• 24 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • More rail infrastructure in Africa is great news!

    For everyone commenting about debt traps, from an African perspective both Western debt and Chinese debt (or any type of debt) favor the creditors but Chinese loans are relatively advantages because

    (1) they tend to focus on infrastructure that the respective countries can use to their advantage as opposed to the WB or IMF loans which promote neoliberalism that has never worked in Africa (or really any other place) and push Africa in a position to only be able to provide raw materials and never be able to switch to value added products.

    (2) They push other richer countries interested in African to invest more if they want to compete with China. The US for example has made plans to invest in African infrastructure to compete with China:

    https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/03/us-plans-build-africas-infrastructure-bring-opportunities-challenges

    (3) If the debtor countries default on the loan or want to renegotiate, China (at least so far) doesn’t use its intelligence agencies and military agencies to destabilize your country or force regime change

















  • I agree with you on all of this except the point on Bumi. I think the change to his character is great and makes him feel more realistic! It felt like the live action Bumi was trying to be as fun loving as animation Bumi but can’t hide how deeply the war has changed him for the worst, which makes sense since he is probably the only one (or only handful of people) to have lived and fought through a hundred years of war. He’s also trying to be a good friend to Aang but can’t help but feel resentful towards him for abandoning his role as the avatar.