Have you ever left a city? Even in some suburbs it's possible to take a picture of someone with only a few houses behind them. In my smallish town, only tens of thousands of people, I live next to the busiest road and I could find an equally barren background about three blocks away.

Not living in an urban environment is not devoid of civilization.

Bizarre line of reasoning. If you want "something to be done", pity is one of the first steps to motivating that. It's not an either/or.

For context the photo is actually from May 1, 2012: "two-year-old Aliou Seyni Diallo eats dry couscous given to him by a neighbor, after he collapsed in tears of hunger in the village of Goudoude Diobe, in the Matam region of northeastern Senegal"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Sahel_drought

they are thought to be becoming more frequent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahel_drought

No civilization in sight? There are actual houses in the background of that photo.

You gotta feed people to be able to do the restructuring. Your logic is hollow to someone starving.

Also impressive you’ve attempted to resurrect the idea of “civilizing” people.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? The GP may not have been a great comment but "resurrect the idea of “civilizing” people" is a wild and gratuitously hostile stretch. The site guidelines ask you not to do that.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

You've done it before, and even worse—for example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26342816. And generally your account has been making a habit of posting unsubstantively and/or aggressively. We've asked you many times in the past not do to that, and we ban accounts that keep breaking the rules this way. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.

Can’t use policing tone as an excuse to let ridiculous opinions go unchallenged.

So you're a proponent of the "give the fish" and not "teach to fish"? If the supplies flowing to them stop they starve again, so I am not sure you're right.

I think the biggest risk here - and the reason why talking about "bringing civilization" anywhere attracts strong pushback - is that historically, what happened was people ending up held hostage over supply of fishing equipment.

Giving hungry people fish obviously isn't a good solution, because then the fish giver becomes a SPOF. But also because the fish giver now has power over the hungry, and some givers will abuse it. Teaching people to fish doesn't work if they're still hungry. It also doesn't work if you're teaching methods that they can't employ. If your solution to the last problem is giving (especially licensing) them means to do fishing, then we're back to square one, with you being SPOF/risk of becoming exploitative.

The solution has to be helping people build self-sufficiency. That may involve giving money, or donating equipment and know-how - but with no strings attached, including non-obvious ones like "you'll have to buy spare parts from us, because your industry can't make them". The goal here is not absolute self-sufficiency (nobody truly has that), but avoiding the situation in which given society's affairs are being managed by outsiders, under threat of starvation or illness.

I read SPOF as Single Point Of Fish at first.

Suspicious Provider of Fish.

You can both give a person a fish, and at the same time teach them to fish as well. It is not, and never should have been presented as, an either/or argument.

(and sometimes, you have to fix the injuries preventing them from being able to even hold the fishing pole)

Strange thought for someone writing a reply on a message board using a device there's no way they could build from scratch.

We've structured society in a way that not everyone needs to be a farmer (or microchip designer/electronic factory line worker) for people to obtain food/devices that access the internet. Are you a proponent of 'give the fish' because you didn't build the device you are typing in?

How many farms have you seen in big cities?