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my my, what a ugly thread this turned into. strange thing is that (a) piracy is not a new phenomenon--it's kind of a traditional business model
(b) it is curious that so many arm-chair field marshals are arguing for heading īnto there guns blazing--into where? to get who? what are you talking about?
(c) it is more curious still that life is held so cheap here. merchanidise flows are more important than life. fuck with my commodity flows and you get the wrath of a thousand arm-chair field marshals descending upon your head. wow.
this is not to say yay piracy.
rather, its more marvelling at the simple-mindedness of that very christian kill em all let god sort em out approach to this sort of situation.
that said, i don't see any obvious solution to the problem of piracy.
most of the responses that link it to socio-economic conditions in somalia seem obviously correct--but what one does about that is much less obvious, particularly given the simple fact that there's no political consensus in the northern hemisphere that there's any particular reason to give a shit about africa really so long as the raw materials keep flowing. this is straight-up neo-colonialism--why bother with direct domination when you can control the organization of economies, get what you're after, and accept no responsibility for anything else? let the africans deal with the consequences of colonialism and neocolonialism--so long as they dont fuck with commodity flows, who cares?
o sure, you have any number of organizational gestures toward redressing this or that problem---but it's an extraordinarily, incredibly diverse continent that admits of no single or simple mode of action coming from the outside, particularly given that most modes of action that originate from the outside are parsed as extensions of colonialism itself. and there's no real interest in thinking out other solutions.
you reap what you sow.
and history shapes what that means.
it doesn't matter whether you like it or not. it's just like that. you want a hard reality--try that one.
i expect to see more armed merchant ships in that area, more military escorts, more conflicts.
is that a good solution?
it's not a solution at all.
but what alternatives are there? i don't see them.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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