Friday, July 25, 2008

Playstations from Sierra Leone?

This morning I came across this article on yahoo.com about how Playstation was inciting a national African war? Yea, so my natural reaction was wtf? Apparently if you own a Sony Playstation 2, you may have unknowingly funded a "brutal conflict in the Republic of the Congo". The Sony Playstation includes a very rare, very desirable metal only found on the African contienent (like everything else we need to survive) called "coltan"

"At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.

Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King."

Ain't that some shit? Just when you think you're not doing anything to fuel the evil fire, you find
out that your big ass PS2 is fueling an entire illegal movement in Africa! Now Sony has said that with the release of the PS3 and the smaller version of the PS2 they have stopped using coltan and are now using a variety of precious metals...only thing is the damage has already been done...to read the full article click HERE

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