just watching all the africa stuff on the red nose thing.
babies dying,aids, malaria.
thing is it does not affect me in anyway.
no sadness, guilt or anything…
am i a heartless bastid.
thing is , the baby p thing, and right back to the jamie bulger case makes me feel sad and extremely angry….???

No.

Everyone’s different, but you can relate better to the those things that seem familiar, Africa is not familiar, at least not on a day to day existence level.

No you’re not a heartless bastid.

De-sensitization mate. At the risk of sounding heartless it has rather been shoved in our faces for a long time – sooner or later we’re bound to get used to it sadly. Things like the Baby P case are still uncommon and therefore shocking. Don’t worry, I feel the same 😕

might be that you’ve not eaten meat for a while and you are just experiencing hunger empathy?

I think, unfortunately, as it seems so distant from our own experience and we only ever see it on the tv it is sometimes hard to empathise. Plus, we get a bit desensitized. So, no.

**** :lol:nutt

Perhaps if that ****t Bono stopped clapping his hands,children in Africa would stop dying…..

I feel sorry for them, but not guilt.

It doesn’t make me want to donate though, just switch over. 😕

even if you don’t feel emotional about it, I’m sure you can see the benefit in donating to the cause

Yes. You have spent the income of an African country on bicycles and used most of their metal reserves to build em. 🙄

😆 on the floor too.

Why do british dead babies make you feel sad and african ones don’t? I cried when that woman lost one of her twins, but I have spent time in ICU with both of ours since they were born so maybe theres more to relate to for me.

Yep, definitely a heartless bastid imo.

And I blame it on all the smacking you had when you were a kid.

Djglover; how are you and your lady and little ones doing? Hope everything’s going well, mate. A few sleepless nights, eh? 😕 🙂 Worth it all though, eh? 😀

Babies everywhere are important. Just innocent lives. Everyone deserves a fair go, in life.

They are OK now, been in and out of hospital a couple more times, but settling down nicely now cheers Rudeboy 😀

If you can’t feel compassion for people in another part of the world then I worry either you are missing that part of the world or a part of yourself.

(Though from past posts that’s not the case at all.)

Excellent news, DJ!

Got to look after the babies; they ARE our future.

Give them all a fair go in life.

No i don’t think it makes you a heartless bast@rd etc… but find a pound down the back of the sofa and send it in.

comic relief was this yesterday?, oh well 😕

Ton, I am completely with you on this, esp the Bulger thing as it happened 5 miles from my house and my daughter is now the same age.

Africa is a basket case and they need to look at themselves before we start pumping in MORE aid, most of which just gets syphoned off through corruption and is proven not to work.

Africa is a basket case and they need to look at themselves before we start pumping in MORE aid, most of which just gets syphoned off through corruption and is proven not to work.

PHEW ! Now that makes me feel a whole lot better !!!

And there was me thinking that the African Continent had been raped, exploited, and interfered with by rich powerful nations.

But far from it, all along Africa has been receiving very fair prices for it’s wealth of natural minerals and cash crops. And of course Europeans have only ever promoted justice and democracy in Africa.

And unbelievably, Africa is now welcoming the Chinese with open arms – now there’s gratitude for you !

Obviously Africa is ‘a basket case’ because all them African types, are corrupt ….. it’s got nothing at all to do with us.

So f*ck ’em I say ….. that’ll teach ’em 😀

It made me feel sad, helpless, guilty, angry, ashamed…

Was there some Red Nose thing last night, must have missed it.

Geddin.

It made me go out to the pub and watch LEEDS V WIGAN.
Cant do with all this poo about teaching then how to read and write so they can fill out our benefit forms.
Screw them dot com.

The real heartless bar-stewards are those white collar intellectually arrogance greedy fat cats that squander and cheat/con through the life savings of ordinary hardworking folks. Every ten years or so you get to see their real ugly “ethic” surfacing having accumulated so much the whole world suffer.

Most suffering are caused by these minority in various guise in power … they are the real heartless bar-stewards as they account for majority of the suffering in the world.

Not you or me.

👿

ernie +1.

I don’t feel anything about starving africans particularly, or ones dying of aids or malaria, or dying in utterly senseless wars. They don’t make me emote.

But I know that it’s not right and that there are things that can be done about it.

Yeah things can be done, but generally by the people who instead choose to spend billions dropping bombs on innocent civilian children, not by people giving a couple of quid now and then.

What pisses me off is the government keep pumping money into these nations even when the finances of this country are screwed. Get a grip and stop getting us in debt assholes!

You might want to watch this clip.

😡

No Ton, not at all.

Look around this place, cos of the credit crunch some people are having to buy XT instead of XTR, keep £600 forks for longer than 3 months and bikes for almost a year.

Should be a big charity push to help these sort of people out not bloody foreigners whose countries are **** cos we (and other nations) have stolen all their resources.

Perhaps we could reinsytate the slave trade as well.

What pisses me off is the government keep pumping money into these nations

And what pisses me off, is that for hundreds of years we’ve been ripping off these nations, expecting them to provide us with the little that they have, for f*ck all.

Perhaps Africa wouldn’t be so hungry today if for example, they didn’t grow cocoa to sell to us at give-away prices so that we can stuff our fat, obese, faces, with bars of chocolate.

It would appear that third world nations now receive less for their cocoa cash crops, than they received 30 years ago.

World prices and production of cocoa (from 1971/72 to 2005/06)

.

Now I’m pretty sure that the price of a bar of chocolate isn’t the same as it was 30 years ago, so how come the farmers who grow the f’kin stuff, haven’t been receiving the full value of their produce ?

Whatever we give in aid to these countries it pales into significance compared to how much we rip them off.

Still, as the world slowly changes away from a Western/Northern dominated one, into a much more multipolar world, I guess we’ll get our comeuppance. As new emerging markets provide the African nations with real alternatives they’ll be able to tell us to go and f*ck ourselves.

And we’ll feel so sorry for ourselves, as people living within our crumbling economies struggle to deal with realistic food prices.

The world’s fattest people, ie the Yanks, spend less than 10 percent of their disposable income on food.

Grrrrrr

If big companies weren’t paying these little slags next to nothing to make cheap shit then how the hell would these people make a living, and how would we get our cheap tat? Primark clothing doesnt grow on trees people! Just think of all the poor single mothers who wouldnt be able to find a bright green mini skirt 2 sizes too small to match their fake tan and hoola hoop earings, and not only that, one that has a pocket that exactly holds a giro, 20 regal, a bling PAYG mobile and a greggs sausage roll.

Cocoa means nothing, its all about the coca.

Shows how much it bothered me .. can’t stand watching Comic Relief! Would rather we pumped 50 million quid into sorting out the UK, gun/knife crime, gangs etc. Our youth need support to stop their criminal ways . .that’s why they’ve ended up the way they are!

just watching all the africa stuff on the red nose thing.
babies dying,aids, malaria.
thing is it does not affect me in anyway.
no sadness, guilt or anything…
am i a heartless bastid.
thing is , the baby p thing, and right back to the jamie bulger case makes me feel sad and extremely angry….???

It’s because we are taught by the media that white kids dying is more important – especially if they are female and cute.

Count me in the desensitised / disinterested camp. Dunno why, I do realise it’s wrong but it’s very easy to change the channel. Im probably making a hugely offensive and narrow minded generalisation but Africa seems permanently f***ed.

Cant help but wonder how it might have panned out without imperialism / slave trading.

Better. But it is wrong to right Africa off as a place that was irrevocably ruined hundreds of years ago. There are a series of reasons why much of it is as bad as it is now, and most of it is perfectly correctable given the will.

Tim Butcher’s book, Blood River, about the Congo, and Martin Meredith, The State of Africa are both very interesting in different ways.

I heard on early radio 4 program of an African nation plagued by Malaria. I listened as its sort of personal as a relative of mine masterminded and acheived the removal of malaia from Mauritius. The next part is , to my mind , dispicable. To a greater extent after hearing this , and all the other 361 scammers I decided they are all beyond help.
An expanding Chinese company that made mosquito nets wanted to build a factory in Africa to produce nets impregnated with a long term anti mosquito repellant that lasted 10 years , twice as long as the current ones do. Brilliant. The whole country could have these nets for pence, if they let the Chinese build a factory to then export to the rest of the continent.
The sad and utterly dispicable part is that the nations President had appointed his own son as a token ” Minister for international trade and developement”, probably on a huge salary paid for by the western world. Now, this idiot decides that the Chinese can build the factory, which will help his nations health , productivity, employment, stature and GDP . But the mofo wants a nice big brown envelope with $400,000 cash in it.
The Chinese, funnilly enough being sort of semi communists, told the “Minister for International Trade and Developement” to go whistle, so no factory , no new better nets , no healthy popluation , and Bono bleating on about helping the Africans, then getting in his Maybach to get on his jet home.
This was about 18 months ago and still gets me angry
Just hopeless when thats what your up against

Shows how much it bothered me .. can’t stand watching Comic Relief! Would rather we pumped 50 million quid into sorting out the UK, gun/knife crime, gangs etc. Our youth need support to stop their criminal ways . .that’s why they’ve ended up the way they are!

But some of the Comic Relief money does go to the UK (though admittedly i have no idea what proportion). There was a horrendously sad bit of film about a young carer, it made me donate.

Alot of old people in the coming years sat in very cold homes here in the UK. Fuel allowance isn’t going to cover the big increases.

That is sad.

Sorry, can’t comment on anyone else’s plight. How can we throw aid at people when the infrastructure of the country ignores its own people. The only way that we can really help is colonolism once more.
Until then, sorry our own elders are far more important to me.