tcpip | A publisher, articles and ancient history

Well, it looks like I've found a publisher for my Jim Cairns study. Otford Press seem to be enthusiastic and - best of all appropriate. Meanwhile, New Politics have accepted my review of Strangio's biography of Cairns.

This Wednesday between 6pm and 7pm I'm being interviews on a RMIT student radio session (90.7fm) as the founder of Labor for Refugees. Be prepared to pitch me some difficult questions ;-)

Have been html-ising some ancient history, including an article on Magic in Roleplaying and Reality, which I wrote in 1996 for Mimesis and Reflection on the Death of Superman, which was published in Green Left Weekly in 1993. As I said, ancient history. Hopefully I'll manage to collate most of the things I've written this year in a single place!

Greylock alerted me to
this BBC article on luxuries versus necessities. The following table says it all really.

Luxuries
Make-up: $18bn
Perfumes: $15bn
Ocean cruises: $14bn
Ice-cream in Europe: $11 bn
Needs
Eliminate hunger: $19bn
Reproductive health care for all women: $12bn
Clean water for all: $10bn
Universal literacy: $5bn

The rest of the week has consisted of plodding away on my Data Security subchapter of my thesis and coding for the Tetum-Bahasa-Portuguese-English translation programme. Coding for Sesami.org is finished and ConnectIE are happy with the result. If anyone else needs a very motivated and skilled IT generalist for the short or long term you know where to find me.

Spent the weekend being quite sociable - dinner on Friday night with some friends of severina_242, some senior East Timor and military people on Saturday and Sunday all-singing and all-dancing Iranians. Whilst each event was individually very pleasant, it has also reminded me how much I really enjoy my own company - and how little of that I get.

My diet starts today. No, I'm serious. I returned from East Timor slightly thinner than usual - probably clocking in at 84kg. Now, three months back and with the festive season, I'm about 95kg. With a height of around 181 cm, this does put me in the "overweight" range and with a BMI of about 28-29 - which is far too high. Fortunately I'm one of those people who loses/gains weight quite quickly. A few weeks on a diet of complex carbohydrates, pure protein, skim milk, vitamin supplements and cycling should see me return to the more healthly level.

Je-sus. I just checked the BBC BMI site. It reckons that I should go down to about 76kg... I haven't weighed that much since, ummm, 1988... Oh well, here goes...

Update

An interesting experiment. Friend_Whoring. Join.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No amount of income transfer to the third world would solve third world poverty if the third world's institutions did not change.

No amount of institutional change will solve third world poverty without infrastructure development.

The aid to the Palestinians is particularly destructive, for example, because it props up a klepocratic elite, legitimises 'the problem is Israel' and keeps alive the politics of illusion.

Aid to Palestine is hardly homogenous. An Israel is at least a significant, even majority, cause of the problem.

the problem is not that the poor lack assets, it is that the institutional structures they live in keep their assets from being capital.

Frankly, that's a load of crap. I have seen enough third world and first world countries to know that it simply isn't true. The major lack in the third world can be narrowed down to a lack of education, clean water, health, housing and food from a citizens point of view, and a lack of technical skills, road, transport, and communications infrastructure from a systems point of view.

Not surprisingly, in such conditions democracy and the rule of law don't thrive. Nor does a market economy - because in order for their to be a market economy, first one needs to have rational actors. In order for actors to be rational, as axioms of the free market (found in any first year economics textbook) one has to have security in food, housing and the education to make a rational choice.

If this is not the case, irrational economic choices and behaviour occurs.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean

I think I just answered it. Laissez-faire. To make free, not to leave alone.

On the plight of the Palestinians, the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the cause of pathological Arab politics, it is the cause of it. Without Israel, Jews would be a persecuted minority throughout the Middle East as they have been for centuries and Arab politics would still be pathological.

Greeks and Turks managed to get on with their lives after their population swap. That could have happened in the Middle East, but the Arab elites found using the cosmic offense of the dhimmi state far too useful and affronting.

On third world development, a Westerner notices all the absences really easily. What is much less noticeable is what is there but massively underused. (And De Soto is a Peruvian and his international network of researchers were all fellow Third Worlders.)

Good institutions will create infrastructure. And eduation, and health and whatever. These things all come from human action. Institutions are persistent human action.

I find this again and again when talking about economic issues with people on the left. The sense of how things are created is lacking. It's all about transfer, but things have to originally come from somewhere. The West didn't become rich because it had mana-from-heaven infrasctructure or anything else. It's institutions built these things.

It's like blaming the gringos for Latin American poverty. Lima, as a European foundation, is a 100 years old than New York, more than that than Miami.

There's even a joke about it.

Yank: Why do you Mexicans hate us gringoes?
Mexican: Because you stole half our country. What's more, you stole the half with all the paved roads.

The Jewish state of Israel is pretty damn pathological as well, with claims from "From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates" (Herzl).

Basically, Israel was set up a religious-exclusive state so that the non-Jewish Arabs could pay penance for the crimes commited by Europeans.

It would have made more sense to hand over Bavaria or the Czech Republic with that sort of reasoning. But of course, the Europeans wouldn't pay for their own crimes.

Nota bene: In some senses I am an old-fashioned Zionist. I support the establishment of a Jewish religious homeland (not a state) in Palestine. I also consider that "Israel" is a term reserved for special spiritual significance for Jews and not something that should be potrayed in a profane manner.

The West didn't become rich because it had mana-from-heaven infrasctructure or anything else. It's institutions built these things.

The West became rich because it engaged in political imperialism, invasions, and genocide, first in Latin America and, after the United States, gained its own power, throughout Africa and Asia (as any map of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries makes quite obvious).

It's like blaming the gringos for Latin American poverty.

Well why not? Every time the Latin American nations have attempted to embark on a government that supported land reform that upset the neoimperialist US corporations they ended up being invaded or facing a US sponsored coup d'etat - I could give you 47 instances of the direct use and intervention of US armed forces (troops, navy, command operation) from 1890 - 1994.

Basically, in the case of Israel, the case of European institutions and the case of Latin American, "wealth" is a function of the capacity to engage in warfare, and to destroy indigenous personell and system of property. Claims of democratic politics and free market economics are invariably rareified phantasies to the people that are on the receiving end of those who claim such ideological justifications.

A publisher, articles and ancient history

Re: Yes, of course the problem is just money

Re: Yes, of course the problem is just money

Re: Yes, of course the problem is just money