Cynical
I'm the new blogger on here. The aussie one. Why am I here? I'm here to be as cynical as possible - no sugar-coating here. Perhaps not quite the same random crap fare - there could even be some serious comment - but nevertheless, hopefully entertaining.
The rich / poor divide
Ahh, the rich / poor divide, perhaps. Statistics show (keep in mind, all ye nitpickers, the exact numbers are unimportant - it's the general idea which is important) - that the average person in the western world has at least 20 times the usage of resources of the average person in the third world. Consider that.
Near where I live, there is a 'housing commission' suburb (ie subsidized government housing for the poor). As one would expect, this is a patently bad idea - increasing crime, etc. "let's just put all the desperate people together, shall we?". Anyway, the thrust of this is thus:
Of these people, there are a ridiculous amount of overweight people - many of whom i'd even describe as morbidly obese, taking up two bus seats. Such a problem does not affect the rich here. And it's much the same elsewhere in the western world - many of the poor have health problems due to being *overweight*.
Consider this for a moment.
This is utterly ridiculous. Consider the fact that upwards of half of most people in sub-Saharan Africa (not including South Africa of course) don't even have enough food to feed themselves properly.
Yet the *poorest* in the Western world have problems due to gluttony!
And yet, this is not even the start of our arrogantly selfish consumerism here in the western world. Sure, many of the possessions we have are very entertaining, and have a relatively low impact - or are even very, very useful to society itself, e.g. computers.
What I'm saying is that we should stop this selfishness, this blind arrogance. Perhaps we've inherited it from our racist European forebears, it's part of our psyche (and I'm referring to culture here, not race.) When Europeans arrived in the New World, they immediately exploited the people already living there as much as possible - and the same elsewhere in the world. Slavery is a topic for another day though.
Concluding comments
Does it really matter if your internet is capped, say, when, upwards of a billion people in the world, and probably more like 2 billion, live every day just to feed themselves?
