“Bro watch this”

[everyone in the room dies horribly over the course of several days]

Garlic

Garlics

Garlic^3

You know how mythology often has creatures acting according to arcane, often senseless, and incomprehensible but utterly unyielding rules?

… you might be onto something here.

I mean, most of the classic cartoons have it as very give-and-take. Tom is more often the loser, because a mouse is the underdog and a mouse winning is generally funnier, but it’s not usually assigned a moral component.

I know all about Europe. It’s that country over the sea with all the stars on their flag and the royalty.

Terrifying

MOTHMAN

Positive karma

How much for people?

I think it’s just a HEMA joke.

Even at the time people commented how weird it was. It was a big dipshit move. I’m glad they improved on the matter, even if the Witcher 2 was still a little rough on that point.

My favorite mechanic was the running across an endless field from village to tiny village to collect nude cards of the local ladies.

… I may have spent a lot of time in the first chapter.

“It tastes sweeter when you kill the watermelon with your own hands”

I actually don’t mind onion rings. But I’d never sacrifice a single fry for one.

I’ll die on this hill

Or do you just want to point out the bad and throw in the towel on the question of how it can be fixed?

Man, that’s for wiser fucking people than me. I’m not going to pretend to know the best outline to split up and combine African ethnicities within contiguous borders. I studied pre-modern European history, not post-independence African geopolitics. I don’t have the expertise necessary even for a rough sketch.

And honestly, I don’t think it can be fixed at this point, at least not across all so-afflicted countries. The damage is largely done. In the past 60 years, institutions have been established, internal migration has intensified, nationalism cultivated, etc. Most of Africa is probably pretty stuck with the problem, and has the unenviable task of making disparate peoples cooperate within a single polity. It is possible - but it is also difficult (see: India).

Rwandan genocide was very much fueled by Belgian racial policies.

My point isn’t that Africa would be a utopia if the European powers hadn’t carved it up like a toddler with a birthday cake, my point is only that the borders as formed in most of Subsaharan Africa are completely arbitrary divisions which rely more on conflicting colonial interests than realities of the people on the ground.

Take a look at Nigeria if you want an example of how conflicting ethnic groups artificially forced together by an attempt of colonial powers to maintain some measure of control turns out. There’s a reason most countries in Europe were either ethnically dominated empires, or ethnically homogenous nation-states - and likewise, there is a reason why European imperialists put great effort into dividing subject peoples abroad.

The ability to construct and sustain a state, or any community, is based on shared values and cultural memes.

Honestly, I’m not sure that there is an optimal solution there. All I’m certain about is that the European powers didn’t give a shit about anything other than resolving their own claims in an ideal fashion when releasing their colonial vassals piecemeal.

Unfortunately, instead of the outside world helping Africa to get to this point … the world instead uses Africa as just another place to exploit and make money out of. In the short sighted vision of the first world … it’s more lucrative to make a bunch of money now by taking advantage of poor dying people than it is to help them become productive members of the global economy.

I would argue it’s more complex than that. The very conditions created by European colonization have resulted in extreme instability and corruption in the resulting, mostly-arbitrarily drawn states, which heavily discourages investment from rational (though amoral) actors. It’s not that the rest of the world market doesn’t want Africa to be more “Developing Southeast Asia” than “Place we get raw resources from”, it’s that the conditions European colonization foisted upon it make getting there from this point very difficult.

Subsaharan Africa: “Oh no! These Turkish and Arab invaders are terrible! Surely Europe, which also fights with the Turks and Arabs, will help us?”

Europe: “Actually, we’ve decided to make it worse.”

Africa: “Oh no”

Europe: “MUCH worse.”

Some rare exceptions, particularly in the earlier period, aside