geniuses means that it could never produce one on its own.

The "Bell Curve" was published nearly 10 years ago, and all of this is common knowledge. Yet, journalists such as the one above apparently feel no shame in simply ignoring it. This is at the very least dishonest. Cowardice is the more likely explanation.

Ignoring these facts does nobody - especially black Africans - any good at all. In fact, ignoring them will cause the West to continue its failed policies at ruinous cost, while black Africa sinks further into misery. A little honesty would prevent a great deal of suffering, but judging from this article that is not to be.

Walter

N.B. Forrest

2003-01-16 18:17 | User Profile

Fewer muti practitioners = more elephants, rhinos & lions.

Bye bye, Thaabo.

Hereward

2003-01-16 19:05 | User Profile

Walter Yannis - I'm afraid it'll take more than "a little courage" to confront the facts of racial differences. The idea of biological racial equality is presented by the mainstream as a scientific and logical conclusion arrived at after much labor, many false starts, and the refutation of pseudoscience like scientific racism is supposed to be. This is incorrect; racial egalitarianism isn't a conclusion, it's a premise, an axiom, perhaps the central axiom of liberals and mainstream "conservatives" alike, rather as the idea of Christ's incarnation is the central premise of Christianity. This explains the circular reasoning the egalitarians are driven to. They're not necessarily stupid nor cowardly; they just have to go to greater and greater lengths, with more and more elaborate explanations, in order to preserve their central premise and "maintain the appearances." Compare the 17th-Century defenders of the earth-centered solar system postulating increasingly complicated planetary epicycles and retrogressions in order to explain why Mars and Jupiter move the way they do, when the heliocentric model is far neater and simpler. Their worldview, in the most literal meaning of the term, was at stake. Similarly, the egalitarians are driven to the most abject logical fallacies, because they're not proving anything; they're defending something that, to their minds, cannot be false. So we have: Q: "How do you explain this difference in achievement/behavior between blacks and white?" A: "Racism!" Q: "What is your evidence that racism is to blame?" A: "Why, my evidence is the difference in achievement/behavior between blacks and whites!" A few brave scientists or journalists cannot shift paradigms like this, though they may provide the straw that breaks the camel's back. False cultural premises are supplanted when they go from being misapprehensions - falsehoods held because people don't know any better - to outright lies, falsehoods most people can see are false but must continue to pay lip service to because of society's investment in them. We haven't reached that point yet, though I feel the time is approaching.

skemper

2003-01-16 20:23 | User Profile

Low IQ's don't make people into savages. I have known mentally handicapped people, all of whom were white, who wouldn't harm a flea. The problem is the heart. Blacks are more prone to sensuality and savagery and have no regard for human nature. Mugabe, Mandela, and Mbeki all have higher IQ's but their evil hearts haven't left them. Think of how much of a problem Africans would be to the world if they all had higher IQ's. I, for one, am glad that they are lower IQ.

Walter Yannis

2003-01-17 06:52 | User Profile

Originally posted by Hereward@Jan 16 2003, 19:05 ** Walter Yannis - I'm afraid it'll take more than "a little courage" to confront the facts of racial differences. **

I think that most liberals know in their hearts that blacks are, on average, less intelligent than whites (and as Skemper points out, they're also more emotionally - uh - exuberant, and also certainly more prone to a primitive narcissism on average than whites) but they are loathe to say that in public. Any talk of racial differences is considered a terrible breach of etiquette, comparable to calling attention to the facial contortions of a palsy victim. Indeed, liberals admit it to themselves only in a whisper.

I think that [url=http://www.ddc.net/ygg]Yggdrasil [/url] has dissected the problem pretty well. He sees the phenomenon in terms of whites' evolved need for altruistic displays, which are the result of runaway sexual selection (Geoffrey Miller's "The Mating Mind"). The sexual selection theory states that displays of reproductive fitness are of necessity wasteful advertisements of one's (or one's relative's) fitness, such as a peacock's tail or an antelope's covorting in front of predators. The very essence of sexual ornaments is that they are wasteful. The organism engaging in such behaviour is saying to potential mates "hey look! I'm so great that I can leap over this lion (or grow this silly wasteful tail that gets me noticed by predators) without breaking a sweat. Mate with me!"

Similarly, humans, and whites in particular, have evolved the need for wasteful altruistic displays of courage, kindness, and lavish generosity (and also poetry and music). As Professor Miller so pithily put it "Altruism is a sexual ornament." White liberals' overweening indulgence of all "peoples of color" and "gender minorities" at the expense of their own interests is precisely this sort of sexual fitness display. White liberals are saying in effect "hey, look at me. I'm so smart, rich and generally successful that I can indulge opinions that are wildly contrary to my own interests and not even break a sweat. Mate with me!" Inasmuch as the young and fertile are most immediately interested in sexual fitness displays, it should come as no surprise that our IP-controlled media make the most obvious pitches to young whites; e.g. MTV videos that present PeeCee racial attitudes as hip and sure to land one a desireable mate.

While the ornaments or music, poetry, kindness and generosity are the things that make our lives worth living, they also carry extreme dangers for our race if we fail to recognize them for what they are: utterly un-utilitarian ornaments to our lives. They are the dessert after meat. They're nice if you can afford them, but you can't survive or thrive on them. Thus, these impulses must be kept in check by reason, and they must NEVER be allowed to cloud our thinking about our own survival. Tragically, the foreign IP element among us has exploited our weakness for ego-satisfying altruism brilliantly.

Yggrasil points out that these altruistic displays occur most commonly among our elites or their wannabees. That makes sense, since the poor are too concerned with survival to fail to see the dangers in indulging ornamental altruism. They're too hungry to confuse the meat with the cake. Clearly, modern liberalism presumes a large measure of leisure and a surfeit of wealth on the part of its adherents. Our best chronicle of the dangers of dangerous displays of altruism on by our European elites is Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". The Crusades - inspired by the sexual display of chivalry among the nobility - are a good example of the disasters attendant upon our elites' taking their sexual advertising too seriously.

Likewise, our current indulgence of blacks and the painfully contrived rules of public etiquette when talking about racial differences (first rule, never mention it!) derive from our evolved need to make altruistic displays. We more level-headed conservatives are forever chiding liberals that their attitude toward race is wildly against their own interests, but we fail to realize that that's exactly the reason they do it!

So, I see your points and they are well made. The "courage" that we need is to recognize that our overweening urge to indulge blacks is a wasteful display that is now threatening our very survival. The "warm fuzzy" that IP propaganda offers us in exchange for indulgence of blacks is not worth the price, to say the least.

Walter

Sisyfos

2003-01-17 07:07 | User Profile

edward gibbon Posted on Jan 15 2003, 15:28

I ask each and everyone of you to develop hard stomachs, calloused consciences and cynical snideness. The starving natives will soon be on television 7 days and nights.

I can’t comment on the boobtube, as I have forsaken cable a year ago, but my local talk radio’s programming is nearly there and, unfortunately, judging from guest and call-in commentary, the dumb brutes of Canuckistan will not forego their “humanitarian duty” to come to the aid of “emerging nations.” There are but two possibilities concerning our precious savages: tens of millions can die now or hundreds of millions can die later when the current donors experience the misery whose coming they have ensured and the heretofore dormant instinct of self-preservation kicks in and crates of food, medicine, and soon-to-be-worthless coupons/IOUs cease arriving.

Being a true humanitarian and multiculturalist, I vote to end western meddling in Africa and leave the continent to the exclusive care of its anthropoids sans western aid or supervision. I’ve no doubt that black acumen and resourcefulness, once freed of alien encumbrance, will enable the brothers to attain a society and distinct culture worthy of their race.

Of course, my vote is meaningless so it will be left to Mother Nature’s indelicate but formidable hands. Pity she takes as long as she does (e.g., Aids has been rather disappointing in turning in what I would consider meaningful results though statistical extrapolations hint of more promising days) since it means that Africa’s exotic animals whose survival is of concern to N.B. Forrest and I will endure further incursion into their native habitats and risk extinction.

Hereward

2003-01-21 22:22 | User Profile

That's an interesting take, Walter. I hadn't thought about altruism (beyond the evolutionarily beneficial sort that helps one's immediate relatives) as being a sort of sexual display along the lines of a peacock's tail. I had thought of it along the lines of religious sacrifice: instead of killing oxen or virgins to placate the Gods, you sacrifice part of your wealth or social well-being to put to rest the guilt you feel at having it so easy compared to the duskier breeds.