[ExI] Hunger causes riots - not war

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: [ExI] Hunger causes riots - not war

>...What's the number one reason we riot?

Football?  Drunkenness?

>... The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to
fight back are many-poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc-but the big
one is more primal than any of the above. It's hunger, plain and simple...

Hunger, ja, but not plain and simple.  Agreed that lack of money is the root
of all evil.  But it gets a little more complicated when we recognize that
even the term riot is not clearly defined.  We have seen what looks like a
riot especially in Arab countries around a bus that has exploded or an
aircraft that has crashed.  We see men and boys (never any women in sight
anywhere) dancing on the wreckage.  We see mobs in Saudi Arabia circling an
obelisk hurling stones at the devil.  Is that a riot?  

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/international/middle-east/2008/12/09/186762/Hajj
-pilgrims.htm

A rather orderly one perhaps.  We see mobs of pilgrims motivated by
religious fervor, who are sometimes compelled to murderous stampede in which
many are trampled, by fireworks hurled by others of slightly different
religious fervor.  Riot?  (Ref: 2 July 1990 stampede in Al-Maaisim tunnel
resulted in 1426 trampling deaths.) (JAYSUS!  Can you imagine?  Usually
whenever proles are killed in any accident, there are typically three times
that number of serious injuries, so we are up at perhaps 5k-proles with
scars.  Can't they find a safer way to pray?  We have televangelists here,
couldn't they just stay home, watch the devil broadcast live and throw
stones at their televisions?)

>... If there's a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it's
food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex
systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense... BillK

<http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-away-from-global-
riots-complex-systems-theorists-say>

I get what they are saying, but it sounds like an oversimplification.

spike