Cyreenik Says
This thought is inspired by a 7 Oct 13 Forbes editorial, Poland's Piggish Pols--They're Not Alone by Steve Forbes, which talks about yet another confiscation of a community's savings by populist politicians. As the article points out, this confiscation of various kinds of savings by politicans and other rulers is almost routine. When I look back through history, I see it looks routine, but not regular. The question of this article is: Why do the savers, the victims, routinely let this happen? It is rare for these savers to take to the streets with noisy protesting and bring down the people and governments that do this?
At this stage I don't have a good answer. My guess is that even though the savers are getting whacked hard, they figure they will do better in the long run by holding their tempers. They figure they can save it again, if the community says orderly. If it falls into chaos caused by their active and vigorous outrage they lose even bigger.
But that's a guess. In the meantime, this remains a pressure point that most leaders know about, and ruthless ones are quite willing to exploit.
The terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya is a big, elaborate, surprising and scary event. It is comparable in scale to the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. This means it will be interesting to watch its effects on influencing people: How will its ability to influence compare to WTC's? This 27 Sep 13 BBC News article, Militants 'hired Kenyan mall shop' by Karen Allen, provides some early followup details.
Let's compare magnitudes.
| Westgate, Kenya | World Trade Center, NYC | |
| Casualties | 67 plus 61 missing | about 3,000 |
| Damage done | iconic shopping mall trashed | airplanes and iconic skyscraper complex trashed |
| Duration | 4 days with lots of shooting | 1 day, no shooting |
| Planning | elaborate, 15 gunmen plus... | elaborate, 19 hijackers plus... |
| Media response | moderate | just incredible! |
| Public response | we shall see, we shall see... | just incredible! the "war on terror decade" (my term) |
o The Westgate attack is big, but an order of magnitude smaller in damage done and casualties created.
o The kind of damage done at Westgate was more conventional than that done at WTC -- Westgate was guns and hostages and shooting up stuff -- WTC was flying jet planes into iconic skyscrapers.
o Both were preceded by elaborate planning.
o Westgate is a cultural center in Kenya, but not well-known around the world.
The press coverage of Westgate in the US has been modest. Even though this has been about some serious "bleeding", it hasn't been "leading". I find this surprising, but good.
Now, over the next year, we get to see what Kenya, the US, and the world's response will be to this event. That too will be interesting.
Update: This 28 Sep 13 Economist article, A different country, gives a more in-depth recap, and talks about the people's and politicians' response. Not surprisingly, it sure sounds like the early days of 9-11.
This thought was inspired by a 22 Sep 13 Huffpost book review, 8 Reasons Straight Men Don't Want To Get Married by Helen Smith, in which she describes why men's enthusiasm for marriage has declined over the last decade. From the article, "'According to Pew Research Center, the share of women ages eighteen to thirty-four that say having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in their lives rose nine percentage points since 1997--from 28 percent to 37%. For men, the opposite occurred. The share voicing this opinion dropped, from 35 percent to 29 percent.' Why?"
This decline is important, not just for the institution of marriage, but because it also reflects on enfranchisement in society as well. It is a symptom of decline in supporting what I call The Sacred Masculine. (I write more about it here) Men and women do think differently and one difference is the propensity to cooperate. As the rules of the game for marriage and divorce get unattractive, men are quite willing to cut bait on this institution. The dark side is they can also be cutting bait on being productive members of society -- "loner" is an easy mentality for men to support.
The result of lower enfranchisement is hard on society. It means a lot less progress. By comparison, during the nineties America added a lot of women to the work force. They became more enfranchised and we had a long, productive boom. Now in the 2010's our social actions taken in the name of fairness and income-leveling seem to be promoting men into leaving the workforce -- the women came, now the men leave. It's not surprising the economy is sputtering instead of exciting, and we are having deep problems educating our children to be both effective and enfranchised.
This is something we need to be paying a lot more attention to. If in supporting the interests of various equalities and rights we choose to not make marriage attractive for men, then we need to be actively searching for and creating other ways of socializing both men and women. In particular, we need to be coming up with new ways to socialize and enfranchise those who are child-raising. We need child raisers enfranchisement to stay high so that they can do the best child-raising possible for their kids. This is a rising tide issue: everyone benefits when all our children get better educations.
It has happened with little fanfare. This 11 Sep 13 Xinhua article, Seoul, Pyongyang agree to fully reopen Kaesong complex, announces that North and South Korea have agreed to fully reopen the Kaesong industrial complex in North Korea. This is a special economic zone where South Korean companies manufacture using North Korean labor. This was shut down in April during North Korea's last round of Saber-Rattling Theater. It's a welcome breath of pragmatism, and not unexpected given North Korean leadership's bipolar nature. What I wonder about is what benefit the South Korean companies see in reestablishing this strange relationship? Then again, this start-stop-start environment may be about as capricious as strike-happy unions or bribe-hungry officials, so it many not seem as strange to the South Korean companies as it does to me.
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