In "POTUS' 'shithole' comment begs the question the liberals don't want asked... because they have no answer!" (WWW 12/1/18 -- includes VIDEO), Walt commented on President Trump's suggestion, in a meeting on the subject of immigration, that some of the source countries for immigration to the USA -- countries like Haiti, whole continents like Africa -- are "shitholes". At the end of the piece, I identified Zimbabwe (having lived there) as a country that fits the definition. My old friend Dr CZ is still there, pounding the keyboard for the Financial Gazette. Here (with asterisks replaced by the intended letters) is what he had to say about POTUS' remark in his blog today.
President Donald Trump touched off a storm when he was quoted describing some countries in this world — more specifically African, Central America and Carribean — as shithole countries. His remarks naturally drew the ire and opprobrium of a number of these countries, with some of them almost threatening to commit suicide over the slur. Even the United Nations, which is supposed to be a busy organisation, found itself joining the redundant African Union in condemning Trump for merely stating what otherwise is as plain as a nose on one's face.
The fact that Trump used unhygienic language does not take away the point that the brother was trying to drive home. The countries that Trump was referring to are those that fit the following bill:
These are countries that are worse than not countries at all. You see, he was talking of countries where leaders — rulers actually — think of elections always, not the welfare of the people they purport to lead to the point of splashing millions of dollars on purchasing votes when basics like medical facilities in those countries are as good as non-existent. Gross irresponsibility like buying chiefs luxury cars when hospitals have no ambulances, and clinics have no basic pain killers.
These are countries in which politicians seek to come into office for their own sake, not to serve anyone, but themselves and themselves alone.
In these countries, elections are not held for any purpose other than to give a veneer of legitimacy to a conspiracy of "criminals".
In these countries, the people who purportedly choose leaders become subservient to these leaders, not the normal other way round. As soon as these sham elections are over, the people have to immediately be scared stiff of the very same people they would have hired to serve them.
Most of these countries are endowed with vast natural resources, but they are grievously poor because these resources are private property of the ruling political elite and their hangers-on. Despite their poverty, these are countries that have the largest cabinets and administrations in order to accommodate relatives and friends.
These are countries in which there are people who are employed — and also employ themselves — exclusively to get angry on the behalf of the (mis)leaders. Arse-licking is a national ritual that everyone, who thinks they are something, have to perform publicly without shame.
Those who purport to be leaders of these countries effectively confirm that their countries are indeed shithole nations by preferring everything foreign. From medical treatment, to education for themselves and their children, to their sartorial needs, to bank pigeonholes to stash their loot, to anything one can ever imagine. It has to come from abroad because they know that anything that their filthy paws touch in their resident country is contaminated.
Citizens of shithole countries usually confirm the status of their nations by fleeing from them in droves, some having as high as a third of their citizens leaving! There is no better way of confirming this status than this.
It is, therefore, surprising that there are some countries that were quick to protest when Trump made his remarks instead of focussing on the substance of the point that he was driving home.
Showing posts with label failed states. Show all posts
Showing posts with label failed states. Show all posts
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Hundreds of Zimbos* fall for joke employment offer
Assiduous readers will know that Walt spent some years, before the turn of the century, knocking around Zimbabwe (the Rhodesia that was), watching a state becoming a failed state, before my very eyes. Almost everyone I knew there has since departed the country, or departed this life entirely So, to keep up with the news from the Dark Continent, I rely on my old chum, Dr CZ, who writes the second part of "Cabinet Files" in the Financial Gazette, every Thursday. It is Dr CZ who calls his compatriots "Zimbos", *meaning "Zimbabweans", nothing more or less.
In last week's column, Dr CZ invited Zimbos interested in assisting him in carrying out a strategic survey that he was planning to undertake to contact him as a matter of urgency. Here is the notice which appeared at the end of the column.
"This is very urgent. Dr CZ is looking for six Zimbos out there who are willing to help him with some strategic research that he will be conducting in the next few days. It is a three-day contract. Over and above being provided with transport, accommodation and meals, the assistants — who should be holders of at least any tertiary qualification — will each be paid an allowance of US$800 per day. The contract days are from the 29 to 31 of this month. Anyone interested should urgently e-mail their name and contact number to the e-mail below. The offer is strictly on a first-come-first-served basis."
The column appeared on February 23rd, and readers will note that the contract on offer was to run "from the 29 to 31 of this month". The joke should have been obvious to anyone who learned "30 days hath September...", but it seems post-colonial Zimbabwean education does not include any reference to that little saying. This week, Dr CZ reports on the aftermath, as follows...
"Although Dr CZ had just asked for those interested to submit their names and contact numbers for the piece of work that was to take place between February 29 and 31, as late as at the time of going to print this March, desperate emails were still trickling into his mail-box… most of them accompanied with bulky CVs and several phone numbers and dozens of the applicants are holders of several post graduate degrees. It was one of Dr CZ’s many asinine pranks that many of his fans took seriously. What was intended to start and end as just harmless mischief has turned out to be a real survey. The results of the survey show what happens when people become hopelessly desperate.
"If the applicants were mere village yokels who could hardly tell their left from right, one would have assumed that none of them knew that the dates on which the survey was supposed to take place do not exist on this side of the rainbow yet, but these are very educated men and women whose basic commonsensical reasoning has since been evaporated by the dire personal situations they find themselves in.
"Most of these people could be fathers and mothers, whom entire clans look upon. Yet they cannot do anything about their situation. This explains why seemingly normal people end up doing things that people in normal situations would not think possible. This perpetuates the abnormality that this country is increasingly getting known to be. This is the sad reality of the situation that this country has deteriorated to… never mind what officialdom says."
Quite right. 37 years after the perfidious British sold out Ian Smith's "white settler regime" to the darker-complected Africans, Zimbabwe has become a basket case... with the bottom now on the verge of falling out of the basket. With every passing day, Zimbabwe gets worse and worse. The Dark Continent gets ever darker.
Further reading: "Mugabe's corpse could win next Zimbabwe election, widow-to-be says", WWW 18/2/17.
In last week's column, Dr CZ invited Zimbos interested in assisting him in carrying out a strategic survey that he was planning to undertake to contact him as a matter of urgency. Here is the notice which appeared at the end of the column.
"This is very urgent. Dr CZ is looking for six Zimbos out there who are willing to help him with some strategic research that he will be conducting in the next few days. It is a three-day contract. Over and above being provided with transport, accommodation and meals, the assistants — who should be holders of at least any tertiary qualification — will each be paid an allowance of US$800 per day. The contract days are from the 29 to 31 of this month. Anyone interested should urgently e-mail their name and contact number to the e-mail below. The offer is strictly on a first-come-first-served basis."
The column appeared on February 23rd, and readers will note that the contract on offer was to run "from the 29 to 31 of this month". The joke should have been obvious to anyone who learned "30 days hath September...", but it seems post-colonial Zimbabwean education does not include any reference to that little saying. This week, Dr CZ reports on the aftermath, as follows...
"Although Dr CZ had just asked for those interested to submit their names and contact numbers for the piece of work that was to take place between February 29 and 31, as late as at the time of going to print this March, desperate emails were still trickling into his mail-box… most of them accompanied with bulky CVs and several phone numbers and dozens of the applicants are holders of several post graduate degrees. It was one of Dr CZ’s many asinine pranks that many of his fans took seriously. What was intended to start and end as just harmless mischief has turned out to be a real survey. The results of the survey show what happens when people become hopelessly desperate.
"If the applicants were mere village yokels who could hardly tell their left from right, one would have assumed that none of them knew that the dates on which the survey was supposed to take place do not exist on this side of the rainbow yet, but these are very educated men and women whose basic commonsensical reasoning has since been evaporated by the dire personal situations they find themselves in.
"Most of these people could be fathers and mothers, whom entire clans look upon. Yet they cannot do anything about their situation. This explains why seemingly normal people end up doing things that people in normal situations would not think possible. This perpetuates the abnormality that this country is increasingly getting known to be. This is the sad reality of the situation that this country has deteriorated to… never mind what officialdom says."
Quite right. 37 years after the perfidious British sold out Ian Smith's "white settler regime" to the darker-complected Africans, Zimbabwe has become a basket case... with the bottom now on the verge of falling out of the basket. With every passing day, Zimbabwe gets worse and worse. The Dark Continent gets ever darker.
Further reading: "Mugabe's corpse could win next Zimbabwe election, widow-to-be says", WWW 18/2/17.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
"We came, we conquered, we failed"
Len apologizes for the sporadic nature of posts on WWW this month. Walt and I aim for a post a day, and generally we make it or come close, but right now Len is preoccupied with business matters -- we don't make a living from blogging, you know!! -- and Walt is off communing with nature somewhere.
All the same, we do try to keep up with news and views as expressed in the meedja. Surfing the net today, I came across a trenchant opinion piece by Grant LaFleche, writing in the Saint Catharines Standard, one of the QMI papers.
In M Lafleche's opinion, "The NATO's project in Afghanistan has failed. It's been 12 years since the Taliban was deposed and everything the mission was supposed to achieve is on the verge of collapse."
He does not argue (as perhaps he should) that "intervention" in Afghanistan ["invasion", surely. Ed.] was unnecessary. He says it was the right thing to do, but that we -- the USA and its NATO allies -- blew it.
"The post 9-11 strategy was to and crush the Taliban, and then turn over control and security to the new Afghani government as quickly as possible," says M LaFleche.
"It was ridiculously short sighted and naive. Afghanistan is not a literate nation with a democratic tradition or history of a free market. To transform into a self-reliant democracy and economy was not a project of a few years but of several decades. It would mean building an entirely new political economy and discarding centuries of tradition that was, literally, stuck in the middle ages. It would mean a plan more than ambitious than the rebuilding post war Germany or Japan. It meant nation-building from scratch."
But no nation has been built. The "democratically-elected" Mohamed Karzai pretends to be in power, but his writ does not run much farther than a mile or so from the perimeter of Kabul...if that far. When the USA withdraws its troops next year (with the remaining "others" hitching a ride on the last chopper out), the Krazai government will collapse, the Taliban will rush to fill the power vacuum, and Afghanistan will revert to what it has always been -- a barbaric, savage and ungovernable collection of warring tribes.
What happens then? We'll let M LaFleche have the last word. "We will likely again debate the merits of sending our troops to war while we ask ourselves what went wrong the first time around."
All the same, we do try to keep up with news and views as expressed in the meedja. Surfing the net today, I came across a trenchant opinion piece by Grant LaFleche, writing in the Saint Catharines Standard, one of the QMI papers.
In M Lafleche's opinion, "The NATO's project in Afghanistan has failed. It's been 12 years since the Taliban was deposed and everything the mission was supposed to achieve is on the verge of collapse."
He does not argue (as perhaps he should) that "intervention" in Afghanistan ["invasion", surely. Ed.] was unnecessary. He says it was the right thing to do, but that we -- the USA and its NATO allies -- blew it.
"The post 9-11 strategy was to and crush the Taliban, and then turn over control and security to the new Afghani government as quickly as possible," says M LaFleche.
"It was ridiculously short sighted and naive. Afghanistan is not a literate nation with a democratic tradition or history of a free market. To transform into a self-reliant democracy and economy was not a project of a few years but of several decades. It would mean building an entirely new political economy and discarding centuries of tradition that was, literally, stuck in the middle ages. It would mean a plan more than ambitious than the rebuilding post war Germany or Japan. It meant nation-building from scratch."
But no nation has been built. The "democratically-elected" Mohamed Karzai pretends to be in power, but his writ does not run much farther than a mile or so from the perimeter of Kabul...if that far. When the USA withdraws its troops next year (with the remaining "others" hitching a ride on the last chopper out), the Krazai government will collapse, the Taliban will rush to fill the power vacuum, and Afghanistan will revert to what it has always been -- a barbaric, savage and ungovernable collection of warring tribes.
What happens then? We'll let M LaFleche have the last word. "We will likely again debate the merits of sending our troops to war while we ask ourselves what went wrong the first time around."
Thursday, March 24, 2011
The compleat failures
Fans of Bob and Ray will remember the story of the Compleat Failure, a hapless man who started his career as bank teller and "progressed downward" until he was reduced to scraping gum off the sidewalk outside the bank, and managed even to get fired from that position.
There are countries like that too, states that start off well enough, then spiral downward in search of rock bottom. Zimbabwe would be a prime example.
This week the Economist features a thoughtful essay on failed states, "Where life is cheap and talk is loose". "States that cannot control their territories, protect their citizens, enter or execute agreements with outsiders, or administer justice," it says, "are a common and worsening phenomenon".
The article has a list of the worst of the worst -- the states with the highest scores on the Failed States Index. Here, with a further comment by yours truly, are the dirtiest dozen black spots.
Country (FSI score*) -- PC problems** -- Non-PC problems***
12. Côte d'Ivoire (101.2) -- post-election deadlock, civil war starting -- African, Muslims vs Christians
11. Haiti (101.6) -- deforestation, destitution, crime -- only African country in the west
10. Pakistan (102.5) -- coups, drugs, illiteracy, terrorism -- Muslim
9. Guinea (105.0) -- destitution, drugs, kleptocracy -- African
8. Central African Republic (106.4) -- desertification, destitution, disease, terrorism -- African
7. Iraq (107.3) -- ruined infrastructure, terrorism -- Muslims vs other Muslims
6. Afghanistan (109.3) -- civil war, drugs, no infrastructure, terrorism -- Muslims vs other Muslims
5. Congo (109.9) -- civil war, massacres, mass rape, looting -- African
4. Zimbabwe (110.2) -- post-election deadlock, economic collapse, kleptocracy, oppression -- African
3. Sudan (111.8) -- illiteracy, tyranny, destitution -- African, Muslims vs Christians
2. Chad (113.3) -- desertification, destitution, next door to Libya -- African, more Muslims
and now... the envelope please...
1. Somalia (114.3) -- anarchy, civil war, piracy -- African, Muslim
I was going to add corruption and incompetence to the list of problems, where applicable, but it applied to every single country on the list and I grew tired of typing the words over and over.
Surely I don't need to point out the commonalities, but just in case... 8 of the failed states (including the worst 5) are in Africa. And we must count Haiti as an African state because almost 100% of its people are of African origin.
7 of 12 are totally or partially Muslim. In Côte d'Ivoire and Sudan, the Muslims fight to dominate the Christians. In places like Iraq, where there are almost no Christians left to persecute, the Muslims fight with each other.
One final point. Almost all of these failed states would also appear on a list of top recipients of western foreign aid. That's how smart our governments are -- not enough sense to stop pouring sand down black, Muslim ratholes.
* Failed states score, out of 120
** Politically correct problems, as listed by the Economist
*** Non-PC problems which everyone knows about but no-one talks about, as listed by Walt.
There are countries like that too, states that start off well enough, then spiral downward in search of rock bottom. Zimbabwe would be a prime example.
This week the Economist features a thoughtful essay on failed states, "Where life is cheap and talk is loose". "States that cannot control their territories, protect their citizens, enter or execute agreements with outsiders, or administer justice," it says, "are a common and worsening phenomenon".
The article has a list of the worst of the worst -- the states with the highest scores on the Failed States Index. Here, with a further comment by yours truly, are the dirtiest dozen black spots.
Country (FSI score*) -- PC problems** -- Non-PC problems***
12. Côte d'Ivoire (101.2) -- post-election deadlock, civil war starting -- African, Muslims vs Christians
11. Haiti (101.6) -- deforestation, destitution, crime -- only African country in the west
10. Pakistan (102.5) -- coups, drugs, illiteracy, terrorism -- Muslim
9. Guinea (105.0) -- destitution, drugs, kleptocracy -- African
8. Central African Republic (106.4) -- desertification, destitution, disease, terrorism -- African
7. Iraq (107.3) -- ruined infrastructure, terrorism -- Muslims vs other Muslims
6. Afghanistan (109.3) -- civil war, drugs, no infrastructure, terrorism -- Muslims vs other Muslims
5. Congo (109.9) -- civil war, massacres, mass rape, looting -- African
4. Zimbabwe (110.2) -- post-election deadlock, economic collapse, kleptocracy, oppression -- African
3. Sudan (111.8) -- illiteracy, tyranny, destitution -- African, Muslims vs Christians
2. Chad (113.3) -- desertification, destitution, next door to Libya -- African, more Muslims
and now... the envelope please...
1. Somalia (114.3) -- anarchy, civil war, piracy -- African, Muslim
I was going to add corruption and incompetence to the list of problems, where applicable, but it applied to every single country on the list and I grew tired of typing the words over and over.
Surely I don't need to point out the commonalities, but just in case... 8 of the failed states (including the worst 5) are in Africa. And we must count Haiti as an African state because almost 100% of its people are of African origin.
7 of 12 are totally or partially Muslim. In Côte d'Ivoire and Sudan, the Muslims fight to dominate the Christians. In places like Iraq, where there are almost no Christians left to persecute, the Muslims fight with each other.
One final point. Almost all of these failed states would also appear on a list of top recipients of western foreign aid. That's how smart our governments are -- not enough sense to stop pouring sand down black, Muslim ratholes.
* Failed states score, out of 120
** Politically correct problems, as listed by the Economist
*** Non-PC problems which everyone knows about but no-one talks about, as listed by Walt.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Are you living in a failed state?
Earlier this week, the Fund for Peace -- a U.S. NGO whose mission is to promote sustainable security -- released its annual list of the world’s failed states.177 countries are ranked on a matrix including security threats, economic implosion, human rights violations and refugee flows. Since the index was published for the first time in 2005, the top 10 slots have rotated among 15 countries. Foreign Policy (the Fund's publication) said it seems that state failure “is a chronic condition”.
And now for the organization’s list of the world’s 10 most vulnerable nations ... or, if you want to look at it this way, the 10 worst places to live ... with Walt's comments.
10. Pakistan - Christians persecuted for blaspheming against Islam. Taliban hiding out in the Khyber Pass. Capital is Islamabad -- no pun intended.
9. Guinea - Not to be confused with Guyana which has improved to 104th. And it borders on India. Just one of a rotten bunch of banana republics in central and west Africa. See map above.
8. Central African Republic - Ditto. Used to be the Central African Empire, whose emperor was rumoured, only a couple of decades ago, to eat his enemies. Hasn't improved much since.
7. Iraq - Site of the Bush war. Hazardous place to live due to frequent and unpredictable explosions. Sunni Muslims fighting with Shia Muslims (dontcha love the name "Shiite"?) fighting with Ismaili Muslims fighting with Kurds, and so on.
6. Afghanistan - Site of the Obama war. Otherwise see 7.
5. Democratic Republic of Congo - Next door to the Republic of Congo, which ranks only 30th. Anarchy in the eastern part, except for the foreign-run mines -- blood diamonds. No roads. No nothing. Heart of Darkness country.
4. Chad - Sits next to Canada at the U.N. Has Libya for a northern neighbour, Sudan on the east. Nice.
3. Sudan - See my recent post on South Sudan. The Muslim-ruled north is only marginally better. Dustiest capital city in the world.
2. Zimbabwe - Uses its worthless dollars for toilet paper. Generates more refugees than any other country on earth. Ruled by Comrade Robert Mugabe (Bob's your uncle!) the 2nd-worst dictator on earth.*
And the winner (?) is...
1. Somalia - Failed to cash in on worldwide interest in pirates. Two or three "governments" claim overlapping territories. Warlords in charge. Anarchy rules.
* Source: Fund for Peace. Who's No. 1? Step forward, Kim Jong-il, Dear Leader and President for Life of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.
Footnote: Read the article to discover why Canada and Eire are coloured green on the map, but the U.S.A. and Britain are only yellow.
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