Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a "persona non grata" and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the "Rodney Riots", which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: "A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters."
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a "Commission of Inquiry" in Guyana that the country's then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
"If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means."
Walter Rodney
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Decolonial Marxism Essays From The Pan African Revolution
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lmao I just read a reddit post that in addition to being a Zionist, neil druckmann also said in an interview that killing Ellie to make a vaccine would have worked, which kind of ruins the seemingly (but apparently absent) intentional ambiguity of Joel choosing to save her
No it doesn’t? It’s not a piece of information known to the characters, so it doesn’t influence their decision. But also, I don’t think it’s implied that Joel would’ve acted differently if it was. And it’s really only a difficult or ambiguous choice in a universe where the cure is possible anyway.
idk in my opinion knowing that the cure would work really affects the overall outcome of Joel's actions which is something that we, the viewer, will still be aware of even if Joel isn't
when it's more ambiguous for the viewer, I'm more inclined to say he did the right thing (or at least, I could see myself doing the same thing in those circumstances), this girl who was in his care is about to be cut open and her brain chopped up by some doctors of questionable skill and education in like, what amounts to a filthy run down shell of a hospital at best
not having the meta knowledge that "it would have worked," like, idk, saving Ellie might have been the right call, since, imo, the likely outcome in those settings is they chop her up, have a bunch of tissue they can't really analyze or do much with due to lack of expertise or equipment or the fact that the surgical environment would contaminate it etc etc etc. Like I think human experimentation that would kill the only known immune person would have a very low likelihood of yielding a useable vaccine even if we had like, modern science and un-fucked civilization to work with
but like knowing "it would have worked," and that Ellie would have chosen to die for it, it's like yeah Joel you fucked up dawg, kinda doomed humanity there ngl,
like I agree it doesn't influence the story as it played out but it definitely influences my perception of it
How so? Why does a fact change the moral decision? Also why wouldn’t you judge the situation based on the understanding of the characters rather than a fact given by an external oracle? It’s kind of irrelevant anyway as Joel believed the cure to be real, he didn’t believe Ellie should be killed for it to be made.
I think the sacrifice a life to save humanity stories as moral tales aren’t meant to be literal interpretations. Like you are currently able to sacrifice a life to save multiple. Why don’t we kill healthy people and extract their organs? It would be clearly immoral to do so but it’s something worth interrogating.
Again I really don’t get this. Why do you interpret the actions one way in the ambiguous case but a different in the unambiguous case? Let’s say the cure had a probability of working (which is kind of the ambiguous case), do you have a hard cutoff where Joel would be wrong to save Ellie? At what percent chance of a cure is Ellie worth saving?
i mean you also have to remember there's the component of that, while ellie was not able to then-consent to what was being done, if she had been able to she likely would have volunteered to sacrifice herself in order to have a chance at saving humanity. She would have even without the Director provided meta knowledge that it would have actually worked. And Joel kept what happened from her because he was aware of that, even though iirc she kinda figures it out.
And idk I mean like when the director says "yeah choppin' up her brain would have led to a cure" then it kind of is a literal "sacrificing her would save all of humanity" thing
i guess you could say it's a slippery slope from that to organ extraction or whatever and I'm a reactionary or something but like, idk, I think that, armed with the meta awareness of it working, and the knowledge that civilization is essentially turbo fucked forever in the absence of a cure (the zombies constantly mutating, spores spreading, even if humanity establishes safe havens that safety exists in such incredible precarity that the slightest mistake could end things for everyone present), like, yeah my opinion swings from thinking Joel did the right thing to, idk, it's not exactly right to let the doctors proceed without Ellie's explicit consent, but like, she would have consented? iirc the game presented it as a "it's now or never, we can't wait to let her wake up and discuss it" sort of thing but I don't remember and if so I don't remember why they couldn't have just let her wake up and be like, hey kid, you wanna save the world
I mean I can headcanon whatever I want but it's the guy who made the thing so whatever bullshit he says is canon is canon
I can ignore it, but the point of this post was to be like, haha, what an artless idiot, diminishing the quality of his own work with this stupid statement. Which I think it does and I guess i'm sorry you disagree :(