Comments on The Core of Darkness

With a name like "Doctor Congo Fever", it was really just a matter of time before he went insane and killed a bunch of people.

The horror...

Obligatory Conrad references aside, in the DRC it's much worse than a bird flu every day. It's more like the Twin Towers coming down 2 times a week. We lose 1200 people per day in the eastern Congo, mostly from preventable causes like malnutrition and diarrhea.

For the moment, though, we're much less worried about new epidemics than about the 10,000 people who fled new fighting yesterday. The horror, the horror.

Speaking of African "epidemics"...

As far as we know, AIDS started in Africa from one of these possible monkey-to-human infection fantasies.

1. Children playing with dead monkeys
2. Eating undercooked monkeys (yum!)
3. People having sex with monkeys (rrrowwrr!).

Then, somehow, the "infection" made it to a handful of men in Los Angeles in 1980...OR a Canadian airline steward, or both, or whatever (it doesn't really matter as long as you have faith).

The moral to this story is that only Bono can save Africa from itself by poisoning Africans.

@4 - what the hell are you talking about?

I don't think anyone's unaware that Africa's a fucking slaughterhouse, Charles. If you've really got such a bug up your butt about it why don't you put down the bong, wean yourself off the red wine, go over there and do something about it? Or stay here and do something about it -- whatever. Just stop moping around a city that's as far from Africa as it's possible to get and still be on the planet, smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish, writing fucking movie reviews (could you possibly have come up with a way of making money that would be less likely to improve things in Africa?) and pissing and moaning about how nobody else seems to care how bad things are in fucking Africa. Jesus fuck.

I don't give a shit about Africa because it's got less to do with me than a million other things that need my attention. What's your excuse?

#5,

I ask the same thing when the HIV/AIDS fantasy is peddled as reality.