Comment by arcturus17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcturus17 | Hacker News Reader

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> Imagine growing up in war-torn Africa, drug-ridden slums of South America or fanatical Middle East with daily executions.

This sentence is so ignorantly woke that it has come full-circle and it is blatantly racist.

Latin America is much, much more than drug-ridden slums, war hasn't torn apart all of Africa - and many countries have recovered from such strife -, and many people in the Middle East live under moderate versions of the Sharia that don't entail gruesome "daily executions" like in ISIS-controlled territories.

About 700M people in the world live in absolute poverty nowadays, compared to about 80% in the 1800s [1]. There is no factual evidence that the "majority" of people in the world live in the abject conditions that you describe. In fact, many people now live in relative material poverty compared to Western standards, but in safety, dignity and prosperity.

We can argue all day about how there is a lot of work yet to be done or how at the extremes wicked expressions of evil continue to exist, but this savage and false interpretation of the world is completely out of place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold

I traveled around the world and spent some time in Brazil. Look e.g. at Rio de Janeiro - a small "city" with a few luxurious somewhat safe neighborhoods like Ipanema and Gavea, then a bit more seedy Copacabana, then a Maputo-style Centro, and all this surrounded by slums that take about 20x the size of the core Rio, including the famous "Zona Morte" a foreign tourist sees first when arriving via the international airport. Friends were telling me stories they experienced in favelas, like grandma phoning to her grandchildren to skip the school because there "were a few rough days" with bullets flying around, or all inhabitants running away because two gangs decided to wage a mini war on some nice afternoon. You see 16 year olds with faces that look 50+ from the "tough love" they experience everyday, lack of opportunities, constant fear of not making it to another day, rampant cheating in everything because that's what everyone is doing, and that's just Brazil, one of the most developed ones. Now look at San Salvador or Guatemala, or some parts of Mexico that went completely bonkers. I am not sure what is "woke" or "racist" in this - most of our planet feels like a hellhole and there is a lot of work to do to improve it. Most people have terrible lives as they have to cope with these either directly or indirectly (even if your life is fine right now, you are still constrained by the hostile environment around), a small minority is cushioned from all that "fun" and pressure.

I volunteered as a teacher in Honduras, embedded in a piss-poor shanty town near La Ceiba that was once ravaged by hurricane Mitch, and while I saw some horror stories (ex: one of my pupils had a forced abortion b/c her partner kicked her), I still believe that about 95% of people lived decent, happy lives and not the constant oppressive existence you describe.

I've also travelled across Africa, and have seen plenty, and I mean plenty, of happy people. They lived in material poverty compared to my cozy European living standards, but in relative safety and prosperity.

Your interpretation of how most people in the world live in absolutely abject and violent conditions is not only wrong in my opinion and experience, the data is also there to back it up. Massive improvements in healthcare, education, policing have happened all across the board in the world.

There is atrocious violence in too many parts of the world, but not "most" of the world like you describe. For each example you describe in Latin America or Africa, I could come up with one hundred counter-examples of towns that live in pretty safe and prosperous conditions.

The world still needs a lot - and I mean a lot - of work, but an utterly bleak and defeatist vision of things does not help the cause.

I don't think it's defeatist at all - it's realistic, I am not putting on rosy glasses but see the reality as it is. Even the people you saw living happily at the moment are in a high risk of experiencing a massive trauma that would scar them for the rest of their lives as their environment can change abruptly. If you want to change something for the better, you need to understand what is the exact state right now. At least we agree on the amount of work that needs to be done.

...most of our planet feels like a hellhole...

Donnie, is that you?

Did you even read what I wrote or was this just a cheap reaction from minimal pattern matching? One could describe state of hellhole as something to avoid and help others to escape it/change it. In your case you went with the "prevent anyone from there to reach my blessed state" interpretation, more consistent with the Donnie.

I think it is equating the term "hellhole" with "shithole"...which seems pretty fair to me.

I think you haven't traveled widely enough or looked at the data and as a result are makinf broad and innacurate generalizations that do qualify as racist.

If you're really worried about people in other nations, you should start voting and protesting against all our stupid wars, sanctions, CIA operations, assassinations, etc. that harm people in other nations. Left to their own devices, free from USA predations, they would mostly be fine. I mean, they might not have iPhones, but most humans throughout history also have not had iPhones.

If you don't want your communication to be compared to that of the crudest politician in recent memory, you shouldn't communicate like he does.

I wouldn’t say their perspective is woke at all, it reminds me of that well known passage in Hobbe’s Leviathan: nasty, brutish and short; which is a work associated with traditional conservatism, although you saw conservative neoliberals like Milton Friedman say similar things when arguing that capitalism has greatly improved the world.

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> that's how childhood looks like for the majority of people on this planet

They are saying it is mostly that, which I believe is blatantly false.

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