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Thirst For Coltan Fueling African Conflict
MetaPhyzx writes "According to an article put forth by the Toward Freedom website, the metallic ore known as columbite-tantalite or coltan for short is fueling conflict in central Africa. The relevance to us who read news for geeks: Coltan is in quite a few consumer electronics; the article references the Sony Playstation series." As reader fahrvergnugen points out in the comments below, there's reason to more than doubt the currency of the claims in the above-linked article, as outlined in a post at Joystiq.
Peace, love and understanding has nothing to do with defending yourself. The martial arts are primarily a means of defense, not attack, and are said to be quite handy against guns, knives and indeed rocks. You can love your fellow man and wear body armour, to much the same effect. Peace does not require intimidating everyone else into cowardice. It is quite sufficient to make hostile intent completely ineffective.
(Hell, most geeks already know this. Which is a more effective way to stop someone reading your e-mail? Threatening them or encrypting it?)
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent, a wise man once said. I beg to differ. It is usually the first. It is the competent who defer it until all other options have failed, and even then the most competent would seek to find ways to not have to resort to it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
every so often i see a quote in someone's sig around here saying something along the lines of "a man with a gun is a citizen. a man without a gun is a subject." sad, but very applicable here.
The problem with African tribes is they have too much freedom. They have the freedom to violate the rights of others without any consequence. This lack of law creates a rule by force in which the incentives favor violent force over non-violent competition. This means any new resource found will lead to bloodshed as the means of competing for them instead of market competition. I don't see that as being to general, since the entirety of history until constitutional monarchy was implemented is filled with the same pattern.
I got assaulted with negative mods when I said the Burma junta was going to seize the aid as being ethnocentric and making over generalizations, a week latter they did. I was no more wrong about that than this because it is human nature to follow self interest, and the incentives as they exist in Africa now make the competition by force and the war of all against all it brings the most rational.
The problem is Human nature is that it is very rational even in irrational situations. Africans may know that if they support co-operation today they might eat better tomorrow but they also Know that if they don't kill the other town they will probably not live to see tomorrow and will eat better today if they do. the option of furthering the system of violence in this case is the more rational. this is played out in movies, no one is going to be the first to drop the gun when they know the other will shoot them if they do.
Africa has a great many regular Africans who WOULD be happy to get by not much above subsistence, if they COULD do it in relative freedom, but they opt instead to do it through organized violence.
Uh, no. You have little to no knowledge of the conflicts over diamonds, and should learn some more before making such proclamations. The "gvmnt. of that country" is not the only party responsible for most resource conflicts in Africa. In many cases it's not even a significant player.
We're not talking about Iraq here, a country which had a stable government until the US showed up. We're talking about a situation where various militant factions and warlords ally themselves with transnational export companies in order to fund their weapons and equipment, and in this case use forced labor to supply the export companies with what they want.
So in short, it doesn't matter worth a damn whether you show them a better way and have them elect their own government, because their neighbors are members of an armed militia which operates completely independently of the government, and may someday decide to enslave them.