126
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
126 points (88.9% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35843 readers
133 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
There's a lot but it mainly comes down to how Europeans were more developed than the rest of the world due to their frequent wars, so when they went to colonize the world nobody stood a chance. And since colonialism and the subsequent horrible decolonization messed up those countries, we get the state of the world today.
To be more specific, colonialism basically turned affected countries into oversized plantations run by foreigners. Any political development that was already there went out the window, and of course no more could be made. Then you got decolonization, where you had countries either being fought off (like France) or packing their bags and leaving (like the British). This created massive power vacuums, and when you have power vacuums you get power struggles and dictatorships and from there we see the world's current state. On the other hand you have Botswana, where they actually had a native ruler class who could rule when the British left. They were an occupied country, not an oversized plantation, so they're virtually one of the best places to be in Africa. Also specifically in Africa colonies would have their borders drawn with no care for the relationship between the people living there, and occasionally they'd actively set them up for failure by putting rival ethnic groups together.
And of course you have neo-colonialism and shit that even now continue to hold back African development.
TL;DR: Europeans came, turned everything into a plantation, then when they left the plantation collapsed and either a dictator came or things returned to survival for the fittest which then produced war-torn dictatorships. These countries should be able to become decent countries with time, and there are many examples of that happening, but the West is still preventing it in many places. See: France in Africa, cold war-era US in Latin America.
Of course we can get into infrastructure and education and all that, but all these things have their roots in the simple fact that these countries had a horrible start (whether a civil war or a dictatorship) and in many cases had to build states from scratch, and in politics a bad start can cost you decades.
It's true, former British colony The United States is still a developing country for this very reason.
Due to the lack of functioning government, the mafia/corporations took over and nowadays the government is but a puppet. I send my thoughts and prayers to the Americans.
Uhhhhh.
Anyone who has been to a developing country (in my case: the Philippines) vs USA will laugh at what USA citizens think of corruption.
You got Fucking assassinations paid for by Filipino government likely to cover up political rivals. Open corruption in the Police where you can just pay them to get out of parking tickets or even criminal acts. Etc etc.
Don't be so much of a drama queen. USA is fine. There are entire countries of people trying to leave their country to enter USA to escape truly awful corruption issues. Phillipines is one corrupt example (especially if your family was politically on the wrong side of the Marcos family or whatever)
Better than some places? Sure I'll grant you that.
Fine? Absolutely not.
Horrific levels of violence, 22% of the worlds prison population, massive drug abuse issues and a failing health care system.
I don't know a single person from Australia who is remotely interested in immigrating to the US, while I know plenty of Americans keen to live here.
The thing is, in the US everything is 10x bigger. There's no corrupt single cops. The whole police establishment is a huge massive overpaid problem that kills people and go one unpunished. There's no political bickering and assassinations in the country, they do it everywhere else in the world, and still receive global forgiveness because you just can't sanction the US. Richest country in the world and yet has the biggest share of prisoners, homeless, personal debt. Highly educated, but by far the most school shootings.
The US isn't "fine". You can't see past the superficial bling because it's a rich country. It's a really twisted country.
And that shit exists in the Philippines but is at least 100x worse. You likely don't understand because you've never been to a place like that.
And note: Philippines is actually a lot better than other countries as well. Truly 3rd world countries like Congo care even less about their citizens. Such states are closer to something like a Civil War or maybe even Crime-lord / Mafia ring, where militia get military weapons from Russia or something and no one cares to listen to the official government anymore because the literal crime lords have more physical power.
USA has one of the best bankruptcy laws meaning debt isn't actually punishing here. There's at least schools in existence here... free schools mind you... and everyone's allowed. There's no segregation system or class system anymore so everyone (including women) are allowed to go through the public school system. Etc. etc. etc.
If you ever get into significant debt that you can't pay it off? File for bankruptcy protection. That's why the law exists, to prevent debts from becoming overly burdensome. That's why so many citizens can enter deep debts, because we have a forgiveness system that few other countries even have.
The reason why student-loan debt gets so much attention btw, is because student loan debt is the one and only debt that cannot be protected during bankruptcy-protection.
Dude. No one said the US is worse than the Philippines. But the US is still not fine.
This is literally a topic about poor, destabilized countries.
The Philippines is far more on-topic than USA here. Philippines in fact might be too rich / developing compared to many even worse-off countries.
Speaking about the police, I would also like to say that there is no police as such in developing countries.
I have never seen the police in the USA take bribes (and even if they did, it’s simply impossible to imagine, honestly, it would be funny, like in some cartoon, ahaha) and the police there, I think, really work ( True, I did not understand these subtleties).
What I also like is that any crazy suspects who try to injure other people (for example, mentally ill people) with a knife or a gun are simply shot, and they are not “coddled” with them, as happens in Europe and developing countries.
But on the other hand, there are some disadvantages: the police can shoot an innocent person, the less “criminalized” weapons are, the more shootings there will be (both among ordinary people and among police), the more power the police have (this also applies to the first point), more violence.
Also, it’s good if there are a lot of people in the country who are fine with mental health, but it seems to me that in the USA, unfortunately, they don’t attach much importance to mental health.
But in developing countries, for example, in Russia, it’s just terrible... what kind of mental health? What are you about? And what is it? Are you depressed? No, you're just lying...
HAHAHA.
You don't know what a developing country actually is. Iran, Syria, Russia... it's just tough.
At any moment, someone or something could fall on you from the roof, not only sites are blocked, but VPNs are at the level of the Great Firewall of China, terrible education, medicine, basically you can’t buy anything because of sanctions, there is no justice, there is no private property, all banks, convenience store chains, Internet providers, EVERYTHING “belongs” to the state intelligence service, even food, and even of poor quality that you are afraid of either getting poisoned or dying from eating them.
Therefore, when Americans say that “the USA is a developing country,” it’s not even funny anymore, it just looks like, excuse me, a mockery for those who live in real developing countries.
By the way, in our country even the likes of McDonald’s, and in general all businesses in the country “belong” to the state mafia intelligence service (structure)...
Living in this country (and I live in Russia) you constantly live in stress, fear and panic. I have already developed some mental illnesses this way, such as C-PTSD. But I’m afraid to get treatment in this country, because, for example, you have to tell a psychologist everything, and if you say something like “Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine,” then they can simply inform on you, and then put you in prison for 15 years, and this person, who reported on you, you will not be able to see again, even when you get out of prison (because some Russians act vilely).
I, of course, followed the events in the United States and knew that under Trump you almost had a coup d’etat, and this is terrible, of course. But, frankly speaking, knowing that Trump has a suspicious biography, and he collaborates with the Russian (Putin) mafia, then if he, I want to say, becomes president, then you can really start to have the same crap as in Russia: massive and systemic human rights violations, murders of the opposition, poisoning of activists, degradation in education, science and medicine (at a minimum), political and economic instability, extreme corruption, Internet censorship, lifelong presidential terms, totalitarianism and the like...
Moreover, the US dollar is one of the most stable currencies in the world, and if Trump is elected president, it will simply be a threat to the whole world.
In this case, I am more than sure that education will decline even in developed countries, organized crime will increase around the world, not to mention democracy and private property, which will certainly not exist in the USA (if Trump is elected).
As surprising as it may be, not everyone lives in the "good parts" of the US that they show on TV.
There are definitely parts of the country where life is similar to how you described, except with less government control.
In some parts of the country, there is no safe drinking water. In some places, you can't even boil the water to make it safe to drink.
There is similar poverty as you described, and while there isn't much chance of warfare of any kind, there are places where being a certain race could get you shot and/or killed if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I understand you, but still calling the USA a third world country is too much
I agree. The entire USA is not a third-world country.
Still, some people in the USA are living like those in third-world countries.
...not only was I born in a developing country, where it’s hard to find a job (or if you do get a job officially, you need to get a military ID - and this means that you either have to waste 1 year of your life or die in Ukraine , killing civilians), so they took away all the foreign services and “goodies” from me (from the age of 15 I wanted to make PayPal for myself, I waited until I was 18, then I was happy, but after 2-3 years this payment system, like Visa/MasterCard , Payoneer left our country because of the gangster-mafia Russian government; as a child I watched Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, I know, there was MTV, and a lot of other Western, interesting things...), and my family are fucking toxic narcissists, sociopaths and, I apologize, like many Russians, cynics. It's just awful...
You probably ask me how I live? I don't live, I survive. More precisely, I'm trying to survive, because... my narcissistic mother is not working now (because she can’t find a job in our “village”) and I’m trying, like a 21-year-old, to do something to have an income...
Again, there was an excellent opportunity to make money on the Internet, but you understand, PayPal is no longer there, everything is bad with foreign banks, there are no the same foreign payment systems, complete totalitarianism as regards (sources of) income/expenses...
...and I can't move to another country. At first I had no money, and now I am forced to hide in the forest, because, considering that there is no private property in Russia, at any moment my door could be broken down (for which they will not pay a cent; because the courts, in in principle, not in this country), and taking me somewhere to the forest is quite possible.
It’s also bad that you want to talk to someone, express your thoughts, but again you can be turned over and go to jail, so I have to keep everything to myself :(
I'm sorry for my English. I translated a few sentences through translator
Also its created a cyclical problem. (And Im going to do a terrible job of explaining this but I hope people can grasp what I'm on about.)
Getting any kind of significant change going in a "developing" nation requires MASSIVE investment that they cant afford, which requires investment from mega-multinationals or foreign nations, who then (either rightly or not) have to tread super carefully because it looks like they are trying to buy the country by proxy, which means they dont want to make the super-mega investments because one little leadership change and a little nationalisation makes their investment worthless.
Basically you need either a super benevolent form of colonialism or super ethical capitalism to get the ball rolling without just repeating the mistakes of the past.
:D
Ethical in the sense of developing a functional economy you can bleed in the long term as opposed to short term cut-throat exploitation.