Detailed Abstractions

As has been widely reported today, two female suicide bombers attacked train stops in Moscow (via the Economist here):

TWO terrorist bombers on the Moscow metro killed at least 37 people and injured 102 in the morning rush hour on Monday March 29th. The first explosion, which killed 22 people and injured 12, struck just before 8am at the Lubyanka metro station, a few hundred feet from the Kremlin and next to the headquarters of the Federal Security Services, the successor to the KGB. The second bomb went off at Park Kultury, by the main circular road in central Moscow, killing at least 15.

The Russian security services said two female suicide bombers from the north Caucasus were responsible….

This seems to be a continuation of hostilities between Russia & Caucasus as Russia continues it’s movements to secure the sphere of Russian influence within eastern Europe.  Many former bloc countries have tried to maintain independence from Russia and Russia has responded.  In some cases, political and economic pressure could be enough, in other cases the military is being used as a foreign policy tool.  Right or wrong, all military objectives are just foreign policy goals through a military vehicle.

What does this have to do with equal rights?  To be honest I’m not sure, but reading Slate made me think I was wrong.  Under the category of “I don’t know what to think about this” Slate had two articles today: The Glass Ceiling for Female Terrorists & a reprint of an article asking if female suicide bombers get 72 virgins here.

While I do agree with the basic premise that Islamic fundamentalists treatment of women is horrendous & I believe firmly the world should be able to judge those countries which force women to be fully subjugated to men, I also believe the timing for these more lighthearted attempts at satire was not chosen wisely.

Please don’t misunderstand – I’m against almost all censorship (depends upon how you define censorship for me to say against “all”) & would never think I should be able to impose my beliefs on their editing decisions.

But as a value statement maybe we should ask: Was this a good idea considering innocents were just slaughtered for doing nothing more than trying to get to work?

Over @ The Economist’s new-ish debate section, they are currently debating the proposition This house believes that China is showing more leadership than America in the fight against climate change and currently, 74% believe in this proposition.

I know I’m unlikely to change many minds, but it’s always seemed to me that when trying to evaluate one country’s international progress on any one specific ideal, we end up narrowing the debate to such an extent as to make the question irrelevant.

In what seems to be a strong desire to answer questions objectively without respect to questions of ethics or other governmental policies, the intelligent ones among us miss the forest for the trees.

Towards that end – my two cents:

Dear Sir,

It seems maybe we should define leadership to an extent that either includes ethical behavior or can exist without ethics. For as long as the term leadership includes some notion of ethics, “ability to move fast” or the ability to put up light rail for the Olympics, simply can not matter in light of governmental policies designed specifically to limit the freedom of the individual and make the peasant serf work for the state.

Even *if* one wants to make the argument that ethics aren’t integral to the question, it’s still useful in evaluating “leadership”. For instance, when China starts implementing new green policies and initiatives, what’s the likely source of technology they will use? American? German? British? Swedish?

& Why? Because when people are allowed opportunities to flourish through a system that protects them with basic contract rights, innovation will flow much more easily. This is why China might manufacture most of the toys and basic electronic gadgets in the world, but the design process certainly came from someplace else.

An an example, they only recently successfully launched a satellite into orbit.  Prior to 1996, 2 out of 3 attempts ended in massive failures, meanwhile those freer countries had hundreds of them for various purposes including GPS, with even private companies using the technology successfully as well.

& lastly – it’s unlikely China would even admit a problem at all if they still retained the control that was possible just a few short decades ago. Today, they try to control press from earthquakes, the forceful removing of millions to make Olympic Village, their crime rate, and any number of other things they consider “bad” press.

Due to the explosion in the sharing of global information however, China finds it difficult to hide as much as they used to. Even the very closed off North Korea is finding this difficult as well.

So long as they continue to hide bad press, there’s no reason to think this “leadership” is anything other than a play at international recognition while hopefully strengthening their core domestic support.

In strategic thinking, this is known as a two-fer.

Either way – both goals have only one thing in common – staying in power and retaining as much control over the population as possible.

Removing ethics and the results of their standard operating procedure seems the only way to think of China as leading the world in anything.