Education.

[skywalker]

Running out of green to wear? Check out other places in the world where people are killed by their governments/slaughtered by militants/exploded by terrorists/have no free speech/starve to death/are impoverished while a couple of rich people profit from their backbreaking labor/generally have awful lives!

Really, I've seen a lot of people say that they wished they knew more about situations in the rest of the world. If you're serious about that, Foreign Policy's Failed States Index is an excellent crash course in human tragedy.

Comments

[mommy]

I always seem to forget how much of the world exists under unstable governments. Thanks for the link!

[skywalker]

Mm. "Somalia sucks" and "Haiti is bugfuck poor" aren't really news, so no one really reports on that stuff.

[batman]

What is the most frightening in that article is the undercurrent of "the only way these countries can be fixed by outside intervention is after they've failed". That's really alarming, especially in resource rich but economically poor areas like Zimbabwe. Seriously, man, their economy ... it's not even free fall anymore. It's an exponential curve on an exponential scale.

[skywalker]

The thing that made me headdesk most was "Which failed states are global security threats and which are simply tragedies for their own people?"

S-simply.

[batman]

No joke. I completely acknowledge that human rights seem to be the redheaded stepchild of international law but. Come on.

[skywalker]

Maybe FP is just bitter that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sold the magazine off. This could just be a big "rofl screw world peace!"

[loquacious]

Well, I know where I will be spending the next few dozen hours...

I always hate to think about how much more suffering and bad stuff there is in the world. I focused on South East Asia in college, so my information on other sucky places is low.

[skywalker]

Yeah, my emphasis is American security policy, so I'm equally spotty. USFP courses tend to go "The US in Somalia! UNISCOM, UNITAF, Black Hawk Down, the end" and we never learn what happened afterwards.

[loquacious]

That's only slightly better than say "The US in Laos: ... Where?"

orz

[skywalker]

... did we bomb them during Nam?

perhaps more importantly: should i watch basquatch?

[loquacious]

We might have? But not substantially...

I encourage anyone to watch Basquash... so long as you realize you're getting into a big ol' barrel of crazy if you do.

[skywalker]

... oh, then what did we do in Laos?

It's okay, I watched Macross Zero!

[loquacious]

Virtually nothing? It was a colony... I want to say of England but I'm not sure, and I'm too lazy to try and look it up when my internet is as slow as it is on this computer.

Is that where your Mochi!Mao icons come from?

[skywalker]

France, IIRC.

My what?

[loquacious]

The little... guy with the Mao hat... who appears to be eating something. From the comment you made before this one.

[skywalker]

OH. NO. That's Imo from Sora Kake Girl.

Macross Zero is a weird (think Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with robots) OVA by the creator of Basquatch; Sora Kake Girl is a goofy Sunrise show.

[loquacious]

Ah... Potato Mao.

[skywalker]

... I'm glad someone else thinks she looks like a little Communist in that, though.

[loquacious]

I think it might be the green hat with the red star...

[skywalker]

Poor baked potato. :|

[loquacious]

The means of production should belong to all the potatoes.