Uganda's law isn't dumb, its fascist and genocidal. Not sure why Charles used such mild language considering how quick he is to compare people to the Nazi's.

On second thought, I do know.

Zimbabwe was a much better place when it was Rhodesia

And because there's no other forum for this: fuck you, you fucking fucks for the Blue Angels flyover gif on your page. I can't believe you would promote yourselves as being an outspoken liberal news source and then rent space to such a wasteful militaristic bit of propaganda. Really, whoever ok'd this can get bent.

@14 and everyone else ragging on Charles about his ebola-colonialism statement:

I think he's referring to the research that has shown that the ebola/marburg viruses are related and most likely jumped to humans from other primates somewhere in 1890-1920, probably 1900-1910, perhaps from some hunter eating bushmeat, and likeliest at this remote southeastern corner of Cameroon, if I remember. This was a very remote region but, around the time ebola jumped to humans, there was a ton of foot traffic on the trails and the river lugging all the rubber and ivory. That's where the colonialism part comes in. The only reason there were all these people beating around the bush in central Africa was to extract all those natural resources for the European companies. Also, an emerging pathogen of humans requires a concentration of plenty of people to pass on the pathogen and let it establish itself within the population. The crowded African towns and cities, born out of the thriving ivory and rubber economies, served as human fuel for the epidemic.

Or they were like the soil, if the ebola epidemic is the plant. Had the distant forests remained remote and sparsely populated, ebola would not have been widely transmitted. It would have flared itself out. Maybe some hunter catches it, spreads it to his family, and that's it. There isn't a stream of humans passing it on to each other on the way to the city, where it can really take hold. That's what Charles is referring to.

@31

is your vagina hurting again? Are the skinny jeans on too tight?

@33 Well, first of all, I was thinking of an article that was about the history of HIV, not ebola. No wonder I couldn't find it! But the idea that so much tragedy is the enduring fruit of colonialism in Africa is unchanged.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/h…

It's a fine read, if a little long.

So be that as it may. Ebola/HIV... Charles point is that much misery in Africa is the result of colonialism.

So having stated that, and on to my argument:

To say that high quality of life and knowledge are both exclusive provinces of Western culture reveals a sad, ignorant (or forgetful) ethnocentricity on your part. Native tribes in California were doing quite well, thank you, before the Spanish arrived, for example. That's where their misery really came in. The Chinese had a rich history of research and innovation on their own. I don't know much about African history, but I'm guessing that African villages tilling their gardens, hunting their meat, raising their kids, and squabbling with each other, living comfortably within their land without demanding too much from it, were much happier than when the Europeans arrived, with all their vaunted, Promethean knowledge of science and technology... which they used, as before, to enslave/exploit the local inhabitants and force them into crowded cities and a frenzied lifestyle where they spent their time working for the company, instead of working for themselves. No longer whiling away their days planting and living off the forest, accumulating a particular body of knowledge that the Europeans didn't have, the central Africans saw the fabric of their society torn up and replaced by a system where they were forcefed into the myopic profit drive of the companies, where the goal is to squeeze as much money out of the land and its people right now without consideration for the future.

Why were there so many people passing in and out of the jungle and creating these large towns and cities? Because they were busy killing elephants and rhinos and stripping trees for rubber and selling it off. Why? Because the Europeans had a voracious appetite for it. Would African villagers suddenly have decided that they wanted to amass all these piles of tusks and buckets of rubber just, you know, to have sitting there next to the garden to trade with other villages with similar piles? Maybe. Would African villagers suddenly have decided that they wanted to congregate in large towns and cities - breathing, mating, spitting all over each other and swapping pathogens - because, I don't know, they suddenly felt the urge to invade distant lands across the ocean and take their resources? I don't know. Maybe. Given enough time.

But all that speculation doesn't change what research indicates happened - HIV jumped the species barrier to humans somewhere around the turn of the 20th Century north of the Congo River, during a time of relatively heavy human incursion into the forest, killing animals for ivory and slashing trees for rubber so they could sell it or trade it at the new, bourgeoning towns and cities that had been formed to accommodate the trade. If you don't have so many people exposing themselves to new pathogens in remote regions and bringing them back to thriving civilization so they can take a permanent hold, then you don't have emerging pathogens.

And that great, saving Western knowledge that the poor African villagers were deprived off? In the case of HIV, the situation was made even worse by the practice of vaccination with reused needles.

Ebola may have a similar history of emergence as a result of reckless resource exploitation, which is a Western practice.

I'm sorry if it insults you to suggest that Western ways aren't the only way, or perhaps even the best way to do things. Those poor, backwards native peoples - Native Americans, Africans, aborigines, what have you - weren't made better of because Western ships came to their shores.

@44

is that all you got? WOW! thats especially entertaining coming from someone like yourself. Are you getting ready for that big raise to $15/hour soon?

you can try to rewrite history all you want, but the facts will always prove people like you wrong.