Egypt vs. Sudan?

This guy says Egypt may have serious issues by February. The country imports nearly half its food (by calories) and according to the CIA factbook its overall imports are nearly double its exports in US dollars. So they’re not facing an uncomfortable economic contraction; they’re facing mass starvation in the streets. With the rest of the world still wallowing in the economic doldrums (which Greece, or China, or California could suddenly turn into another crisis), tourism is unlikely to surge to the rescue.

Goldman and Totten take some comfort in pointing out how unlikely Egypt is to start a war with Israel over this. Frankly, I have no idea why they would. Israel is only one of Egypt’s neighbors, and two among them are richer in terms of natural resources and currently still recovering from internal conflict. To the west, Libya is still trying to pull itself together from the ousting of Kaddafi. There’s no guarantee the country isn’t going to fall further into civil war as the victorious tribes vie for top spot. Egypt could potentially shave off a few of the eastern provinces and enrich itself significantly.

However, the EU has a strong interest in a stable Libya pumping lots of oil. They’ll likely only welcome Egyptian interference as a last resort. Obama also has some interest in a stable, peaceful Libya as well, and Egypt probably doesn’t want to piss off the US (according to the CIA factbook, Egypt gets 10% of its imports from the US, and I suspect a lot of that is food). So Libya is a slightly less likely target of Egyptian aggression than Israel.

On Egypt’s southern border, however, is Sudan. Nobody likes Sudan on account of them engaging in a genocidal civil war against the populations of their southern territories, still in the process of separating from the northern part of the country. While the south got 80% of the oil reserves in the armistice, the north still retains other rich minerals and the primary port for shipping the south’s oil out to the world, as well as most of the refining capacity.

Animosity between Sudan and Egypt is literally ancient. Sudan doesn’t have many friends in the world. The nations most likely to protest are China and Japan, Sudan’s biggest customers for their oil. China, with but one aircraft carrier that’s not yet combat-ready, doesn’t have the physical means to intervene, and Japan almost certainly lacks the political will to do so. Even southern Sudan is likely to cheer Egypt putting its foot on its genocidal neighbor’s neck.

According to Wikipedia, Egypt’s army is four times larger than Sudan’s was before the country was divided, and Egypt’s only rival in the number of modern battle tanks is Israel. If Egypt can master the logistical difficulties of marching south across the desert, they could conceivably win both wealth, renown, and a boost to the nation’s moral and the prestige of the army in a short, victorious war against Sudan.

The alternatives appear to be returning hat-in-hand to the IMF, which maybe they’re willing to do after the elections in November? Also, the US could possibly placate Egypt by offering a lend-lease kind of deal on grain, though that may be less likely now that the summer's proven so brutal to our corn crop that the EPA is easing demands on ethanol use at American gas pumps.

Finally, while China may not be able to intervene militarily, they can do so financially. If Egypt only makes noises about invading Sudan, that might convince the Chinese that all the money they've sunk into the country is at risk. That could convince them to make low-interest loans to Egypt, possibly in exchange for preferential treatment for Chinese ships moving through the Suez Canal.

So the real question is, why did Egypt turn down an offer of assistance from the IMF? Was it pride, or politics, or were the IMF's terms unacceptable? How much will that change, if at all, after the elections in November? Will Egypt be more willing to accept aid from China or the US? Right now, if pushed to the wall, I'd peg the chances of Egypt going to war with one of it's neighbors at something like 20%, which isn't huge, but is a far cry from zero.

The World Turned Upside Down?

Some folks, I think, are thinking too hard about government agents committing acts of looting in Egypt:

How much of the looting is bona fide grassroots rioting and how much is false-flag activity by the cops? I don't know, and neither do you... But government agents are clearly involved with the spree, and it's very possible that they're stoking and spearheading it; defense of person and property, meanwhile, has fallen not just on the Army but on civil society, as neighbors form informal protective associations. If Robb's scenario turns out to be true, Egypt has inverted the Hobbesian story of the state: The police are spreading disorder and the voluntary sector is containing it.

What a wonderful world we would live in, if Hobb's theories had been true! But the truth is, for most of the world, the state is not a defense against predation, but merely the biggest of the predators. When it defends its citizens, it is not to keep them safe from predation, but merely to insure that it reaps the largest harvest. Those of us who live in nations where this is not true are blessed. As for the rest of the world, they hope only that the state will not take too much, and that they will be allowed a tiny portion of what it is they have earned.

Are You In The Game? Or Under It?

There’s a lot of disgust out there with our political parties. Both sides feel angry and betrayed. Eight years ago (and even not so long ago as that) conservatives and libertarians decried “compassionate conservatism” as a betrayal. Today, liberals are saying the same thing about the Democrats and their policies. And the mantra for both is that they will abandon the party; they won’t donate money or time, they won’t support their candidates, and they won’t vote.

Which, quite frankly, is stupid.

In our two-party system you do have choices. One choice is to support the other party. “But I can’t do that,” you cry. “The other side is EEEEEEEVIL!!1!!eleven!!!”

No, they’re not. They’re your colleagues, your neighbors, and often your relatives. If they are, in fact, evil, then you need to move to a part of the world that is less evil than here. Good luck, and don’t let the door whack your bottom on the way out.

Your other choice is to stick with your party. Because a political party is like a car. It’s not so much an end in itself as a tool to perform certain tasks. When your car breaks down, do you just throw up your hands, abandon it, and not go to work anymore? Of course not. That’s stupid. You get it fixed.

If your party is broken, do you throw up your hands, abandon it, and let the country slide into disaster?

“But they don’t have any candidates I can support,” you cry. “They’re all a bunch of weasels.”

Then get new candidates. Where do you think candidates come from? There are these things called primaries, where a bunch of people toss their hat in the ring and vie for your party’s endorsement. They each have a different vision of what you party should be doing. If you don’t like these candidates, you need to find one you do like, or run yourself.

Waiting until the primaries are over and then complaining that you don’t like the final candidate is exactly like waiting until everyone else gets on the bus and then bitching that you can’t find a window seat.

Sometimes (perhaps even frequently) your candidate in the primaries will lose. Then you’ve got to figure out why and fix the problems. Maybe you need a new candidate. Maybe you need to spend more time explaining why your candidate’s ideas were better. Maybe you needed to raise more money. Learn, retool, and do better next time.

In the meantime, is the candidate your party chose better than the opposition? Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We’re all human and nobody is going to be perfect. Do the best with what you have.

And if your candidate is so odious that you can’t bear to vote for them, then perhaps you’re using the wrong party. Seriously.

Getting tied down to one party is often a mistake for any group. If they feel they can take you for granted, they will. There are only two cures for this. The first is to jump ship and vote for the other side. The second is to fix your party so it doesn’t take you for granted anymore.

In America, folks, politics ain’t a spectator sport. You’re either in the game or your getting trampled by it.

“Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbours’ garden.”

Stupidity is self-reinforcing. The more you do a stupid thing, the more "normal" and "rational" it looks. It also becomes harder to discern the pattern of cause and effect. Take the infamous gender gap in China as an example. It's easy to blame such things on China's one-child policy, enacted to get a handle of their massive population.

The problem is, apparently, that's only a mitigating factor. A culture in which daughters (and their husbands) are seen having no social or fiscal responsibility to their parents makes girls a financial liability. That's a disaster to peasant families living on the edge.

And because this stupidity is seen as the natural way of things, it persists when families rise out of poverty. According to the same article in The Economist:

So modernisation and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a son. When families are large, at least one male child will doubtless come along to maintain the family line. But if you have only one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son’s expense. So, with rising incomes and falling fertility, more and more people live in the smaller, richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.

The only cure for such stupidity is changing the attitudes that perpetuate it. The article gives us a glimmer of hope at the end, pointing out how the trend seems to have reversed itself in South Korea, and the discrepancies have plateaued in China and India. So hopefully things are turning around.

But in the meantime, Asia has a surplus of guys, and it's not going to be easy to live with. The same culture that values boys over girls also attaches status to marriage and raising a family. (Yes, I know that doesn't make sense. That's my point.)

So within ten years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America, or almost twice that of Europe’s three largest countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and children provide.

Let that sink in. Society flourishes largely on the eagerness of young men to produce surpluses of wealth with which they attempt to attract mates. Among humans, it's our chief version of bright plumage. The trend is well known from past societies that have faced such discrepancies: as these men reach young adulthood, they compete fiercely for the women available. But as it becomes clear to the losers that they are not going to win a wife, they drop out. Crime rises, productivity drops, unrest and anti-social behavior of all sorts (but especially the kidnap and rape of women) shoots up. According to this article, China and India may have already reached, or even passed, this cusp.

Medieval Europe solved a similar problem by starting the Crusades. They shipped their excess young men to the Middle East to die or win new lands and brides there. The historical model, in short, does not predict a stable, peaceful Asia in this century.

Photos by lanchongzi and Tony the Misfit.

The Joy of Chaos

What's "Io, Saturnalia!"? The traditional greeting of Romans to each other when they met during the weeklong celebration of the dedication of the temple of Saturn. It was a winter festival of tomfoolery, merriment, and gift-giving that gave us a number of our Christmas traditions.

Some scholars use Saturnalia as a literary term, describing the chaos that upends an old balance or system in order to introduce a new, (usually) more perfect status quo. You see this a lot in Shakespeare, where the rising action kicks the legs out of what was going on before, throwing everything up into the air, but just when it looks like all will dissolve into chaos, a new order asserts itself. You see it most strongly in the comedies, where the growing chaos and confusion are suddenly brought to order by the courage of the hero or heroine, and happy couples are united with the promise of wedded bliss. You see it in the tragedies as well, such as in "Hamlet" where, with the stage littered with bodies, the brave good prince of the neighboring nation comes on stage to create a new order in Denmark.

So that's Saturnalia, a crucible of chaos that takes the now and forms it into tomorrow. Hence also the JMS quote up there.

In spite of the occasional declaration of the End of History, we find ourselves constantly in times of transition and transformation.

One of the big ones is supposedly the end of the American Century. The 20th century was our time, so the assumption goes, and the 21st belongs to the rising powers of Asia.

To which I say, "Poppycock!"

Not so much out of a sense of national pride, though there's some of that there, I'll admit. Primarily, I say this out of a reasonable sense of the ebb and flow of things, and the power of stupidity.

America's great strength comes not from our size, our resources, or our geographical position in the world. Those things help, but there are countries better positioned, richer in resources, and more populous than we are.

Our big strength is a cultural tradition in a system of fractious government.

What? Isn't fractiousness a bad thing?

What on earth makes you think that?

Ok, bear with me here. This takes a bit of explaining. The root of democracy, and such notions as the "free exchange of ideas" that we hear about in universities all the time, is that none of us knows as much as all of us. When partisans are bickering, on blogs, on news shows or talk radio, or in the deliberative chambers of legislature, democracy is working exactly as it was designed to. Ideas are being examined, tested, challenged, and changed, going through the fire to be refined, improved, and purified. That's how it's supposed to work.

What actually ends up happening, most of the time, is compromise. A little bit of this side's suggestions get used, and mixed with the other side's proposals. Which is ok. Yes, it means the good ideas get diluted, sure. But it also means the bad ideas get diluted as well. When you have everyone in agreement, or the decisions being made by a small few, the good ideas don't get diluted, but neither do the bad ones. And no matter how smart that small few are, there will be things they don't know, or don't understand properly.

And here's something we all know to be true: good ideas are few and precious. Bad ideas are a dime a dozen.

This is why the USSR fell apart and the US thrived, really. We had a bunch of people running around trying all sorts of crazy things. Some of those crazy things worked, and here we are. In the USSR, they had a much smaller circle of folks deciding what crazy things to try, so they ended up spending more time and effort on really bad ones, like trying to create a race of super-soldiers by crossbreeding people and apes. No, really, I'm serious. It's the same sort of thinking that leads wacky dictators to decide that the first stage in their plan to build nuclear weapons is to drive out of their countries everyone with last names like Einstein and Oppenheimer.

The more they do that, the tighter they squeeze, the further they pursue bad ideas, the more people flee to the US to escape. The more we argue and fight and cuss and scream, the harder we have to work to make sure our ideas will stand up to the scrutiny of the other side. And that's a good thing.

What's This?

This is the blog I've been avoiding making for some time now. I don't really have time for this, but it's probably important.

One thing I learned from my degree at UT is that the most powerful force in human history is stupidity. It's why we keep trying things like price controls, nation-wide communalism, appeasement, and isolationism, even though they've never, ever worked.

So, in large part, this blog is going to be about stupidity: mine, yours, theirs, wherever it rears its ugly head. It's going to be primarily about politics, especially of the international sort, and a bit about culture and society and fun stuff like that. I hope it's going to be enjoyable for you to read, and for me to write.