freediver wrote on Nov 13
th, 2017 at 8:33pm:
Am I supposed to go back through your last 18 days of posts
You did that anyway FD, and you quoted just about everything except the one quote that mattered. Perhaps it wouldn't go for 18 days if you simply listened to what I said (and what you even requoted) in the first place. No doubt you're prepared to go another 18 days and beyond continuing to insist I didn't say what I said - even after I reposted the quote twice now. Do I need to post it yet again?
freediver wrote on Nov 13
th, 2017 at 8:33pm:
It's a simple question Gandalf. What causes famine in Africa?
FD's answer: weather and nothing else. right?
Its your usual kindergarten logic. Especially absurd when you want to focus on Africa - whose famines throughout the modern era has had uncanny associations with economic exploitation and/or mismanagement. No one except you seriously believes the spike in famines during the free state period - which just happened to coincide with the rape and pillage of the land by King Leopold's forces - can be simply dismissed as nothing but some weather event.
From Britannica:
Quote:One lucrative source of wild rubber was the Landolphia vines in the great Central African rainforest, and no one owned more of that area than Leopold. Detachments of his 19,000-man private army, the Force Publique, would march into a village and hold the women hostage, forcing the men to scatter into the rainforest and gather a monthly quota of wild rubber. As the price of rubber soared, the quotas increased, and as vines near a village were drained dry, men desperate to free their wives and daughters would have to walk days or weeks to find new vines to tap.
...
Quote:With women as hostages and men forced to tap rubber, few able-bodied adults were left to hunt, fish, and cultivate crops. Millions of Congolese then found themselves suffering near-famine, which made them vulnerable to diseases they otherwise might have survived. Furthermore, as in any society where men and women are separated, traumatized, or in flight as refugees, the birth rate dropped precipitously. No one will ever know the precise figures, but, from all these causes, demographers estimate that between 1880 and 1920 the population of the Congo may have been slashed by up to 50 percent, from perhaps 20 million people at the beginning of that period to an estimated 10 million at the end.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-II-king-of-BelgiumQuite simply, to dismiss a spike in famines during a period in which brutal occupiers were raping the entire countryside for natural resources (rubber), not to mention diverting farm workers away to help with the exploitation of resources, as nothing but a bit of unlucky weather - is beyond laughable.
freediver wrote on Nov 13
th, 2017 at 8:33pm:
It's a simple question Gandalf. What causes famine in Africa?
Ah simple isn't it FD? Famine is just oh so simple... - especially in Africa.
nothing but a bit of unlucky weather. I won't put the laughing emoji because its just so stupid, its beyond laughing.