[Timber Loftis]

Melcheor writ:

You are justifying your opinion with stereotypes.

This little insult almost caused me not to even carry forward with the discussion. It's easy to insult when you don't want to mount a real argument. Looking to the most prevalent and general factors and trying to plan around them is not "justifying opinion with stereotypes." As I said before, I didn't state things that are universal to every individual, merely those that were generally applicable. For instance, whether you want to call it a stereotype or not, it is generally true that Africa has suffered through a long spate of changing regimes and recycled dictators -- you yourself even lament the fall of empires in Africa, because we all know the situation was caused by the void in power that the empires left.

As good sociologists, we make generalizations about groups, not individuals. Good social planners would be wise to plan around such general characteristics. Let's look at an example:

Even if some take advantage of aid, we should still send it for the benefit of those who do not.

Not true. Take the trade sanctions against Saddam. We knew he would take advantage -- we knew every $1 sent his way would go first to him to build weapons and castles. Maybe a few pennies would actually make it to the Iraqis, but that's too low a percentage to spend the effort. If Sally Struthers ran a telethon to raise money for starving kids in Africa, and told us that at least five cents out of every dollar donated would make it to the needy, many of us would choose not to donate -- and rightfully so. The generalization that "some aid is better than no aid" is naive in that it doesn't consider these sorts of diminishing returns.

Estimates suggest the total cost of the iraq war will end up somewhere between $150 and $250 billion, just for the US. The G8, by comparison, *managed* to agree to $50 billion dollars in aid. Your country does have its priorities wrong and so does mine. This is what the adverts highlited.

And, they may well be dead wrong. What if freedom actually were to set in and take hold in the middle east and africa? Those people could very well be much better off in the long term. What is worth more to a society -- injecting aid in the form of grain and food, or changing that society's whole paradigm such that it chooses to free its self from the yokes of oppression?

Assuming it can be done, and the people can actually be freed -- which remains to be seen -- then upending all the wrongheaded, oppressive, failed or failing muslim dictatorial regimes in the region could well be the best money spent.