Saturday, 2 March 2024

FROM this week’s news ON: politics & democracy, and international affairs [Note: Content Warning - links to distressing reports on this topic. Reader discretion is advised]

Note: CONTENT WARNING - some of this content is about upsetting, disturbing or triggering events & attitudes. Seek competent help - including professional - if you need it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that linked articles may contains names and/or images of deceased people. READER CAUTION IS RECOMMENDED! For anyone distressed by anything in this post, or for any other reason considering seeking support, resources are available in Australia here, here, and here. In other nations, you will have to do an Internet search using terms such as “mental health support - <your nation>” (which, for instance, may lead to this, this, and this, in the USA, or this, this, and this, in France [biased towards English-language - my apologies]), or perhaps try https://www.befrienders.org/. 

Note: in my “from the news” posts, quotes are shown italicised and blue, my comments are in a different shade of blue, and “good” items are shown in green. I have loosely grouped the posts where such seemed reasonable, but that is subjective (i.e., my opinion - others are free to disagree), and challenging, as some posts belong in multiple “groups”.

From thiis week’s news on politics & democracy, and international affairs (note: I may continue to add links for a few days, possibly up to a week, after these are published), and noting the conflicts, listed here, for instance, and other global issues, such as those listed here, that may not have made it into this weeks news: 

  • “Deadlock over disarmament ‘not acceptable’: Guterres”   https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/02/1146962   “Amid geopolitical divides, arms competition, increasingly dangerous new technologies and an elevated nuclear risk, the Secretary-General ... highlighted his concern that the UN Conference on Disarmament is consistently failing to deliver.”   

 

  • “In PNG, weapons meant to keep the peace have been leaking to warlords for decades. Now, they're used in massacres”   https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-01/png-weapons-aid-australia-united-states-used-in-tribal-fight/103505728   “When Papua New Guinea became an independent nation, its new police force and military needed weapons.   They needed to hold the monopoly of force in order to secure the country.   But tribal allegiances are stronger than those to a nation state”   The article suggests videos showing military-grade small arms should have warned authorities of the risk   


 

 


  • “Alan Kohler: An idea Milton Friedman could never, ever grasp – ‘social licence’”   https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2024/02/26/kohler-business-social-licence   “I never believed in the Friedman doctrine. Even as an 18-year-old cadet it seemed to me that companies were nothing more than the people in them, indistinguishable from them, and those people have social responsibilities ....   Fifty four years later those truths are more evident than ever.   ...   The warnings of Karl Polanyi were ignored ... that economies (and businesses, by implication) are embedded in society and can’t be separated ... [and] that free-market liberalism makes demands on people that are not sustainable”         “The Fijian myth of the greedy god - Raiana McKinney and Esther Wozniak”   https://youtu.be/CBWgOe8HsV0?si=v5hjMjb5fx6SqCc1   Well told - and some good teaching on attitudes that some still need to learn ...         “The Side Hustle Bait and Switch”   https://joanwestenberg.medium.com/the-side-hustle-bait-and-switch-d64ee8e9aa08   “Exhausted, Broke and Still Hustling: The New Normal   It’s no coincidence that the “side hustle” economy has grown exponentially at the same time that corporate profits have hit 70-year highs while wage growth has hit a 40-year low. A cynic might call the confluence deliberate.”  


 

From the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s (International IDEA)  Global State of Democracy (GSOD)’s democracy tracker initiative: 

for the month of  January, 2024  (note that this is a few weeks behind current events owing to the time required to collect and analyse data - the newsletter was headed “Waves of reforms impacting citizenship and voting rights”):  

improvements have occurred (last month) in (for details follow each hyperlink):   Chad,   Germany,   India,   Montenegro,   Netherlands,   North Macedonia,   Spain,   Tanzania,   UK,

declines have occurred (last month) in (for details follow each hyperlink):  Comoros,   Cyprus,   France,   Guatemala,   Iran,   Ireland,   Ecuador,   Kyrgyzstan,   Nicaragua,   Pakistan,   PNG,   South Korea,   Russia,   Serbia,   South Sudan,   Sri Lanka,   Sweden,   Thailand,   Venezuela,   Palestine,  


From ACLED’s dashboard: 

For the week   17-23 February   (note that this is several weeks behind current events owing to the time required to collect and analyse data):  

Large decrease in violence: Colombia,   Venezuela,   Niger,   Nigeria,   Cameroon,   South Sudan,    Kenya,   Burundi,   Mozambique,   Madagascar,   Iran,   Pakistan,   India,  

Moderate increase in violence:  Puerto Rico,   the Philippines,  

Large increase in violence:  Ethiopia,   Honduras,   Haiti,   Trinidad and Tobago,  


From the Early (mass atrocity) Warning Project  map:

Currently experiencing mass killing:  Nigeria,   CAR,   DRC,   Sudan,   South Sudan,   Ethiopia,   Somalia,   Iraq,   Syria,   Pakistan,   India,   the Philippines,

Highest risk:    also Afghanistan and Yemen  

Increasing Risk:    Burkina Faso and Tajikistan  


From the International Crisis Group’s monthly Crisis Watch: 

Current Crises:   Afghanistan, Central Sahel, China, North Korea, DRC, Ethiopia, Haiti, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela  

Imminent Risk:   Cameroon, CAR, South Sudan, and Yemen  


My links for activism post may aid any activism you may decide to do on any/all of these. If you do, don’t get too fixated on specific instances of problems - important though they may well be: take a moment to also consider the broader issues these incidents and groups of incidents may suggest/reveal. Note: as with other mass murderers/serial killers/and the like, violent extremists and other evil people/groups crave publicity, so I refuse to give that to them - including not using their names (which is a policy adopted by good law enforcement and media for other mass murderers - as I can do as I am a secondary news source: the name(s) are in the primary sources if people wish to know them).

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

  • this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

  • there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  • I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below.

Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/  

 

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