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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
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Arwon Bazu                 Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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Originally posted by Alkis Russia is huge, importantly located next to the EU, has a lot of oil, and straddles an extremely unstable and backwards southern frontier and is thus a cause celebre to Islamic extremism and a kalidescope of related nationalist movements. The fact that it's not a global superpower and has no hope of being a serious conventional military threat to anyone further away than Chechnya doesn't make it not worth talking about. But then, I'm happy to discuss lots of things that aren't of vital global interest, whereas most people seem to mainly want to talk about GRAVE THREATS to our VERY WAY OF LIFE and see anything else as of very secondary interest, as mere sideshows. Which probably explains why there's been no threads about, say, the Thai coup and its consequences for ASEAN, or the situation in the Horn of Africa. It's unfortunate, because obsession with the DIRE THREAT of the day tends to crowd out interest and attention to anything else. You see this tendency with the massive crazy over-stating of the Islamic fundamentalist threat (liek omg they're gonna take over Europe), and especially with China. People want to see big scary threats and in a world without obvious security dilemmas such as existed in the Cold War, they have to invent them (otherwise there's no villains for new Bond movies). The subsiding of the brief unipolar moment of unquestioned American hegemony is passing, and naturally that too makes people used to the idea of America as head of the global order kind of uncomfortable too (which explains why there's even uneasy talk of an increasingly assertive and powerful Europe in certain circles)... the result is that the second biggest kid on the block is the natural target of fear, especially since it's an ancient and often confusing civilisation with a very different government that makes a wonderfully otherly "other". Also, China isn't *that* powerful. It doesn't really see itself as a major superpower or even close... according to its own reckonings of comprehensive national power, incorporating not just hardware but economics and cultural and diplomatic "soft power" as well, it sees itself as well below not just the US, but many western countries such as Germany as well. I'm not buying all the anti-China paranoia that's been flying around pundit circles for the last few years. I think people, Americans especially, are just way too accustomed to thinking of and describing the world in apocalyptic tones, of universalised threats and conflicts, and I think seeing the world in such terms of Manichean struggles tends to mask and obscure much subtler situations. (edited by Arwon on 12-28-06 09:34 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Viruses are organic material which mutate rapidly. They're therefore difficult to keep up with and difficult to differentiate and isolate from native body tissues in order to fight, so therefore any cure for all viruses would need to:
A. Attack only viruses. and B. Attack them based on features common to all viruses. Biotech and nanotech seem like the two most likely paths. Something engineered to target some feature of viruses that ordinary human tissue does not share. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I assume there's some protein or structure that can be used to differentiate between the two. I guess it's a matter of getting the engineering up to scratch. Talkin outa my ass here. (edited by Arwon on 12-28-06 09:49 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Why does it have to affect you directly to be worth attention? | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| So Ford's dead now. Therefore it's time to assess what he did. I think he's probably right in the middle of the hall of mediocre presidents, but I guess at least he ended the Vietnam debacle once and for all.
The big one is probably the Nixon pardon.... right thing to do? |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Man, people really need to stop thinking of geopolitics like a Realtime Strategy Game. | |||
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Well, the US senate only has two senators per state (since it has so many), and it has first-past-the-post elections rather than the proportional elections and preferential voting of many other Houses of Review in other countries. These two features tend to ensure high incumbency rates and choke out voices that might otherwise get a run in a more competitive senate... especially those of people from outside the two dominant parties.
That said, it's still a damn sight better than the House of Lords or Canadian Senate. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| The richest man in China is a photovoltaics (that means solar panels) magnate who studied at my university, and China's vehicle emission standards are tighter than Europe's. I think you'll find that, in keeping with the pseudo-Communist tendency to plan things (and be less pressured by short-term electoral cycles and stuff), they're recognising the basic realities of oil dependence and global warming and planning for all their options.
That's why they're developing entirely new types of nuclear reactor at present, that's why they're going heavy into hydro-electric power, looking at sustainable urbanisation models (near Shanghai for example), aiming to produce at least 20% of their energy through renewables by some target date or other, throwing subsidy and investment money at solar magnates... as well as making friends in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to secure those precious hydrocarbons. Really, aside from the skyrocketing coal consumption and rising (slower but still rising) oil consumption... the main concern is the impact of Chinese industrialisation on global warming, not on the military implications. It would be stupid not to do these things, especially when the alternative would be to risk so much political capital on a pointless and counterproductive attempt to strongarm the world into handing over all its oil or something. They've been doing this diplomacy and foreign affairs thing for five millennia, give them some credit for forsight and subtlety. (edited by Arwon on 12-29-06 06:07 AM) |
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Arwon Bazu  Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Nah, that's a problem with shitty government and planning and a bit of NIMBY anti-development sentiment... and a convenient yet archaic law being used as an ad hoc method of salving a situation they helped create through negligent government. Pretty marginal case, especially since trading hours are hardly the central issue when we're talking about moralistic laws against things like drugs, sex and prostitution and how laws against them are wholly inappropriate and often counterproductive.
Of course, you could always move, no-one's forcing you to live there if its so unbearable. (edited by Arwon on 12-29-06 09:13 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Yeah he did, that's what all that stuff about the culture of fear and paranoia was about. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| True that. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I dunno, "it's the culture, stupid" seems like about the best conclusion you can draw from that movie.
I don't remember, did he spend much time on the level of economic inequality and social injustice in the US compared to other countries with high gun ownership rates like Finland and Canada? I suspect that you could draw a spectrum among "high gun ownership rate" nations with "high income inqeuality" and one end and "low" at the other, with South Africa at one end, Finland at the other, and the US in the middle, and find a direct correlative relationship with crime rates. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I think this is PSA with his 'Mod Hat' on. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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If he gets to used one of the world's most erudite and respected publications, I'm going to use a cheap cliparted internet comic which, while several years old, seemed appropriate:
(Also: Koryo's just mad all he could do is post links to Free Republic) (edited by Arwon on 12-29-06 10:51 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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I'm just entertained that we're somehow discussing a globally ascendant China declaring war on a Bolivarian Union as though this is a serious possibility and not a god-damn alt-history fantasy game scenario. (edited by Arwon on 12-29-06 11:01 PM) |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I'm honestly surprised you don't read Free Republic. The Freepers are ground-zero for the sort of China-paranoid gung-ho democracy-crusaders you pretty much reflect. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| I'm suggesting it's reflective of your general tendency to see the world in terms of a Cold-War computer strategy game or something. Just because China will soon have the theoretical hardware capacity to be a more assertive regional and eventually global player in a multipolar world doesn't mean they're going to become the fucking Evil Empire. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| See that's the thing. Gun deaths are highly visible, but there's not that many of them. There's probably more people killed in car-crashes. It's quite easy for a culture to be quite lacsadaisical about gun-deaths and not to blame the actual guns or see them as a problem, despite the fact that people are killed by them. When somebody gets shot in the streets of LA, is it the fault of the guns or more attributable to other things like poverty, drug addiction and social injustice?
Guns are a furphy and a distraction. I'm not convinced that getting rid of all guns would make America that much safer. American crime rates are broadly comparable to the rest of the developed world, especially largely gun-free countries like the UK and, to a lesser extent, Australia. Guns are not a key variable in crime rates. The problems with comparison are numerous... "Crime rates" as an undifferentiated statistic are misleading because they include assault and arson and car theft and such, for example. Also, every country measures crime differently. Some go by crimes reported, some by crimes prosecuted,others use household surveys to augment police statistics with unreported crimes, and categories of crime vary greatly... for example, in Australia car crashes go under vehicular manslaughter and thus get counted in the murder rate, but in the US this doesn't occur. Establishing causal relationships between firearms and crime is notoriously difficult. Broadly speaking, America could probably use a decent registory and licensing system to help with crime-fighting, but beyond that, its cultural pre-occupation with guns and its apathy towards their proliferation is a socio-historical quirk, not a major problem. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| The surge theory is a PR campaign, not a strategy. It's a way of establishing future lack of culpability on the part of the people who actually started the war, a sort of "well we tried" thing. Soon they'll be able to blame the libruls and the media for losing the war just like they did in Vietnam.
The war is lost. According to the stated objectives it's been unwinnable since practically the initial invasion. Sorry. |
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| See that's not really what I'd call gun-control. Maybe it's cos the terms of debate in this country are about banning types of guns or not. | |||
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Arwon Bazu Since: 11-18-05 From: Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia Last post: 5909 days Last view: 5909 days |
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| Yeah but there's still severe limits to what the great powers can actually do. Even the US, in its unipolar hegemony at present, can't change the basic realities of global politics. It's hamstrung in Iraq, unable to do anything in North Korea, powerless to stop political events in Latin America from unfolding as they do, and so forth. During the Cold War things were no different, at best the powers were reduced to expending vast resources to nudge countries' indigenous politics in certain directions. Direct coersion never worked, as shown in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Cold War was not a testament to the power of global superpowers, but to their limitations in actually controlling events in the world. (edited by Arwon on 12-29-06 11:39 PM) |
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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - - Posts by Arwon |
