William Hogan

Academic biomedical informatician
Opinions are 100% my own and 0%, not at all those of my employer.

[AMWakeUp @AMwakeup]

Bezos's stepfather was a multi-millionaire. So was his father. His grandfather was the first director at DARPA. He had every single institutional & familial advantage & was making a ton on Wall St when Amazon launched. This re-write is just pathetic

[Kashyap Sriram @kashyap286]

Firstly, Ethiopia is under US sanctions while Vietnam is not. And speaking of former French colonies, Haiti was the first to get independence (1804) and is still one of the poorest countries in the world because of the debt they had to take on to gain independence (it took them until 1947 to fully repay it!). Whereas, New Caledonia is still a French colony and is neither rich nor poor.

"If colonialism were the answer to why Africa is poor..."

This line completely ignores the European powers' (and US) post-colonial control over Africa. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the DRC, was tortured and killed by Belgium and the US for being a nationalist. His body was dissolved in acid so he wouldn't become a martyr. His legacy is largely unknown even within the continent. Several other such "lessons" were meted out. Google Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso) and Sylvanus Olympio (Togo).

Once you set the example, you gain obedience. The VietCong, on the other hand, didn't surrender even though 3 million Vietnamese died during the war, and several thousand more continue to die to this day (!) from Agent Orange exposure.

As for former French colonies in Africa, France still controls their currency and holds their central bank reserves in France. As Rothschild purportedly said, "permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."

Third, the borders in Africa were drawn in such a way that conflict was inevitable. At the Berlin Conference in 1884-85, the European powers simply carved up the continent by drawing straight line borders. African leaders were conspicuous only by their absence at this historic event which shaped the next century. This is why Cameroon, a French-speaking country, has a minority English-speaking territory, ensuring it remains destabilized. Likewise for West Asia/the Middle East, where the Sykes-Picot legacy lives on.

@magattew conflates formal colonial rule with colonial control. Vietnam managed to fully kick out both France and the US, reunified the North and the South, and kept its sovereignty. All African leaders who attempted the same have been systematically eliminated (see Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's divisive leader, for a recent example), ensuring Africa forever bears the open wounds of its colonial legacy.

But Ms. Wade is right on one thing: Vietnam owes its prosperity to overcoming colonial rule. Maybe Africa can become prosperous if Africans do the same.

[Nora @Heal_within96]

Africa is underdeveloped because:

1) Every nationalistic leader was murdered, and the current leaders are obedient puppets to the Western hegemonies.

2) Western companies continue to steal resources.

3) They continue to fund coups/instabilities, preventing any chance of peace, which would have instigated development.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Vietnam at the end of the American War.

Infrastructure destroyed.

Economy shattered.

Unexploded ordnance across vast swaths of agricultural land.

Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners from the defeated south to manage.

A refugee crisis. A food crisis. A currency crisis.

International isolation.

American embargo.

Soviet support collapsing as the USSR declined.

By every measure, a country that should not have been able to develop.

That is now one of the most cited development successes of the last fifty years.

The variable that distinguished Vietnam from countries that did not recover is not geography, not culture, not natural resources, not colonial history in terms of severity.

It is the quality and continuity of political leadership that was allowed to exist because it could not be removed by force.

Give Africa its Lumumbas.

Give Africa its Ho Chi Minhs.

Stop killing them.

Then ask about development.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Así es la esclavitud en las minas en el este del Congo, de donde sale más del 70% del cobalto del mundo, miles de esclavos diariamente extraen el mineral por apenas 2$ al dia para llenar los bolsillos a las multinacionales capitalistas.

El capitalismo que no te enseñan, así es como se sostiene el nivel de vida y de consumo en Occidente, en estas minas al menos hay 40.000 niños esclavizados que pican piedra para que Apple saque 4 modelos de Iphone cada año.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They will tell you the world is complicated.

They will say this with such confidence, such weariness, such practiced exhaustion with your naivety, that for a moment you will feel embarrassed for not already knowing what they know.

The world is complicated.

Which means: the sanctions that are starving children are complicated.

Which means: the coup that replaced a democracy with a dictatorship had strategic logic you simply aren't equipped to evaluate.

Which means: the drone strike that killed the family was a difficult decision made by serious people with information you don't have access to.

The complication is always one-directional.

It always runs toward excusing the powerful.

It never runs toward complicating the story of the people underneath.

Their lives are never complicated enough to warrant the same forensic sympathy.

They are simple.

They are context.

They are the complication that required the difficult decision.

"The world is complicated" is not a statement about epistemology.

It is a class position.

It is what power says to people who are about to start asking the right questions.

[Semper Vigilantes @SemperVigilant1]

Indiana Jones and the quest for the only boomer that ate at a fast food restaurant more than once a year.

[TheUnusualSuspect @beerandtokens]

My brother in Christ.

In 1980 the home price to income ratio was 3.6x, now it’s 5x

In 1980 a degree cost 15% of the average annual income, today it’s 58%

In 1980 child care cost 7% of the median household income, now it’s 19%

In 1980 health care cost 10% the median household income, now it’s 21%

In 1980 the average car payment for a new car was 6% of the median household income, now it’s 13%

These are national averages, and not some anecdotal personal experience.

Idk why it’s so hard for people to do a little good faith research and just admit that life’s necessities are exponentially more expensive now than when they were young adults. It’s a crazy level of pride, arrogance and denial.

[Zoya🕊️ @Zoya_ki_batein]

In Texas, A 18-year-old girl experienced a miscarriage at around six months pregnant. She visited emergency rooms three times over about 20 hours. On her second visit, she screened positive for sepsis, but doctors discharged her because the fetus still had a heartbeat, saying she was "fine to leave." On the third visit, an OB-GYN insisted on two ultrasounds to "confirm fetal demise" before admitting her to intensive care. She died hours later from sepsis complications. Her mother later said it felt like doctors were more concerned about the fetal heartbeat than her daughter's life.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Let's take your framework seriously for one moment, Douglas, and follow it to its conclusion.

A burglar breaks into your house. He finds jewelry in a drawer you hadn't opened in years. He takes it, sells it, keeps the money.

By your logic, he has "enhanced your wealth" by discovering and exploiting a resource that was "otherwise untouched."

You may object that you owned the jewelry. That it was yours regardless of whether you were actively using it.

Your entire argument collapses at exactly that point.

The resources in colonized territories were not unowned.

They were not untouched.

They were not unknown to the people living on and with them.

They belonged to those people by any definition of ownership that doesn't require a European signature to be valid.

Extraction without compensation, enforced by military violence, is not wealth creation.

It is theft with extra steps and better documentation.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

"Sub-Saharan Africa became poorer after colonialism ended."

You actually typed this.

As if the poverty of post-colonial Africa is a mystery that appeared from nowhere the moment Europeans left, rather than the direct, documented, extensively studied result of what Europeans did while they were there.

The slave trade removed tens of millions of people from the continent over four centuries.

Colonial borders were drawn to divide ethnic groups and create permanent instability.

Colonial economies were structured to export raw materials and import finished goods, deliberately preventing industrialization.

Colonial governments destroyed existing political institutions and replaced them with extraction bureaucracies.

And then they left.

And you look at what they left behind and says: see, they need us.

The arsonist who blames the ashes.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You just made the argument against yourself and don't realize it.

The 13 colonies. Australia. New Zealand. South Africa. Rhodesia.

Who lived in those places before the settlers arrived?

Who owned the land that generated the wealth you're pointing to?

Who was killed, displaced, and erased to make room for the prosperity you're using as a data point?

You didn't name colonies that became wealthy.

You named the graves of civilizations whose wealth was taken, whose land was stolen, and whose people were either exterminated or reduced to landless labor on their own continent.

The Aboriginals did not get wealthier when Australia was "settled."

The Zulu did not get wealthier when South Africa was colonized.

The Cherokee did not get wealthier when the 13 colonies became a republic.

What you are actually saying is: if you kill or remove the original population and replace them entirely with Europeans, the Europeans will be wealthy.

Yes. Correct. That is what genocide followed by inheritance looks like.

That is not a defense of colonialism.

That is its indictment.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The most clarifying question you can ask anyone defending colonialism, implicitly or explicitly, is this:

Name one colony that was made wealthier by colonization.

Not the colonizing country.

The colony.

One.

They cannot.

Because the economic record is unambiguous.

Every serious economic historian who has studied colonial extraction, from India to Africa to Southeast Asia to the Americas, documents the same pattern: resources flow outward, inequality increases, local industries are suppressed to prevent competition with colonial products, the colony ends the relationship poorer in real terms than it began.

This is not contested in the academic literature.

It is only contested in the popular mythology.

And the popular mythology exists precisely because the alternative, accepting that Western prosperity was built on systematic theft, is an identity-level threat to the societies that benefited.

So they keep the mythology.

And every mythology produces missionaries to preach it.

[I’m named after El Debarge @hydrothemc]

If only there were signs.

[𝙈𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙖 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇵🇸☭ @miggy_n7]

"el capitalismo nunca se impone"

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

Boxing legend Muhammad Ali on why he refused to be drafted to the US Army to fight in Vietnam🇻🇳:

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America…shoot them for what?

They never called me n*****, they never lynched me…how can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The projection here is extraordinary.

You accuse my argument of being propaganda, professionally produced, foreign-funded, designed to seem credible while serving hidden interests.

Let's describe something else:

A media ecosystem that has spent eighty years describing every American military intervention as a response to aggression rather than an act of it.

A film industry that has produced hundreds of movies in which American soldiers are the protagonists and the people they're fighting are the backdrop.

An education system that teaches American history as a story of imperfect but genuine progress.

A political culture in which "support the troops" is mandatory and questioning what the troops were sent to do is unpatriotic.

That is the propaganda.

It has no single author.

It requires no foreign paymaster.

It is produced domestically, at massive scale, by a culture that has found the story it needs to tell about itself and tells it through every available channel, every single day.

You swim in it, Robert.

You cannot see it.

You can see a small, accurate, documented argument and call it "propaganda."

You cannot see the ocean you've been swimming in your entire life.

That's what a really good propaganda operation looks like.

Not a paid social media account.

A whole culture.

And you are its product.

[The Intercept @theintercept]

For the first time, documents confirm the CIA carried out tests on North Korean POWs and planned for much more invasive experimentation. https://t.co/oiWacXy2Co

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

The killer of Hortman was a self-proclaimed 3-time Trump voter, according to his interview with the Blaze, and according to friends of his, and also voted in the GOP primary.

It’s insane and shameful that these MAGA and Fox pundits have lied so much about the Hortman killing.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The psychological furniture of empire includes a very specific relationship with maps.

Most Americans cannot locate the countries their government has bombed on a map.

This is not an insult.

It is a documented, repeatedly confirmed, empirically established fact.

Studies have shown this.

You can conduct the experiment yourself.

What this means, functionally, is that for the population of the bombing country, the bombed country does not fully exist as a place.

It exists as a news category.
A crisis.
A situation.
A source of refugees who are then a separate problem.

It does not exist as somewhere that people live lives, eat meals, raise children, argue with their neighbors, make plans, have favorite songs.

You cannot fully mourn what you cannot fully imagine.

And you cannot fully imagine a place you cannot find on a map.

Empire benefits from this.

Empire depends on this.

The geographic illiteracy of the imperial citizenry is not a coincidence.

It is a condition.