Category Archives: Geopolitics

Confess

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There is a ‘metal band’ in Iran called Confess (picture below). The context is music, and I assume that a metal band plays music on a spectrum that has heavy metal at one end.  It’s also referred to as a ‘thrash band’.  I know about Confess because its members are in prison, charged with a list of offences including blasphemy, which is a capital offence in the Islamic Republic of Iran.  You can read the story here.

Confess

You can even hear the band playing at this same site. I think it’s god-awful music, but I wouldn’t condemn the perpetrators to death.

I’m stroppy because we are being drawn into something like an alliance with Iran, since the Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah and the Kurdish Peshmerga seem to be the only people with boots on the ground who are effectively opposing Daesh.

I’m sure the people of Iran, the great majority anyway, are decent sensible folk who take their religion with a pinch of salt and are interested in much the same things that we are. I don’t know if Fawlty Towers has been translated into Farsi, but if it has I’m sure it has a huge following.  (‘We’ means secular westerners like me, by the way.)

But let us never forget that Iran’s leaders are staunch theists who claim to be guardians of the only true interpretation of Islam; and therefore anything they do, no matter how cruel or loony, must be right.  I’m not saying they’re worse than the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia but I don’t think they’re significantly better.

A Massive Experiment

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Which prominent political leader said this, in 1988?

“For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world’s systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes – population, agriculture, use of fossil fuels – concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.”

I’ll post the answer tomorrow (Valentine’s Day, and that’s not a clue).

Global Debt

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A shock-horror headline today said that global debt stands at US$200 trillion, which is about 3 times gross global product. A debt:income ratio of 3 is quite modest for a young couple borrowing to buy a home and a car, but for a business or a government it should ring alarm bells.  So should we be alarmed?

Someone drew my attention to a beautiful graphic in the Daily Mail, showing how 11 of those 200 trillions are lent and borrowed among the banking sectors of 16 countries.  It seems that everyone’s lending to everyone else.  Even China and Germany are borrowers and even Greece and Portugal are lenders.

So if everyone defaulted tomorrow… well, there would be a lot of individual winners and losers, but there wouldn’t be any Martians turning up to repossess our planet because we hadn’t kept up our mortgage payments.

What calms me is the fact that the headline is about gross debt. Someone who borrows $100k in order to buy bonds to the same value has given rise to $200k of debt, but their net debt is zero.  Even our heavily mortgaged young couple probably has money in a bank account – effectively a loan to their bank.

The Bomb

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Remember when we were all afraid of being annihilated in a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR (aka ‘the Russians’)? At least, that’s what historians tell us; I don’t remember being afraid of that personally.

Well now there are so many people with their fingers on so many buttons that nuclear annihilation is just part of the scenery. If Israel, Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear bombs – whether of the atomic or the hydrogen variety – it’s a matter of when and how big, not if.  It’s like the next mega-volcanic eruption or the next really big asteroid strike or the next Global Financial Crisis.  Why waste emotional energy worrying about it?

This post was inspired by Kim Jong Un’s latest test, of course.  Nuclear bomb test, I mean, not psychiatric.  And also by a cool animation I saw in the Washington Post showing the size, location and perpetrator of every test since 1946.  Do have a look.

Bombing DAESH

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The news has just come through – the UK Parliament has voted in favour of bombing DAESH in Syria as well as Iraq.  This is a victory for common sense as well as a boost for British self-respect.  The civilised world is confronting the closest thing to pure evil that we are likely to see in my lifetime.  For a nation with such a proud military history – not always a glorious one in moral terms, I concede – to stand back while others are stepping forward would have been a disgrace.

By the way, for the sake of balance, here’s a link to an article asserting that using the term ‘DAESH’ or ‘Daesh’ is silly.

Donald Trump – In Trouble Again

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Like almost everyone else outside the Republican Party, I find myself staring in stunned disbelief at the popularity polls.  How could anyone consider Donald Trump to be in the Top Ten Million for consideration as the Leader of the Free World?

But I have to interpose my body between Mr Trump and the howls of protest that his latest reported remarks have drawn.  He said that refugees could be “the greatest Trojan horse of all time.”  Whatever the motives and prejudices that may underlie that statement, it is undeniably supported by two very obvious precedents.

First, US foreign policy has for many years been hostage to Zionist lobbyists, whose power depends on a Jewish population (only 2% nationally, but disproportionately influential) which derives in large part from past flows of refugees from persecution in Europe.

Second, the recent outbreak of sanity with respect to US-Cuban relations has been delayed for decades by the Cuban exile population – refugees from Castro and his communist regime, implacably opposed to détente.

Muslim Takeover of Australia?

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I get a lot of emails expressing fear that Australia, or the Western world in general, will be taken over by Muslims because of a) immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, b) Muslims’ high fertility rate or c) both.

Obviously, if Muslims do breed faster then non-Muslims they will inevitably achieve a majority one day. But is it imminent? I constructed a small Excel model and put in some simple assumptions for Australia. Here they are:

  1. Muslims represent 3% of the Australian population now.
  2. Muslims’ natural rate of increase is 1.5%pa while that of non-Muslims is 0.5%pa.
  3. Annual net immigration is equivalent to 1% of the population.
  4. Muslims represent 30% of net immigration.
  5. Anyone born to Muslim parents adopts their faith.
  6. Nobody converts to or from Islam.

This set of assumptions produces a Muslim majority in the year 2289, at which time the total population of Australia will be 3.6 billion.

I’d be happy to receive evidence-based data to replace my crude assumptions; or to send out my little model to be played with by you or anyone else.

As an atheist myself I earnestly hope that nobody follows any religion at all by 2289, rendering this a pointless exercise. Fun, though.

Poster Children

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The photo of a drowned 3-year-old lying face-down on a Turkish beach suddenly became visual shorthand for the miserable situation in Syria and the desperation of people seeking refuge.

It is an admirable human trait that our sympathy is aroused by the sight of a child in distress. Indeed, if we did not react that way very few children would make it into adulthood. But I am uneasy about the kneejerk-ism that such sympathy provokes. Complex issues should be addressed thoughtfully and with full understanding of causes and effects.

At the moment nothing is more complex than the tangle of superstition, competition and ancient hatred that characterises the Arab world. I want my government and other governments to behave rationally. I do not want them to be pressured by compassionate electors to take heart-warming, headline-grabbing decisions that buy short-term popularity at the expense of actions that could, perhaps, lead to long-term solutions.

Seeds of Evil

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All the Abrahamic faiths contain seeds of evil as well as seeds of good.  At the moment the evil seeds of Islam seem to be the most numerous, or the most virulent.  The murder of Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris is the latest manifestation to hit the global headlines, but atrocities are committed daily by Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab, Boko Haram and other extremist groups and individuals.

The common thread linking the Abrahamic faiths is the belief that there is only one god, and that he writes books.  It’s a bizarre notion in my opinion, but that may be the subject of another post.  If a god writes a book, and does not occasionally send a prophet to revise it in the light of changing circumstances, his dictates remain frozen in time.  This is not a big problem if the dictates are general in nature – “Love one another” is a good example – but it is a very big problem if the god has provided a detailed manual for everyday living.  This, I think, is at the heart of the problem confronting Moslems today.

I say “confronting Moslems” because the vast majority are decent, reasonable people who want the same things for themselves and their children as everyone else does.  I say this confidently having lived and worked with Moslems for much of my adult life, starting with my volunteer service in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).  But a decent, reasonable Moslem family may produce a child who adopts extremist ideology and commits terrible crimes.  In almost all cases other family members are as mystified and horrified as their non-Moslem neighbours.

I would liken Islamist extremism to a parasite inhabiting a host, much as a the malaria parasite inhabits the mosquito population.  We target the innocent mosquitoes because they bring the parasite to us.  Non-Moslems must avoid targeting the whole Islamic community because it harbours the parasite of extremism.  The war against extremism must be waged together.

 

Outbreak of Sanity! Cuba and USA Renew Diplomatic Ties!

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Yes!  This is the kind of change the world has been waiting for since President Obama was elected six years ago.  For decades the USA has been humiliated by playing the part of an impotent Goliath trying to cow a plucky little David into submission.

I have to declare an interest: Mrs SG and I were tourists in Cuba earlier this year.  We went with open minds and a lot of curiosity.  We came away thinking that, while we wouldn’t want to live in such a paternalistic society, there were many worse places in the world, including some that are firm allies of the West.

It seemed to me that Cuba is rather like a sugar plantation where the owner (the Government) meets his slaves’ essential needs but does not allow them much say in the management of the business.  That does not sound like a ringing endorsement of the Cuban system, but there are plenty of people in the democratic capitalist world who are equally powerless and have no guarantee – or even expectation – that their essential needs will be met by anyone.