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Heart of Darkness

anon_juqi said in #4624 2d ago: received

There are four global trends that threaten major crises in our lifetime: birthrate collapse, US-China conflict, AI runaway, and the one singular continent whose population continues to double. The first three of these are discussed ad nauseum in popular discourse; the fourth is taboo.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the the fourth rail: the challenge of Africa.

Over a century ago, Joseph Conrad wrote his seminal novel set in the Congo, Heart of Darkness. The biggest city in this vast tribal jungle region was Leopoldville, named after the Belgian king, containing fewer than 5,000 people.

Today, this settlement is known as Kinshasa. The Kinshasa-Brazzaville urban area is a vast slum containing roughly 20 million people, though no reliable statistics exist. It is substantially larger than New York City.

A river bisects Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Deeply corrupt and sclerotic, neither country has sufficient state capacity to build even a single bridge. As a result, travel between the two sides is by ferry or air.

The world's shortest commercial flight connects Kinshasa and Brazzaville airport, lasting 5 minutes. The airline is based in a third, slightly more functional country; it leases its planes from Ethiopia, lacking the capability to perform maintenance.

Subsaharan Africa is hugely genetically diverse, more so than the rest of the world combined. It is the precivilizational human source population. As discussed in depth in previous threads, it is clear today that migration to colder climates ca. 50k+ years ago, followed by advent of the city ca. 10-20k years ago, created new selection pressures and a feedback loop with human evolution. Certain SSA countries, in particular those with significant back-migration from post-city societies such as Europe and the Arab world, have a sufficient right-tail of competent human capital to self-sustain.

These may include Ethiopia (with centuries of Arab influence) and specific small countries such as Rwanda. The twitter "world IQ map" caricature of the entirety of subsaharan Africa as a 75 IQ red zone is oversimplified.

However, the Heart of Darkness remains. There are huge areas of the continent that lack a right-tail subpopulation capable of maintaining, much less building any of the elements of modern society. They are sustained entirely from the outside. And unfortunately, these areas are precisely the ones that have enormous birthrates without much sign of decline. Ethiopia currently averages 3.5 TFR and falling; they may triple by end of century without any dramatic incident.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, meanwhile, is currently 100 million people, roughly half of which are under the age of 17. The TFR is 6 and flat; if this remains the case, they will multiply 80x to 8 billion Congolese by 2100. Even today, they import 70% of their food.

"Secure the borders and ignore" is not a realistic option. The Gaza war has killed 50k people so far; ask yourself honestly if the world would watch the daily tiktok livestreams emanating from a 10-million-death famine without taking action. Then consider that even a 10-million-death famine would not meaningfully dent the growth curve.

It is a mathematical certainty that growth rates in the Heart of Darkness will decrease dramatically in the coming decades. Anything else is logistically impossible. However, the current default way this happens looks very ugly, both for them and for us. Nobody has a solution. The problem itself is invisible; to mention it is haram.

Treat this question with as much realism, candor, and maturity as you can muster. What do, anon?

There are four globa received

anon_xoxe said in #4626 1d ago: received

One thing I’d be curious to know is whether the fact that Bill Gates-style campaigning to promote birth control has been seemingly quite effective in, for instance, South Asia, yet hasn’t seemed to make much of a dent in the Congo region, is due to differential allocation of NGO resources or simply because the population of the latter is so high-time-preference and incapable of meaningfully thinking about cause and effect that it renders such campaigning largely ineffectual. Does anyone have any insight on this question?

referenced by: >>4628

One thing I’d be cur received

anon_juqi said in #4628 26h ago: received

>>4626

There is a large capability gap between Africa and South Asia. South Asia, for all of its issues, has capable subpopulations that have organized complex civilizations for thousands of years. India has a functioning space program.

Westerners lack intuition for what Africa is like. The DRC, for example, is about the same size as the Western United States. The country has 100 million people and two paved roads.

There is a large cap received

anon_nega said in #4629 25h ago: received

Nobody has any clue what is going on in Africa. Nobody has any clue if there are as many hundreds of millions of them as the statistics say, because the statistics are made-up estimates by African bureaucrats and UN/NGO flunkies who need to over-estimate the number of people they need to "give aid" to. If the UN/NGO complex was defunded, which can be done with a few simple bureaucratic decisions in Washington, D.C., which is where all the money for this complex comes from, all the UN/NGO flunkies would have to leave, and nobody would have any idea whether millions of Africans are dying or not. Supposedly they have all been dying since Trump cut USAID in February. Where are the videos? The photos? Not one. It's all statistical imputation. Africa practically does not even exist outside of UN/NGO types using it to gain personal power and the fact that some darkies manage to board boats to Europe via the Arab smugglers.

referenced by: >>4632

Nobody has any clue received

anon_juqi said in #4632 24h ago: received

>>4629

It's true that sub-Saharan official statistics are unreliable, but that doesn't mean we know nothing.

We have satellite imagery. We have export statistics, eg. we know how much food we're sending. We have direct anthropological observations.

You can quibble details, but the reality is that SSA has roughly 1 billion people; a median age below 20; and a TFR above 4. In short, it's a billion and doubling every ~20 years.

referenced by: >>4633

It's true that sub-S received

anon_nega said in #4633 22h ago: received

>>4632
Cut off the free food, turn off the cameras, and not one person outside the dark continent will even remember they exist.

referenced by: >>4634

Cut off the free foo received

anon_xoxe said in #4634 21h ago: received

>>4633
How can you effectively turn off the cameras though? Aren’t there already enough camera phones in the area to prevent that from working? I’m guessing if you looked, you could find all kinds of footage of warlords butchering people on DRC or the CAR (admittedly I haven’t tried). Would you need to like carve certain areas out of the western internet?

How can you effectiv received

anon_demu said in #4635 20h ago: received

A basic question here is whether Europe is about to undergo another Völkerwanderung this time from the south rather than from the East.

The political will to control these movements is likely to increase. Politics, especially in Europe, will likely become increasingly ethnic in the coming decades. In that environment, I'd expect the influence of universalist left-wing ideologies to fall. In this scenario, there would still be left-wing parties, but they could often be quasi-fronts for ethnic groups, like the Socialist Party in Brussels for the Muslims there.

The changing ethnic composition of Europe could cut both ways in terms of support for restrictionism. Arabs, or specifically North Africans, are probably more hostile to Sub-Saharan Africans than Europeans are. The Tunisan president, Kais Saied, who already warned against population replacement, may be a harbinger of this (see: https://www.ft.com/content/c4ecf01d-c01a-4b06-a574-896bc0822850). So that may offer an additonal belt of protection around Europe.

On the other hand, those already in Europe with a Sub-Saharan background may lobby in favour of such migration; however, they don't seem to be as politically organised in counries where there a lot of them, like Brussels -- at least right now.

The attention Gaza gets is somewhat exceptional. That may be due to the fact that Palestine is a very long-running issue, so has accumulated interest over time. The area is of religious significance as well, meaning everyone knows about it. So I wouldn't use that as a benchmark for the attention other events could attract even today, let alone twenty or thirty years from now.

A basic question her received

anon_ryto said in #4636 20h ago: received

India is a far, far greater existential threat to the human species than Africa. Africans are extremely stupid, have no effective ethnic solidarity with each other (the continent is pretty diverse), and have no political unity.

India's population relative to the rest of the world will continue to increase for at least several decades. They are politically united and their government pursues an extremely aggressive policy of exporting their people into other countries in order to gain economic and political footholds to use as leverage. They are extremely racist, psychopathic, sadistic, greedy, and shameless about exploiting loopholes in the legal systems and cultures of the host countries that they invade.

Don't waste your attention or energy worrying about Africans. Indians are who we should be worried about. You should be spreading awareness of this threat to everyone you know. They are a detestable and hostile enough group that it is actually possible that public opinion in the West will turn against them to such a heated degree that they will be expelled en masse.

referenced by: >>4641

India is a far, far received

anon_juqi said in #4641 6h ago: received

>>4636

This India hate is wildly overblown. "Existential threat to the human species"? Where in Pakistan are you from?

India has below-replacement TFR today. There are 1.4 billion Indians, about as many as there will ever be. India's default outcome is to complete a modest upgrade from deeply poor to what development economists euphemistically call "middle-income", aging into a low-growth slow-news country like Indonesia, a nation of grey-haired saars. That's not much of a threat.

> India's population relative to the rest of the world will continue to increase for at least several decades.

Wrong. The fraction of the world that is Indian is decreasing. Peak India occurred several years ago.

Meanwhile, SSA has 1.3 billion people today; they are about to overtake, then wildly exceed. There is an excellent chance that you and I will live to see a 10-billion-person world, 5 billion of which are Sub-Saharan. Game out what that world looks like.

A meta-point: it's a cliche that people have a hard time grasping exponentials. Regardless, it is absurd how much epistemic alpha remains in entertaining the possibility that a *very consistent exponential curve will continue to be consistent*. The One Weird Trick to being less wrong about lots of things.

The people who predicted the implications of AI a decade ago? They understood exponentials.

The people who wrote that Covid was going to be a pandemic in Jan and Feb 2020, when the regime line was that it was no big deal, and in fact a heckin raycism to worry about? Exponentials.

Pic related.

A final corollary; there is a reason why China is expanding its presence aggressively in Africa. For all faults, they are a country run by people who understand exponentials.

This India hate is w received

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