But I bet the spin is "how horrible these awful transnational corporations/capitalists are!" and not a word said about how these people would rather break up ships by hand than farming the land they have farmed for thousands of years.
And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the question "would these people have better lifes if these ships weren't sent to Chittagong?" isn't asked. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
But it seems to me you're the one who's projecting a lot here: farming the land they have farmed for thousands of years. How do you know this?
There's overpopulation, as linca says. There are quite probably social distinctions that mean some families may have too little land or animals to live off. And there may well be - as was for long the case in Europe - a family structure in which some sons at least have to go off to "seek their fortune" or more prosaically go where they hear you can get $1.50 a day shipbreaking.
Generalising about subsistence farming on this basis seems a stretch. (And my comments are not meant to defend dirt-poor subsistence farming either: just that subsistence farming on which you can subsist is surely not "unimaginably awful"). When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
Some don't have any at all. Not all lower castes were for farmers... *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
We can also look back at our own history. In 19th century Europe people left the countryside en masse for the horrible industrial cities, because the cities were less horrible than the alternative.
And eventually, things got better. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
What's meant by "romanticising" the third world farmer, and who do you believe is doing it?
The C18 Agricultural Revolution began in England, where the move to the cities was not a flight of peasants from the land that they were desperate to get away from, but a result of the Enclosures, which destroyed by privatisation the previous mode of agricultural production.
The idea that "things got better" when heaps of people were living in exploited filth in C19 industrial cities, compared to rural poverty, is so potty I think you're just trying to stir it up. Right? When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
And then there is the promise of opportunity. Capitalism is indeed good in providing great opportunities, to relatively few eventually. People apparently like to make a lottery choice, even with substantial life-size risks. Concentrating on success stories while ignoring silent evidence of loosers is one of those logical fallacies that Taleb talks in "The Black Swan".
And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the question "would these people have better lifes if these ships weren't sent to Chittagong?" isn't asked.
Because it's largely irrelevant. The gangster-capitalist argument of "all else being equal, would you prefer a job with a trans-nat to no job" is nonsense, because all other things need not be equal. Assuming that they are denies the power of political progress. So no, I don't want to stop sending shipwrecks to India, full stop. I want to stop sending shipwrecks to India and instead pay the then-unemployed workers with some of the largesse captured by the trans-nat fatcats.
- Jake Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam
Look at South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe for that matter. And then contrast it with all the countries that never got anywhere, and look at the ones that are now at last moving forward, and ask yourself what they have done to get moving. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
You're really now in danger of endorsing that exploitation as some kind of necessary step on the road to all-industrial progess. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
Would make a nice pair of argumentations with redstar's. *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
But there is some truth in what you two are complaining about: we will not all be equal until economically we are equal, and we won't get there without letting the developing world develop. We keep talking about gini coefficients and applying them haphazardly (to countries, for instance, rather than regions or, ultimately, the world itself). We will not achieve peace, imho, until we are thinking about gini in terms of global equality, and not intra-national equality. And we don't get there by blinking our eyes, and tapping our feet, and wishing liberal christian democracy and euro-centric values on the developing world.
The question then becomes which development models are the most humane and effective and here, there is room for a lot of argument.
most of the migrating rural people, at the time of the Enclosures, weren't flocking joyously, spontaneously from farmsteads to the cities... They Wuz Pushed. with intent. so that others could consolidate the land into vast private estates, so that others could exploit the labour of the dispossessed -- who were now abjectly dependent on the money economy for the barest necessities of life and hence forever under the thumb of the money-lords. same process still going on today as the tide of Enclosure and the cash-crop plantation system reaches all around the world. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
