Category Archives: Afghan War.

THE BEADY EYE ASKS. WILL THE WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY GET RID OF INEQUALITY.

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by in 2021. The year for change., Afghan War., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change Summit Scotland 2021, Climate Change., Environment, Green Energy., Human values., Humanity., Inequality., Our Common Values., Post-Covid-19, Technology v Humanity, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The pursuit of profit., The state of the World., The world to day., Trade Agreements., Unanswered Questions., We can leave a legacy worthwhile., Wealth., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., WORLD POVERTY WHERE'S THE GLOBAL OUTRAGE

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(Thirteen-minute read)

With or without technology there will always be inequalities in the world.

So why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology?

Because this way of thinking is so ingrained that is adopted by organizations that fight poverty—which often refashion themselves to resemble technology startups.

Inequality has been growing so much that all governments and civil society speak about it with increasing worry, trying to understand its causes, but unable to find solutions, because of greed. 

It is our policy on technology that drives inequality.

There is no better example of this than in the way the world is handling the current Covid pandemic unable to share the know-how to make the vaccinations. 

Patents and copyrights are not guaranteed as individual rights, like the right to free speech or religion.

After all, why would a drug company pay large amounts of money to people to develop new drugs if the drugs can be copied and sold by competitors from the day they enter the market?

If it is not already obvious, patent and copyright monopolies are instruments of public policy, not acts of God.

This is why there is still not enough coronavirus vaccine to meet worldwide demand.

A year ago there was no commercial market for mRNA products.

Vaccine manufacturers long ago should have been sharing technology and expertise to boost production in the U.S. and Europe, and especially in developing countries. 

The same would be true of software developers, makers of medical equipment, computer manufacturers, smartphone companies, and any other product where the cost of research and development was a substantial portion of the price of the product.

The complete elimination of patents and copyrights is of course an extreme scenario, but it is a possible policy option.

If we did choose this policy option, we would have a much more equal distribution of income, in spite of having the same technology.

In short, the fact that there was a huge increase in inequality associated with the development of technology over the last four decades was the result of policy choices, not technology.

There should be serious public debate about both how strong we want to patent and copyright protection to be and also whether they are always the best way to promote innovation and creative work, as opposed to alternatives like direct public funding.

If we acknowledge the extreme case, where we literally have no patent or copyright protection, then we have to recognize that there is nothing inherent in our technology that would cause inequality.

Few things, in principle, can’t be delivered through technology.

It is entirely our rules on technology that can cause inequality to increase.How Technology Ends Inequality

So on one hand, technology can eradicate poverty — not by making poor people less poor, but by making it less valuable to be rich.

On the other as technology spreads, making its creators rich, but treating its users the same, we should expect more monopolies and more financial inequality.

Although it is your data you can’t pay for a better Facebook experience.

Companies are incentivized to offer a product if it makes more than it costs. And technology ends up not costing much once you’ve built it.

So, in the end, you charge people whatever they can pay and in poorer countries, people just pay and get paid less.

Times are changing from the days that growth in inequality was largely an organic process independent of government policy.  

“Owning” the robot/algorithm is not a technical relationship, it is a legal one, and therefore one that depends on our laws.

The reason some people might get very rich from owning robots or algorithms is that they own patents and copyrights that are needed for the making of the robots/ algorithms.  

                                         __________________

In the past, technological improvements would be beneficial to all:

Extreme economic inequality is corrosive to our societies.

Around 8% of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty — but do you know why?

Gender inequality, caste systems, marginalization based on race or tribal affiliations are all economic and social inequalities that mean the same thing:

You might think that poverty causes hunger (and you would be right!), but hunger is also a cause — and maintainer — of poverty. This is why now with climate change, negotiating international trade agreements behind closed doors with only bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists present has to end.

Economics should take into account ethics and the environment, and treat its claims less like invariable truths.

It goes without saying that any actions coming out of Cop 26 climate change conferences to reduce temperatures will be derailed by not just income inequality, (only the higher income household will be able to afford green energy technologies. Solar panels, electric cars, heating pumps, etc.) but by the total lack of shared responsibility to do anything about it.   

Of course, there are hundreds of other elements that contribute to the problems our world is now facing. 

World poverty isn’t a problem of limited resources, it is a problem of inequality and this inequality is upheld by the idea that aid creates dependence.

Climate change will drive up to 132 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030.

The pricing carbon emissions on average is at a mere $3 a tonne.

The price of inequality in all its forms is greed. There are vast fortunes to be made with Technology/ Algorithms for profit and nothing blurs ethical lines faster than greed. 

So far, any decoupling has either been largely relative – in the sense of merely achieving higher rates of economic growth than gains in emissions – or achieved by shifting dirty production from one national territory to another.

And that is why, for now, global emissions are still rising.

The idea of “Just Transition” without financing is pie in the sky. 

Take the aftermath of the Afghan 20-year war.

The country is now facing starvation. Why not bomb it with food.   

By coming together to tackle the plague of destitution around the world, we have the opportunity to advance the human condition and eliminate global poverty in a way no one has done before.

All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME WARS AND BATTLES HAVE HAD A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON THE COURSE OF HISTORY.

18 Tuesday Feb 2020

Posted by in Afghan War., Technology v Humanity, War., What Needs to change in the World

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(Thirty-five-minute read) 

” Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” John F. Kennedy

If you ask Google how many wars have they been in the world.

Here is the answer:

” Early humans could have fought wars that went unnoticed. Sources range from 100,000 to 300,000 WARS.”

Then if you look at wikipedia.org and ask how many are current wars, on top of the list of the 40 active conflicts/ wars around the world at the moment, the Afghanistan conflict is number one, because of the letter A. 

You could not be blamed for wondering that after so many wars why it is in these modern days of interconnectivity other than the insanity of one or more leaders that causes wars. The boundary between rational and non-rational is fuzzy. There must exist incentives for conflict and some barriers to the ability to reach an enforceable bargain. 

The ideological change is both the most common cause of conflict and the root of most wars, but there is rarely only one cause of dispute.

Not only do we go to war we supply arms to the potential adversity. 

War is a better-known word in England that Afghanistan.

(According to Wikipedia,) The Kingdom of England has fought conflicts in 171 of the world’s 193 countries that are currently UN member states, or nine out of ten of all countries. So it is not surprising to learn that the British invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the late 1830s. 

You could say England has been at war from the Battle of Edgehill (October 1642) 

What do you define as a war? What do you define as the UK?

Take the nicely named Troubles in Northern Ireland – 30 years.

(The leftover of the Irish War of Independence 2 years has its origins in the 12th century when England invaded to create its first colony.)

As with all wars once they start the original reasons are eventually forgotten in the devastation inflicted. 

World war one started in 1914 after four years it left over 15 million people dead and set the stage for World war two six short years.

The Holocaust alone resulted in over 11 million people killed, 6 million of which were Jewish. Somewhere between 22 and 26 million men died in battle during the war. In the final act of the war, between 70,000 and 80,000 Japanese were killed when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years and 5 months.

The Falklands 10-week. 

The Gulf War six months was a war waged by coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait arising from oil pricing and production disputes.

The ongoing war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict with Israel established in 1948 continues to the present day on various levels.

Or the ongoing Al-Qaeda insurgency in Yemen now 22 years.

So here is what I have learned about the Afghan wars.

During the nineteenth century, two large European empires vied for dominance in Central Asia. In what was called the “Great Game,” the Russian Empire moved south while the British Empire moved north from its so-called crown jewel, colonial India.

Their interests collided in Afghanistan, resulting in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839 to 1842.

This resulted in a series of unsuccessful wars for the British to control Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Turkey. The British lost at all four wars — the First Anglo-Saxon War (1838), the First Anglo-Sikh War (1843), the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848) and the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878) — resulting in Russia taking control of several Khanates including Bukhara.

Following this great victory over the British, Afghanistan maintained its independence and continued to play the two European powers off of each other for three more decades.

Soviet-Afghan War.

Afghanistan is not called the “graveyard of empires” for nothing.

The Soviet-Afghan War lasted over nine years, from December 1979 to February 1989. Insurgent groups are known collectively as the mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, fought a guerrilla war against the Soviet Army and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan government, mostly in the countryside. The mujahideen groups were backed primarily by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, making it a Cold War proxy war. Between 562,000 and 2,000,000 civilians were killed and millions of Afghans fled the country as refugees, mostly to Pakistan and Iran.

More than nine years of direct involvement and occupation.

On April 27, 1978, a Soviet-supported communist government took over the country with the first Soviet deployment into Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. They had President Amin put to death because he was talking to the Yanks and installed their own leader, President Babrak Karmal.

The Soviets resorted to using napalm, poison gas and helicopter gunships against the Mujahideen – but they experienced exactly the same military scenario the Americans had done in Vietnam. 

In the years that followed, more than 870,000 Afghans were killed, three million were maimed or wounded, a million were internally displaced and over five million were forced to flee the country.

It became a source of embarrassment for the Soviet Union as the Mujahideen (a guerilla force on a holy mission for Allah) would come down from the mountains in the summer with US-supplied Stinger missiles and after around 13,000 Soviet troops were killed the Russian had had enough with the country becoming one of the poorest nations in the world. 

By 1982 some 2.8 million Afghans had sought asylum in Pakistan, and another 1.5 million had fled to Iran. The Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and many more injured. 1988 the Soviet Union signed an accord with the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and agreed to withdraw its troops.

Mikhail Gorbachev took the U.S.S.R. out of Afghanistan.

Men start growing beads and destroy all non-islamic idols and statues- al-Qaid. 

By the end of the 1980s, the Mujahideen was at war with itself in Afghanistan with hard-line Taliban fighters. The word Taliban means “students”

By 1982, the Mujahideen controlled 75% of Afghanistan despite fighting the might of the world’s second most powerful military power.

On 25 April 1992, a civil war had ignited between three, later five or six, mujahideen armies, which escalated into another full-blown conflict. By mid-1994, Kabul’s original population of two million had dropped to 500,000. In 1995–96, the new militia Taliban, supported by Pakistan and ISI, had grown to be the strongest force.

On September 2001 the 9/11 terrorist attack which the USA believed that Osama Bin Laden head of al-Qaida was the behind the attacks. The United States began bombing Afghanistan and 10 years later kill Osama.

As of August 2016, about 104,000 people have been killed in the war in Afghanistan since 2001, more than 31,000 being civilians.

With the rising of ISIS in Afghanistan, the country was plunged into a new humanitarian emergency and Afghans into a new internally displacement and the refugee crisis.

Since invading in 2001, the United States has poured more than $117 billion into Afghanistan.

The war has enjoyed bipartisan support from the beginning. Bush launched it. Obama began his administration approving a “surge” of 30,000 troops for what he called the “good war.”  

The United States went into Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks to get bin Laden, quash Al Qaeda and punish the Taliban for harbouring them. Bin Laden is dead; Al Qaeda has metastasized across the region; the Taliban have been hunted for 16 years.

Now there is no clear vision of where we’re headed.

A blank check to wage war anywhere, any time, for any length, 

To me it is quite clear with Trump “where we’re headed”—to more years of endless war without victory, wasting more lives ensnared in a war with no exit. 

So the situation isn’t complicated:

The origins of opium date as far back at 3400 B.C

There is enough opium production in Afghanistan (something the US was never truly capable of controlling or suppressing.) to ensure that the current war ends in a dream-like state and armed nation-building does not work.

Forty years might seem a long time but its nothing compared to wars back in the days when wars lasted from anything up to 700 years.

So here are few brewing for the future. 

The U.S.A. vs. Iran.

Why? 

Because of Donal Trump re-election. His inability to learn from Vietnam or Afghan that military power will mean little when drawing into a decades-long guerrilla war with factions of the Iranian regime.

Egypt vs. Ethiopia.

Why?

Because the Ethiopia Blue Nile dam is 60% completed…

Iran vs. Saudi Arabia.

Why?

Because the collapse of Lebanon, the Arab Spring, the Yemen civil war, and the Qatari blockade are all significant global geopolitical events spawned by tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two nations are already engaged in numerous proxy wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and as time goes on this list is only set to grow in size. 

North Korea vs. the U.S.A.

Why?

Because North Korea operates as a military dictatorship,

Russia vs. NATO.

Why?

Because Nato needs to justify its existence. 

The Irish have always been noted for a complete disregard for time.

Venezuelan Civil War.
 
Why?
 
Because it is safe to say things are not going too well in Venezuela.

South China Sea War.

Why?

Because it is home to 10% of the world’s fisheries and tens of billions of barrels of oil.

Amazon Apps ves Humanity 

Why?

Because we were too lazy and gave away all of our data. 

Climate War.

Why?

Because this could very well be the catalyst to end all wars. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.