Human-itarian Concern for Gaza

Interesting comments by Obama on the Israel-Palestine situation:

“I was deeply concerned by the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life in recent days and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs in Gaza. Our hearts go out to Palestinian civilians who are in need of immediate food, clean water and basic medical care, and who’ve faced suffocating poverty for far too long.”

What is noteworthy of course is that the Israeli occupation and blockade of Palestine isn’t mentioned, nor is the killing of palestinians by Israelis condemned.

The analogy is by no means perfect, but what sprang out at me was that I had seen this before: this sort of disconnected ‘concern’ for suffering, divorced from any issue of rights, this acceptance that suffering is bad and should be avoided, without any acceptance that the actions which produce it are actually wrong, impermissible, immoral. This idea that while Palestinians may have welfare, they do not have rights.

This is the dominant position on non-human animals. For example, it is, I recently learned, a legal requirement that at the end of any experiment carried out on animals, even a harmless behavioural one, they must, with a few exceptions, be euthanased – to prevent them suffering. To prevent even the risk of ‘unnecessary’ suffering, blanket, systematic killing is prescribed.

It would be alarmist and hyperbolic to say that the Palestinians are being treated like animals. But there is a noteworthy connection: in both cases, welfare concerns are accepted, but rights are not – with the result that while suffering may be regretted, it is out of the question for either humans or the Israeli state to be accused of doing something impermissible, something forbidden. I feel this needs to change in both cases.

This concern with welfare is, in a sense, the opposite of respecting someone’s rights. It means taking on the authority to evaluate and deal with how others are feeling, without recognising at any point the imperiousness of a prohibition – something that you simply may not do, regardless of whether you consider it a good idea.

If the Israeli assault on and occupation of Gaza and the West Bank are not condemned, the Palestinians are not being granted the level of respect we typically grant to humans, but rather that which we grant to animals.

A related discussion of double-standards is up at Lenin’s Tomb.

Depressing Similarities

Hundreds killed, thousands wounded?

Government in denial?

Aid organisations warn of an impending humanitarian crisis?

UN staff being shot at?

It’s almost like the Sri Lankan government have been taking notes from Operation Cast Lead.

Or alternatively these things are inevitable results of fighting in situations where the civilian population hate you.

This is Fantastic

Shapely Prose reports on two recent articles: one that finds that diets don’t make people less fat, and hence concludes that we should focus on exercising, and one that finds that exercise doesn’t make people less fat, and hence concludes that we should focus on diet.

At least amid all the complexities of hard-to-interpret science, we can be confident that as long as everybody keeps repeating ‘diet and exercise, diet and exercise’, it will be true. That’s comforting.

Crisis, What Crisis?

As hopefully everyone has now noticed, there is an economic crisis going on. Everyone is very worried about this. Plenty of people have already written about how capitalism caused the crisis. I’d just like to point out how little sense the way we’re responding to it makes.

We’re richer than ever before, in technological and resource terms. Certainly in, for example, the UK, we have enough food, enough housing, and enough of pretty much everything to ensure everyone a comfortable existence. So what if there’s a crisis – even if national GDP halves, all it means is that we don’t get so much of the fancy stuff we don’t really need. This is no big deal, surely?

But it is a big deal. And don’t call me Shirley.

To understand why, let’s compare what a rational society would do, and what our society does. A rational society would arrange differently the production and distribution of goods that have different levels of necessity. Really basic things would be guaranteed, whatever happens, whereas luxuries would be allowed to be produced at a more volatile level, in proportion as various contingent factors made doing so appear reasonable.

The result would be that any overall fall in output just produced a reduction in the luxuries available to all citizens, while those things that are in any sense ‘needed’ remain unaffected.

Now let’s consider what our society does. In our society, regardless of how rich we all get, any overall fall in output will 1) affect a section of people and make them severely impoverished, depriving them of their homes and jobs, and 2) affect a much larger section of people with stress and anxiety over the possibility that this might happen to them. If more stuff was the answer to poverty, then there would be no poverty: poverty is a structural inevitability because our economic system produces it at every opportunity.

There, that’s my anti-capitalist rant done. I’d just like to point out a couple of things:

-Firstly, the rational approach I described, arranging things so that important goods are guaranteed and only inessential ones volatile, mirrors the approach a sane individual would typically take to their finances: start by ensuring that the bases are covered, that you’ll have a sufficient income, a secure place to live, insurance in case of accidents, etc. and then take risks and accept uncertainty regarding less important but fun things.

-Secondly, in both cases, the effect of this rational approach is to displace the economy from the centre of society. That is, once the really important things are sorted out, the economy itself becomes less important. Imagine if there was no prospect of foreclosures or unemployment, if nobody anywhere was having to struggle to ‘make ends meet’. A drop in economic output would still be reported, but it wouldn’t be the main news story for months on end. Non-economic issues would displace it from being at the centre of political disputes. There might be a recession and nobody notices, being too busy doing more important things.