What happened to Zimbabwe

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/09/zimbabwe200809?printable=true&currentPage=all

by crocus • 18 years ago

45 48 18 years ago

vanityfair.com

swombat4• 18 years ago

Nothing to do with hackers.

timr• 18 years ago

Give it a rest. I'm a hacker, and this satisfies my intellectual curiosity. If you don't like it, don't vote for it.

mattmaroon7• 18 years ago

I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.

"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I'd argue that we should simply flag accounts as hackers, thereby, by definition, greenlighting anything they post, except I wouldn't be one of them.

prakash• 18 years ago

I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police. +1 for giving it a rest.

I am tired as well, with all these off-topic articles. Giving it is a rest is a bad idea, since that will only accelerate HN going the reddit way. For all practical purposes it is going that way, just that you are helping accelerate it.

qqq• 18 years ago

> I think we're all a little tired of the off-topic police.

Do you think I should submit this link?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin

(I read it today to satisfy my intellectual curiosity.)

ScottWhigham• 18 years ago

Vanity Fair, Matt? That's what you want to see on this site? Look, I enjoy your blog but if HN starts with the NYT, VF, US News, et al posts all day long, this won't be a place you or I want to visit. And that's the problem everyone one of us (myself included) who post as the off-topic police are trying to prevent. We have a fun group and this is not where we come to get news; this is where we come to talk to other really smart people about hacker/startup-related topics.

tptacek• 18 years ago

Hackers like good long-form narrative journalism even more than they like Ron Paul. Thanks for explaining your downmod; I've cancelled it out.

danw• 18 years ago

HN doesn't have to be news about hackers, just any testy brain food that hackers like. If it's been voted up and it's not link bait then it's what the userbase wants

davidw5• 18 years ago

I don't mind, and am often quite fond of the 'tasty brain food' articles when they completely avoid politics/economics/other controversial stuff that generates more heat than light.

sh1mmer2• 18 years ago

I think it's fair to point out it's nothing to do with Hacking. I also think it's cool it's on the frontpage. There doesn't have to be a disconnect.

I think that comments are a great way to add meta-data to a story. People often read the comments before investing time into a link, in that scenario this simple note is fine.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

Swombat, now look what you've done, you've turned the comments section of this post into a debate about rules...

Anyway, yeah this sucks ass. I love how China just spent $300 billion staging games while Russia invades Georgia, there continues to be a war in Iraq, and Zimbabwe suffers 9000% inflation.

swombat4• 18 years ago

Unintentional, really... I was just pointing out, in a neutral tone, that this wasn't hacker news. It was an informational note, really.

Also, looking at the other comment threads, it seems to me that there isn't much genuine discussion about this anyway.

maxklein• 18 years ago

Zimbabwe is War 2.0. You know how things moved online? Well, Zimbabwe is what happens when a media and economic war is waged against a country. The war is between Britain and Zimbabwe, and the REALLY sad part is that all of you have been convinced by the one-sided propaganda you read. How many of you who think you know the entire story have actually ever read the Zimbabwean side of things?

It's war 2.0 folks, and you don't even realise it. Africa has a completely different perspective on the Zimbabwe conflict, but in your freedom to read whatever they provide for you to read, you have no other sources of information.

pistoriusp• 18 years ago

I didn't really want to respond to this off topic post. I didn't read the article, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by it been war 2.0 or Africa having a different perspective of Zimbabwe than the rest of the World.

I live in South Africa. I've spoken to many Africans who seem to agree with the rest of the world, as do I. This war between Britain and Zimbabwe? That's the sad delusions of Robert Mugabe and his friends... Used to fuel hatred.

I'm utterly confused and actually disgusted that you're comparing the situation in Zimbabwe to the movement of the Internet?

theoneill• 18 years ago

Have you ever been to Zimbabwe?

rglovejoy• 18 years ago

I believe that this is one of those situations where there is no "other side". Robert Mugabe has destroyed his country's economy and stolen an election, all for the sake of his own personal power. This is pretty much par for the course in most of Africa.

ajm• 18 years ago

Please would you justify and/or provide some evidence for your claims that this is and economic war being waged. It seems to me, a briton with Zimbabwean friends whose tales back up those expressed in the article, that you are being misinformed.

gojomo• 18 years ago

Can you provide a link to the "Zimbabwean side of things"?

jbyers• 18 years ago

I was in Zimbabwe in September of last year. This article matches very closely with our impressions of the political climate of the country and seems consistent with the opinions of the Zimbabweans we talked to -- at least, those who were willing to talk openly about politics. Certainly there's an economic war going on, but it seems a civil war, where any semblance of a functioning economy has long since been manipulated into uselessness by Mugabe's hand. I carry my own biases to be sure, but it was hard not to draw this conclusion from what we saw last year and the terrible decline since then.

Zimbabwe's current situation is complex, charged, and forged out of decades of conflict among groups inside and outside the country. I can't argue outright there isn't another broad perspective on what's happening, but I'd like to read about it for myself. Please post links.

baruman3• 18 years ago

I find this article interesting in that part of what's necessary for successful start-up industry is freedom of which Zimbabwe has none. As a person of African descent and a Latin American living in the U.S. I am constantly struck by leaders who do not understand the world economy or simply dont care. A country like Zimbabwe, if they were to invest in their youth in say OLPC for instance or sending x number of students to study Computer Science or Engineering abroad; they would see an untold benefit societally in 15 to 25 years. Unfortunately we cant account for human greed and corruption which drives the Mugabes of the the world.

dcurtis2• 18 years ago

The problem is that giving kids laptops does not make them smarter. OLPCs are not magical teachers.

Also, especially in Zimbabwe, if you invest in sending children abroad to study, they will probably never come back. One of their biggest problems for the future is the mass exodus of intelligent, educated people from the country.

baruman3• 18 years ago

I of course was referring to some system where if I pay for your education you come back and work in the country fro x number of years. It cant just be a system where the government pays for the education of a few hundred or thousand people and they move to New York or London. There have to be other factors whereby the government and private industry make it attractive for people to come back and start technology start-ups.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

The problem with Zimbabwe is that it's not Rhodesia.

baruman3• 18 years ago

Anything is better than European colonialism...

crocus• 18 years ago

Anything?

What happened to Zimbabwe

Related Stories