question about blackholes and africa

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and no none of them have anything to do with each other although they are similar.

madagascar is my favorite african country and while i like it alot mostley for its rocks&gemstones i wonder why in the world it is everyone elses problem what goes on in africa? why cant these people seem to get there countrys together and to make them somewhat sustainable? are they just used to handouts from the world or what? christ almighty i think its because they live close to the genie bottle (Israel) and thats why theres always some nasty thing going on over there. all that bad luck from the middle east is rubbing off on africa

now i recently read an article about a feild of thousands maybe more of a bunch of black holes in an science magazine, and while i wasnt suprised to find the very worn out classic explination of "black holes have so much gravity not even light can escape them" in there what i dont understand is if thats the case what in the heck keeps these things together and not consuming absolutely everything in the universe? wouldnt something that powerful be able to eat at will and dine on EVERYTHING. it would seem so, it would also seem that there obviously is something greater than gravity itself holding the black hole in space and prventing it from not being a pig also if light cant escape a black hole how are jets of light shooting out of the center of it? my only guess is its friction causing heat

The only way to 'see' a black hole is to observe the behavior of the matter around it.

As for Africa...I guess you just lost me in the comparison.

ok that i get sort of, but if you have to observe things around black holes to see them how are they shooting light out of them? i thought light couldnt escape? and why dont they eat everything continually growing? or does everything just get squished so it stays one size? then why are some blackholes supermassive? and some are smaller

You can blame colonialism for Africa's problems. Afterwards, military governments became powerful because there was no tradition of subordination to civilian governments. In addition, the favoritism of certain tribal ethnic groups by the colonial power in order to maintain control of their territory resulted in tension and hatred between groups. Not to mention that but most African country's borders do not reflect the nationality of the original people there. I could go on but I think that provides a bit of insight. Its not because they're used to handouts and it has nothing to do with Israel.

Your right in a sense that something stronger then gravity, or electromagnetism holds black holes together, though it still plays a big part. These forces are known as the strong and weak nuclear forces, and they exist only at the subatomic level. There are others on smaller scales as well. Also, black holes aren't in a position to 'consume' the universe; they are not literally tears in space but rather, super-dense masses. They gradually accrete matter, which, in theory, will never reach the black holes singularity, but will essentially fall forever towards it through space-time. At the same time, the point closest to the singularity will be going faster and will be subject to greater forces then the point furthest; this would result in the object stretching out, eventually becoming one-dimensional at some point. Black holes do emit energy, called Hawking Radiation.

the topic title sounds like this thread should be in the adults only section...but i'm guessing this is not a declaration of the love of ebony women?

oh for christ sakes, i new someone would eventually misconstrue my comparisons. but that is the problem with living in america today, everyones so touchy over verbatum and im sick of it. i was not trying to compair black holes with black people, i guess im just sloppy with my anologies but what i was trying to do is say they are simliar in i dont understand how the work, or why they dont work. get it now?

now back to your regular broadcasting

i was just commenting on the title and most likely projecting.

Those are gas jets, not light being emitted from the black hole. A little research on quasars, accretion disks, and extragalactic jets might help with understanding black holes. As for skafather84, he is funny guy, eh?

I'm not aware of any 'charitable' hand-outs for Africa before non-Africans interfered in Africa.

Non-Africans have influenced Africa's current situation by destroying local life-ways and social structures and imposing their own authority structures, economic structures and (as Vigilans points out) have carved the continent up into 'nations' that bear little if any resemblance to Africans' understandings of themselves and each other.

I'm not so sure about black holes, but surely they can only 'consume' matter if they can attract it. The ability to do so would be effected by distance and the extent to which other masses are exercising contrary gravitational influence (on a particular mass).

Black holes don't eat the whole universe because the gravity from them is not so much 'strong' as it is 'concentrated'.

When a star collapses into a black hole, the black hole has the same strength of gravity that the star had before it collapsed.
If the sun instantly turned into a black hole, the Earth and all the other planets would not be sucked in, they would continue to orbit.

Light would not be able to escape from a black hole once the light got close enough, even if the hole only had a mass of one gramme. This is because gravity's strength is inversely proportionate to the distance of the object being acted upon. As the center of the black hole is infinitively small (or just very, very small according to some) there will always be a point at which the gravity is so strong that nothing can escape.

Lets be fair here.. African tribes were quite willing and able to slaughter their neighbours and enslave them and any manner of nastiness long before any of them became colonial subjects. There was always tension and hatred between tribes. Ask a Zulu. They were colonising other tribes before they ever saw a white man. Colonising, genociding, exploiting.. the lot of it. If anything, that form of slaughter and mess actually dropped under colonial rule (depending on the colonial power, of course.) And colonial rule ended quite some time ago. Is Zimbabwe really doing that much better for itself as an independent nation as it did under foreign control? Though it is true about the arbitrary borders (though that's true in a lot of places worldwide, so hardly specific to Africa.)

Africa is a very rich continent, wealthy in the extreme with all sorts of fabulous shiny stuff. That on its own is going to cause no end of conflict. If it lacked such vast deposits of gold, diamonds etc, nobody would be that interested. But wealth = trouble. Its the reason why Africa is a mess on a day to day basis. A corrupt few control the wealth of all, and lack even the basic motivation to govern their nations for any other reason than the cynical expansion of their own bank accounts.

Black women have large bosoms.

Sounds like very human behavior. It's also not necessarily a very accurate way to look at things. The continent is really very large, and the savageness varies widely, much like any other very large geographic range inhabited by humans.
Warring ranged from savage and vicious encounters to a bit of cattle raiding, which might include human captives, who then would be adopted into the family of their captor and given their social due accordingly.

Like people generally, some societies in Africa were more outwardly aggressive than others.
In fact such societies benefited most from Anglo intervention. They were already more likely to have slaves to sell for powerful modern armaments and the potential to exchange a live enemy for these weapons not only added to motivation, it profoundly increased their success. Other societies had a choice between engaging in the same activities to get their hands on some weaponry to defend themselves with, or being subject to genocide. Survival can be a powerful spur to aggression.

Traditional life-ways were severely impacted by colonialism. This does not necessarily exclude warfare and aggression.

If you put your arm in a fire, does it stop hurting when you pull it out?
The traditional life-ways that Africans found stable within their cultural and ecological niche have been in many cases destroyed beyond repair. Do you expect people to simply fall into modern Anglo Western ways of living as though it were a benchmark for something rather than the result of historical accident, coincident and other such sundry causal forces?

And causes problems in many of these places too.


There are rich resources elsewhere, the US is not devoid of significant resources for instance. A major difference is the disruption of local life-ways, the imposition of foreign rule, followed by withdrawal and leaving the locals with the mess. Perhaps Africa would experience considerable problems without this interference from outsiders, but to be fair, we cannot know that.


Some do, further some have big butts, and I cannot lie...

Africans were enslaving and selling their foes to Arab slave traders, who never colonised the area. By no means were all slaves "made a part of the family". But I was speaking more generally. The original post implied that all the evils in Africa were brought there BY colonisation, when that is clearly not the case. Some were exacerbated by it, true, but it is difficult to lay blame when so many people had their fingers so deep in the pie. For example.. the Boer were never happy with the anti-slavery stance of the British, but they considered themselves the more naturalised people, and in many ways were more native. Does that make Boer (ie Dutch) colonialism better or worse than the British variant?

Morally speaking, Africa should not have been colonised, and I am not trying to imply that doing so was greatly beneficial to the natives. But nor did it necessarily cause them any greater harm than what was occurring before. They were being slaved and being killed anyway, and in some cases this stopped under colonial rule. Surely to some degree an improvement?

I never expectted Africans to simply start being western. I am not so naieve. However, it is obvious that they cannot run themselves with any degree of competence using the infrastructures the colonists left behind. This implies to me that they were never effectively taught how to use them. They simply took them back, often by force of arms, and tried to shoehorn tribal prejudices into western democratic process.. or were cynically manipulated by the Soviets. Any number of events, any number of nations. Its difficult to generalise enough for a forum post, there being so many different parts and stories.

Finally.. the US is centrally controlled by a single government who control the mineral wealth etc. It is not comparable to hundreds of independent nations. Were Africa ever united under one government, it would be more comparable. Were the US being run by the native Americans, having ejected their colonial overlords, it would probably be as much of a s**thole.

And many Nations did not voluntarily withdraw from Africa, so it is hardly fair to say they left the Africans with the mess. They didn't want to leave a mess.. they were forced to do so.

And I still hold that the people of Zimbabwe "free" as they are of White control now, were in much less of a sh***y mess when it was Rhodesia. Prejudiced governance by white rulers, or incompetence by black ones? Even when Rhodesian forces reputedly deliberately introduced Cholera and Anthrax into the water, they killed less people than Mugabe has done. At least the colonial governments wished to actually govern nations which worked.. stable ones. African Leaders often seem hell-bent on destroying their nations and the people in them.

Unless you wish to posit Africa was in the kind of mess then that it is now, I think this rather undermines your point. If trading their tribal enemies to outsiders is the cause of the mess, the place would never not have been a mess, but that is not the case.


By no means did I suggest that it was. In fact I am at a loss to understand how you could construe as much. My comments were specifically intended to convey the variance between African societies and cultures. How from this do you construe that I might possibly be stating or implying that all African societies treated slaves the same?

Why do you think whether one form of colonialism was less negative than another proves the extent to which colonialism is or is not a factor in the current problems experienced in the African continent? At any rate, colonialism is only one of the negative interventions by non-Africans in Africa.


They were not being enslaved in such great numbers, nor killed in such great numbers, before European intervention as they were after; those who escaped slavery were autonomous and free to live their own life-ways. The traditional life ways, even when savage were their own, not some alien system imposed by outsiders.

But if you think the damage of colonialism is restricted to the colonial reign itself, you miss at least half the point.

Colonialism always entails the displacement of local authority structures. In the case of Africa it also entailed a large amount of forcing separate often traditional enemies into one 'nation', and it very often involved picking one ethnic group out from the rest, and raising them to superior positions of power and authority over other ethnic groups (often traditional enemies).

What do you think happens in the event that the colonial authority withdraws?

That would be a very predictable outcome given that the infrastructure is designed to facilitate colonial rule while seeking to undermine local authority, and self-rule.
Of course they were not. They were never set up for the use of the local African populations.

Of course there is a power grab when there is a power vacuum. Of course the never defunct tribal-conflicts that were exacerbated in many cases by colonial rule (in particular the tendency to pick a favoured ethnic group as 'helpers' in imposing and administering colonial rule) were inevitably going to break out when the colonials packed up and moved on, leaving the favoured ethnicity desperate to retain their position at the top (to fail would expose them not only to a lowered status but also to the potential 'pay-backs' for their role and liberties taken when favoured by colonial 'masters;), and everyone else desperate to make their own time in the sun come.

I posit Burundi/Rwanda as an example of what I describe above. I think this is a very significant example because the events in this region are some of the most appalling to have ever occurred in Africa or anywhere. In 1972, approximately 100,000 Hutus were killed by the Tutsi controlled army over a period of a couple of weeks (in Burundi). The explosions of genocide and violence that have occurred in the general region over the decades since, are simply in a different realm to anything that occurred there before colonialism.

Colonialism created the possibility of a centralized authority, caused an increase in ethnic tension (by favouring the Tutsi people), then bailed out and left the population behind, creating a power vacuum that the (minority) Tutsi population was best placed to grab at and furthermore felt some justification in taking over, but which the Hutu majority believed themselves entitled to at least a share of.

The result has been catastrophic for people living in the region.

I could suggest the US would struggle if it were required to abandon its social, economic and political institutions at the drop of someone else's hat, reorganized by that someone else on contrary premises and principals, with some ethnic groups being held up as a sub-class of elites over the rest of the population, then suddenly off goes the reorganizers and leaves them all to it.

History shows us that in Africa or some place else, where there is a power vacuum, people will struggle to fill it, and that very often violence is resorted to before the issue is settled one way or the other.

Would you hold the same view of your lounge if I broke in, never having your permission to be there, started doing my own thing, and you only managed to eject me after I made a mess? Why would the mess not be entirely my fault given I should not have been in your lounge in the first place?


Which is not relevant. What would be relevant would be some demonstration that proved or strongly implied that Zimbabwe would be in as much or more of a mess if it had never been Rhodesia.

You ask almost as though we were not discussing instances where the earlier is causal of the latter.


Do you think Mugabe's regime would exist as it does without colonialism?


That is a very one-sided summary. It excludes the fact that both sets were simply trying to exert control for their own self-interest and that one just happened to be more successful in their attempts.

There are a lot of reasons why Africa is the way it is now. I can assure you that if the Scramble of Africa had not taken place, Africa would have made it on it's own (don't forget that some of the earliest, most advanced civilizations are from Africa, in fact Humans themselves are). And you mention that it is due to 'Soviet' meddling, which is not accurate. The Soviets supported Communist governments just like the US supported far-right governments which were frequently incredibly brutal. Hell, read into South American history and the regime changes the US has had control over. The same can be said for Africa. I think a good example of the impact of a Western country on an African one would be the case of the former Zaire. Once it was called the Belgian Congo, and the Belgian King Leopold II had this area colonized and exploited; the population was brutally repressed and enslaved (this was in the 1890's!). I believe the population of Africans in the Belgian Congo went from 25 million to 6 million in a 15 year period. That is a HUGE amount of death! The Europeans were often genocidal conquerors. The British and French were no different. In German West Africa (now Namibia), there was an uprising in the early 1900's, which was put down at the cost of 600,000 African lives.
Non of the European nations put any effort into building lasting infrastructure, government institutions or educational services. The end result was an Africa, post-independence, ruled by Western-educated military men who had no reason to subordinate to a civilian government due to there being no tradition of this. As for whether or not whites were doing a better job, I implore you to read into the history of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Their President during it's short life, Ian Smith, was not a good ruler in any sense. In South Africa the same happened. Colonialism did not have African's interests in mind at all, and for anyone to suggest so is missing the point. Go read 'The White Man's Burden', a rather racist poem in which Rudyard Kipling describes it as the 'moral duty' of Europeans to 'civilize' the Africans and Asians; this was really just a moral cover for greed to exploit the resources of these colonies. I mean, the British fought a war with China because they banned the sale of British Opium. Hello?