THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND KARMA

“Power is perceived as a reward for high stocks of merit rather than an outgrowth of a popular mandate.”

This quote comes from Sebastian Strangio’s Hun Sen’s Cambodia, in his description of the age-old power structure in Cambodia. A well-connected Cambodian billionaire may have become rich on the back of all sorts of ill-gotten gains, but he can then build a stupa to himself or contribute to the construction of a pagoda, in order to accumulate ‘merit’. By a circular logic, he can then claim that he is rich and famous as a reward for his contributions.

More than this, the tycoon is rich and famous for his acts of merit in previous lives. He is the beneficiary of his karma. Who are we to question why he is rich, if his karma has already pre-ordained his wealth and power?

This description of Buddhism sounds strangely similar to Max Weber’s famous analysis of Calvinism and Protestant Capitalism. In this theory of predestination, God pre-ordained that only a certain elite would go to heaven. One could recognize the elite by their success in society, either in wealth or in power. A capitalist might resort to all sorts of illegalities to become rich, but once rich, he could claim that he was one of the elite and would go to heaven. It was predestination, so you can’t question it.

American billionaires are treated like gods, without questions about how they may have obtained their billions. The rich tycoons appear daily on talking head TV shows with their pronouncements on morality, economics, and any other topic of their choosing. They are rich; therefore they are always right.

And at the top of this hierarchy, of course, is Donald Trump. Because he is rich and because he became President, he is regarded by many (especially Protestant Evangelicals) as “sent by God”, regardless of his many moral vicissitudes. They can easily believe that God would not allow him — God’s chosen one —  to lose an election, regardless of what the facts tell us, so of course he must have won.

There is a flip side to this coin. If rich people are rich because of their karma or because of predestination, then poor people are poor for the same reasons. This idea translates to right-wing resistance to social programs. Those people deserve to be poor, or are predestined to be poor, so society has no obligation to help them. As Jesus himself said, “The poor ye have always with you.”

After the Pol Pot auto-genocide of 2 million Cambodians, many survivors attributed a lot of the problems to karma. What had Cambodia as a country done to deserve such calamity? Maybe we weren’t devout enough as Buddhists, in this generation or in previous generations.  A result has been, strangely, a devout return to Buddhist blessings and rituals. The well-heeled perpetuate this view by contributing to pagodas in order to demonstrate their good karma. They can grab land with impunity from poor people and throw them into destitution and homelessness because, of course, the poor have bad karma and their poverty is a fixed given.

To make a long story short, in both Buddhist Cambodia and Protestant America, do whatever it takes to get rich — murder, rape, steal — but then claim that it was God’s will, or your karma, or Buddha, or whatever or whoever that justifies your wealth and power.

AVOIDING THE NATURE-NURTURE MINDSET

Identical twins have different fingerprints.  Let that sink in. They have identical genes and DNA, and yet their bodies are different. Fingerprints are therefore not entirely determined by genes. On the other hand, those twins didn’t learn from society to have different fingerprints.

Neither a ‘nature’ theory (i.e. genes) nor a ‘nurture’ theory (i.e. learning) can adequately explain the difference in fingerprints. There must be something else.

This argument comes up again and again in explaining homosexuality. The nurturist may even believe that gay people choose to be that way, and so they advocate that gays be punished. Uganda and some other countries have made laws putting gays in prison for life, or even giving them the death penalty. In perhaps less extreme America, many people are advocating Gay Conversion Therapy, on the theory that gay behavior, learned from society, can be un-learned as well. Conversion therapy often has disastrous consequence for the victims of such thinking.

On the other hand, almost all gay people will say, “I didn’t choose to be gay; I’ve been that way since birth.” That suggests a ‘nature’ argument. For years, researchers tried to find a ‘gay gene’. At one point, scientists thought that they had identified an Xq28 gene that predicted homosexuality, but that was later proven insignificant.

There is clear evidence that heredity plays some role. One estimate is that one’s genetic make-up constitutes at most 25% of one’s gender identity. But that leaves another 75% attributable to other factors. However, the most recent and comprehensive study of gay genetics (Science magazine, reported by Public Broadcasting Service) concluded that the genetic contribution must be ‘polygenetic’, that is,

“…meaning hundreds or even thousands of genes make tiny contributions to the trait. That pattern is similar to other heritable (but complex) characteristics like height or a proclivity toward trying new things….” 

In other words, a combination of genes may increase the probability of a tendency towards some behavior, in the same way that your genes may predict a vulnerability towards a disease like cancer, but the environment is still important in giving you cancer. Some combination of nature and nurture is responsible. Even in these cases, we are still relying on a nature-nurture mindset, only using a linear continuum between the two.

Still, twins’ fingerprints are not a combination of nature and nurture, since the fingerprints are ‘hard-wired’ without any learning in the sense of Pavlov’s dogs or B.F.Skinner’s Walden Two. Similarly, the gay person’s claim that he has been that way from birth suggests that he had no choice in the matter and did not change from straight to gay at any point after a learning experience.

The way to avoid this nature-nurture mindset is to introduce a third determinant of personality: what happens in the womb. Something has clearly happened within the womb to change the twins’ fingerprints. There is nothing revolutionary about this idea; think of crack cocaine babies, whose health is undermined by the mother’s chemistry due to cocaine use.

There are cases where one identical twin is straight and the other gay. Note that each fetus is encased in its own placenta, so there can be differences between the two placenta, such as chemistry, but also position, movement, and other variables. A lot can happen within those nine months of pregnancy, about which we still know very little.

By considering that a lot of behaviors and ‘hard-wired’ characteristics might result from intra-uterus conditions, we can free ourselves from the prison of nature-nurture thinking. We can now consider three contributors to future behavior, rather than just the two.

‘INTERNATIONAL’ HIGHER EDUCATION

A friend of mine once told me, “If a school calls itself an International School, it isn’t.”

Developing countries around the world have imitated the Western model of higher education. This imitation can go to extremes, such as the graduation procession of the professors in their caps and gowns (even accompanied by Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”), or the curricula full of Western history, art, and culture.

In some respects, this imitation is desirable, especially when students want to continue their higher education abroad, where they must transfer local credits and majors that mesh with the Western programs. Even if a student wants to transfer from one African university to another, the Western system of credits, used by most African universities, provides a consistent framework for the transfer.

However, maintaining the illusion of internationalization can get downright silly. Most of the universities in my country spend a lot of money and effort visiting foreign universities, where they can sign a meaningless Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which they can then post on their campus entrances, websites, and social media pages as “Our Partners”. Many universities post dozens of these official-looking documents, although none of them have ever resulted in any exchange of programs.

Let me describe some of the lengths to which one university, with which I am quite familiar, has gone to promote a false image of internationalization. ‘International Students’ (but all local students) are admitted into a program, ostensibly English-medium, which can lead to transfer to an American university. Applying students must take an English test, but no one ever fails, and about half of the students are at beginner level of English and cannot understand an English lecture or read an English text.

To maintain the international image, all courses require texts and syllabi officially used in American universities, usually 600-800 pages in length and in an academic English incomprehensible to the students. At present, the university described has no international lecturers, so that all courses are taught in the local language, even for TESOL and English Literature majors. Students emerge with a bachelor’s degree in TESOL without a knowledge of English.

Recently, this same university is promoting, with great fanfare and hoopla, an MOU promising transfer into an American university after year II. One problem: students must achieve a certain TOEFL score to study in English in America, but those students are not properly informed of this requirement, and will be unable to pass the TOEFL. Hence, there will probably be zero students in the program (well, maybe 1 or 2), but the CEO has stated publicly, “It doesn’t matter whether there are any students; this is good for our international image.”  There you have it: it’s all about image, not about education.

In order to facilitate the above agreement, the university had to revamp its entire curriculum to dovetail with that of the American university. All students (perhaps none of whom will actually go the the US) are now required to take an Art History course (purportedly in English, but not really), with the usual 600-page unreadable American textbook. In order to introduce this course into the curriculum, some other course had to go. They chose to omit a really useful course in Critical Thinking to be replaced by the Art History.

This kind of fakery is going on all over the developing world. The result is selling students the dream of international education while providing little education useful to most students.

UPDATE ON HAMAS April 23, 2024

I wrote the blog about Hamas’ objectives almost two months ago. In light of recent events, I want to examine how it is turning out. The recent Iranian attempt to bombard Israel is evidence that Hamas is succeeding in its mission to draw the international players into the anti-Israel fight.

But maybe Hamas is failing. Some pundits are suggesting that the Iranian strike was just staged theatre, and that they knew the missiles would be intercepted. That’s very debatable: sending 350 missiles is no joke, and at the very least, is expensive. And suppose just a few of those missiles had hit their target. A major war might have ensued.

I think that Israel made a major mistake by bombing the Iranians in Syria. That was a clear escalation of the conflict to the international arena, and it invited the Iranians to retaliate. UNLESS….. it was all worked out in advance. Israel would bomb Damascus, then Iran would send a message that it is not afraid to attack Israeli soil, to which Israel would send a message that it is not afraid to attack Iranian soil. Messages sent, no damage done.

Whichever scenario is true — fake attacks or real assaults — it would appear that Hamas has lost this round. There has been no all-out war against the cursed Zionists. Moreover, Israel is now seen as the proud defender of its soil against Iran, the primary backer of Hamas. Public opinion — at least partially and temporarily — has shifted to anti-Iran sentiment.

The Battle of Al Shifa Hospital

Next, what about the battle of Al Shifa hospital? It was indeed a major battle for over three days. Who was doing the shooting at the IDF from inside the hospital? The doctors? The patients? No, the battle of Al Shifa proved to the world that Hamas was indeed using the hospital as its military base. Even the official Hamas statement was that “civilians, patients, and displaced people were among the fatalities”.  ‘Among’? So they admit that were militants there?  

As I had suggested in my February blog, using the hospital for military purposes is an open invitation to Israel to attack the hospital. Hamas once again appears to have won the propaganda battle, as the world is now decrying the deaths of hospital patients, etc.  World media is now conveniently forgetting that Al Shifa hospital (and presumably many others) are being used as military centers of operation. Also conveniently forgotten are the facts that the holding of hostages, as well as the use of hospitals for military purposes, are very much against international law.

Rafah

And what about Rafah? Israel promised to launch its offensive before Ramadan, two months ago. Pressure from Biden and from within Israel appear to have forestalled the invasion, but it still might happen. I hope not, for everyone’s sake. Israel could cordon off Rafah and consolidate its gains to the north. Maybe even build a wall, a la Trump, and claim Hamas was paying for it. [All the tunnels under the wall would show how ridiculous it would be, and would also show how the Trump border wall is just as useless at keeping people out.] Hamas controlled territory would be reduced to Rafah, although its tunnels into northern Gaza would remain. If Hamas started firing missiles at Israel from Rafah, then Israel would go in and wipe them out, civilians be damned.

I follow the theatrics of the ‘negotiations’, which are going nowhere. As I pointed out in my first blog, ‘victory’ for Hamas consists only of continuing the war, to show the world that they can hold out against the armed strength of the Israelis. The Hamas ‘proposals’ basically boil down to saying, “OK, Israel, you withdraw all your troops from all of Gaza, allowing Hamas to win the war, in return for which we’ll release some hostages, although we can’t even find most of the ones who are still alive. Meanwhile, we’ll rebuild our tunnels and military to prepare for our next raid into Israel.” That’s not a serious proposal. On the other hand, Israel is saying, “OK Hamas. You release the hostages and we’ll stop the war for a while. Then we’ll start up again, with the added advantage that there will be no more hostages.” That’s not very serious, either.

I’d say that Hamas is on the back foot. If they can’t provoke an international war against Israel, they can either continue fighting or negotiate. They can continue the war in Rafah, at the expense of perhaps 100,000 Palestinian lives, or they can negotiate a settlement in which there will be no more Hamas. Maybe the Palestinian Authority will be allowed to govern, or maybe Israel will occupy Gaza, or maybe there will be a UN Peacekeeping force. Any of these options would be preferable to sacrificing the lives of 100,000 Palestinians, just so Hamas can continue the war.

HAMAS’ OBJECTIVES Feb. 27, 2024

Why did Hamas invade Israel? Surely they didn’t hope to take any territory, and even more surely, they didn’t hope to defeat Israel. After raping women and causing mayhem and as much Israel outrage as possible, they went back into Gaza. What did they hope to gain by that? Did anyone think that Israel would just let them go without any response? I’m not hearing anyone in the media discussing Hamas’ motives.

Clearly, the intent was to provoke Israel into a full scale invasion of Gaza. No one can deny that Hamas brought this on themselves. They knew that Israel would strike back with all their fury. One could then criticize Israel for the inevitable ‘disproportionate response.’ Hamas invited Israel to destroy Gaza.

Also, most people accept that Hamas embeds itself inside and under schools and hospitals. Again, did anyone think that Israel would just leave these embedded military operations alone? No, Hamas invited Israel, and counted on Israel, to attack the schools and hospitals. One must conclude that Hamas wanted the thousands of dead children and civilians.

Hamas had no hope of actually winning this war. Rather, the hope was that film footage of dead children and maimed civilians would provoke such international rage against Israel, that the wider Palestinian communities and even the Arab and Islamic nations would finally gang up on Israel and put an end to the Zionist regime.

Hamas has truly succeeded in bringing about their desired thousands of dead children and maimed civilians, thereby bringing rage against Israel, but they have failed to bring in other nations to destroy Israel. Other than some Houthi strikes on ships, the international community has stayed out of the fray. True, Hamas and their Iranian backers have succeeded in preventing any normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. There is still hope that the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon will explode, but the West Bank appears to want to stay out of this.

For Hamas, what would winning even mean? Driving the IDF out of Gaza? Of course not. The best they can hope for is to prolong the slaughter as long as possible, so that they can maintain the image to the world of the brave Palestinians holding out against the evil Jews. The international community is trying to press Israel for a ceasefire. Why don’t they press Hamas for a ceasefire? Hamas has lost the war, especially if one considers Hamas to be synonymous with Gaza.  Hamas, by their own count, has brought about the deaths of some 30,000 civilians. A ceasefire should therefore include the end of Hamas, along with the destruction of the tunnels under Gaza. The international community, including the US, is eager to reconstruct Gaza, once the war is over. Hamas could end the war in a second, but they clearly don’t want this carnage to end.

Perhaps a temporary solution would be the neutralization of just Rafah under international supervision, even if the war in the rest of Gaza goes on. However, Hamas wants only the escalation of the war to the wider community, and so still clings to the hope of provoking Israel to kill more civilians in Rafah. If this happens, the blood of all those Palestinans (Sunnis, as opposed to Hamas Shias) will be as much on Hamas’ hands as on Israel’s.

DO EVANGELICALS HATE JESUS?

In recent years, the evangelical right wing has embraced attitudes and behaviors 180 degrees antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Where Jesus taught people to ‘love their neighbor’, evangelicals hate blacks, Hispanics, Jews, LGBTQs, immigrants, and anyone who does not look or think exactly like them. This behavior is pointed out and condemned a lot in the media, but I’m not hearing any cogent explanations as to WHY this is happening.

Let’s start by citing study after study showing that religious people do not behave more or less morally than non-religious people. This is quite startling, since religion is all about morality. We can only conclude that religion has little or no relationship with actual behavior, but somehow is closely tied to perceived goodness and morality.

Let’s also rule out the Bible as a source of morality. People cherry-pick the Bible to justify or to mean anything they want. This is especially true because of the black-and-white difference between the eye-for-an-eye morality of the Old Testament and the love-thy-neighbor morality of the New Testament. Even Jesus’ saying, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” is twisted by Christian theologians as meaning the precise opposite, i.e. it really means he came to bring peace.

I see several possibilities for Christians and other religious people:

  1. God forgives our sins. Jesus died to save me. I may commit all sorts of evil deeds, but God will forgive me and everything will be just fine. This thinking is related to the doctrine of original sin; we are all born sinners, so I commit sins all the time, but God always forgives me. (This possibility applies to Christians but not to most other religions.
  2. I am religious; I pray and go to church; therefore, I am a good person; therefore what I do is good.

Let me explore this second option in more historical detail. Consider the Inquisition, in which thousands of normal people were tortured on the rack or burned at the stake. The perpetrators of this atrocities were often cardinals and bishops. By destroying these heretics, they were doing God’s will. After all, cardinals and bishops are men of God, so in their own minds they must be doing good. (This possibility applies to all religions.)

There is a possibility that the pedophile priest understands that he is doing wrong, but that his other priestly acts more than compensate for his bad behavior. On the whole, he is good: “I’m helping so many people in good ways, that I can be allowed this slip-up in morality.”

3. There is a third category of perceived moral/immoral behavior — tribal thinking. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim saw religion as the embodiment of the tribe. He saw morality as the collective adherence to tribal values. In today’s world, ‘tribe’ can apply not just to ethnic groups, but to groups who share a common ideology or social status. Vance Packard, in The Status Seekers, saw the various sects of American religion as reflective of social class values. Thus, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians, reflected the class thinking of lower, middle, and upper classes of society.

In Durkheim’s view, ‘God’ is just a symbol of the tribe. Idols and totem poles are just symbols of the tribal values. For Christians, the Cross is just a totem of Christian society.

In this view, moral behavior is simply behavior that reflects the tribal values of some group, be it an ethnic group or a social class. The phrase “God tells me that homosexuality is wrong” translates to, “My tribe tells me that homosexuality is wrong.”

A totem is the symbol or embodiment of solidarity of a clan or social group.

It is only a small jump from this view to a hatred of other tribes, whose gods tell them something else. Almost by definition, other tribes’ differences can be seen as the work of the devil, and must therefore be eliminated. God not only gives me permission to kill members of other tribes, but He (i.e. my tribe) proclaims the obligation for me to kill them.

Donald Trump recently put this tribal morality into understandable language. While describing Hispanic immigrants as rapists and murderers, he said that he welcomed immigrants from ‘nice’ countries. Of course, we know what that means.

In fact, Trump understands this very well. That scene where he crossed the street of rioters and held up an upside-down Bible was symbolic of the tribe, even though Trump has never read the Bible, nor does he have any idea what it says. Similarly, his sale of patriotic Bibles is a clear link of the religious symbol of the Bible to the tribal values of white superiority.

In the biblical Battle of Jericho, Jahweh commanded His Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the city, as well as every animal they found. How’s that for tribalism?

So Christian values like loving your neighbor apply only to your own tribe. The old phrase ‘Southern hospitality’ applies to hospitality to white people of your tribe, but not to non-white outsiders.  One of my favorite stories is about American missionaries in Africa who set up a mission school several decades ago. One African student at their school was so intelligent, that the missionaries got him a scholarship to a prestigious American university. When in America, he went to visit the Southern church that had provided his education, but he was denied entry because he was black.

When you look at American Evangelism through this tribal lens, it all starts to make sense and hang together. It explains, for example, the close relationship between Evangelicals and Politics, in which one’s political positions are simply those of the tribe, and are not to be questioned. Even ‘the facts’ are subject to tribal ‘relative truth’.

To the Evangelicals, Jesus and the Bible are just symbols of the tribe. It doesn’t really matter what Jesus said or what the Bible says. They don’t exactly hate Jesus; rather, Jesus’ teachings are irrelevant to the current tribal values.

Some Thoughts on Good and Evil

In 1987, in Detroit, an airplane crashed, killing some 148 passengers and six crew. However, in the wreckage, a lone infant was found alive. Overnight, the world media were filled with expressions of “God is Great!”, “God is all-merciful,”, “Praise God.”  

Wait a minute! Almighty, all-loving, all-knowing God just murdered 154 people in cold blood. I’m not hearing any criticisms of God. It must be part of his all-loving plan for us. “God is good — all the time.”

I think that even religious people don’t really believe this malarky. Rather, people see an overwhelming background of evil and suffering as the default condition. Once in a while, God creates a miracle and does something good. The existence of any small good at all is cause for praise and celebration. One good amidst a hundred evils is proof of God’s existence.

This psychology of a default evil is not too far from the Buddhist doctrine that “All life is suffering.”

I had a daughter who died of cancer at the age of seven. Family members prayed for her survival, to no avail. She might have survived if God had answered their prayers, but He chose not to intervene, so she died. Again, suffering was the default condition, so the family were not unduly shaken by God’s inaction. Their faith was not changed, and they continued to pray for an array of other divine interventions. God was still good, all the time.

Incidentally, there have been a host of scientific studies on the effects of prayer on healing. Some have been positive, while most have shown no effect. Some even demonstrate that patients who know they are being prayed for suffer even adverse outcomes. Never mind, miracle healings do occur, and with no other rational explanations, people naturally ascribe them to divine interventions.

A long time ago, I saw a movie called something like “The Debate”, about two Jews — maybe brothers — who somehow escaped the Nazi concentration camps and met years later. One had renounced his fate, after seeing the horrors that God had permitted. [Remember that old Emerson, Lake, and Palmer line, “Why did He lose, six million Jews?”?] The other had become a devout rabbi. When the apostate brother asked him how he could have become a rabbi after witnessing and escaping the horrors, he replied, “The Holocaust proved that there is right and wrong in this world.” In some Hegelian way, the existence of evil implies the existence of good.

The bottom line is, “God chooses.” A soldier who gets ‘foxhole religion’ sees the guy next to him have his head blown off while he remains alive. Why does God choose for one soldier to live while the other dies?

If I pray to God to help me be admitted to University X, that means someone else will be denied admission. Does God believe in affirmative action?

I’m often amused by high school football games, where before the game, team A huddles for the ‘team prayer’, basically asking God to help them beat the shit out of team B. Simultaneously (and known to team A), team B across the field is asking God to help them beat the shit out of team A. Does each team think that they can out-pray the competition?

The football prayer illustrates not only that we believe God can take sides, but that we can influence that choice by praying fervently enough. This leads to a slippery slope, as follows:

Suppose I pray to God to help me win a tennis match. This is equivalent to asking God to help my opponent lose the match. That is asking God for a negative outcome, or ‘evil’, if you will. Once you start asking God for negatives: “God, make my opponent lose this match”, you might as well ask for specifics: “God, make my opponent break his leg.” From there it is only a short step to issuing curses on people. Just as we ask God, before our meal, to ‘bless’ our food (whatever the heck that means), we might as well ask him to curse the food of our political opponents.

No, the arrogance of trying to manipulate God into choosing our side doesn’t make much sense to me. As Jim Morrison (The Doors, Soft Parade) put it: “YOU CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” If God, once in a while, performs some unsolicited miracle (seemingly either bad or good in our eyes), that is His business, not ours to question.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH AFRICA?

I love Africa. I spent 12 years there, living in 5 very different countries — Nigeria, Lesotho, Ivory Coast, Mozambique, and Uganda — and travelling in most of the rest. In each case, I left, disillusioned at the lack of progress, at how African countries seemed to be working against their own interests. But each time I left, I went back, longing for the continent I loved.

I went to Cambodia just after the Khmer Rouge auto-genocide of some 2 million people. This had to be the lowest point of humanity in all of history. And yet, 29 years after I went to that basket case, the country has risen to the point of being classified a ‘lower middle-class’ country. It has surpassed almost all, if not all, African countries. So what’s wrong with Africa?

This question is not answered in the media, because most answers would be attacked as racist. “What’s wrong with Africans?” is pretty demeaning. But in my view, even to generalize the people as ‘Africans’ is racist, or at least ill-informed. On that huge continent, the people are as different as night and day.

I learned this when I first went to Nigeria, or more precisely, Maiduguri in Bornu — far north-east Nigeria near Lake Chad. Yes, that’s the place where the Boko Haram kidnapped those girls and have committed all sorts of atrocities. I was there to set up a new university, still existing as the University of Maiduguri. The people there are Kanuri: tall and thin, very dark-skinned, Muslim, and islamic-educated. We had several Ibo and other lecturers at our new university. They are short, stocky, and mostly Christian-educated, from Southeast Nigeria. They felt as foreign and out-of-place in Bornu as I did. I did most of my socializing with the ‘foreign’ Ibos, since we had so much more in common. Certainly these two groups of people could not be lumped together in any generalized ‘African’ rubric.

The Ibos and the Kanuris hated each other. Northern Nigeria had been instrumental in the starvation of thousands of Ibos back in the Biafra days. And therein lies, in my opinion, the crux of Africa’s problems. In a word: tribalism.

Just a few days ago was the 30th anniversary of the Rwanda massacre, where some 800,000 people were slaughtered. Then the West foisted ‘democracy’ on the country. Do you think that any Tutsi would vote for a Hutu? Not a chance. They vote for their own tribe, no matter how corrupt of criminal the candidate. That is the case all over Africa. ‘Democratic’ voting is by tribe, not by policy, intelligence, or philosophy.

Democracy is only a facade in Africa, as the parties are tribal factions, not real political parties. Are there any relative successes in Africa? True, you only hear about the horror stories in the media, but I’m not hearing about successes, except those silly happy-news Africa programs on CNN, which tell me nothing.

Sadly, it seems that the relative successes are countries where a strongman, who controls the army, keeps the tribes from killing each other. I lived in the Ivory Coast under President Houphouet-Boigny, who kept the Baoulé and the Bété from each others’  throats. It was the most developed country in Africa, and a real joy to live in. But when Houphouet left the scene, the country descended into chaos. One could also point to similar strongmen like Hastings Banda in Malawi, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and others, where the strongman kept the country together, but where chaos ensued after their departure.

Of course, there were other leaders who stayed in power simply by killing off the opposition tribe(s): Idi Amin in Uganda, Sekou Toure in Guinea, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

I also blame the colonial powers for drawing arbitrary lines on a map to form the newly independent countries. This process lumped together tribes who had hated each other and who had been killing and enslaving each other for centuries. They put the Hutus and the Tutsis together in the same ‘nation’. What did they expect? There again, it would be nonsensical to brand the tall, thin Tutsis, and the shorter Hutus with the same epithet of ‘Africans’.

I guess you can understand from the above why the media won’t touch this subject. I’m sure I will be attacked, but so be it.

What I’m not hearing about Targeting

The word ‘targeting’ is being tossed around a lot lately, especially in light of the ‘targeted’ killing of the aid convoy in Gaza.

The IDF apparently used AI to inform them that the convoy had Hamas fighters in it. They therefore ‘targeted’ the convoy, in the sense that they hit the convoy they were aiming at. It was no accidental or stray fire that hit the aid workers; it was clearly intentional.

(Aside: these days, AI is generally praised as God’s answer to everything. I find it surprisingly ironic that the IDF is condemned for using AI. “How dare they use AI in their decision making.”)

Now the media, especially CNN, are twisting the word ‘target’ to claim that the IDF was specifically trying to kill aid workers. I don’t see any reason for the IDF to whip up international wrath in this way.

The same way that Russia and Israel ‘target’ hospitals. Yes, they were aiming at the hospitals, in the belief that the enemy were operating there (e.g. Al Shifa in Gaza). That is targeting in one sense of the word. But intentionally trying to kill civilians is a different meaning of the word.

So be sure which meaning you are referring to.

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