This blog post by an ex-athlete, now ESPN writer, is being vilifiedas a mean spirited and callous screed and ESPN fired him for it the next day.
The quake aside, and Haiti specifically aside, I’m wondering to what extent it is possibly hold the people of a nation morally and ethically responsible for it’s perceived success or failure. People around the world do this to citizens of the US all the time for our foreign policy and mlitary actions. Is it unfair to (effectively) tell the people of a sovereign nation that the miserable political and social conditions they live in are mainly their own fault??
I don’t think it’s categorically unfair to say that, but it would be wrong most of the time. If the vast majority of the people in a country held totally backwards beliefs, then one might justifiably claim that their plight was their fault. This is part of why I am not particularly sympathetic to the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: even though the Israel government has acted immorally at times, the Palestinian people are, by and large, bigoted religious fundamentalists. They are not a sovereign nation, however. I can’t think of an actual sovereign nation whose people’s terrible circumstances I would blame on its citizens.
That blog post is so braying and smug as to be risible. E.g. with this:
He is essentially dismissing the potential suffering of anyone who lives on the sea. Tsunamis can happen anywhere. The logical conclusion of his rhetorical question is: nobody should live my the sea, lest a once-in-a-thousand-years event happen. Goodbye the majority of the seaboard cities of the US, goodbye Venice, much of Hawaii, most South Sea nations, Sydney, etc.
He claims people living under oppressive dictatorships are responsible for the regimes that crush their ability to rebel.
He implies New Orleans should have been moved years ago.
Ignoring the lack of compassion, essentially his attitude is a (slightly insane) ivory-towered, insular one based, as far as I can tell, on ignorance, lack of comprehension of civilisation, and thus easily dismissed.
In general though, I agree with The Bith Shuffle in that “it would be wrong most of the time”. Sure, there are myriad cultural artefacts that adversely affect the logical outcomes following a disaster - I’ve seen it myself first-hand. But to ignore those cultural artefacts is to deny the effects of poverty and lack of education, and the charming imperfection that is humanity. Better, surely, to help those whose lives were already shit, to protect themselves against future disaster, something which donations could, in fact, assist.
Let’s not forget that the interaction with other countries might well help make a country poorer and less self sufficient in the long run. It can be very difficult to resist the interaction. Haiti used to be a net exporter of rice, but no more. I think that is a change that Haiti comes out very much the worse for in the long run. Look into the reasons behind that and tell me what they should have done instead. Also Haiti was paying tribute to France for a ridiculously long time. If you want to start pointing fingers be sure you are pointing in the correct direction.
Some countries are poor for obvious reasons. Chad has trouble raising enough food to feed the people there most years and has nothing else to trade for food. It is no surprise that it is a nation in need. I don’t see where fingerpointing is going to help anything.
I’d turn the question around and ask if the citizens of rich countries should be held accountable for their condition.
If so, that means they deserve blame for the historical and current capitalistic exploitation of natural resources and human labor (their own and those of other nations) that helped them be rich.
If not, that means they are just blokes lucky enough to be born at the right time and in the right place, and that they are just cogs in a great machine established by a society lucky enough to have sprung out of certain circumstances, free from certain impediments.
Even at the individual level, it’s hard to lay complete blame at the feet of poor people. It’s kind of hard to rise above poverty if that’s where you come from, no one ever encouraged you to take school seriously, and even if they had, no one could come up with money to send you off to college or vocational school. And oh yeah, you can’t even get hired at a temp agency because no one has ever taken you aside and told you that gold teeth and long acrylic nails aren’t impressive attributes for high-paying gigs. So if it’s hard to lay blame at the feet of poor people for their own circumstances, then it’s really hard to tell poor people that they’re responsible for the shit-holiness of their countries.
We in the US are a wealthy nation. However our desire for tax cuts combined with government services has bankrupted the country and made us dependent on China. Our kids have to pay the bills for our irresponsible attitudes. If you poll people, most will say they want tax cuts plus the same/more government services. Good luck.
The fact that most of us barely pay attention to civics means the person who gets to us the fastest with the best soundbites gets elected to write complex global policy.
Our attempt to outpace the Joneses is resulting in various natural resource crunches that are going to cause massive domestic and global problems over the coming decades.
Our indifference to climate change, and our willingness to outsource our pollution to China to get cheap toys is also a problem. We want cheap toys and stuff from walmart, so we set up the factories there and let the Chinese deal with the $300 billion a year in environmental damage. We could pay 5% more on the stuff we get that says ‘made in China’ in exchange for stronger environmental and labor standards in those countries, but we don’t.
So us citizens of the US are helping to destroy the environment, outsourcing labor and environmental abuses to keep our consumption costs low, using up limited natural resources at an unsustainable pace, bankrupting our country and helping cause climate damage that will do trillions in property damage all over the world.
So no, I’m not mad at the poor in Haiti. Not to be a dick (I’m part of the problem too, I’m not saying ‘those Ugly Americans’ and not including myself), but those of us in the US are probably the most irresponsible citizens on the planet.
We bankrupt our own country then hand it over to our kids. We export labor and environmental abuses. We use up natural resources at a clip. We contribute heavily to climate change.
I disagree with this one. I’m assuming that long acrylic nails and gold teeth is a characteristic of poor black folk. And your statement assumes that these poor black folk live in some kind of ghetto bubble where they never come into any kind of contact with well off white people, or even successful black people or politicians, none of which are likely to have gold teeth or long acrylic fingernails.
It’s pretty obvious if you pay attention that success in the wider society requires a certain look, which doesn’t include gold teeth and long acrylic fingernails (or a black hooded sweatshirt with metallic gold crowns and dollar signs printed all over it.) Having those things means that you either didn’t pay attention, or you just don’t care, assuming you’re an adult, and not a teenager (they generally look stupid regardless of race or income)
The people in third world countries are no less intelligent or responsible than us. Quite the opposite, they tend to take more responsibility for the actions of their governments. The people of Haiti elected Aristide to serve their interests, the American public has taken no responsibility for their government repeatedly deposing him.
And to battle the ignorance inherent in the propounding of the view of Palestinians as religious bigots, about a third of all Palestinians are Christian, including at least one Hamas MP. Hamas are a Muslim organisation. Does this not bespeak tolerance? Israel, on the other hand, is an apartheid nation built on blood and conquest.
I’ve seen whites with gold teeth and acrylic nails, so no, I was not talking about just poor black people. And you could replace these things with white-beaters and mullets, or bottle-bleached hair and pierced eyebrows.
And it certainly is possible for a person to live in such a bubble. There are many of Americans who have never left their hometowns, not even for vacation (a luxury in itself), and don’t have positive face-to-face contact with people who don’t share their values and tastes. They have TV sets and see people who don’t look like them, but it doesn’t click in their brains that things like dress and diction are correlated with class and success. Or if it does, they are raised to denounce those correlations, in the form of reverse snobbery or defeatist attitudes (e.g., people who speak standard American English and wear business suits aren’t “keeping it real”).
I don’t think it’s “pretty obvious”, actually. For you to think it is, you must assume that poor people are privy to what is considered that “certain look” and are sophistated to know that their look ain’t it. Consider all those horror stories you hear from Human Resource folks about candidates who show up in inappropriate clothing. I suppose it’s comforting to blame them for their own stupidity, but I feel sorry for them. It’s easy to take for granted, but you have to be taught how to dress for certain situations. For instance, when I was interviewing for academic and natural resources positions, I was told by mentors NOT to wear a business suit. This advice took me by surprise, because when I was in undergrad and I was interviewing for internships and co-ops, I was explicitly told to wear my best business suit. But when I filled out my application to work for Six Flags as a teen, I was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and I was hired that day! When you can grab one type of job wearing a t-shirt and shorts, why wouldn’t you assume the rules are different for other types of jobs? Now if the rules weren’t intuitive to me, a product of a middle-class environment, I know it isn’t necessarily that way for someone who is poor, uneducated, and mentored by other poor and uneducated people.
It’s easy to blame poor people for not being smart enough or attentitive enough, or for being self-defeatist, but these behaviors don’t spring out of a vacuum. The poor of the product of their environments, just like everyone else is.
There are a lot of interesting, complex questions being asked here. If the people of a nation aren’t responsible for their own conditions, who else is? (Serious question.) When you absolve people of responsibility, you also take the power to change things away as well.
I like the question of whether citizens of rich countries are also responsible. I’m going to think about that one.
I can think of a lot of reasons how a poor country can be that way without any doing of the people. If the land isn’t arable and lacking resources, it’s constantly bombarbed by natural disasters, and it’s geographically isolated, then I’m having a hard time seeing it being a rich country without getting tons of outside aid and/or without it exploiting another country with resources.
Not to say that all poor countries fit the above criteria, but it’s oversimplistic to say “Of course it’s people’s responsibilities for their conditions!” Not every condition is the same. And history can also stack the deck in favor of certain outcomes that are totally independent of the current population residing in a particular area.
When people are completely free to migrate to other places, without having to jump through legal and financial hoops, then I think it would be fair to blame people for continuing to live in inhospitable places.
I find no support for this contention, although arguing otherwise would sidetrack the OP to some extent.
There is an underlying typical assumption that all countries must hold approximately the same average pool of intellectual talent, and that therefore any general under-performance against the world average must be from some sort of external circumstance of geography, weather, resource, or so on. This assumption is held to quite vigorously, but to date has little quantifiable support for it.
World history is full of the able and the less-able; conquerors and conquerees; slaver and the enslaved; on and on. In the modern world one has to ask why a rank appears in the first place. If, for instance, the Haitian population has been taken advantage of by outside populations, why was it not the other way around? Is it just somehow the case that every sub-saharan african population at home or abroad has gotten the short end of the external circumstance stick, in every country and every political system, and always ends up on the bottom tier?
It is witless to hold poor folks and poor countries accountable for their condition. We are all accidents of our birth, and to be born to a particular gene pool is not an accomplishment; it is a happenstance of nature. But neither should we pretend that there cannot be differences in the fundamental innate average ability of a given population to succeed on the international stage, particularly when outcomes stare us in the face of our protests that Mother Nature could not have designed her world that way.
Our response to any individual–or country–should be the same: We are in a position to help. Perhaps that position is the luck of our birth or a lucky circumstance of our life. What does it matter? We are all humans.
There are arguments that average IQ and the IQ of the smart fraction (the top 5%) are important to the level of wealth, democracy and development of a nation. And it is argued that the average national IQ can vary wildly from a high of about 105 in East Asia (Taiwan, China, South Korea) to a low of about 70 in parts of Africa. The smart fraction varies from a high of near 130 to a low of about 90 between nations.
If true, it means better interventions to improve fluid intelligence are needed to help countries develop (maternal and childhood nutrition, complex learning environments, early education, cognitive exercises, etc).
I thought we had settled the whole “some ethnic groups are inherently less able re intellectual capability” argument a while ago and that it was proven to be a false assertion. Has this changed?
Apply your argument to the individual, though. Someone born into a regime that crushes dissent and keeps the population ignorant. How much responsiblity can that individual be expected to hold? Assuming you think, as I do, “not much”, multiply that up to several million such individuals. How can they possibly be held responsible collectively, if each individuals doesn’t have the means to change his/her circumstances?
There have been numerous threads on the whole “some races/ethnicity’s/human phenotypes are inherently more intellectually capable than others” proposition and (so far as I recall) the argument for this position never won the day.
That has never stopped you from making a bullshit “race realist” argument.
You ignore fact for fantasy. History, politics, culture, geography, etc are real quantifiable things that have real quantifiable effects. You reject/ignore (and fucking mock) these things in favour of your own personal, bullshit, fantasy, “race realist” crap.
And perhaps what’s your diagnosis of those losers?
Ranking? You mean your own personal bullshit ranking? A ranking that is historically/factually ignorant? One that apparently drastically rewrites and changes (1800’s Ireland=crap, 2000’s Ireland=European dynamo) (ancient world Egypt=awesome, today=crap)
Why don’t you pick up a book about Haitian history. There are literally tens of threads of the subject. Read. Learn. But I honestly believe that you have no interest in learning anything that clashes with your “race realist” shtick.
That is about the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever read on this board. “the blacks are always shit.” Name anything any other culture has developed in any part of the world and you will have found that “the blacks” have also used/developed it.
“It is witless to hold poor folks and poor countries accountable for their condition.” …Because that stuff is not controlled by any individual person, but from multi historically/political reasons; not for your fantasy gene junk! You (and your “race realist” kind) have proven dick-all except for an arrogant ability to pretend that science fiction/fantasy equals science fact. You unshamingly represent your views as fucking gospel without a peep on how they are repeatedly rejected by the scientific community as fantasy.
I shouldn’t pretend??!? How about you be honest and tell it straight; stop misrepresenting the scientific community. 1) Your views are unsubstantiated (without proof). They are totally rejected by the mainstream scientific community (in all science fields) as baseless and fringe.
