Colonisation is the link between third world countries, not the common thread of their poverty, which varies massively within this group as we both pointed out, and I'm quite open to the idea that the post-colonial performance of these countries is down to cultural and institutional factors. But third world status is defined by their economic position at the start of the Cold War, at which point the majority of these countries were only just gaining independence. It's ridiculous to assert their positions here were due to the culture of groups that were at best an advisory body to colonial administrators, rather than differences in colonial regimes. And culture being influenced heavily by economics, it is difficult to draw a line between these starting positions and the cultural structures that developed, or for that matter to see what purpose it serves except to "pander to left wing white guilt" (what does this even mean, is anticolonialism a primarily white phenomenon where you come from?)
That said, your using America and Vietnam as counterpoints to my argument suggests that we may be talking at cross-purposes somewhat.
Okay actually lets try and reel this in, this is how I see this conversation:
1) You claim that third world countries are an example of irrational collections of people, citing their poor economic performance as evidence 2) I point out that many third world countries have seen very good economic performance since gaining independence, and their low absolute wealth is more easily explained by their poor or negative performance under colonialism. 3) You point out that many third world and first world countries have performed well post-independence, and give o...
Last Wednesday (2010 Dec 01), BBC Radio 4 broadcast a studio discussion on the question: "should we actively try to extend life itself?" The programme can be listened to from the BBC here for one week from broadcast, and is also being repeated tomorrow (Saturday Dec 04) at 22:15 BST. (ETA: not BST, GMT.)
All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, "This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility."
Instead, I heard people saying that work on life extension is disrespectful to the old, that to prolong life would be like prolonging an opera, which has a certain natural size and shape, that the old are wise, so if we make them physically young then old people won't be old, so they won't be wise. Whatever cockeyed argument you can construct by scattering into a Deeply Wise template the words "old", "young", "wise", "decrepit", "healthy", "natural", "unnatural", "boredom", "inevitable", "denial", I heard worse.
If I can bear to listen again to the whole thing just to check I didn't miss anything important, I may write something on their discussion board.