This Is Why Poor People's Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense

[Ban Kenobi]

I estimated 10/per pack and about 300/month on smokes. Depending on the brand this gives us a reasonable back of the envelope calculation.

"Depending on the brand"

So in addition to ASSUMING she smokes a pack a day we'll also ASSUME she's not smoking a cheap brand? A lot of assumptions there.

[notyoueither]

Jebus H Criminy Cricket!

Look, we stomped all over the political rights of people all over the world. We did it because their choices conflicted with ours. The other side did it too! They tried to gain allies and prevent defections just as we did. 'We' is all of us in the West. Our governments either did it or were complicit in the doing, for the most part, and a whole **** of a lot of people got done.

Was it a nice thing to do? No. Was the alternative of fulfilling Lenin's (?) prediction of us allowing them the right amount of rope to hang us with better? 'Oh no, we can't deprive Bolivia of their popularly elected Communist government, because it was like, democracy, yah know?' Bull ****!

It was an existential struggle. It was going to be our way of life or theirs that prevailed on this globe. No ****ing doubt we chose ours and didn't make a lot of compromises with people who would have led off by offing the educated and capable, along with a comprehensive list of liberals among us if they gained sway.

Don't bull**** yourself that it was all sunshine and roses, or that no mistakes were made along the way. The same administrative apparatus that has gifted you the healthcare website was at one time deciding which governments to topple, FFS.

Unambiguously the good guys? A ****ing ha! That's a pretty tainted white hat there, Mr Rogers.

[Aeson]

Colonialism is a much better analogy. We (the West) ****ed up a lot of places and/or kept them from developing in a healthy manner ... ironically enough many of these places ended up with Communist revolutions pushing back against the vestiges of colonialism.

Not that all our interference since has been solely to stop Communism. Much of it is to protect our other interests (oil, cheap labor, etc) rather than just FREEEDOM!

[notyoueither]

**** you and your righteous bull****. You are not 'the good guys' when you promote death and the curtailing of liberties.

It sucked in major proportions, however there were two sides peddling the same thing. I'm going to doubt that you would prefer the other guys to have won.

Perhaps some acknowledgement of what actually happened would help. I don't know. It was a **** show and everyone gets some on them.

Because being tortured to death is clearly better than living in squalor That's why there are so many suicides in communist countris.

There's no torture, camps or extra-judicial executions in Communist countries? I must have misread the memos, and the records.

[notyoueither]

Colonialism is a much better analogy. We (the West) ****ed up a lot of places and/or kept them from developing in a healthy manner ... ironically enough many of these places ended up with Communist revolutions pushing back against the vestiges of colonialism.

Not that all our interference since has been solely to stop Communism. Much of it is to protect our other interests (oil, cheap labor, etc) rather than just FREEEDOM!

Want some fries to go with that?

[regexcellent]

Jebus H Criminy Cricket!

Look, we stomped all over the political rights of people all over the world. We did it because their choices conflicted with ours. The other side did it too! They tried to gain allies and prevent defections just as we did. 'We' is all of us in the West. Our governments either did it or were complicit in the doing, for the most part, and a whole **** of a lot of people got done.

Was it a nice thing to do? No. Was the alternative of fulfilling Lenin's (?) prediction of us allowing them the right amount of rope to hang us with better? 'Oh no, we can't deprive Bolivia of their popularly elected Communist government, because it was like, democracy, yah know?' Bull ****!

It was an existential struggle. It was going to be our way of life or theirs that prevailed on this globe. No ****ing doubt we chose ours and didn't make a lot of compromises with people who would have led off by offing the educated and capable, along with a comprehensive list of liberals among us if they gained sway.

Don't bull**** yourself that it was all sunshine and roses, or that no mistakes were made along the way. The same administrative apparatus that has gifted you the healthcare website was at one time deciding which governments to topple, FFS.

Unambiguously the good guys? A ****ing ha! That's a pretty tainted white hat there, Mr Rogers.

Unambiguously the good guys doesn't mean clean hands. It means that we were the better side. It means that toppling Communist governments was the right thing to do even if it did get messy sometimes.

[Ben Kenobi]

Want some fries to go with that?

The irony is the man who's made it his life's mission to civilize the natives condemns colonialism.

[SlowwHand]

What it means is taking the lesser of two evils. Pick your poison. Everything isn't always a cut and dried easy decision. If you think it is, get ready for paralysis by analysis.

[notyoueither]

Unambiguous good guys do not have cargo loads of innocent blood on their hands. Simply being the better side doesn't make it better when talking to the relative of a person disappeared by the right wing dictatorships.

At best you could say the world is a better place now that 'we' have won and we voluntarily put those methods aside. You can say that the other guys probably wouldn't have. From the POV of the rest of the world that's what they really should care about. Oh, and just maybe a bit of a tip of the hat to how much hell we and they put them through that we never had to suffer.

It was an odd thing. It's never been seen before, and let's hope it is never seen again. It's an unacknowledged holocaust. Sure, there's Cambodia, but what of the rest of the mass graves? Russians still regularly deny the Ukrainian famine and we deny everything else that went wrong.

[Aeson]

Want some fries to go with that?

Not if they're French

Well, perhaps if they're French and it's in Vietnam ... those fries are right up our alley.

[Aeson]

The irony is the man who's made it his life's mission to civilize the natives condemns colonialism.

The fact that I'm not governing anyone (or even having input into government) surely doesn't have any implications here

[SlowwHand]

I think you should run for lord gawd.

[Agent Sox]

There are other reasons why poor people make decisions that people like us might think arenot the best. You have to remember that no one is going to miss poor people if they are gone, so it's very easy for the government to perform experiments on poor people that mess them up and then put them back. This used to happen a lot with African Americans and with epople who had less desirable jobs but my guess is the government hasn't really stopped doing it they're just more secret about it now.

[molly bloom]

At 300 a month, it's an expensive addiction.

It might well be. That's the figure you decided FOR her, not the amount she stated her consumption equals.

[molly bloom]

Even if the people in Russia aren't better off (which I strongly doubt), everyone else in the world is way better off with the Soviet Union gone. If the Soviets had never ****ed around in Africa, Latin America, or Southeast Asia they wouldn't be half the huge ****holes they are today.

So it was just the fault of Soviet Russia ?

BRIAN ATWOOD: I must say as the head of the American foreign aid program I have to continually explain that we invested money during the Cold War that wasn't for development purposes, that when we started investing foreign aid money in Zaire, a per capita income of something like $1600 per person, it now has a per capita income of under $200. The investment of over $2 billion of American foreign aid served no purpose because you had essentially a corrupt government that wasn't accountable to its own people and that didn't care about development.

Interview on P.B.S. Newshour

CHESTER CROCKER, Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs:

So there are real problems with Zaire and real problems with Mobutu's leadership, and I can tell you working closely with that leadership, as I did for eight and a half years of my life, was no bed of roses. The Mobutu government was a very staunch friend of the West, and one of the most reliable partners that we had during those years. We were interested in security and stability and in making sure that the contest with our global adversary was one that we prevailed in, so those were our priorities in every region of the world. Let's be frank about it. It was very difficult in those circumstances to make democratization the No. 1 priority in your foreign policy.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/july-dec96/zaire_12-26.html

Ronald Reagan called Mobutu "a voice of good sense and good will."

Mobutu nationalized the mines in 1967. At its high point, in the mid-1980s, Gecamines produced 480,000 tons of copper a year with 35,000 employees, earned three quarters of Zaire's foreign exchange, and educated 100,000 children in company run schools.


Born in poverty, the son of a domestic cook and a hotel maid, Mobutu is reported to have obtained his first few million dollars in the early 1960s from the CIA and the U.S.-dominated UN peacekeeping force that put down the Katangan secession. He was the army chief of staff at the time. Mobutu has steadily augmented his wealth ever since by blurring the distinction between public and private funds, dipping often into the national treasury. Not least among his many lucrative sources of "leakage," as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund call illegal diversions of money, has been Gecamines. By 1980 it was estimated that officials were skimming off at least $240 million a year from the nationalized resource. More recently a World Bank investigation estimated that up to $400 million -- a fourth of Zaire's export revenues, most of it earned from Gecamines inexplicably vanished from the country's foreign-exchange accounts in 1988.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/flashbks/rwanda/zaire.htm