Get the Facts
Sometimes, you need, you know, just the facts.
As pointed out by Stephen Prothero, taken from reviews here and here:
Just as puritanical Wahhabis refuse to accept that Sufis are proper Muslims, for example, so many evangelical and other Christians insist that Mormons lie outside the orthodox Christian fold. Some major traditions stretch the definitional limits of the word religion to the breaking point. Confucianism, and perhaps a couple other Asian traditions, would appear to have more in common with an ethical system such as stoicism than with most other religious systems, in which creeds and deities and worship are more central. So why is one called a religion and the other not?
Christians regard sin as the problem and see salvation as the solution. Muslims define the problem as pride that can only be conquered by submission. Buddhists seek to overcome suffering while Christians regard suffering as ennobling, which is why Christians aren’t trying to achieve nirvana. Buddhists, unlike Christians, aren’t looking for salvation since they don’t believe in sin. Neither do Confucians. And while Jews and Muslims speak of sin, they are not all that interested in salvation from their sins.
He also went on the Colbert Report to explain the different things each religion set out to explain, which are much more different than a layperson like me would expect.
Mercer has ranked Vienna as the city that offers the highest quality of living in 2010. In your humble blogger’s opinion, this list is useless at best, and misleading at worst. Having just gotten back from a trip from London, to say that London ranks at 39, Berlin at 17, Toronto at 16, Amsterdam at 13, versus Vienna at 1, sounds pretty unlikely to me.
By Mercer’s own fluffy standards, it is hard to say that any countries in the top 50 is better than the next when it comes to basic household ownership of appliances, or the availability of basic public transportation, or the availability of meet and vegetables.
I would guess that the reason why North American cities tend to rank rather poorly on those quality of living indexes is most likely due to the urban sprawl, relatively weaker public transportation system, increased chance of congestion and pollution due to higher ownership of cars, lower concentration of older and more prestigious art and cultural installations, and perhaps less care when it comes to more environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing urban infrastructure and architecture.
Here are some observations from my casual encounter with Vienna:
- It does not feel as safe as most other western European cities. That’s not to say that is is dangerous, but seeing homeless-ish people and young thugs with muzzled pit bulls along with a high level of police presence around subways does little to paint a picture of peace and tranquility.
- There are visible signs of greater income inequality than what I’ve encountered elsewhere. With the possible exception of Berlin, I have seen little outward appearance of income inequality in western Europe, other than Vienna. People tend to be more shoddily dressed, and looked less healthy. But of course the latter could be attributable to its meat-heavy diet.
- Vienna is not a particularly clean city. Lots of people have called London dirty. London is not dirty compared to Vienna. Read more...
Evidence seems to show that the “brain drain” effect is strong along linguistic lines, so that the income distribution along the top income brackets for a few of the largest English-speaking countries move in tandem with each other.
I wonder if the same can be found for Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America?
Are people saving more to make up for government budget shortfalls? There’s evidence to support that hypothesis.
Data from the most savings-obsessed country also supports that. It would make sense if you think about it – if you expect the government to cut back on everything from mortgage subsidies and employment benefits, to raising retirement age, healthcare co-pays and your children’s tuition fees, it would make a lot of sense to save.
And yes, all the aforementioned points are in hot debate, in preparation for the election next week in clogs country.
Unless you live in an emerging economy where the recession hasn’t hit public finances, for the rest of us that are stuck on the wrong side of the divide, it’s cutback time baby!
In the US, public deficits are still tolerated on the backs of a still troubled economy and underlying optimism that when things turn around, the coffers will fill up again. In Europe, there’s little room for such fantastically sanguine outlook. From Club Med countries that are now forced to scale back, to Britain where deficit reduction debates as one of the driving issues of next week’s election, to the northern Calvinists and Lutherans where austerity is once again on the “in” word, public spending cuts is the inevitable future.
When public spending cuts took place in Canada back in the 90s, we had school strikes every other year, and public transit strike pretty much every single year. Now the talks of cutbacks is happening again both in Canada – conservative, considering we’ve ran current account surpluses for the past 12 years, as well as here in the Netherlands.
Here are some of the ideas brain-stormed so far, the most contentious ones are the most universal – namely, healthcare and mortgage interest deduction.
Let me quickly go over both.
Healthcare reforms during the past decade have made healthcare a considerable cost in every family’s budget here in the Netherlands. During the American health reform debates, the Dutch healthcare system was held up as the system to aspire to. Coming from the land of universal (and more or less free) healthcare, I beg to differ.
In Canada (and to a lesser extent also in America), healthcare is a cost shared between the government and businesses that employ individuals. Those of us from the system knows that a job is not a job unless it comes with “benefits”, which in my experience, includes coverage for all preventative and curative dental, optometrist and other rehabilitative care. But all is not perfect. In recent years, a number of provinces in Canada now require a yearly income-tested payment from its residents, at no more than a few hundred dollars a year. Read more...
Long-term economic planning is not limited to the former USSR and China. Every country has one, and here is Europe’s version of it.
As it is everywhere else, “competitiveness” is on people’s mind.
The Lisbon agenda, the predecessor to the EU 2020 strategy that targeted Europe as the most competitive economy in the world by 2010, was a confused strategy with conflicting ambitions that silently left the centre of EU politics long before the crisis started.
Only the childishly innocent think it will be different this time. The 2020 strategy has fired up the chattering classes in Brussels. It panders to those who believe governments can steer economies to growth and that the solution to every economic problem in Europe is stronger harmonization of policy.
But despite reductionist pandering, the last 10-year-plan didn’t quite go as planned, and little has changed since then. Again, its singled-minded insistence of an imaginarily uniform market neglect the realities of internal competition within the region.
[T]he belief that one central strategy can fit the entire EU, with 27 disparate economies of different profiles and reform requirements, borders to a mentality of economic planning that can only do damage to ambitions of growth.
The second issue is assessing just exactly what Europe should be competitive in.
The 2020 strategy gives voice to a vexing conception of competitiveness that lately has been growing in Europe: the perception that competitiveness means global commercial dominance in all sectors. It is a perception that feasts on fear – a fear similar to the transatlantic doomsday notion in the 1980s that held that Japan would out-compete Europe and the United States. This time it is China, emerging markets and other fast-growers that represent the outside threat.
Now it motivates a program that aims at beefing up the competitiveness of the agricultural, industrial (heavy, light and advanced) and services sectors – of all production in Europe. In Europe’s 2020 paradigm that involves a return of industrial policy activism – the belief that governments can “pick winners” by writing cheques to coddled sectors. Read more...
In a stark, anti-Malthusian turn, demographers are increasingly subscribing to the theory of underpopulation (or at least the possibility of a flattening of population growth) for the coming decades.
There is discussion by former population apologist turned pro-natal environmentalist Stewart Brand. To put it bluntly:
So you have a youngish generation which is working like hell and not being distracted taking care of kids. And so, you get a boom….But then you pay for it later because the next generation of hard-working kids isn’t there. And as the hard-working generation, that cohort, gets older, they start to move from being productive to being dependent, and there’s not too many people for them to be dependent on, in the younger generation. And then you start to get a nation that looks like Florida.
And there’s the revelation that even women in under-developed countries are having less children, as soon as infant mortality is kept under control.
Demographers used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated and the economy got rich, as in Europe. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, where girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. They have just three children now, less than half the number their mothers had. India is even lower, at 2.8. Tell that also to the women of Brazil. In this hotbed of Catholicism, women have two children on average—and this is falling. Nothing the priests say can stop it.
[E]ven the middle east is changing. Take Iran. In the past 20 years, Iranian women have gone from having eight children to less than two—1.7 in fact—whatever the mullahs say.
Here’s Melinda Gates on Charlie Rose, confirming the same findings (can’t embed the video, bummer, but around 17:40 is where she discusses fertility and decline in birth rates in developing regions).
I found out very recently an interesting fact about religion in the Netherlands. To my previous knowledge, the country has always been predominantly Protestant, and more specifically, Calvinist. And as far as I knew, that was also the reason why the Dutch-speaking Flemings joined up with the French-speaking Walloons to form Belgium, way way back in the 19th century – because both groups were devout Catholics.
Well, this does not seem to be the case anymore. Over the years, the actual number of Catholics in the Netherlands have clearly overtaken those that count themselves as followers of the Protestant faith. Back in 1849, the country boasted more persuasive share of Protestants (59.7%) compared to Catholics (38.3%). At last count in 2005, the country is now home to 26.6% Catholics versus only 16.6% Protestants, and a growing share of Muslims. The rest have more or less got off the bandwagon of God, or as the Dutch word for secularization vividly demonstrates, ontkerkelijking, falling out of church’s way.
So given how much hostilities there is between the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons, and give how the idea of national governance has all but transformed by the existence of the EU, and the downloading of responsibilities to the local governments, the question is, why not divide up Belgium in their current form as two separate ones? The newly independent ones can then decide to remain independent by themselves, or join the neighbouring countries which they have more cultural and linguistic roots in common with?
At the moment, the country is divided along pretty clear linguistic lines. Each group has its own TV stations, parliament, schools, etc. The Dutch-languaged media outlets reports the going-ons of the Netherlands with more enthusiasm than those of its own Francophone compatriots.
It’s kind of like a Quebecois situation, except the continent of North America is not dominated by English-speakers, but instead inhabited by linguistically divided nation-states that co-exist with open borders, where local and national governments have to answer to an added layer of supra-national governmental bureaucracy, and where each group holds its own historical and cultural grudges with more vehemence and vindictiveness than having “Je me souviens” on the back of your cars. Read more...
Apologies for the radio silence. I have been overrun with a busy month at work, plus a fairly intense curriculum in the Dutch language. I will try to keep up with blogging in the coming period, although it will most likely be much spottier than before. But on the bright side, my progress in Dutch, as grudgingly slow as it may be, might bring a slightly more insider-y perspective on what is going on in this country at the moment.
The elephant in the room that the mainstream media mutters with forced restraint and off-handish contempt is Geert Wilders. The peroxide blonde belongs to the PVV (Party for Freedom), which was only created in 2004 as an off-shoot of the mainstream liberal party – the VVD. If this undercover report is any indication, 6 years on, the PVV is still a amateurishly run organization.
But operational competencies aside, the message the PVV delivered over the past few years have been consistent, disarming, and most alarmingly to the Dutch establishment, very effective. The party won first and second place, respectively, during the municipal election last week in the two municipalities it had candidates running, in Almere and the Hague.
The Dutch media, and perhaps the international media in general, slots Wilders’ electorate into the category of disgruntled and disenfranchised blue-collared natives, threatened by the shifting sands of social and economic globalization.
But that’s not really right. Wilders’ is not Haider or Le Pen, his supporter base are not the same nutty group of anti-Semitic, anti-homosexual, anti-feminist, and euroskeptic xenophobes.
Instead, listening to Wilders explaining his core beliefs and you will be overwhelmed by the amount of sense it makes. He preaches a different strand of right-wing politics that has morphed the rhetoric of his right-winged contemporaries through the distinctly Dutch filter of “anything goes”.
In Wilders’ political universe, sexual orientation and race are not the discriminating factors. In fact, his embrace of those traditional targets of right-wing politicians throw many off. Far from being an anti-Semitic, Wilders have opened declared his love and commitment to the state of Israel, and parallels the struggles of the Jewish state to the struggles of western civilization against “encroaching Islamization”. Read more...
Someone has taken a chill pill and examined whether the idea of an “Asian century” has any bearings to reality.
The way those arguments go, not so much. It turns out that advantages accumulated over centuries will not disappear over night, or even decades, for that matter.
As much as the Asian economies have shocked and awed the rest of the world in their speed of growth, a rapidly aging population, wealth disparity, income inequality, political turmoil, and the lack of any kind of “Asian consensus” will make the emergence of a united Asian block highly unlikely.
Whether measured by military prowess, education ranking, level of innovation, or simply, coolness appeal, it is doubtful that Asia will ever overtake the West. Moreover, it is arguable that the world will default to trusting the devil it knows, than the devil it doesn’t.
With Asian nations still squabbling amongst themselves, many look to the United States as a neutral power broker, a role America plays around the world. German writer and scholar Joseph Joffe calls the United States today the “default power”: No one in the world trusts anyone else to play the global hegemon, so it still falls to Washington.
Two arguments on why it won’t happen, and eve it does to a certain degree, it won’t matter.
Apparently, severe population decline is very limited to certain regions, also mentioned here last week.
There will be countries and regions that will suffer long-term depopulation due to low fertility and emigration – but a combination of the two phenomena is mostly concentrated in eastern Europe, particularly in eastern Germany, Bulgaria and Ukraine. But the European population will also continue to age, and some demographers predict that babies born in the first decade of this century will live to an average age of 100.
And size is not always proportional to influence, if that’s really the concern at hand.
Since the late 19th century, when a massive decline in birth rates began in most of Europe, some demographers and long-forgotten futurologists have been busy envisioning an inevitable demise of Europe and “western civilisation”. However, it is not population size but affluence and technology that make some countries more powerful than others. Switzerland, with a population of 8 million, is globally more significant than, say, Bangladesh, with a population 20 times larger.
For the last couple of weeks, Australia has been trading barbs with India, on a series of what were deemed racially motivated attacks on Indian students studying in the country.
So who are those Indian students getting attacked?
Melbourne has been attracting Indian students in large numbers, but they are mostly enrolled in vocational courses—like cookery or hair-dressing and hospitality—offered by colleges operating from a few rooms in buildings located in the central business district or suburbs.
The students in these institutions are from rural Punjab or small towns from other parts of north India. Their principal motivation isn’t education. They are here to acquire “PR” or “Permanent Residency”, for which one must have stayed in Australia for at least two years. Egging them on are the agents in India, weaving the alluring Australian dream but omitting to mention other criteria a PR candidate must fulfil. Buying this dream are mostly Indians from poorer economic backgrounds, doomed to feel alienated in kangaroo country.
And attackers?
Salaem says it isn’t the white Australians who are attacking Indians. He blames the violence on those who have migrated from Muslim countries or Africa. But he concedes that the government’s open-door immigration policy has created enormous problems for white Australians. “The government’s education policy of getting students from India and other countries is depriving our local boys a chance to get into universities.”
So economic insecurities combined with a sudden large infusion of foreign population from a single source, with little efforts and policies directed towards integration creates frictions. Where have we seen this before?
The World Cup is coming to South Africa. A lot of beers will be drank, and a lot of illegal sex will be had.
This is a country where young girls and women (and no doubt boys and men as well) walk the street, a major sporting event the like of World Cup will add a not-so-welcomed boost to its sex industry.
Unlike the last World Cup held in Germany, where prostitution was legal, and thus controlled, South Africa is the wild wild west. And business is booming for human traffickers.
From a recent Time report:
While South Africa invests billions to prepare its infrastructure for the half-million visitors expected to attend, tens of thousands of children have become ensnared in sexual slavery, and those who profit from their abuse are also preparing for the tournament. … The children, sold for as little as $45, can earn more than $600 per night for their captors. “I’m really looking forward to doing more business during the World Cup,” said a trafficker.
And this kind of attitude from the president of the country does not help.
Jacob Zuma practices polygamy, and has now just admitted to fathering his 20th child – and not from one of his 3 wives either.
In a country where 20% of its population are HIV-positive, the campaign against unprotected sex with multiple partners is not just a matter of social and ethical etiquette, it’s pretty much a matter of national security. For someone in Zuma’s position to publicly flaunt the policy-line, and engage in behaviour that so many global agencies and NGOs are trying to dissuade the African citizenries from, it’s pretty despicable.
I’m a bit late here, but finally got to watch this today. This was not some run-of-the-mill documentary that over-promise and under-deliver on implied shocking footage, with disclaimers of violence and language plastered all over the blandness.
This was genuinely shocking, disturbing, and at times, revolting.
Location: Monrovia, Liberia.
In the first ten minutes, you see corrugated shacks with no sanitation, with people shitting along the beaches, 10-year-old boy hooked on crack and talking about raping pregnant women, the most abysmal looking brothel with blood splatters on the wall. You hear about the massive amounts of weapons still scattered around the city, with rebels ready to pounce on the precarious peace as soon as the UN peacekeepers leave. You hear a guy rapping about AIDS, hear some shocking statistics – 4th poorest country, where 70% of its women have been raped at some point or another.
And, yes, you see actual footage of cannibalism.
The UN mission is scheduled to leave September 15 of this year. If and when they do – although extensions look likely, will Liberia’s post-apocalyptic wasteland tumble even further into the inferno?
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