All my Malaysian friends are posting about their election. It’s important for them because in the past few years they’ve had a lot of protests for more political transparency and ethnic representation in politics, as well as less corruption and nepotism. 

Good to keep an eye on that one. 

kohenari:

Attention wingnuts:

That war against tyranny you’re so worried about being armed so you can win? You lost a long, long time ago.

The government is not trying to kill you; if it was, you’d already be dead. Take off your tinfoil hats and stop stockpiling handguns.

I like this a lot. If the government really did want to disarm you, your shotgun would do very little. 

My cousin made this point, supposedly to revolt against a 1984 or Fahrenheit 451 scenario. 

Which tells me he really missed the point of those books. I haven’t read F451 (yet!) but 1984 is not about armed insurrection. 1984 is about ideas, and how society can get used to living in a false utopia without questioning the new order and without realizing it. 

It is not at all warning you to stockpile on guns. It’s that in that world you would have accepted things regardless. 

So my Comparative Welfare States class is naturally somewhat Europe focused. This is to be expected because, frankly, Europe has both the widest variety of, and also the most comprehensive welfare states. 

Of course, a somewhat different way of looking at things is that the US, for example, which has a fairly minimal welfare state, just has a different philosophy: that a flexible labour market acts as its own source of welfare: easy employment is the security net for those who falter. 

Anyway, in Europe the vast majority of comprehensive social reform came around the 1960s, pushed along by the various Social Democratic parties. And this is more or less the case from Sweden to France to the UK and to Italy. 

Social Democrat parties are traditionally moderate-left leaning, their original constituencies and strong supporters being industrial working men, who were breadwinners for families which relied on them. And the system was more or less built to support them. 

Today though, it’s a complicated world. The family structure has changed, with more women going to work, and the jobs market has changed too. In Europe and the US fewer and fewer jobs are industrial, more and more are service oriented. 

So the traditional structure of setting up a social support system for an industrial worker who might expect to work in the same company for his entire working life… has changed. For one, service jobs are harder to regulate, since a lot of them are either very education requiring, like waiters. People like waiters also don’t work regular hours, and many won’t have a full time contract, and instead will be part time, or on-call. 

And in most of Europe, just like in the US, part time work doesn’t really grant you any benefits. People like this, who are inconsistently employed, are called the Working Poor. 

This is part of why a lot of the older former industrial workers have shifted their support towards more conservative parties. Although they traditionally supported Social Democrats, who pushed to create their welfare system, the changing nature of these countries’ economies has made them much more conservative. 

After all, that’s what conservative means. They want to preserve the old system. Though that’s not entirely true: they want the world to go back to how it was in the 1960s, when they had it made. And this is part of why they’re also typically against immigration, because all change is threatening to their part of the social order. 

In a way, you could correlate this kind of thing to America. It’s typically pointed out that there are a lot of poor white people who nevertheless vote against their economic interests by voting Republican, since Democrats are usually seen as supporting poor people and Republicans are typically seen as supporting rich people and their businesses. 

In Europe, it’s a resistance against change, against the growing insecurities of the changing world. In America, is it the same?

This is, to me, a non-rhetorical question. I see a lot of people like to answer that it’s a problem of lack of education and easy brainwashing or that “Republicans are just dumb”, but Europeans aren’t too badly educated and many of them still support conservative parties which aren’t necessarily working in their economic interest but are perceived to be. 

diadoumenos:

Why Are Elections on Tuesdays?

[W]ith the advent of the railroad and telegraph, Congress decided it was time to standardize a date. Monday was out, because it would require people to travel to the polls by buggy on the Sunday Sabbath. Wednesday was also not an option, because it was market day, and farmers wouldn’t be able to make it to the polls. So it was decided that Tuesday would be the day that Americans would vote in elections, and in 1845, Congress passed a law that presidential elections would be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November

Non-Americans might probably wonder as well why American holidays also aren’t held consistently on dates, but instead on days. 

Thanksgiving, for example, is the third Thursday of November. 

Sometimes it’s hard to conceive of the older United States before the Civil War, which was much less federal than it is now. Each state had its own different rules and laws, and in this case they didn’t always agree upon the same calendar. So to find days which worked for everyone for federal occasions, this system was born. 

Fareed Zakaria’s take on the second Presidential Debate, analysing their economic proposals. 

reallyfoxnews:

How does Fox News handle Mitt Romney’s lag in the second debate? Broadcasts an image of debate moderator Candy Crowley set on fire.

Video.

What’s surprising about this is that Candy Crowley is not exactly a liberal or anything. But, you know, she fact checked a Republican candidate, so supposedly now she’s the devil. 

So this is probably one of the most blindingly generalizing articles I’ve ever read, and it’s assigned reading for my International Relations class. 

Its initial premise is fine. National sovereign borders don’t mean what they used to. I get that. There are all kinds of other factors beyond mere nationstates. Okay. 

But then the author takes some of the most superficial assumptions about countries and regions and their local politics, and assumes that they create a greater regional political entity. 

For example he assumes these run together: 

Bolivarian Republics

Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela

Led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, large parts of Latin America are swinging back toward dictatorship and following the pattern of Peronism, with its historical antipathy toward America and capitalism. The Chávez-influenced states are largely poor; the percentage of people living in poverty is more than 60 percent in Bolivia. With their anti-gringo mindset, mineral wealth, and energy reserves, they are tempting targets for rising powers like China and Russia.

And then there’s:

9. Russian Empire

Armenia, Belarus, Moldova, Russian Federation, Ukraine

Russia has enormous natural resources, considerable scientific-technological capacity, and a powerful military. As China waxes, Russia is trying to assert itself in Ukraine, Georgia, and Central Asia. Like the old tsarist version, the new Russian empire relies on the strong ties of the Russian Slavic identity, an ethnic group that accounts for roughly four fifths of its 140 million people. It is a middling country in terms of household income—roughly half of Italy’s—and also faces a rapidly aging population.

I’m sorry, but do you know how much Ukraine hates being lumped together with Russia. To say nothing of the wildly different cultural differences between Armenia and the rest. 

And I think this was just lumped together because there are Shia in positions of power in these otherwise very different countries:

11. Iranistan

Bahrain, Gaza Strip, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria

With oil reserves, relatively high levels of education, and an economy roughly the size of Turkey’s, Iran should be a rising superpower. But its full influence has been curbed by its extremist ideology, which conflicts not only with Western countries but also with Greater Arabia. A poorly managed economy has turned the region into a net importer of consumer goods, high-tech equipment, food, and even refined petroleum.

What is this person smoking? I’m sorry, but I highly question this research. 

In a lot of ways my experience of living in Indonesia shaped a lot of my political thought. In my previous post I talked about what nationalism had contributed to Indonesia. In a nutshell, it provided the national cultural consciousness that held the country together as a relatively stable polity. This is quite a feat, because all its various peoples had just about nothing in common except being colonized by the Dutch. 

But that kind of nationalism, so quickly created and so quickly accepted, more or less as a real idea, isn’t easy to do. And there is no form of government which finds it easier to force people into doing things than authoritarian ones, so I think we should discuss it. 

A lot of us are probably used to living in relatively liberal democracies, and we take for granted that this is a good thing, and it generally is. There are great advantages to democracies over dictatorships or authoritarian states, not least for the maintenance of individual human rights and so on. We generally too see a clear line of almost Marxist progression of society and governments: We go from feudal monarchies, to imperial colonialism, to democratic capitalism. Marx takes it further to the “true democracy” of socialism, but we need not talk about that. 

But again, my perspective is flavoured by having lived in Jakarta, particularly during the transitional period of the late 1990s, when in 1998 they deposed their dictator and implemented a freer political system. So I was, in a way, able to see both sides of the coin. 

One of the most common questions in many circles back in 1999 or so, was “Is Indonesia ready for the responsibility of democracy?” People asked this because it had lived so long under a dictatorship, which held sham elections every 5 years, that perhaps people didn’t understand how the process worked. It seems like an insult to the political maturity of the Indonesian people, but the question actually has pertinence in general when it comes to figuring out why democracy fails in some countries and succeeds in others. 

I think Nigeria is a good example, here, of democracy failing. Nigeria is a west African country which you can probably actually compare to Indonesia in terms of its demographics. It has a very diverse populace in terms of ethnicity and religion, and is also very resource rich, particularly in oil. It too was made into a colonial province in ignorance of traditional ethnic boundaries. 

When it became independent in 1960, Nigeria had quite a few advantages over other post-colonial countries, not only in its rich natural resources but also in having an educated elite and its own parliament. So where did it go wrong? 

I read in Meredith’s “The Fate of Africa” that Nigeria suffered from intensely partisan politics, because its main political parties represented specific ethnicities which also tended towards specific faiths. Therefore all the MPs tended to only argue for benefits towards their own people and not attempt to cooperate for collective national good. This is part of what led it to the Nigerian Civil War, whose effects are still apparent. The point is that the concept of being Nigerian was not nearly as important as it was to identify as Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa. 

This is understandable in the sense that the whole concept of “Nigerian” is  foreign-made. Britain drew the lines on the map and named the place. So the idea of being a “Nigerian” was still completely alien to people, while their ethnic loyalties were still strong due to old tradition. 

This, again, contrasts with the Indonesian example. Sukarno was a puppet leader under Japanese occupation, but while he read out pro-Japanese propaganda, he was simultaneously promoting a collective Indonesian consciousness. This is his lasting contribution to Indonesia. He wasn’t an effective president, but he was very much the founder of the Indonesian identity, which is surprisingly generally accepted despite being, also, a new concept. 

Sukarno was deposed in by Suharto in the 1960s, but in several ways Suharto would take that nationalism further, not always in a positive way. It would be under Suharto that the Chinese community in Indonesia would be crushed and forced to integrate. They would lose their Chinese names and take Indonesian ones, be banned from printing Chinese newspapers, opening Chinese restaurants, and basically be forced to abandon their Chinese-ness. This integrates them into the larger nation, thus partially avoiding some of the problems of multi-ethnic Malaysia, but is still a very heavy handed approach. 

Similarly, Suharto would clamp down hard with the military in Aceh, which wanted independence, and under his direction Timor l’Este was annexed just days after it was granted independence from Portugal in 1975. 

This, you can argue, is also a dictator doing what really only dictators are able to do: maintain national cohesion by force. 

Suharto did some good things, though. He’s regarded by many as a relatively ideal dictator, aside of course from the secret police and military repression of independence movements. While his family would grow famously corrupt, the man himself was the kind of dictator whose means of power security was mostly not force, but economic development. By inviting foreign investment, he developed industries for Indonesians to work in, build infrastructure from the taxes and fees from that investment, and took a highly underdeveloped country in the 1960s to one of the booming Asian economies of the 80s. Under him, Indonesians had access to schools, secular government, electricity, roads, and all the things that make a big difference to standard of living, not to mention life expectancy. 

When the first real Indonesian elections rolled around in 1999, everyone was really afraid that the voting centers would be mobbed, that there would be demonstrations and fighting, that there would be chaos. This wasn’t the case. It was the most orderly first election I’ll ever remember. Indonesians took their responsibility seriously, and while some people tried to make trouble here and there, other voters would reel them in and keep things in order. It was, to me, powerful evidence of political maturity, and the memory still moves me emotionally today. 

But they might never have gotten to that point, if they hadn’t had Suharto. In an odd sort of way, an underdeveloped people and country needed strong government to provide them with the infrastructure and basic education with which they could later take responsibility for themselves.

We can see this lesson repeated in Singapore, which is an amazing success story for a small city state which still has a not-actually-democratic system today. Singapore was incredibly lucky that the people who ruled and administered it were pretty competent and not particularly corrupt. 

Suharto himself might not have been too bad, aside from being oppressive to people who were against him, but his family was wildly corrupt. Altogether the estimate for the family as a whole is about 6 billion USD in laundered money. And that basically describes one of the main problems with dictatorships. 

Let’s say that you have an exceptional political leader. He is principled, competent, intelligent, and gets things done to the benefit of the people he rules and serves. This happened, too, in several monarchies. Dictators and Kings wielding absolute power sometimes get things done that democracies can’t, and often enough it could well be to the betterment of their people. People see decisive change and celebrate it. 

But what about their sons? Are their sons incorruptible? Very often not. And very often, fathers want their sons to carry on their legacies and have a way of reserving the spot for them afterwards. And people don’t have a legal choice in the matter. 

This is pretty much why dictators shouldn’t stick around for too long, even if they meant well. Power is useful, but often corrupting. Even if the country is ready to move on, they themselves as rulers might not be, and that’s when you get Syria, or Russia. 

The complex thing about Syria though, is that a lot of people really do support Assad, at least earlier, because they saw him and his father as the real founders of the modern state of Syria. They did a lot of good things, along with some very bad things, along the way. So I can understand why people would continue to support him. 

One of the interesting things about Sukarno, the founder of Indonesia, is that he got caught up in his own dreams. He created the concept of Indonesia which formed the basis of Indonesian culture, which hardly existed before that. But he was also prone to delusions of grandeur. He wanted Indonesia to encompass and represent all Bumiputra peoples, including the former British colonies that we now call Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, and when that didn’t happen he sent saboteurs and paratroops to stir up trouble in those places. 

It was, again, the kind of thing a delusional dictator would do. Suharto, by comparison, was a breath of stability. 

Probably the greatest problem with dictatorships is just that you don’t know who you’re getting, and you have no choice in the matter. You might get a competent if ruthless bastard, like Syngman Rhee in South Korea or Suharto. You might get grandiose and delusional dreamers, like Sukarno or Kwame N’Krumah. You might get intelligent administrators, like Lee Kwan Yew. You might get a total nutcase, like Pol Pot or Muammar Qaddafi.

These people tend to assume power without any sense of public legitimacy. No one from the people chose them. They keep power through force, propaganda, and rarely through competence. But I’d argue that sometimes a competent dictator is better than too much freedom too early in a new nation’s political and national consciousness. 

kohenari:

I published this piece back at the beginning of February. I think the questions still stand:

In vetoing a Security Council resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to step down in Syria, Russia and China have provided cover for the regime’s on-going brutal crackdown and, as such, criticism from the U.S., France, and a host of other countries and organizations was immediate and forceful.

So now what?

If the Security Council can’t even call for Assad to step down, it’s pretty clear that some more meaningful action isn’t forthcoming. Unless it comes from, for example, NATO. And some of the language we’re hearing today from Obama, Clinton, and Rice makes the possibility seem pretty realistic.

But the point of this post isn’t really to ask whether or not the U.S. — with NATO and the Arab Leagues as allies — will intervene militarily in Syria. Nor is the point to ask whether or not it ought to do so. If you want to know what I think, you can read some of my posts on Libya from last year (here and here, for example). Clinton has said, “military intervention has been absolutely ruled out and we have made that clear from the very beginning.”

But as I watched the social networking reactions to the Security Council proceedings, I started wondering about the reactions of progressives and (some) libertarians. From what I’ve seen from these groups, there’s condemnation of the Syrian crackdown and of the Russian and Chinese vetoes. But that condemnation doesn’t extend to a call for anyone to actually do anything. And that’s to be expected because these are groups who worry about what happens when people start thinking about acting rather than simply condemning. Indeed, I’m fairly confident that these strange bedfellows will resume their complaints about intervention as soon as planes are in the air; they’ll point out that the U.S. keeps targeting Muslims, they’ll insist that the U.S. has ulterior motives for its involvement, and they’ll point to all of the other places in the world in which the U.S. doesn’t intervene as proof for the first two arguments even as they demand that the U.S. stop dropping bombs on people entirely.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those arguments, though it’s easy enough to disagree with them. The trouble is that it’s tough to want things you can’t have. In this case, it’s tough to want people to be able to choose their leaders and not to be murdered by their government while at the same not wanting to get too deeply involved when they can’t choose and when they’re being killed.

But let me be clear about this last point. I am well aware that, in the process of using force to help people in Syria, some of the people we intend to help will be harmed. This is the point on which my critics will hang their hats, as they did the last time we had this conversation. And so I’ll say again what I think is a pretty important point when it comes time to consider the costs and benefits of military intervention on behalf of people who are suffering under a murderous regime:

The choice we face is between people being killed and people being killed. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all. In both instances, people die and it’s violent and bloody and awful. But in one instance — when we eschew intervention — the people who generally die violently are those who are attempting (and failing, due to inferior military capabilities) to throw off a tyrant. In those instances, it’s my position that to fall back on pacifism or isolationism because all warfare is awful or imperalistic or costly amounts to something of a moral failing insofar as it amounts to siding with the tyrant.

Choosing not to involve ourselves in what happens overseas doesn’t mean that people in Syria will suddenly be safe and happy and alive; it means that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have any blood on our hands because we didn’t directly harm anyone.

We can all be outraged with the choice that the Russians and the Chinese made today. And we surely ought to be outraged about what the Assad regime has been doing for months and months now. But if that outrage just means that we wag our fingers at Assad, the Russians, and the Chinese, rather than actually doing something about the terrible crimes being committed in Syria, then how outraged are we, really?

Most of the people who didn’t want the U.S. to get involved in Syria have gotten pretty quiet in the past six months because the U.S. hasn’t really gotten involved … at least not in the way that the U.S. got involved in Libya, to the endless breast-beating of these same people. In fact, there’s very little discussion of Syria from the non-interventionists these days, though the violence there continues apace.

Honestly, I’m curious: Do people think the Libyans are better off now than they were? And how do people think the Syrians would answer that question?

Personally I’ve always leaned towards intervention. I know it’s not in America’s interest to get involved in any quagmire again, but if you do look at the Libyan example… 

What they did was fly over and minimize the damage that Qaddafi’s forces could inflict on the rebels, and then washed their hands of it. Libya is a bit of a mess now but I’m pretty sure Libyans can’t claim any hand of imperialism to be involved in the choices they are making now. Indeed, Libya seems to get less disapproval than the drone flights in Pakistan. 

It might suggest that, if such a thing were possible in Syria, that such a low level intervention were implemented, and then the interveners would wipe their hands of any further military involvement… And therefore avoid further political fallout…

Maybe that would work. Just thinking out loud. 

I just overheard a clip of this speech on CNN and went to look it up, because it just pissed me off. I don’t know if it’s Romney being completely dumb or him styling his speech for dumb people, but let’s just summarize how this is not possible:

1. Saying you want to wipe out Israel is very different from actually doing it. And this is the case in common law too. Saying “I’m going to rob that bank” will make people suspicious of you but no one can charge you with anything until you actually do it. 
2. On that note, America has killed vastly more Iraqis than Iran has killed Israelis. Food for thought. This is again because Iran has not attacked Israel. 
3. If you’re going to go down that route, it’s the equivalent of using international UN branches for your very much personal agenda. No one else cares as much about Iran as the US does (except Israel) and so using the UN Court of Human Rights as your own personal court is totally not cool. 
4. Genocide is also a hugely tricky topic, and it’s one of the great problems with international law. Even with practically clear cut cases like Rwanda and Bosnia, it takes ages to get your verdict through, because the definition for genocide is still kind of vague. So you can’t just go up to the UNHCR and say “Oh, by the way, I’d like to bring that Iranian fellow in.” 
5. It’s kind of a gaffe that he said “genocide convention” which suggests that he doesn’t know the difference between the “Geneva Convention” and the UN Court of Human Rights in the Hague. Even if he’d meant Geneva Convention, that’s very much a set of rules for states at war, again, not states, or leaders of states, talking about war. It is mostly to do with fair treatment of prisoners. 
6. The UNCHR is for war crimes, mostly, and again there has been no war between Iran and Israel. I don’t usually take gaffes too seriously even if they’re funny, but this suggests that he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care which one it is even though they are completely different things. 

All this is besides the fact that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly and unashamedly trying to manipulate the US election. There is literally no other head of state of any other country in the world who would have the balls to do this, but Israel gets away with it. 

And frankly, it offends me not only that Bibi is doing it, but that Romney is now his official spokesperson. It is highly insulting to my, and by relation American voters’, intelligence. 

Today I had another session from one of my classes, “Comparative Welfare State Analysis.”

We were assigned a prohibitively huge amount of reading. The problem with reading Esping-Andersen’s comprehensive work is not so much the amount of it, as much as just how comprehensively laborious his writing is. It gets tiring to read after a while. And I like reading, and I do actually like reading about political economy, and I still got bored. 

The class itself, though, was really interesting, and my lecturer’s a pretty good communicator, which helps a lot. So what I’m going to do is give you a little bit of the basics, and then go off on a tangent regarding the thoughts it spawned in my head. I’m going to talk a lot about this because I found it fascinating and have lots of thoughts about it, but I totally understand if I’m taking over your dashboard, so it’s below the Read More. 

Read More

reuters:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted that some of his most famous media adventures with wildlife have been carefully staged but has said they were worthwhile because they drew the public’s attention to important conservation projects.

His macho appearances with everything from tigers to whales have been a staple of Russian state TV for years, cementing his image as a man of action but drawing mockery from critics who have likened them to Soviet-style propaganda.

Although Putin’s spokesman has previously revealed that at least one of the stunts was a set-up, Putin until now has appeared to play along with the exercises, allowing state media to present them as they seem rather than how they really are.

But in a rare meeting with a Kremlin critic after his latest wildlife stunt - taking to the skies in a light aircraft with a group of cranes last week - Putin admitted he had often taken part in media exercises which were carefully staged.

Sometimes, he said the stunts had been over the top.

READ ON: Putin admits wildlife stunts are staged

kohenari:

Fox News once again provides the most insightful picture of the political and intellectual climate in America today.

On the one hand, we don’t know what we’re talking about. But, on the other hand, we’re also happy to lie about the things we don’t know in order to score political points.