tcpip | Millions lost, I'm an illegal immigrant, so run to the crocodiles.....

Millions lost, I'm an illegal immigrant, so run to the crocodiles.....

What a week. My multimillion dollar income proposal for the country is turned down, I give intention to resign, I discover I am an illegal immigrant with a missing passport (which requires a lengthy meeting with the National Director of the Police force), and have a fantastic journey to the countryside to get all this out of my system.

The better part of ten months of lobbying, research, careful documentation and analysis seems to have come to an end. Two proposals for the country-code top level domain; mine and that advocated by staff in the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications.

My proposal would be worth approximately seven million dollars income per annum. Theirs would actually cost money. My proposal used several contextually appropriate examples (Tuvalu, Nunei, Laos). They didn't use any examples. Mine suggests hosting with access to 162 Gbps. Theirs is 1024 kbps.

Guess which one the Minister for Telecommunications has decided to go with? Yep, you guessed right. An hour after I
received notice of his decision, I handed in my intention to resign.

There is still a couple of last minute options. A one-to-one meeting with the Prime Minister is being organized, but I
don't see much hope in changing the decision. After all, noone wants to usurp the Minister's decision. He is such a
nice guy and all.

Just to make matters better, I discovered that the Protocol Division had lost my passport. Fourty days they were
given the passport for updating the visa. It sat on someone's desk for that fourty days, rather than going to
Immigration and Border Control. It was only the subtle threat of international criminal charges being laid which caused
it to be miraculously reappear. No explanation of course. With some assistance from the Director of Consular Affairs
(one of the more hard working people here), I had a meeting today with the National Director of the Police, a charming
and sensible character Carlos, to explain exactly why I was not an illegal immigrant.

Anyway, with all this on the agenda on Friday evening, Debbie, a community development worker, had arrived from
Melbourne for her first visit to East Timor. Within an hour of getting off the 'plane, Daryl and Jim (both Lt-Col's
from the Australian army), two Portuguese UN workers and myself are in vehicles heading towards the south coas to have
a weekend out of this capital city. Jim's a weird one. So straight it's weird. Although he's in the legal and negotions
corps, he wanders around with a pistol everywhere. Daryl on the other hand I've developed a crazy friendship with.
Despite being in the armed forces for eighteen years, he has radical-left politics, hates guns and war (like any
sensible soldier) and is always a jovial, pleasurable person to be around. And he likes a drink.

I've done the journey often enough before, but it's worth explaining. From Dili to Aileu, Aileu to Maibasse, Maibasse to Same, then to Betano. In East Timor distance isn't measured by kilometers, it's measured by the time it takes. As the crow flies (or something that can get a better altitude) you're travelling about 70kms. Due to road conditions, mountains, jungle, fog, landslides, rivers and the effects of earthquakes you're talking about four to six hours at best. Usually you're at least 1000m in the air, and up 2500m in some parts. Enormous sections are like being in an Edgar Rice Burrough's novels, especially in the moutainous center. On the south coast you have beautiful beaches interspersed with mangrove swamps which are inhabited by hundreds of crocodiles, weighing up to 400kgs.

During the journey one passes through three different ethnicities; starting with the Tetum-Praca people of Dili, the Mambe people of Maibasse and Same and the Tetun-Terik people of Same-Betano. The southern district, Manufahi, is the least developed region in the country; mostly preliterate, grass huts, animism and, until very recently (and maybe still) headhunters. Apparently it is a great honour to have your head lopped off by a Manufahi warrior.

In Maibasse we stayed at the old Portuguese governer's residence, which is now a hotel of sorts. We were the only visitors for the night, which came with the additional luxury of hot water - I had my first hot shower since January this year and believe me, I took my time.

In Betano we slept on the beach (after getting the OK from the village chief) following a late night of sitting around the campfire, having a bbq, drinking and singing. Obviously we attracted a fair bit of attention and by the following morning a substantial number of youngsters had turned up. We started "Eskola Besik Tasi" (Beach School) and discovered one boy (Solomon) could both read and write with some competence.

Recent floods having taken their toll on the region. Although they have been susbtantially worse just west (Suai) and east (Viqueque) the damage was evident here as well. An significant section of road out of Betano, along the major river (Karaulun) had just been washed away - a good 40 meters worth at least. Enormous sections of road along the cliffaces along the Same-Maibasse road have likewise vanished, but not yet to the point where it is impassable. We were hoping to return either via the east or west road, then turn north, but they are completely flooded. In other words, despite only having one seaside, Manufahi can only be reached by a single road directly from the north - and that's hardly safe by any stretch of the imagination.

On other matters.... Just when you thought that we were on the verge of a new political dark age, the United States produces a great alternative; Kucinich!

Those whose anti-Americanism is just another version of racism can shut up now. The war machine, the "Patriot Act", the campaign against reproduction rights and so forth have nothing to do with so-called "American culture" (besides, the U.S.A. is a nationality not an ethnicity) and everything to with a particular government of the United States of America.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Really GP, I'm trying to work out why you've bothered tagging me.

You seem oblivious to the facts. One person did the hard yards of research over ten months to help raise a fourth world country out of dependency. There was no rational grounds for rejecting the proposal except that one great temptation. Power. Yep, someone want the power to control the ccTLD.

Meanwhile, the people here remain begging for a bowl of rice. And that's no exaggeration.

A destructively power-seeking bureaucracy and poverty-struck people?

That would be the fourth world then.

I am very sorry for your experience and I am sure it is no help that it is one experienced again and again by people in your situation.

J P Powellson even wrote a book based on his decades of experience of the same -- Centuries of Economic Endeavour

I don't suppose you can get the local Treasury to bat for you? After all, they'd probably like the money.

The Ministry of Planning and Finance are supportive. As is the United Nations IT people - in fact they are very supportive. But the decision is "politically" with the responsible Minister. Who actually is a nice guy, but he has power hungry people as advisors.

I understand the motivation of self-interest in poor countries and the tendancy of bureaucracies everywhere to build petty-empires, I'm just rather surprised to see it here after the people experienced so much of it.

Maybe in part that's because it's been normalized. Maybe in part because, at the end of the day, they didn't make their own revolution.

There were plenty of own revolutions which ended up much worse.

After all, in the sense of extracting a surplus for the use of powerholders, Stalin's Soviet Union was the most exploitative regime in history.

But yes, 'revolution as gift' is somewhat problematic, for that sort of reason -- a lack of learning.

Also, why would they think that there could be antyhing different? They have not experienced it and there are plenty of Western voices who are only too happy to 'deconstruct' Western society as 'only' or predominantly a system of exploitation.

After all, in the sense of extracting a surplus for the use of powerholders, Stalin's Soviet Union was the most exploitative regime in history.

Certainly one of them. But that was sometime after the revolution when that really started kicking into gear (when totalitarian Stalinism, industrialization and agrarian collectivism could converge).

Interesting tangent though, is the changes in the Gini coefficient since the change in the former Soviet Republics. Not surprisingly the change has been "positive" (i.e, more towards 100, where 1 person owns everything, rather than 0, where everyone has exactly the same). The following article gives a rather sad overview of what has happened.

Mind you, you've lived in St. Petersberg and Kiev, so this is probably not news to you..

(1) early Soviet History

Not really, consider War Communism, Lenin's very own megacidal economic disaster.

This drove him to NEP, but clearly as a temporary expedient. Stalin, I believe, was quite right to judge that, if the revolutionary impulse that Lenin had begun was to continue -- particularly the capacity of the Party to drive that impulse -- then the NEP had to be abandoned. His industrialisation plans were fairly clearly War Communism updated.

Or, to put it another way, it was both eminently possible under what Lenin had begun and natural to its logic. Which is why we see similar things repeated elsewhere under Leninist regimes.

I sort-of understand this attempt to insulate Lenin from his consequences (which, of course, though much more indirectly, included Hitler -- Lenin raised the stakes of politics hugely: there was nothing a respectable Westerner might not value -- not life, liberty, culture, religion, property etc -- which was not put at risk in a Leninist takeover, this lead to some nasty, desperate choices), but it fairly obviously requires a heroic flying in the face of the evidence.

(2) Post-Soviet history

Yes, I am somewhat familiar, from my visit and much reading.

There are huge problems comparing Soviet and post-Soviet statistics. Not least of which is much of the former were just made up and then there is the 'comparing apples and oranges' problem. The real income of the Soviet elite just didn't connect very much to salary, for example. The property situation of almost everything controlled by a state which is controlled by an elite who pillages it does not conveniently compare in Gini terms to a vaguely-private-property based dispensation. Similarly in deducting from GDP the roughly 25% (we think) that went on defence spending.

But one would expect the transition to be, well, rocky. The fact that much of the transition has been actively sabotaged doesn't help. (I note that the Russian transition is clearly worse than the Eastern European one and that socialism had already produced stagnant or declining life expectancies.)

The criminal culture was created under the Soviet regime (again, a natural long-term consequence of Leninism -- corruption is the market for official dispensation; make such dispensation socially dominant and corruption will, eventually, become similarly dominant, which is why purges are necessary -- to break up corrupt networks). Said culture was made much more open under the following dispensation.

Oblivious to the facts?.. no, but only to your personal feelings toward your involvement and the personal career investment you've made.
I don't know how old you are, but at 66-years I've learned a thing or two about politics, both local and international, and the UN in particular.
It doesn't work and it cannot work under the present charter arrangement due to various built-in systemic dysfunctions.
Politics is about power; and power for powers sake may not be rational, but it is native to human nature... something that human-kind cannot change of itself.
Be forewarned of this fact and learn accordingly, for this is the beginning of understanding when understanding is defined as the knowing of using knowledge and the spring-board to wisdom.
If you understand this, you'll do better next time.
I wish you well.

Politics is about power; and power for powers sake may not be rational, but it is native to human nature... something that human-kind cannot change of itself.

Is it really? Are we as a species so neurotic that we actually need institutional control of other people? If that's the case then how does one explain those who don't seek it?

The desire for power is a motivation that is part of human nature as much as any other human activity. In other words it's extremely varied. We have objective universal needs but apart from that there isn't much that one can say is or isn't part of human nature. Our linguistic nature means that we have (unlike other animals) a need for meaning. But that's about the extent of it.

I understand the desire for power. I understand the desire to accept some costs for that power. But I couldn't fathom why with such a general need people who give preference to something that, even in terms of power, is pathetically trivial.

"Is it really? Are we as a species so neurotic that we actually need institutional control of other people? If that's the case then how does one explain those who don't seek it."
Of course there are those altruistic personalities, but they are the extreme minority. As you know, minorities don't throw much weight in the political arena. Personality differences considered, the aggressive type-A personalities are the one's more motivated toward political involvement. Type-B personalities tend to go with the flow, and generally do not want to lead anyone anywhere.

Now a request. Please elaborate on this:
"I understand the desire for power. I understand the desire to accept some costs for that power. But I couldn't fathom why with such a general need people who give preference to something that, even in terms of power, is pathetically trivial."
I feel I should comment by sighting the type-B phrase above, but I'm not sure I grasp the fullness of your statement.

Your claim that minorities don't through much weight in the political arena is contradicted in the very next sentence that says "aggressive type-A personalities" (whatever that is) are more motivated towards political involvement.

(We'll temporarily screen out the fact that personalities are mutable and that psychology can't rationally ground itself anyway.)

Unless you're suggesting that type-A people are a majority. In which case it still doesn't mean anything as a person can be "aggressively" altruistic.

At the end of the day, I still don't think that the lust for power is innate part in anyone's nature or of the species, but rather is a neurosis, ranging from the minor to the socially pathological. This instance is interesting because the power gained is so small, yet the cost is so large.

You are pathetically naive to not understand your very nature. You will never find rationality in human nature, it not in you or anyone else. But "at the end of the day" perhaps you are still young enough to learn otherwise... if not, then your survival quotient is rather limited indeed.
Until then, I wish you well... you will need it.

Oh, by the by...
concerning ccTLD business of East Timor... I have not found a country code in the Top Level Domains lists.
Did this fall through too, or is it still pending?
Went up to the ccTLD web-site for the Austral-Pacific zone with no results. Did I overlook it?

GP, having been involved in online communications since 1987 let me tell you what I do to people who engage in personal abuse. I killfile them. I have neither the time nor the interest to engage with people who are incapable of raising themselves out of ad hominen statements due to their inability to operate with intentionalist semantics and discuss the
real issues raised. My work, my research and my friends are far too important to waste precious time. So
congratulations, you are the first person to receive this "honour" on my livejournal.

You claimed that I am "pathetically naive" for not understanding my "true nature" without providing any justifications for such a claim. Most people actually consider me anything but naive and that I am quite well aware of my nature. You utilised a psychological classification system that has no recognized validity. You claimed that there is no rationality in human nature, which is actually the only thing that makes us human.

As a grumpy old man, perhaps you should try to work out why you have so few friends before you shuttle off this mortal coil. It's never too late to change, it's never too late to become a better person and personalities are not fixed. But it requires your motivation. Let this be a lesson to you.

Obviously you have not learned the real lessons from the rather sorted history of mankind... the genus Homo, family Hominidae, order Primates, is so obviously destructive... even to the point of potentially terminating not only his own species, but also the more innocent creatures along with him.
Perhaps you shall witness this first hand.

Your arrogance is unbelievable. Along with your inability to spell.

The "real" lessons... What, like you know and everyone doesn't? "The rather sorted [sic!] lessons"

Listen pal, human beings have done some terrible things. Those are things we call pathological. And they've done some bloody marvellous things - and those are the things we call rational, reasonable, fair, just. Get the picture?

Those who look at the pathological and try to claim it is evidence of human nature are just wanking in the wind pathetically looking for an excuse for their own lack of action.

Now go away and meditate on that for a while.

*plonk*

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Millions lost, I'm an illegal immigrant, so run to the crocodiles.....

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