You know people who make posts like "America is the third world" have... never actually been to the third world have they?
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cat(fox) :therian:replied to cat(fox) :therian: last edited by
If you give a homeless person $20 you just gave them more money than an impoverished person in the third world is likely to make in a month.
That is not exaggeration.
That is reality for billions of people.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to cat(fox) :therian: last edited by
@Elizafox But if he lives in a place where dollars are a common currency, that $20 probably buys him a lot less than it would buy in an impoverished place of the third world.
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cat(fox) :therian:replied to cat(fox) :therian: last edited by
Americans exist in such privilege that when they see things like homeless camps they truly believe it rises to the level of conditions in impoverished parts of Africa. It should piss you off that people live in far, far, far worse conditions, every day, and not many people really care or do much about it.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Just because you ignore it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
This isn't appeal to worse problems, no one should live like this anywhere.
What I'm saying is when you call America a third-world country you're literally ignoring the privileges you do have here, even if it doesn't feel like you have any.
Statistically, you're way less likely to starve to death even if you're homeless if you can make it to a soup kitchen or food pantry. You're probably not going to die of cholera. You aren't going to get malaria, and I can virtually guarantee that because it's essentially eradicated. You probably won't get TB, which infects a third of the world outside America. They still also get the same diseases we do, such as COVID, except worse, because of worse conditions.
And of course many people who are "housed" in the third world live in conditions not much better than that of the homeless here, and often much worse.
It is the law in the US that lifesaving care has to be administered by a hospital even if it bankrupts you. Good luck even getting to a hospital in the third world. Or even finding a doctor. Or getting a bed if you need it. Diarrhea is a leading cause of death in the third world. Let that one sink in.
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cat(fox) :therian:replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley That is certainly true. America is extremely and needlessly expensive and that is something you learn when you travel elsewhere.
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cat(fox) :therian:replied to cat(fox) :therian: last edited by
You know also homeless people also exist in the third world. Not just refugees, but often them also.
Imagine how they must feel.
Imagine how they get treated.
Imagine their conditions.
Just saying.
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Yeah OK that's fair. The US does have pretty amazing water treatment, though I've been hearing lately a lot of impoverished people are getting their water turned off in my city, from inability to pay. Diarrhea still isn't the leading cause of death.
Ugh, but even there I have to consider that you don't have to be well off to avoid dying of diarrhea. Just dig shitholes far away from the water, build a fire to boil your water, put it through a charcoal filter, using charcoal from the fire, and make sure anyone with diarrhea gets more water until they've flushed out whatever it is. Death from diarrhea is death by dehydration.
https://www.defeatdd.org/blog/understanding-burden-diarrhea
Not to say that's always possible in say, Africa. But the problem there is motherfucking asshole corporates forcing people to live crowded together and denying them any chance to protect themselves, while dumping toxic waste in their drinking water. The problem is not that Africans are so poor and impoverished uwu. People are actually poisoning them.
I still vaguely remember at that UU church I went to, some lady was like 92, and she was the head of a project to simply go to various villages downstream of a massive industrial operation in Africa, and show them how to build charcoal/gravel filters for their water. Diarrhea plummeted anywhere those got put in. She brought back great photos, and got me interested in learning how water filtration works.
But I swear I agree with you!
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@cy The issue is, in order to do all these things, you have to know that it's important to filter your drinking water through charcoal, and how to do it. Oftentimes, people living where education system sucks don't know about water safety, or how to achieve it.
The really cruel irony is, in the Developed World(tm), we can trust municipal water authorities to manage these things for us, but in the Developing World(tm), one might need to know them on their own. Just like it's expensive to be poor, it takes a lot of skill to live where the government doesn't work well.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to cat(fox) :therian: last edited by
@Elizafox A huge part of the purchasing parity differences is, the differences in societal estimates as to what a human's work is worth. In the Global North, a series of political and labour actions (but also the aftermath of WWII) led to humans being valuable, and expensive, leading to prices that look 'high' in comparison to local commodities' prices in places where humans are cheap. Unfortunately, there's been decades worth of push-back now, making humans cheaper here than they used to be, instead of making humans more valued in the Global South, as things should be.
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Oh totally. Education is absolutely vital, and not the crap they teach at universities, producing those ignorant people who can't even clean water. And it does take a lot of skill to live where the government doesn't work well, but if people work together and cooperate, they can save a lot of that labor. These water filters weren't some tiny plastic garbage that only cleans the water in your own cup. They were the size of a small bus, and could provide enough water for dozens of families living together. There's a lot that small communities just can't manage, but there's also a limit to how large you can scale before someone in the system is getting shafted. I dunno where that limit is, only that it's important to pay attention to.
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@cy FWIW, one of the ways in which the Era of Enlightenment manifested in Europe was, a bunch of publishers (typically, people who were already in printing businesses for some other reason) printed cheap books about common simple things that peasants often didn't already know, from agricultural techniques through areal and volume calculations to geography beyond the local market area, and sold them in large numbers. Quite a bit of useful specialist knowledge became common knowledge this way in the 1700s and 1800s. It also contributed to general literacy rates.
The American version would be the almanacs and calendars that Benjamin Franklin is probably most famously associated with.
This sort of techniques might potentially also be handy in some parts of the Global South, even a couple of centuries later, where colonial powers prevented the first wave of Enlightenment getting around. Literacy is in many places now less of a problem than it used to be, but language skills and translation can still be an issue, and where cellphones are the common device for computation and reading, the matter of popularised general knowledge needing to be truthful is still sometimes an issue, especially in matters popularly targetted by conspiracy theorists such as vaccination.