I’m in a lousy mood, so maybe now is not the best time to reflect on the state of the world. But what the hell?
Several people have written diaries blaming Bush and/or Blair for the tragic loss of life in London today. And, it’s true, their post-9/11 policies have made such attacks more likely, rather than less likely. I don’t know if these attacks were carried out by Muslim extremists, or not. But the motivation of Muslim extremists to kill American and British citizens did not start with Bush and Blair.
:::flip:::
There is a long history dating back to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the colonization of the larger region, Roosevelt’s deal with the Sauds, the creation of Israel, the 1953 coup in Iran, the decision to arm Israel in the 1973 war, our instigation of the Soviet-Afghan war, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, our decision to side with Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, our decision to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, and our subsequent containment policy of Iraq.
When the United States entered World War One, we did so using rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy. And we did help to end the Hohenzollern and Hapsburgs monarchies.
When fascism arose in their place, we smashed that ideology and helped create a new, tolerant, and peaceful Western Europe. We then went about bringing those blessings to Eastern Europe.
But, in the process, we did little to nothing to make the world safe for democracy in other regions of the world. Whether it was the Indonesia, Angola, Vietnam, the Philippines, or elsewhere, we put anti-communism ahead of self-determination, civil rights, and representative government.
A fair accounting of America’s net effect on the rest of the world has to take into account the good as well as the bad. Too often, we harp on the negative, too often the right refuses to see the negative. But, we have to look at the negative in order to understand why people are going to such great lengths to kill us.
The reasons are complex. And there is a tremendous amount of blame on the terrorists’ side. It’s one thing to resent our policies, it’s another to hate equality for women, or to kill people for drinking alcohol, or to kill your sister for being raped. Too many people in the Islamic world are attracted to a very anti-modern ideology that encourages people to feel threatened by western, or even global culture. We share some blame for this, because we and the Saudis financed and encouraged a lot of this ideology. But no amount of money could turn Europeans into the Taliban. It’s not all our fault that there is so much sexism, religious bigotry, and violence in the Middle East.
Sometimes the left acts as though it’s perfectly okay for there to be governments in the Muslim world that are horribly oppressive. It’s their country and their culture, some say. It may not be our place to dictate how other countries are governed, but the average Iranian, or Saudi, doesn’t want to live in such a religiously stifling culture. They want civil rights, they want freedom of expression. They may want a little less of it than we do. They may be happy to outlaw or restrict non-Islamic faiths, for example. They may think women should be modestly dressed. But they don’t want to ruled by Mullahs and Princes that are incredibly hypocritical and corrupt.
Too often, we engage in simplistic, all or nothing rhetoric when we talk about the Middle East. Things are not so simple. The average Iraqi citizen may have been better off under Saddam than they will be under a government run by very conservative Shi’ites. If that citizen is a woman that likes fashion, or is career oriented, she may find the new government stifling.
On the other hand, if that citizen is a religious Shi’ite, they will enjoy being able to visit and worship their Holy Sites in Najaf and Karbala. They will see new career opportunities and new freedoms.
What Americans and Brits need to understand, is that we have built up a reservoir of ill-will and mistrust over a long period of time. And, even today we are largely continuing a policy that is aimed at assuring a steady flow of inexpensive oil and gas to the global market. And we want that oil and gas to be in the control of Western corporations, not the Russians or Chinese. That’s our policy. It’s bi-partisan, and it’s British and American.
We all benefit from an uninterrupted supply of oil and gas. Any leader who allowed a major disruption that caused massive loss of jobs and wealth (as happened in the 1970’s), would be rightfully blamed by their citizenry.
So, what is the solution? Or, at least, a realistic short-term solution in our current political environment?
To my mind, we need to find alternative sources of energy. We cannot continue to rely on Middle Eastern oil and gas because it brings our values into an irreconcilable conflict. We want and expect a good standard of living. We want our leaders to guarantee that, to the best of their ability. But we don’t want to contribute to the oppression, and subjugation of the Muslim world in order to accomplish the job.
This essay could go on forever, so I’ll wrap it up, for now.
We need a populist movement that demands that we get to work on alternative energy for cars, planes, heating, etc. Let the oil-rich nations of the world work out their difficulties and get more benefit from their resources. And let us figure out a way forward that doesn’t require that our military is stationed in over 100 nations, poised to intervene wherever energy stability is threatened.
Above all, let’s start being honest with ourselves about our history, our enemies, and the limitations on how much we are willing to give up without resorting to violence to regain it.
Bangladesh was a wasteland filled with ignorant repressed poverty-stricken people when it ceased to be East Pakistan. The departing Pakistani army had systematically used rape as a weapon to destabilized society.
Bangladesh doesn’t matter. So it was left to the tree-huggers and silly liberals to deal with. The result is a democracy that votes to prevent extreme religious power, a decrease in family size based on voluntary choice, very little of femicide seen in China or India, and a slow steady slog to autonomy. There are terrible things there: massive deforestation leading to horrible floods driven by the IMF delusion of sustainability. But overall it is a nation in the family of nations.
Now, Afghanistan was IMPORTANT. So the STRONG MINDED people who UNDERSTAND the world were making the decisions there. None of this namby-pampy business of educating women, or letting people vote. We needed CLEAR THINKING and STRONG leadership.
So, we have the Taliban from those who present themselves as clear thinkers, and GrameenBank from those dismissed as starry-eyed. It seems to me the evidence is there. Invest in women for long term returns. Invest in violence for very different returns.
It is so sad that the people who make the decision to invest in violence never seem to even see the bus, or the people on it.
-sigh-
redwagon
Nice contrast there. The best thing the US and the rest of the “developed” world can do is give away its money and shut the fuck up — a penitential silence for the directions it’s sent the wheels of history for lo these many years.
doesn’t make sense to me at all. Giving away our money…
How do you see taking productively used capital and giving it away as a way to create value?
Humanitarian relief is one thing. Allowing countries to own and benefit from their resources is one thing.
But the problem is the differential benefit of economic growth, not economic growth.
That’s what I mean about growing up. One symptom of doing so would be giving up the fantasy that “growth” can go on forever. Unless you’re banking on colonizing Mars or someplace, just how do you propose to make that happen?
And if you don’t know maybe it’s time to throw away the economist faith and find some better models.
all economic activity, outside of subsistence agriculture, involves making an investment and creating more value. That value is then distributed to those that helped create it.
The more value created, the more wealth there is to distribute. Look at how Clinton’s bull market filled the coffers of the treasury. Of course, uninformed speculation is the worst form of value creation (because it is all on paper), but we can’t pay for health care, or anything else, without economic growth.
That doesn’t mean that every available dollar needs to be put toward investment in economic activity, as the libertarians suppose. But it certainly would not benefit anyone to take most of our available capital and to give to people that will have difficulty using it create value.
As long as people want things that there are unable or unwilling to make themselves, there will never be a limit on economic growth.
Issues of enviromental and resource sustainability are crucial, but seperate from any theory of transactional commerce. Either we become wealthier, or we don’t. How that wealth is distributed is extremely important, but if we are all poorer it is unlikely to raise the boats at the bottom, or make the powerful more peaceful and generous.
You insist that “economics” has to be walled off from “environmental and resource sustainability”. To me, this is just an arbitrary demand by true believers in one totally unproven worldview.
You haven’t answered my question: unless you deny that growth depends on resource extraction and use, or that the planet’s natural resources and carrying capacity are limited, how can growth go on infinitely?
you are ignoring that population, while trending up, is actually at non-replacement levels in the developed world. I’m not walling off the environment from economic activity, I am treating them seperately for clarity.
Economic activity is inevitable. It can be simple, like growing food and eating it. Or it can be more complex, like growing food, eating some of it, and selling the rest at a profit, buying a new field, and making more food.
In the first case, your investment, the work put in, yields nothing but subsistence.
In the second it yields more food, more value, more people you can employ working your fields.
You can’t wish away economic activity. Either work creates value, it doesn’t, or in some cases it loses value.
If you bemoan how economic activity is using up resources, the answer is alternative renewable resources. Or at least we should do as much of this as possible.
If your concern in population, it’s misguided. We need more people, not less. That is, unless we want to kill off the elderly.
is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the cornerstone of society. Making it so is a choice. Other choices are possible.
what you mean.
If you mean that a culture can put too much emphasis on work, and not enough on play and family, then I agree.
But if you mean that we can alleviate poverty through abandoning commerce, then I don’t.
I’m not sure what I mean either, but thanks for the dialogue.
Mostly I’m thinking about the concept of the ‘triple bottom line’ where value creation, environmental stewardship and social justice are co-equal. These days, the value-creators seem to operate as though that is all that matters. And, of course, it’s so easy to measure the accumulation of wealth. Much harder (and subjective) to measure damage to famiies, environmental racism, etc., etc., etc.
Guess I have some more thinking to do.
A
PS I have this debate often with my economist friends here in Chapel Hill. They start from the premise that the value of everything must ultimately be reduced to dollars so it can flow into their models. A human life. Peace of mind. Happiness.
Sure it’s convenient . . . but what if it is fatally misguided?
I would have more trust in economics if all environmental costs were accounted for. While there are “externalities” in the system, someone is going to take advantage of the bookkeeping system for their private benefit at the public expense.
Example – The increase in childhood asthma cases due to air pollution is actually a benefit to the GDP – great for the drug manufacturers, and the power companies that don’t have to retrofit emission controls on their plants.
If economics can’t even get something this basic right, I’m reluctant to give them more trust than ecologists, climatologists, atmospheric chemists, etc.
There’s a crucial point one doesn’t often see made.
Growth is not sustainable in a finite environment. Period. The current level of economic activity is not sustainable. No amount of political or economic rhetoric will overcome the laws of thermodynamics. Any realistic discussion of the future of the world has to start with the basic realization that there are already too many of us, and we are already consuming too many raw materials and producing too much waste. Talk about efficiency, while welcome, misses the point: even at the unattainable level of 100% efficiency, it still takes a fixed amount of energy and matter to do a particular job.
To begin contemplating the long term future, we must first figure out how to sharply reduce population and sharply reduce consumption. We must face the fact that the economic ideologies of the 20th century — both communism and capitalism — rest on a flawed bedrock that presumes unlimited growth. We must face the fact that we must make large scale armed conflict impossible. We must make a commitment to end the intrusion of primitive religious belief into matters that can be factually resolved by science.
That’s reality, and that reality-based community is presently too small to make any damn difference.
We can talk all we want about a kinder, gentler United States, but we’re just blowing smoke until we come to terms with the fact that 4% of the world’s population cannot continue to consume the majority of the world’s resources without impoverishing the rest of the world and eventually ourselves. The first world, and Americans in particular, must voluntarily reduce their standard of living or it will be taken from them by force, either by the rest of the world or by the simple limits of raw resources.
A few billion dollars in aid here and there doesn’t really count for squat.
for outlining the reality based approach to the future so succinctly and well. It all seems so obvious — I can’t figure out whether dissenting claims are just based on a devotion to the “truths of economics” or fear-based denial. Or honest expectations that everything will be fixed by mining/colonizing Mars or other scifi “solutions”.
two things.
One is sustainability, and the other is economic growth.
You can’t evoke laws of thermodynamics because that just means that eventually we’re all dead, which is interesting, but not very useful as a matter of policy.
Our biggest problem is currently lack of population growth. We have nowhere near enough new people, and we can’t pay for our aging populations.
The usage rates of non-renewable resources is a critical problem, but that problem is going to be there no matter how much we slow it down.
In order to raise the standard of living, you have to create value and then distribute it equitably, so as many people as possible can avoid destitution, but without destroying the ability of people to create value.
Imagine a world where everyone is either too old or too young to work. We’d all starve. Imagine a world where no one has the wherewithal or capital to create jobs. We’d revert to subsistence farming and hunting and gathering.
The problem is not economic activity, it is a reliance on non-renewable resources, and a non-equitable distribution of wealth. But the wealth has to be created in order to be distributed. This means we need to have lots of people of working age, and lots of sound investment, and a better balance between rich and poor, without disrupting investment opportunities.
But if your concern is primarily with sustainability, then I agree, we need to make alternative energy a top research priority. If we don’t, we are going to get badly burned, and everyone on the planet will suffer.
I get your points in general, but am distressed by the paradigm guiding them — the notion that we must accept an ever-increasing population base to avoid a collapse into a culture of hunter-gatherers.
Of course, my own paradigm is equally depresssing. I come from the view that the human race is most closely akin to a runaway virus inexorably destroying its host (the world). Some days a reversion to subsistence farming seems like a very good idea.
an ever increasing population though. That is a relic from the 60’s environmental movement.
In every developed nation population is at non-replacement levels. Since we want the non-developed nations to become developed, if we succeed we can expect their populations to start to retract as well.
Our problem is that he have nowhere enough people of working age. If you wanted to control population, you’d want to have the same amount of people born and dying each year. Right now, we are out of whack.
. . . Since we want the non-developed nations to become developed
it would be anyone with any conscience.
Of course, there are many who want them to stay poor, or are indifferent.
Development — as in first world developed countries — is not necessarily or obviously the most effective response to poverty. I have seen abject poverty first hand in more than 40 countries and have concluded that economic development as we practice it in the west is often more likely to be part of the problem than the solution.
But that’s just us (me and my lack of conscience) trying to keep the poor in their place.
Peace.
you are absolutely correct about the destructiveness of what passes for “development” initiatives propagated by the international aid industry.
The absolute best book detailing the tragedy inflicted on countries through aidorganizations is “Lords of Poverty”, by Graham Hancock. This link here is to a brief outline and analysis of his book and it’s definitely worth reading for anyone interested in learning more about how the structure and intent of the international aid mega organizations insures they’ll ultimately do more harm than good.
Thanks for this.
I got so frustrated with my BM exchange that I’ve been spending almost no time here anymore. But it’s nice to know there are other reasoned people listening and commenting.
Take care.
The neocons have a little plan for that too and it’ll straighten out all this ‘having to kiss AARP’s ass’ too, just ignore the bird flu until it’s too late.
With current world population, it would take the resources of three or four earths to provide everyone with a Western lifestyle. So if the folks in the third world are going to have a chance at development, there needs to be a reduction in world population. It can be done in a planned manner, or it will be taken care of in one or more of the old fashioned ways – war, famine, and plague.
The question of not enough people of working age to support the young and elderly is a separate issue that can be addressed through development of new systems of production and distribution. For example, industrial robots can take on more responsibilities as labor becomes scarce and more expensive (a technology that the Japanese and Canadians are developing rapidly).
With medical technology, productive working years can be extended for large numbers of people that previously wouldn’t have lived to be 65 or 70 in reasonably good health.
Also, the age imbalance is in part a temporary phenomenon until the baby boomers die off. After that, the demographics will still skew to an older average age than a century ago, but the “glut” of oldsters will be gone. And an older average age might not be a bad thing. Hopefully with age comes wisdom, on the average, or at least a reduced tendency to rush impetuously into a war. Maybe not on the part of a specific leader(s), but on the general populace that elects the leaders.
So I see the aging population as a temporary problem, a spur to robotics and increased technological development, and long term possibly a hopeful thing. On the other hand, unless we decrease the population I see us driving increasing numbers of species into extinction, increasingly degrading the environment worldwide, continuing to have wars over limited resources amid famine and plague. That’s the hard reality we have to address as the reality-based community.
It would have been easier if we had started 25 years ago, but we didn’t (at least in the US), and the hour grows late before support systems start breaking down and negative effects start reinforcing each other. Here’s an example from a couple of different journal articles I’ve read in the last few weeks:
Discovery 1) As the planet warms, the oceanic circulation that occurs in El Nino years will come to predominate and become the norm.
Discovery 2) The plankton in the Pacific Ocean grows much better in La Nina years, when nutrients from the ocean depths come to the surface to fertilize plankton growth. In fact, in La Nina years several times more carbon dioxide is absorbed by the plankton (and removed from the environment as the plankton die and sink into the ocean) than in El Nino years.
Combine these two, and we’re losing part of the brakes on global warming.
Another breaking system we’re losing – as the polar regions heat up, more methane (a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2) is released by peat beds and melting permafrost.
Another breaking system we’re losing – deforestation.
The system is not sustainable with the global population we have rapidly advancing towards Western levels of economic development. We can control the retrenchment or let it happen, but happen it will.
as usual, has some thoughts that are well-worth adding to this discussion. A sample:
How much “economic growth” is described above? Is this “creating value”?
from a review:
“In his final chapter Sen surveys the relationships between justice, freedom, and responsibility. And he reiterates the advantages of capabilities over narrower measures of human development. The idea of “human capital” is a step forwards, but is still too narrow in its restriction to effects on production; it fails to capture the direct contribution of human capabilities to well-being and freedom and their indirect effects on social change.”
This is a good book to read about the state of the world.
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0375406190-0
from Powells above
” This brilliant and indispensable treatise compellingly analyzes the nature of contemporary economic development from the perspective of human freedom. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of economic life and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. It is a good to be enjoyed by the world’s entire population. Drawing on moral and political philosophy and technical economic analysis, this work gives the nonspecialist reader powerful access to Sen’s paradigm-altering vision and vividly shows how he, in the words of the Nobel Prize committee, has both “restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of economic problems” and “opened up new fields of study for subsequent generations of researchers.”
Economic growth and sustainability are closely linked. As long as economic growth means an increasing rate of resource extraction, they’re joined at the hip. Thermodynamics is relevant for a lot of reasons, one of which is that recycling resources can never reach the breakeven point; there is always a net loss of resources. All “sustainability” does is delay the inevitable.
The only genuinely renewable resource, at least in human terms, is solar energy. (Wind, hydro, and biofuels are ultimately driven by solar flux.) It’s the only significant input into what is otherwise a largely closed system. Thermodynamics tells you, in indisputable terms, just how efficiently you can use energy, and indirectly, how efficiently you can use that energy to transform matter, i.e. get work done. No engineer, least of all in the energy industries, would dismiss entropy as interesting but useless.
The problem with lifting the so-called “developing countries” to US levels isn’t just a matter of wise energy use, it’s also simple raw materials. There is not, for example, enough iron in the ground for China alone to have as many cars per capita as Americans. The crust of the earth is mostly made of silicates; everything else is, for all intents and purposes, a trace element. And iron is, as those trace elements go, one of the most common. There isn’t even enough platinum for everyone in the world to have a car with a catalytic convertor.
Thermodynamics also relevant in somewhat more abstracted economic terms. Work is performed when energy moves from a region of high concentration to a region of low concentration. The same applies to money insofar as it is a store of value/labor. Distributing wealth equitably, as you put it, is the economic equivalent of heat death, a state in which no work can be done — where “no one has the wherewithal or capital to create jobs,” as you put it. The value of money is sustained by inequity. Without poverty, there is no wealth, and vice versa. Distribution of wealth is synonymous with the destruction of wealth. Wealth loses value as fast as it spreads out. To put it another way, as soon as everyone can afford their daily bread, the price of bread will naturally rise in response to market conditions. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is forever busy snatching candy from the mouths of babes.
Capitalism has been tremendously successful in a lot of ways, certainly more successful than its competitors, but it cannot cure poverty because it is predicated upon it. Scarcity determines value. The other problem with capitalism is that there are many things which are necessary for the common good that are not and cannot be made profitable, and many deleterious things which are tremendously profitable: chronic illness, poverty, low-level warfare. If the best human beings can offer in the way of economic systems is capitalism on one hand and communism on the other, we’re in big trouble.
The solution to the aging population problem is one that no one wants to talk about, and that’s replacing retirement with disability. When Social Security was first proposed, the number of people who lived until retirement age was much smaller than it is now, and most of them were not in very good health by the time they got there. Many people now live active lives well into their 80’s. Those who do not or cannot save enough to take a permanent vacation at 65 need to be out in the workforce supporting themselves and those who are genuinely too old and infirm to work.
In particular, your point that capitalism can’t cure poverty because it is “predicated upon it.”
I don’t believe we have a capitalist system, but rather a corporate system. At some point we transitioned from nation/state to corporate/nation. One of the things corporations lack are their own military systems. Nations also provide support for the corporations through diplomacy, hence the gathering in Scotland of G8.
The corporate system is even worse than capitalism and communism. Maybe bartering was the best.
As to your solution for the aging population, “Those who do not or cannot save enough to take a permanent vacation at 65 need to be out in the workforce supporting themselves…” – ouch!
A couple of things come to mind. There are some (many?) places of employment that want their senior employees to leave. They can then hire younger or newer employees at lower wages or salaries.
Any job that requires physical activity does wear and tear on the body after 40 + years. Though there are, “[M]any people now live active lives well into their 80’s,” their activities are not 8 hours or more a day, day after day.
In my part of the world, I am seeing more and more gray haired folks working at checkouts and fast food places. Though some may be choosing to work because they want to stay “busy,” most need the money.
Couldn’t another solution to the aging population be opening immigration?
The flaw with immigration is that it just forestalls the inevitable, no less than BooMan’s proposal of making more people. What do we do when all those new people are too old to work? We’ll be worse off than we were in the first place.
The arithmetic here is unarguable. No matter what number you pick as the ideal ratio of young workers to older retirees, and you eventually end up with too many idle old people. Unrestrained reproduction accelerates matters even more.
It has been argued — this very day, by BooMan himself — that this won’t be a problem because birth rates decline as nations become developed and wealthy. That argument is also flawed because there simply aren’t the raw materials available to make the world as wealthy as America and Europe. And that’s just with our current population.
Those who think nuclear fusion will provide the way out are also failing to carry out the geometric progression. At anything approaching current population growth rates, even if we had workable fusion reactors, we would deplete all of the deuterium and tritium on Earth in a matter of centuries, and on the moon in a few centuries more. Provided you could, say, import millions of tons of the stuff using giant tankers hauling hydrogen isotopes from Jupiter, you run into another problem: waste heat. If everyone on earth — current population again — consumed energy as fast as Americans do today, the waste heat from our industries and machines alone would raise the average surface temperature of the earth by about five degrees. That’s more than global warming is going to do, and that’s nothing compared to what the human population, at current growth rates, will be doing in two hundred years. (At the current doubling every twenty years or so, the Earth’s population will be several trillion in two centuries.)
This is hard to think about for simple emotional reasons. I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to find a way around the problem — which essentially means trying to find a way around the laws of thermodynamics, among other inalterable physical laws — and I am forced to the conclusion that there is no solution that will permit us to live like we do today in anything like our current numbers. There need to be fewer of us, and we need to live with less, a lot less. That doesn’t mean poverty, necessarily, but if we are to avoid poverty, we must surrender wealth.
No one is going to get elected by telling people they need to give up most of their wealth and stop having so many babies. That’s a big problem. I don’t know what the solution is. But it’s not a problem that’s going to be solved by any current economic system, dismissed with an Adam Smith hand-wave, or be cured by technology so advanced as to resemble magic. Growth is constrained by inalterable physical laws, and to a lesser but no less significant extent, so is merely maintaining the status quo. There’s only so much stuff to go around, and we already don’t have enough. It’s not that we aren’t distributing it equitably; it just isn’t there to begin with.
Figuring out what to do with all the old people isn’t even half the problem. What are we going to do with all the young people?
“I am forced to the conclusion that there is no solution that will permit us to live like we do today in anything like our current numbers. There need to be fewer of us, and we need to live with less, a lot less. That doesn’t mean poverty, necessarily, but if we are to avoid poverty, we must surrender wealth.”
Yes. I have come to this conclusion too. I read “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn and an interview with him. We seem to have begun on the path we are on when we first settled down and began to be “fruitful and multiply.”
Your writing is so very clear. And there is no tone of condescension which I appreciate enormously – thank you. I hope you teach in a classroom, not just through your writing.
Not studying any of the sciences, just picking up things as I go, I attempt to problem solve, as others have done in this post and in other diaries. Even when we come up with something, we are then confronted with the problem of how to get it acted upon.
Again, thank you for your clarifications. I need to go off and emote…aaaagh!
“If that citizen is a woman that likes fashion, or is career oriented, she may find the new government stifling.”
Hsssssssssssssss
unartfully expressed.
Let me try again.
Fashion is the wrong word, because it has a connotation of frivolity.
What I really mean, is that if an Iraqi woman really valued her right of self-expression, through how she dresses, she may find the loss of that freedom more stifling than whatever gains she might have made.
For instance, given a choice between voting and being able to dress casually, she might prefer to dress casually.
Given a choice between living under Saddam’s regime and having good career opportunities, and living under a more conservative government, and culture that has less career options, she may prefer life under Saddam.
Sorry for an ugly sentence.
It might also be that she’s kinda attached to her clitoris and might also me that she’s not to keen on the idea that her husband can kill her without any retribution what so ever.
That whole slave thing…kind of a bummer.
although I don’t think Iraqi women need to worry about genital mutilation from a Shi’a government. I’ve never heard of that occurring in Iraq or Iran.
Female genital mutilation is more or less an African custom (IIRC it is also practiced in Indonesia-Oceanea by some obscure groups). Practice of mutilation follows linguistic and physical culture demographics more closely than religion. Where it is practiced by Muslims it is almost always also practiced by Christians and followers of traditional religions. I have never seen anything but condemnation of the practice from orthodox (even wahabbi and salafist) Muslim sources. You do, however, get popular syncretism that attributes an Islamic signifigance to a cultural practice.
Additionally, while this is sort of a lesser of two evils thing, if you are going to be a woman in an “Islamicist” polity- you better hope that it is Shi’a. Without going in to to much detail, women and their inheritance rights have a theological signifigance to the Shi’a due to their Imam’s being descended from the Prophet through his DAUGHTER. As a result women have much more signifigant property and other rights under Shi’a interpretations of the Shari’a than under Sunni orthodoxies. (There’s also something to be said for the Persian and Turkish influence on Shi’ism and the Northern Arabs in general, Persians and Turks have traditionally allowed for greater roles for women in their cultures.)
Lastly, the husband isn’t really free to kill his wife. Honor killings are usually committed by the woman’s blood relatives (fathers or brothers, sometimes even by their sons). This has a lot to do with concepts of who is exactly dishonored by what. And the general problem that offing one’s wife leads to vendetta with the in-laws.
Not sure if this info has a point, but as they say on TV- knowledge is power.
Good rant.
And some constructive thinking.
Hats off to you for focusing on something proactive and non-violent that the U.S. and U.K. could be doing.
We have a horrible history in the Middle East and we are currently in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of violence begetting violence.
It’s been obvious for at least half a century that the rest of the world was not going to just peacefully starve while the rich few nations took all the resources and wealth. We could have mitigated the unbelievable rich-poor gap, but instead chose to use our resources to “fight communism”. Soviet-style communism fell when it tried, much too late, to adjust its faiths and principles to fit the modern world. Now Euro-American capitalism is heading for the same fate, and the human species may not survive its collapse — or at least not what we think of as human culture.
Tech fixes are not going to “solve” the energy and resource problems without a new way of looking at the distribution of the world’s wealth. It will also take new ideas of what in necessary and important in human life.
What that means is that Americans and most Europeans need to grow up. You can’t always get what you want. If you’re willing to kill people so you can have your idiotic car economy and big houses and strawberries in January, then the rest of the world will respond by the only means it has. And predatory religion will take full advantage of the hate, anger, and despair that are the overwhelming daily reality of so many people.
I’m in a shitty mood, too, BooMan, and have to say, it’s made darker when I see this liberal whining to keep all the crap we “need” but make everybody like us again, even our own citizens. Ain’t gonna happen without change that runs way deeper and more radical than liberal “reform”.
That was in the back of my mind as I writing this.
One of the vices we are in is that we can’t overcome the public’s outrage at gas and heating prices whenever they go up. Now, you say the public needs to grow up. That takes leadership. I remember Carter in his sweater telling us turn down the heat. It’s a tough sell, but it needs to be done. The thing is, it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t cause the party promoting it to get tossed on their ass.
Ideally, we could get bipartisan support for some tough changes of policy. But it’s currently impossible.
we’ll grow up involuntarily. It won’t be pleasant.
numerous fricken times. What a bunch of teenagers we all are. I’m ready…..shit’s going to change, get on with the change. Of course I didn’t mortgage my children for “toys” and for those who did all that I can say is DON’T MORTGAGE YOUR CHILDREN and stop acting like teenagers with no shut off valves
re: Carter, sweater, talk of austerity, getting tossed out on his ass –
Digby had an amazing post months back detailing some of the research on the striking commonalities of fundamentalisms in cultures around the world (patriarchal, xenophobic, homophobic, obsessed with group boundaries and social rules, and with passing all these down unchanged to the young, etc.), with interesting implications for how to lead for change.
One of the researchers was looking at rhetoric from folks like FDR and JFK and noticing that in support of very liberal ideals they were using very ‘conservative’ and nationalistic sounding appeals (don’t remember all the cites, but ‘ask not what your country can do for you…’ was one).
I’m not suggesting that we can convert hard core fundamentalists to an energy independance activists. But I do think that under social stress and uncertainty many people seem to have inherited some wiring from the millenia of living in small bands — or something. In tough times, it looks to me like many folks get little messages telling them to hunker down, distrust outsiders, and perhaps any changes linked to outsiders, worry excessively about social continuity, etc. Any leader who wants to motivate average ‘non-political’ Americans toward real change needs to bear some of this in mind.
I do think that it’s possible to create an appeal to the nation that is simultaneously idealistic and innovative, on the one hand, and strikes (genuinely) conservative notes as well, with appeals to community values and ‘renewal’, etc., from a centrist to left-liberal bent.
Clinton had a piece of this with his early ‘we need every American’ paean to diversity, but he never followed through with Dean-type mobilizing and empowering.
My sense at this point is that Wes Clark (who I’m assuming is not a bought and paid for creature of the Clintons) has something of the vision, the palpable outrage at what the Neocons have done (not sure how I could truly get behind anyone who didn’t have that), and (potentially) the openness to the grassroots, that he might be able to serve as an effective channel for such a movement. That he might be able to effect something of a real house-cleaning and rethinking.
“…just peacefully starve while the rich few nations took all the resources and wealth…”
This triggered a memory of a song from the 60’s by Rare Bird titled “Sympathy.” Part of the lyrics were: “While half the world lies down and quietly starves because there’s not enough love in the world. What we need, my friends, is sympathy ’cause there’s not enough love in the world.”
Thank you for instigating yet another profoundly stimulating thread on BooTrib. The respectful interplay of ideas between you and Booman has been enlightening. I tend to agree with both of you in some aspects and not so much in others. I’m going to be thinking about which is which for hours.
I have been torn over the role of nuclear energy in this equation. On the one hand, nuclear energy appears to solve the Big Three:
• Dependence on foreign oil and the attendant military intervention and resentment
• Greenhouse gas production and the consequent environmental, economic and humanitarian catastrophes
• Environmental impacts of drilling and power plant production
The shortfalls of nuclear energy are the waste, the uranium mining, and the limited usefulness for automobiles. The car problem is probably solvable with use of a chemical battery intermediate like hydrogen or agricultural oils. The waste problem is thoroughly intractable, at least until fusion is a reality, and the mining impacts are minor compared to oil and gas drilling. I think nuclear may have a role to play in our energy plan, but not with taxpayers providing the insurance, and not with the current subsidy schemes. A decentralized grid would be much more robust, with small solar or other generation stations in homes and towns across the country both giving and taking from the grid.
On a different note, I agree that it is vitally important that we recognize the good as well as the bad. This will go a long way towards defusing the hysterical charges of the extreme right mainstream. The key is to recognize and promulgate a realistic vision that is fair and humane, but does not get trapped by the rhetoric that the current power elite uses to justify the status quo.
You overlook yet another problem with nuclear: there just isn’t all that much uranium readily available to replace oil for any extended time. I haven’t kept up with the current estimates, but they were not promising as of a decade or so ago.
You could go with breeder reactors, which create their own fuel in the form of plutonium, but then you open up waste, accident, proliferation, pollution problems many orders of magnitude greater than we face with the current designs.
As to fusion, it’s been “around the corner” for at least 30 years now, and we still haven’t achieved breakeven — getting more energy out than we put in. It looks more and more like just another wish-fueled fantasy.
Like I said somewhere above, we won’t fix things without deep changes in the way we live. Americans who would rather die than give up their cars for public transportation will get their wish more sooner than later.
Very good points. I lived in Princeton NJ in the 80’s when they were starting up and playing around with the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, so I saw the ups and downs, high expectations and disappointments of the technology.
This link is interesting, although it is from a few years ago. Looks like there are about 3MT proven reserves at US$130/kg, and we’re using about 60kT/yr. That’s 50 years at this rate.
Cheaper materials for solar power are up there as one of the best long-term bets, but as long as coal/oil/gas/nuclear are heavily subsidized, we’re screwed on this front.
in the 80’s too. I wonder if we know each other.
Party at Princeton Plasma Physics Labs, dudes.
(N.B. Another Princetonian here)-
A good friend, and physicist, tells me that we’re about 30 years off from a commercial fusion reactor design. This is because there are a number of reactor design issues that need to be resolved empirically. He figures another six or more genreations of test reactors are needed.
When asked if this time frame could be shortened by throwing money at the issues, he said yes, the experimental reactors could be built simultaneously cutting the delivery time to something more like a decade.
His cost figure? $500,000,000,000.00
In other words we could’ve responded to 9/11 by taking the money we’ve spent in Iraq and dumping it into fusion research. Bush could’ve delivered fusion by the end of the decade, just like JFK delivered on his moonshot. Moreover, we would probably have a superior level of energy supply= both short AND long term.
Glad that didn’t happen, the Chevron stock in my 401k would’ve tanked- phew!
Class of ’87
OK…
Stephen Bent
(I feel so exposed!)
Wow, I am class of ’87 too and I know you. Email the address at the bottom of the page and we can talk. It’s good to meet up with you!!
–within the United States.
The opposite side from us is 40 years along in taking back America from the New Deal and the Enlightenment. They’re doing and saying and manipulating everything that helps them take more power and opportunity from the people and from the institutions and tools of reasoning.
Their involvement in the Middle East is also much closer to economic conquest than it is some kind of alternative approach to “freedom” or “democracy.” They don’t even think about freedom, but there’s not much in our world they oppose more than democracy.
What Americans and Brits need to understand, is that we have built up a reservoir of ill-will and mistrust over a long period of time.
Yes indeed. From Dr. Martin Luther King, “Beyond Viet Nam:”
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
This is 35-year-old a direct statement that the most fundamental problem with America is the American system itself.
incapable of being conquered Well we’ve increasingly favored the machines and computers and profit over the 35 years since, and the evil triplet King cites have grown accordingly. The record, at minimum, does not contradict King’s assertion.
There is only one short term path towards solution–we must retake the U.S. government. Energy independence in the 25 years since Reagan shelved Carter’s philosophy is now a long term problem, especially since we helped gear up Asia for the developed economy.
Whatever strategy we propose for Israel/Palestine, Islamic terror or anything else, it has to be crafted and marketed so that it contributes to weaking Republicans and contributes to getting Democrats back into the government.
And then the real work begins, because the 95% of the American system outside Constitutional government will remain oriented exactly the same on the day we’re sworn in as it was when King assailed it in 1967.
I am grateful for the opportunity to read so much thoughtful analysis of what’s wrong with the world. But after searching quite a lot, all I can find as to who committed this savage act is the assumption that it was Al Qaeda. Considering that this is England, why not assume that it was the Irish? It’s really not all about us.
I agree we should find other means for energy, but it seems to me that the only answer to what’s wrong with the world is to STOP THE KILLING! Bring home the guns – let the soldiers stay and clean up their mess, if they dare a real test of courage.
that I don’t know if muslim extremists are responsible. But I felt like talking about why they are carrying attacks anyway. I rely on people to catch my caveats and qualifications, but I understand your unease.
Your comment that Americans have to understand the legacy of mistrust reminds me that the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era began with teach-ins, which commonly included a great deal of information, and various points of view, on the history of western involvement, some (but not enough) about the indigenous cultures,etc.
We are even better prepared to learn more about the Middle East and other areas because culturally we have a bit better understanding of non-Christian religions, and especially of corporate involvement, and there is more information readily available about the region and western involvement.
I hope that at least our universities have overcome the initial blanket of fear largely created by the Bushies that any discussion of the region and its history that doesn’t automatically back the current U.S. war is grounds for calling up Homeland Security.
Just as each terrorist attack legitimately raises questions about strategies and tactics in preventing terrorist attacks, they cause us to once again ask why are they doing this? Though the level of ignorance is appalling, it is useful to revisit the question.
I am not hopeful. I guess I’m brooding as well ;).
Terrible news today, added on to the terrible news everyday… but I can’t help feeling that we are asking the wrong questions, coming to the wrong conclusions and looking in the wrong directions. Of course, this may be due to may natural contrariness and inclination to disbelieve most any official story on events.
Anyway… energy self sufficiency is a good place to start, and certainly a worthy goal short term and long term. But then that leaves everything else… just about everything that allows us to have our ‘high standard of living’ is dependent on other people basically living in hell on earth. What to do about that? I don’t know. I think it’s unwise to ignore it, but I also think that it’s unrealistic to believe that, even if widely known, anything would change. We are too used to our comforts, and would be most unwilling to give them up… surely there’s some other way? will most likely be the question.
Izzy has a good diary out now on water… a basic substance that is need to sustain life, which is being privatised in poor countries worldwide… with not only the full support of rich countries, but with actual insistence on it happening. So, you get stories now that speak of poor people not wandering the roads and villages to beg for food, but to beg for a cup of water.
Me, I’ve thought for a while now that “Islamic” terrorism was only the beginning.
I think everyone is in a lousy mood today..mine starting off with the diary on disgusting t-shirts before finding out about what is happening in London…to bush’s pathetically uncompassionate little soundbite speech about him/terrorists instead of even mentioning people in London-the stupid shithead.
Making the world more safe to me seems more simple than leaders(a moot point there)realize(or refuse to acknowledge as it doesn’t make them money) and would go back to Kennedy’s Peace Corp and Carter’s wanting to lift us out of oil dependence. To say nothing of possibly restoring some of the luster to our countries name. Spending 300 Billion fucken dollars on Peace Core type programs in poverty stricken countries would be to me the logical way to make the world safer. Give indigenous people the means, tools and education to do for themselves and they would be able to lift themselves from poverty and throw off despot leaders in their countries.
Of course it would also help if the US would stop interfering in other countries governments that we think do not benefit us in particular(such as Venezuela) and/or ignoring countries such as Saudi Arabia because we think we need them so continue to condone atrocities there as it’s in our interests to do so.
I can’t specifically blame bush for what terrorists did in London today but I do blame him for fostering Al Queda into a rock star like status to their believers, making Al Queda a worldwide know entity. I do specifically blame bushco because of their Iraq invasion and other policies in making the US and the world much less safe.(and my feeling is that the London attack is a prelude to another attack here) If he had treated 9/11 as a massive criminal investigation conducted behind the scenes the public would no doubt have little awareness of Al Quada until hopefully those terrorists/masterminds behind 9/11 were caught and put on trial.
It is hard for me though to feel any differently than I do. I watch American companies sell state of the art firepower to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and I watch them train people that those who rule feel that they can trust utterly completely to fly the Apache Attack Helicopters that we sell them. We train these “special pilots” for them at our own military facilities here in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. They use the helicopters regularly to stiffle protests and the keep the people in line. Saudi Arabia desires to keep its population so under its thumb that they import people to even work on the equipment. They can’t even trust the local population to train them and employ them caring for the aircraft. A lot of Americans live over there and make big bucks to do it. My nation pays billions to these same disgusting rulers and aids them in all sorts of ways to keep the oil flowing our way, and the Bush’s have done plenty plenty plenty to keep oil that is under the feet of all the people who live over there flowing the direction they like when it comes to Saudi Arabia. I’m sure that Osama was well aware of Bandar and the Bush’s and I’m sure it only stoked the fire. Along with my husband’s letter from Iraq where he is so frustrated he is about to lose it and he describes how he can feel the outrage and hatred towards the troops growing daily over there and how he feels that he is only help train new terrorists for new attacks, and I still feel that inspite of all the old hatreds there are a lot of brand new and really fresh hatreds that Bush has sown and grown. I will never forget how many 9/11 terrorist were from Saudi Arabia and I will always remember the many crimes against the humanity of Saudi Arabia that I have witnessed this nations leaders knowingly participate in often with glee.
My diary about Bush today was concerned with ensuring that Americans are properly protected through adequate funding. It was in no way “blaming Bush and/or Blair for the tragic loss of life in London today”.
I have to say this though, Boo. If Bush and Blair, as current leaders of these two countries fail to do everything they possibly can to fund security measures and quite apart from whatever the history of terrorism is in the world, they do shoulder responsibility for activities that might have been prevented. That’s just reality. There is no way that a government can provide protection from every possible scenario, but they owe it to their citizens to put their money where their mouths are regarding this war on terrorism – as does my Prime Minister, Paul Martin. Until they can say they have done everything possible, I refuse to let them off the hook.
Huge, complex and fundamental issues raised in this story. I have a few, mainly philosophical thoughts, more from a historical perspective than an economic one.
I want to get one smaller philosophical point out of the way first, having to do with the difficulty involved in how we attribute “blame” for such events as those that transpired today in London. Certainly, as BooMan remarks, British history, (and US history more recently), is replete with egregious transgressions in the MidEast of one form or another going back at least to the turn of the century. Before that, the brutality of Christian aggression against Islam and the retaliation that provoked from Muslims against Christians represents probably the darkest period in humankinds modern history. So, laying most of the blame for today’s attacks in London on the imbecile Bush and PM Blair is not necessarily correct. However, the Bush regime does bear direct responsibility for damaging the ability of British intelligence and law enforcement’s to effectively apprehend criminals of the type likely responsible for these bombings.
Read Juan Cole’s excellent analysis of the biggest post-invasion intelligence blunder by BushCo here. So much for the small philosophy.
BooMan says this.
Certainly this is true, but, more broadly, it’s true that in the case of every major religion, when the followers of these religions become aggressive zealots and attempt to establish supremacy in the broader world, they are all anti-modern, all anti-individual rights, and all anti-democratic. Religion is an autocratic form, and when religious extremism takes hold, anyone and any belief system that doesn’t accord it supremacy is demonized. Pseudo Islamists like bin Laden are examples of this, just as pseudo-Christian fascists like Dobson, Perkins, Santorum, et. al. represent this. So, my point is that while modern Islamic cultures do seem to enshrine many of these repressive, abusive and intolerant views, Christianity and Hinduism and Judaeism likewise weaponize ignorance and fear in the same way.
Last. I don’t know much about economic theory, but it seems to me that any effective and meaningful analysis and discussion of the impending calamities looming on the horizon with respect to energy and commerce should somehow start with an indisputable understanding that real economic growth is inextricably linked with how well we strike our balance as environmental stewards. Trying to envision a positive and functional future while simultaneously sacrificing rersponsible use of resources in the name of short term economic gain is essentially false economics. If we pump out all the oil, stripmine all the coal and destroy the rivers and watershed, log off all the timber, pollute the oceans, etc., in the end we will lose big time.
I think getting this message across to the broadest cross section of the public is essential to our ability to advance our civilization towards providing a better life for all. As long as we gain at the expense of our neighbor, or of our earth, ultimately, we’re going nowhere.
A populist movement would be great, but there’s little discussion on the blogs.
I like the battery-powered car they have in Norway, though it still needs some improvements. The final modification will be when we have solar-powered batteries small enough for cars.
That’s not beyond imagination.
And it would change the world.
You’re certainly right in noting that Bush and Blair are embedded in a political and social mindset (Euro-American) that dates back many hundreds of years, and that the hostility that Bush and Blair may receive from the Middle East is also embedded in that broader context. We could go back farther than Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt to the viewpoints that many Europeans seemed to hold of Muslim “infidels” going back to the Crusades and earlier; to a time when “those Others” were viewed as less than human at best.
Look. Human beings are not nice. Arab, “Euro-American”, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Left, Right… It doesn’t matter a hill of beans. Unless we hold guns to each other’s heads we act on instinct, and instinct isn’t pretty. And if in the process of holding guns to each other’s heads someone is foolish enough to pull a trigger,either out of constitutional weakness, temporary insanity, or nihilism, then everyone else is going to start pulling triggers. Until human nature is changed (a program which is also a kind of attack) that is the way things will be.
Since “rising above” this situation requires an even greater renunciation of instinct, it creates a ‘house of cards’ situation where what used to be resolved by mammalian territorial displays are now solved by catastrophic wars like WW1, WW2, Viet Nam, etc.
Civilization runs on sublimated instinctual energy (a la Freud). It is like a rubber band in that it only stores this energy; after time the rubber band can’t take any more and it snaps. Looking for some fault peculiar to any particular culture (west, muslim, confucian, what have you) misses the point entirely.
I get a bit skeptical about generalizations regarding “human nature”. Instead, a lot of human behavior is culturally embedded. I don’t know if you’ve read anything about warfare patterns among, say, the North American indigenous peoples (and to a large degree the same will hold true for the meso- and South-American indigenous peoples). If you do, one thing that will jump out is that the rules of war were vastly different – you didn’t see the sort of “total” warfare and ideological warfare that seems to characterize the European nations. For example, the idea of destroying an enemy tribe’s villages or crops, or to commit a mass-murder of their women and children (including unborn children) would have been unheard of in the indigenous tribes of which I am aware. The practice of beheadings, among other atrocities, turns out to be something of an art form among the European conquerors of years past.
I’m not going to argue that genocide was exclusively a Euro-American invention, but there is little doubt our societies have done way more than our share of such practices.
Do human beings have the potential to be “nasty?” Certainly. The historical and social science literatures are filled with countless examples of human cruelty. By the same token, however, it should be noted that human potential may or may not be actualized depending upon the sort of social environment in which individuals are embedded. It occurs to me then, that rather than simply throw my hands up and give up on humans as hopeless biologically condemned to all manner of cruel behaviors it behooves us to look at our own cultural assumptions and ask ourselves the difficult question of how adaptive those assumptions are – not only for our own societies but indeed for the species as a whole.
My two cents.