AIDS in Africa

In a post below about Bush and AIDS in Africa, Max commented:

"Most of these deaths are political."

I replied:

"Yep, lack of political will. Victims can't free themselves until they know they are slaves. Yes, it's nice to be compassionate but I fear that we are creating another huge chunk of dependent humans who will not contribute to the long term interests of human freedom. Africans have been taught how to fish for centuries but why bother to fish when guilty white liberals will do it for you? PEPFAR is at best a bandage on a bleeding wound. Like Mexicans, Africans need to get their shit together."

I know how cold and cruel that sounds but I agree with Herbert Spencer:

If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die. Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.

Precisely! But we should not kid ourselves that it is anymore than mere mitigation and that good intentions often have evil unforeseen consequences.

Out of compassion, the USA has acted as a safety valve for Mexico for a long time. It didn't help. Mexico is still a basket case. And we are now faced with the end of the American Revolution because we are being over-run by people who are ignorant of the enlightenment and the classical liberalism which is the basis of our republic. As Hosea wrote:

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.

PS I don't take the bible literally but I'm convinced that, if you haven't read it, you're ignorant of half of the history of the human race.

The true size of Africa

Reginald Bassey posts an enlightening map and chart. (Click to biggify.)

The most common system for drawing maps is the Mercatur projection which makes the land masses of the northern hemisphere look larger than they really are. Africa is actually larger than the USA, China, India, Japan and the whole of Europe combined.

The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 sq k (57,510,000 sq mi.)

Africa is 11,668,598 square miles or more than one-fifth of the earth's landmass.

Henry Morton Stanley

You know: the guy who went hunting for Livingstone and, when he found him, said, "Dr Livingstone, I presume."

From Stanley was more hero than colonialist brute:

Critics who have condemned a planned statue of Henry Morton Stanley are misguided, says Tim Butcher.

His 1874-77 journey, charting the Congo river, started the Scramble for Africa. Before Stanley, the white man had been largely content to nibble at the edges, staking little more than ports such as Freetown, Cape Town and Mombasa. After Stanley, the white man went inland.
...
What makes Stanley a special case? After his first Congo journey it is true that he did return as the colonial agent for the Belgian king, Leopold II. What Leopold then got up to in the Congo was at the darker end of the spectrum of colonial cruelty – his agents hacked hands off natives pour encourager les autres to drive up harvesting of natural rubber, and they armed tribe against tribe. It was this horror that Joseph Conrad saw in 1890 when he skippered a boat down the Congo, something that burnt in his soul for nine years before it spilled so memorably onto the pages of his novel Heart of Darkness.

But in all this, Stanley's role was that of sorcerer's apprentice. He might have created something that went on to do awful things, but that happened years after he left. Perhaps he deserves opprobrium for hoodwinking chiefs into ceding sovereignty. If that is the standard, then just about every early American president should be pilloried for conning native Americans out of their land.

Welsh explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley with his adopted son Kalulu: