Pajiba

So, world starvation - which is mostly in sub-Saharan Africa - has nothing to do with the tribally-based, politically corrupt regimes who take the food sent to them by the UN,the USA, etc and keep them from their own people?

Don't get me wrong. I think the American government fucks up a lot in the world. But I refuse to believe we're making much of African political leadership starve their own people. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I definitely want to see the film now regardless.

And then afterwards, I'm going to eat some meat off the endangered species list and throw my waste out the window of my Hummer.

JK.

Ms. Mix & Bitch

Walk this back to the colonial divisions of both Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the Middle East, Central and South America, etc and there is a long history of the developed world screwing over these areas. Yes, the political systems of these countries should be accompanied by wacky circus music, but these systems are often being propped up by American interests.

This of course does not mean I want to give up my indolent lifestyle or sense of entitlement. Let's get real here.

Wow, I got a huge Norman Lear buzz off of this.

The typo in "They will leave on the streets and in cardboard boxes while their country" conjures up a bittersweet image of determined and impoverished people fleeing the desolation of the city both by walking out en mass down the main thoroughfares and also via flying carboard boxes, to points unknown but hopefully better. I think J.J. on Good Times painted that at one point.

This puts me in mind of District 9, where the only production design crit I really had was that the Prawn shuttle at the end of the film had kind of a video-gamey, low-poly cardboard box feel. Hey, at least it wasn't a "steel columns on concrete slab" power plant interior for the Enterprise engine room! Goodness other, non-Jimmie Walker J.J.: there's supposed to be, like, imagination, and wonder, and creativity and stuff.

This is my cake!

Well, not having seen this documentary I can't say their theory is unsound, but how exactly would the third world be better off in the absence of the U.S.? (If they're positing that it is the U.S. capitalist system making the world WORSE then that would imply the world would be better off without us, period, right?) Could it possibly be the ethnic strife and violence, lack of rule of law, corruption, etc. that is causing the problems there? And maybe some American multinationals are encouraging those systems, but I fail to see how those systems wouldn't exist in our absence.

I'm all for theories as to what we can do to make the world a better place, but excessive self-flaggelation should have gone out of style a long time ago.

I'm sure we have some responsibility here, but I think the shitty-ass African governments have something to do with it as well. And the shitty-ass "traditional" practices that keep women as third- or fourth-class citizens. I read some depressing shit in NY Times magazine yesterday about the way women are treated (by other Africans) that cannot be blamed on imperialism (they also touched on the treatment of females in India and China, almost equally depressing).

A lot of these countries would not be the shitholes they are now if the women were not treated worse than cattle. Many (most?) men in Africa actually value cattle. They apparently don't value women (or girls) except as breeders and sex partners.

So I reject the guilt trip. In fact, I'm getting tired of female-hating societies bitching about what a bunch of assholes Americans and Europeans are. Half of our population isn't forced into marriage or prostitution. We actually educate our females. We actually think beating women is wrong. And rape is punished - you know, we actually punish the person who does the raping, not the victim, like a lot of these places do.

Yes, I know that many (actually, it appears to be most) of the starving people are women and kids, and obviously, we should help them. But when the fuck are their own governments (run mostly by men) gonna do something? Sure, forgive the African debt, too. But it'd be nice if we could use some of our political power to help the people there who need it most - the women. Instead of tiptoeing around the delicate traditional sensibilities of African or Middle Eastern countries, we should just tell them straight out (if we haven't already) that the main reason they're all such horrible places to live is that they allow half their population to treat the other half like shit. Money and other aid will only go so far. We could hand over every spare dime we have to a lot of these countries and they'd end up spending it on huge standing armies and weapons to invade a neighboring country, and their own people would be no better off.

So I posit that the world's poverty can be attributed to the piss-poor status of women in the places where poverty is still endemic.

Also, just for the record, I've never paid anybody a dime to paint any part of my body.

Well, if you want to do something about poverty instead of watching a movie about poverty, try getting into the micro-loan business. Below is the site I use. They lend money to people to help them start businesses so they can get themselves and their children out of poverty. You can lend as little as $25, and you get to choose who gets your money. The best part is, it's a loan, so you have a great chance to get your money back, and you can either take it and get your pedicure or lend it to someone else. I help people, feel good about myself, and my toes look pretty.

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=home

The article I read (Nicholas Kristof, Aug. 23, 2009 www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html) has suggestions for organizations that help women, not the shitty governments that allow them to be abused, one of which is kiva.org. Others mentioned are womenforwomen.org, care.org, ednahospital.org, girlslearn.org.

This page: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23women-list.html?_r=1&ref=magazine

has links to still more.

Nicholas Kristof has pretty much made publicizing the appalling treatment of women in Africa and other places his life's work. His Pulitzer Prizes are well-deserved. I wonder if this movie mentions him at all.

Groovy Violet? I think I am deeply in love with you.

Slash, that was beautifully put. I'm fortunate enough to work at a university that exposes me to people from many different cultures, and so many women from so many countries are amazed at how much better it is for them over here. One woman even ended her marriage because after a few months of being treated like an actual human in the US, she was unwilling to put up with her husband's bullshit any longer.

I don't know what it is about women that has so many males of the world terrified enough to work so hard to keep them down. Even the Bible is chock full of woman-hating. But you can't expect the US to ride to everyone's rescue; people have to stand up for themselves sooner or later. And people who currently have a nice life have a right to enjoy it.

We "asshole" Americans privately donate over $16B annually to developing countries (the vast majority in Africa), more than double the foreign aid of the major EU governments combined. Whether Phillipe Diaz recognizes it or not, Americans are the most generous people on earth when it comes to private giving.

Mother Theresa was anti-pain relief, anti treatment, and believed that people suffered by gods will, therefore intervention was a bad thing. I swear that woman had the best mis-information and PR department in recent history.

Whoops, slipped into another rant.

OK, off to work, which is getting paid to ride other people's horses, which they have enough money to purchase, house, feed, and pay me to ride, mostly because they are middle class Americans with expendable income, leisure time, relative good health, and insufficient skills to actually ride them safely or effectively themselves.
God Bless the USA.

Thanks to respondents for your kind words; I do want to clarify (if I didn't make it clear already) that I have no problem addressing where we may be complicit in corruption in Africa and elsewhere (and I'm certainly aware of how we help prop up the corrupt Saudi regime with our petrodollars), but like others, I'm not accepting full or even a majority of responsibility for conditions in Africa. I don't feel bad about having it good in America. I feel bad that women (and men, too, but I'm a little more concerned for the women, since they have so few legal rights in their countries) don't have it even half as well where they live. It's pretty fucking bad when you have to leave your country to be treated decently just because you don't have a penis. The men of those countries should be ashamed of that. Instead, they bitch about how the Great Satan keeps THEM down. It's just really hard to feel bad about how oppressed the men in Pakistan or Iraq or the Congo or Saudi Arabia are by our Judeo-Capitalist system when I know they treat their women even worse. Much worse, actually. Worse than POWs are allowed to be treated by the Geneva Conventions. If we did to suspected terrorists in Gitmo what happens to women routinely in Africa, the Middle East, etc., it would have been shut down years ago. Not apologizing for torture, just using that issue as a comparison.

So for Martin Sheen et al to expect me to feel like an asshole because I live comfortably in a country that actually respects my right as a human being to be educated, reasonably free from harm, etc. - not gonna happen. If they're hoping to market this movie via American guilt, they may be miscalculating. America has a lot to answer for, but there are some things we've done right, and the status of women is one of them. And for Africa (and their American spokespeople) to imply that ALL their problems are our doing - ridiculous. Implying that all Africans are helpless pawns in some global game of economic chess is actually not helping them. We can forgive every penny of African debt, but if underlying social conditions don't change, that continent will be just as badly off, they just won't owe us any money.

Man. Motion sustained for "fuck this documentary (for the most part)."

I thoroughly enjoyed the rants of Slash, Lindsay, and Groovy Violet. Especially great point about the treatment of women in these other countries. I can feel my world view broadening already.

soon enough, we will all catch up to poverty. as the world runs out of fuel, america will be left full of hyper literate skill-less people who couldnt feed them selves to save their lives, let alone figure out how to get through a winter without a furnace

but it won't be like the days of yore, now we will also face having poisoned the water supply left leaking nuclear plants all over, changed the planets climate, already killed and eaten everything that could be killed and eaten, and paved over the best best farmland, poisoning it with asphault.

but dont worry, we'll still have 8 hours of gameboy batteries left

Just get back from Pittsburgh?

Maybe some of the problems are because of all those years when the young, healthy and strong people were taken from their homes and forced to work and build a nation on the other side of the world? By the time the slave trade was over, whole chunks of the continent were so far behind the rest of the world, it's no wonder they haven't caught up.
Then, consider the implicit message embedded in slavery: You are nothing more than a commodity for stronger people to steal and use as they will. When I read about corrupt goverment and horrific human-rights violations, I wonder if that's a message that's still resonating.

I'm just adding to the conversation here, I'm definitely not blaming America. Every country has it's own 'slaves', from another country or their own indigenous population, and we're all swimming in that cesspool of inherited guilt and/or grief.

Nice work idleprimate.

I'm going to defend Rowles. There is nothing wrong with questioning the system that provides you with your wealth. There is nothing wrong with taking an objective look at how your lifestyle measures up with the rest of the world.

There is so much defensiveness here over the simple question - is this okay with you? How do you feel about what you're looking at? We're discussing a system in which all of us work in synchronicity to create wealth for ourselves by cornering resources. Canada, USA, UK, pretty much everybody, including the thugs destroying their countries. Instead of a typical and well worn knee-jerk reaction against all the awful people demanding we feel bad about ourselves, why not take a critical look at why we strive so hard to defend our idle expenditures?

The world is an ecosystem that is based on balance, ebb and flow. It is not a game of checkers. There is no reason that we couldn't build upon what exists to create new options and opportunities to provide for the other beings who SHARE this earth. The micro loans are good, but where is the urge in us to address the frightening excesses of our chosen financial system? Look at it. It's not right. There is some kind of evil math at play that charges the poorest among us such usurious interest rates. It's like a heavy weight on the chest of an infant. Nothing good can come of it.

Yours is a gift of a chance birth. Step outside the conditioning of your culture and see what you find.

Defensive?
OK.
Well, I think we were called out.

There are probably 5 legitimate reasons why I am an asshole, maybe more, but being American isn't one of them, IMHO.

EricD - I blame the World Hunter on YOU! What an awesome typo.

Lindsey perhaps I'll agree that Dustin didn't need to include the word "America" in the same sentence as the word 'blame'. That just pissed people off. 'America' isn't the sole factor, just a place where the current financial system takes the most prisoners. Like I expressed above, it's a network of countries, a network of policies, and a network of 'winners' in a game of hoarding.

I was trying to talk past the 'huzzah and damned if I'll take the blame for my Merican hard working ethic yaddayadda'. Fair enough. People resent being called out to feel guilty about their successes. I don't think anyone should feel guilty for what they have. They SHOULD feel guilty if they are unwilling to examine how these successes came to be. They should also take some time to consider their fellow man during this short trip on earth.

For every person that expresses anger at having to share their hard won gains, ask yourself how confident you are that your efforts would have amounted to the same if you started from a different country or culture. It's unquantifiable, true, but willingness to consider it is the key.

Call me an idealistic ass, but I don't believe you have to lose anything to create gain for others. Live you life the exact same way, just make conscious choices. Angry, detailed rebuttals just seem to miss the point.

Lindsey has my dream job.
And hot damn, that was a good point, about less talking and more doing.

This kind of stuff always makes me wonder: If we saved, say, 5 million people a year from disease and famine and war, that's 5 million more we'd have to find food for, right? And water. And jobs. And energy. And places to dispose of waste ... And those 5 million would beget 15 million, and those 15 million would beget 50 million ...

Not to be too glib about it, but maybe war and disease and famine are nature's way (our nature, human nature) of regulating populations a bit. We've gotten really good now at the medical angle of it, lots and lots of people are living long lives who would have been dead already 20 or 50 or 100 years ago, and some of the best minds on the planet are working on eradicating what's left to be eradicated (AIDS, cancer, malaria etc.), and what has it gotten us? An extra billion or two people who get to live longer in hunger and poverty and misery.

Fortunately, we still have two of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, war and famine, working pretty well for us, often hand-in-hand. But when I see movies that depict a utopian future where all of our problems have been eliminated and human beings live extended lives, I always wonder where the fuck they're putting and how they're feeding 50 billion people.

Eh, I think it's possible that both things are true--that our country does do really assholey things AND really good things.

They talk about Subsaharan Africa but the people talking are in Brazil. Other images seem to be other Latin American countries. Hope this mistake is only in the trailer, not in the actual movie.

Poverty is a wonderful thing. It sticks to a man after all his friends have forsaken him.

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