One of these years I want to try a wild turkey, but have been told I'll be disappointed.
They'd be fools to do so merely on the word of a clearly hostile outsider, and even if they believe you, the perceived risk from Ebola might still be smaller than the perceived risk from social isolation.
Luckily, they (say, a village family in rural Ghana) are equipped with essentially the same meat computer your are. They are perfectly able to perceive the fact that the neighbor is dying with blood pouring out of her body, just like tens of thousands of other people just have. They are able to perceive that the ultimate social isolation is having everyone you care about die. It's nice to see you're not one of those people who thinks that a farmer in Liberia, who deals with life and death every day as he tends to livestock or hunts, isn't somehow too dim-witted to grasp cause and effect when he has the basic facts. This is about social behavior DESPITE knowing the facts.
Culture has value
Unless it's what's just killed off everyone you know. Or look at places like Ferguson, MO, where culture just decided to burn down local shops in a tantrum over reality disagreeing with an instantly concocted bogus media mythology. Culture, like the culture of castigating your neighbors for daring to go get an education or acquiring a broader vocabulary - as seen in swaths of urban culture or patches of, say, Appalachia - is often destructive, the opposite of valuable. Pious political correctness, which employees poisonous moral equivalence in the name of assuaging misplaced guilt over the fact that some cultures actually work better than others, preserves and actually perpetuates that destructiveness.
Do you understand the average education levels in Africa? The average wage? The living conditions?
Yes, and the three countries in the worst shape (as it relates to the spread of Ebola) all have a miserable record of taking lots of external support that could be educating their people, bolstering their healthcare systems, and generally improving the lives of everyone in those countries. But because of cultural inertia and rampant corruption (you know, the people who feel entitled to skim the support cash/material personally and not do things like march out into the rougher parts of their own country to explain to the rural population that they're killing themselves with primitive rituals), those are places that can't shake off the problem.
Do you want to know who is a smug western douche? You are. "Africa" isn't a place you can talk about in sweeping terms like you just have. Your dim, uninformed vision of it as a single, monocultural place with a common level of education and sophistication is absurd (and incredibly condescending, Mr. Holier Than Thou). "The entire continent" isn't the same. Countries like Nigeria have seen cases in this outbreak, but have headed it off at the pass because the population, culture, and approach to things like this are very different there than they are in, say, Liberia.
I'll tell you what, you go to a Baptist church and tell them they need to give up a "ridiculous part of their culture". Or try it at a Mosque.
I have no trouble telling ANY group of superstitious people that what they think is ridiculous. Especially when they do things insist a capricious god is going to cure their kid's cancer, or kiss the bodies of Ebola victims, and then wander back to their own homes and, a couple of weeks later, wonder why their whole family is dying - despite a helpful aid worker risking her life to explain to them the basic facts of life and death. It's the 21st century. Billions and billions of dollars in aid flows into the countries most vulnerable to issues like this, and it gets squandered, diverted, or mis-applied because of toxic levels of corruption by comparatively educated people. They want to have a piece of that foreign aid action while also having the lazy inertia of backwards cultures that can't cope with this much human density. That sense of entitlement to both a primitive past and a piece of the largess of other countries that have moved on - it's unmistakable.
Quit being such an entitled white racist asshole with your critiques of their culture.
No, the entitled assholes are the ones who feel no reason to stop doing the very things that are spreading the disease. You're the one with the skin color obsession, everyone else is talking about what people actually do. Like laying hands on the corpse of someone who's just died of Ebola, while simultaneously asking the rest of the world to risk their lives and spend their money and time to come help
While we're on the subject of investing in infrastructure, we've got a water crisis coming up very soon now. With undeniable climate change, a large part of the country is never going to have to enough water, while another large part of the country is always going to have way too much. I think we need an interstate highway system level project to move water around the country as needed. I think this will be vital for the well being of tens of millions of Americans over the next couple of decades, but no one is even thinking about such at thing right now.
I never said that there were no eyewitnesses
You just doubt that the grand jurors listened to eye witness testimony from the half dozen in question (out of the 60 witnesses they heard from) that actually told them what they needed to hear. Yes, they heard from LOTS of other witnesses who had anything from minor variations to outright debunked fabrications to share, but - as the prosecutor seeking charges against Wilson said - they heard from a consistent, corroborated core of media-averse African American witnesses who told the tale you don't want to hear.
Heck, one eyewitness says that the cop shot him execution style in the head at point blank range.
Why are you focusing on the known liars? What's the point? We all know that dozens of people reported pure BS in order to get attention or while grinding some I-hate-police axe or the like. I'm not mentioning those people because, just like the grand jury concluded, their testimony was anywhere from muddle-headed to outright fiction-for-malice's sake. You're the only one who cares what the liars had to say. But they're irrelevant. It's the physical evidence and the credible witnesses that it corroborates that count. And speaking of counting, you're still not finding it comfortable enough to count all fingers on one hand, and move on to the next hand? Really? Or should we just right back to your opening complaint, the implication of doubt and dismissal about their testimony because you hadn't bothered to read it?
Oh good grief. 15 years after the DotCon implosion, when industry leaders and Congress responded to the collapse in tech employment by ramping up H-1b guest worker visas, we're supposed to believe this is news?
That's incorrect: no judge ever had a hand in creating it.
A judge is the ONLY person who gets to decide how that information is made available. That means he goes over every bit of it for context, and the entire package is his product, with his reputation at stake for making mistakes in what's released and how it impacts the anonymity of the witnesses involved. There is no provider of that information except for the judge.
You're now claiming witnesses don't exist? After you started off claiming there were 7, six of whom were African-American? You can't even keep your own story straight.
I realize that English is not your native tongue, so I appreciate how much you're trying here. But we're talking about YOUR assertion that the documents in front of your eyes don't include the testimony of eye witnesses. Or have you finally got around to reading it, and you're changing your story, just like the debunked media-frenzy "witnesses" did?
And, ranting? You're the one who's been linked directly to the body of documents that completely satisfies your fake concern that the eye witnesses didn't really exist, and that their testimony doesn't say what the grand jury concluded that it said. So much energy you're putting into pretending it's not there for you to read! Why?
And you think you know this utter load of shit exactly how?
Because everything put in front of the grand jury is also available, online, right in front of you. Not that you'd want to see that or anything, because it would take all the fun out of that petulant little fit you're having.
Prosecutors control everything the grand jury sees. Grand juries are behind closed doors. So how do you know that the prosecutor doesn't lie to the grand jury?
Knowing there would be people with the hearts set on vilifying the cop and the investigation, the prosecutor made the rather unusual decision to let the grand jury take an unusual amount of time to make their own investigative queries, to see any and all testimony they wanted (including obviously spurious stuff from all over the internet, and already debunked nonsense from the street - like Brown's running buddy's description of Wilson shooting out his cruiser window, standing over Brown and shooting him in the back
I like how your correction to someone "deliberately spreading false information" is just a re-telling of the officer's account.
No, that's the account based on recordings of radio communications, and based on the testimony of multiple credible eye witnesses, corroborated by the physical evidence. And that's the account that the grand jury mulled over, along with a lot of obvious BS from all sort of other sources, that led the panel to realize there's no THERE there. Just like the DoJ investigation, in which Eric Holder was passionately, desperately hoping to find some sort of evidence of a civil rights violation, is coming up with a whole lot of nothing.
The people who keep trotting out the false narrative are just trying to wish away the 25 days of work done by the grand jury, and the untold thousands of man hours and millions of dollars tied up by Holder and the FBI, that are delivering exactly no police officer to string up.
Gee. I'd think a better way to avoid being punched is to not try to run the guy over, then slam a car door on him.
That might be something to consider, except of course that's pure fantasy on your part. Multiple credible eye witnesses (unlike you, and unlike the people who changed their stories or finally admitted they didn't actually see it happen after all) pointed out that the officer didn't either of the two things you're mentioning. So why bring them up? What's your agenda, in manufacturing a false narrative?
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"