Categories
Conflict & disaster

[2498] The Syrian frustration

I know I said no to foreign military intervention in Libya when its civil war erupted. I reasoned that such intervention would rob legitimacy from any success out of the rebellion against the Gaddafi administration. In retrospect, I vastly underestimated the popularity of the rebellion. Foreign intervention did not matter much in determining the perceived legitimacy of the new government. Even if foreign ground troops were deployed in Libya to aid the rebellion which did not happen, I would think these foreign soldiers would be greeted enthusiastically by most Libyans. Once I realized this, I decided to support the intervention. Besides, the Gaddafi government itself received foreign military aid, and even had foreigners fighting for him. The NATO/UN action seemed justified in a tit-for-tat logic. In the end, I am glad the situation in Libya turned out as it has panned out, with or without foreign intervention. What is happening in Libya so far has been very liberal when compared to its history and its neighbors.

Libya has to rebuild their country and it has a long way to go. The relevant point here is that the military struggle has ended.

Not for Syria though. What happened in Libya is happening in Syria. Protests erupted. The government used force against the protestors. Some protestors picked up armed and fought back in an organized manner. The Syrian rebels have not been as successful as their Libyan counterparts had before NATO/UN intervened so far. Its evolution is almost the same, except this time, the UN Security Council is divided. That makes foreign military intervention impossible, if not hard.

I am tempted to repeat the same argument about legitimacy, popularity and foreign military intervention in Syria. At the back of my mind however is the success of the Libyan model and if the UNSC had passed the resolution, it would probably pave the way toward foreign military intervention and I would support the intervention in favor of the rebels.

But the UNSC did not pass the resolution to call among other, for the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. For me, that is a barrier towards support for the intervention.

The Syrian case added a new dimension to the issue of military intervention, or rather it accentuated it. It highlights the importance of not only the organic legitimacy of the rebellion at the expense of the incumbent dictatorial government but also international legitimacy. Libya had both. Syria has only one so far. As a sidetrack, Iraq had none (nevertheless, after all that has been said and done, I think the Iraq episode is a success story and I find it hard to deride the invasion of Iraq as I had in the past. That does not mean the invasion was legitimate though).

In the statist world that we live in, we definitely do not want countries to simply conduct hostile military action in foreign soil regardless of its justification, apart from explicit self-defense. That would mean an overly chaotic world. There has to be a check-and-balance mechanism and however flawed the UNSC is, it is one that prevents the strong from bullying the weak so blatantly. That is not to say the bullying does not happen (remember Russia and Georgia in 2008?) but the system does provide some needed discouragement.

The realist in us will realize that the UNSC is all about politics and not idealism. Russia has interest in maintaining the status quo in Syria. News reports cite that Syria is Russia’s only open ally in the region amid an either an increasingly independent Arab states, or pro-US states like Saudi Arabia and other smaller Gulf states. The fall of the Assad government may benefit the US, especially when the US is siding with the rebel forces.

Regardless of the benefits the US may gain, that does not negate the liberal impetus for the intervention and that is the protection of individual liberty which is clearly being trampled over.

The point of all this is that I want a military intervention.

But the consensual approach in the UNSC does appeal to libertarian non-interventionist foreign policy. It is a bit convoluted and can be contradictory but as I have written a long time ago, it is true that pure Ron Paul’s non-interventionism ignores violation of liberty outside of the border of a liberal state. That is a problem for me but it is also a practical approach to the fact that liberal states cannot fight tyranny everywhere out of economic reality. The UNSC with it consensual approach makes non-interventionism a default position.

But in the case of Syria, it frustrates me as a libertarian. The very libertarian foreign policy comes with a trade-off with another very libertarian principle.

Categories
Politics & government

[2497] When the middle path is a waste of time

Amid opposing positions, political centrists have the tendency to stake the middle ground. It is a compromise that appears sensible on the surface. Sometimes, it can be sensible deep down in a substantial way. It can even be the best path forward.

Not always though. Not all compromises are sensible and it can be even outright nonsense. A chronic centrist would do so anyway, and then has the gall to call those who see a square peg in a round hole as extremists.

There is no guarantee that centrism equates sensibility. Sensibility depends on an entirely different consideration altogether. It might very well be the seemingly extreme position that is the most sensible and right.

A chronic centrist does not believe that. He is a person who works like a mindless average machine. Take any two diametrical positions, average it out and there you go: a solution. Move on to the next issue, take any two positions, average it out and then there you go again: another solution. It goes on and on forever.

They rarely make introspection of the averaged positions. There is no thinking behind it, except some kind of blind elementary arithmetic applied onto issues in the public sphere. The only real argument they have to offer is that the middle path is a compromise. A win-win some would say. And a compromise is always a virtue, so say the centrists, who are also probably self-proclaimed political moderates.

Of course there are compromises that need to be made on a case-by-case basis. We live in a society where give and take has to happen and where we end up treading along the middle path. It indeed happens every day.

A musician practicing his trade living next to a neighbor who likes a quiet evening would have to talk to each other so that both can live comfortably without too much bad blood, for instance. On a bigger more concrete scale, the relevant landowners in Kuala Lumpur, the developer of the Mass Rapid Transit system and the government have to compromise to get the project going.

Or maybe in election seat negotiations among parties which have a common interest to defeat yet another party by combining resources instead of fighting each other, it is in their best interest to reach an amicable solution and refrain from engaging in wasteful squabbling.

By contrast, there are principles and ideas that cannot be violated. If a thief steals an apple from a person, one does not cut the apple to give half of the fruit to the thief and the other half to the owner. That is injustice. If a racist proposes a policy and a liberal advocates the opposite view, one does not just write a compromised policy that is half racist, half liberal. That is confusion. There is nothing sensible about such an unjust confused judgment.

It is a half-measure that the mindless and the gutless would take. The mechanical, automatic centrist is mindless because he does not make sense. He is gutless because he takes no real position. The centrist is an automaton. Feed in the input. Average it out. There you go: a moderated position.

We do not need automatons to solve our problems. We especially do not need mindless, gutless, automatic centrists to do the thinking for us. They tell us nothing of value. We need thinking beings, ones who reason from some position of principle, inducing and deducing through tough propositions to reach well thought-out conclusions. This is stuff that is likely beyond the mental capability of these automatic, mechanical centrists.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
First published in The Malaysian Insider on January 30 2012.

Categories
Economics

[2496] Taylor’s OPR (more proof we did not need that stimulus)

Since the Monetary Policy Committee will be meeting next week, it is only natural to talk about the Overnight Policy Rate. It currently stands at 3.00% and it is likely to stay like that after the MPC meet. I personally (and professionally!) am betting a cut only in March as I think while inflationary pressure is receding, it is still high. Maybe, there is a bias in that expectation. What can I say?

But what would a customized Taylor’s rule say?

This particular Taylor’s rule is imperfect as the “equilibria” are somewhat squishy and not quite as methodical as I would like it to be, but in the coming weeks I should be able to calculate better coefficients to produce better hypothetical rate to compare with the actual OPR.

But observing the preliminary customized Taylor’s rule of mine, the OPR does seem to lag behind the rule. When I met some officials and economists from the Malaysian central bank a month or two back, they cheekily said they would not reveal the “natural rates”. The next time I meet them, I plan to cheekily share with them my Taylor’s rule, and say “you don’t have to tell me because I can read your mind.”

What I find interesting is that during the last recession, the Taylor’s rule suggests that Malaysia would have been in some kind of liquidity trap if the OPR had followed the rule closely. More interestingly, since the monetary policy was tight during that time, it could have been loosened more, leaving little if any need for  the 2008/2009 fiscal stimulus. Yet another proof against the Najib administration’s fiscal stimulus (or non-stimulus as Mr. Hisham, I would imagine, would put it).

Categories
Books, essays and others History & heritage Science & technology Society

[2495] Thought so highly that they kept 161,600,000 of it!

Fun-quotation-that-has-something-to-do-with-Australia:

…he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he had contracted the mysterious microbe.

This incident sounds bizarrely one-of-a-kind and of no possible broader significance. In fact, it illustrates an enormous subject of great importance: human diseases of animal origin. Very few of us love sheep in the carnal sense that this patient did. But most of us platonically love our pet animals such as our dogs and cats. As a society, we certainly appear to have an inordinate fondness for sheep and other livestock, to judge from the vast numbers of them that we keep. For example, at the time of a recent census, Australia’s 17,085,400 people thought so highly of sheep that they kept 161,600,000 of them.

Some of us adults, and even more of our children, pick up infectious diseases from our pets. Usually they remain no more than a nuisance, but a few have evolved into something far more serious… [Guns, Gems, and Steel. Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock. Page 196. Jared Diamond. 1999]

Happy Australia Day!

Categories
Politics & government

[2494] Cheapening transformation

Transformation is a big word. It is not some word that should be used lightly. Use it too often for the smallest of things, it will turn into a cliché and it will lose its meaning soon afterwards. In Malaysia, that is already happening with all the stress on transforming Malaysia under the 1Malaysia banner.

And so, in conferring an award to Prime Minister Najib Razak, World Chinese Economic Forum’s Michael Yeoh said, “[y]ou have contributed significantly to the transformation of the Malaysian nation.”[1]

Transformation of the Malaysian nation?

With the ETP appearing stalling or at more kindly put, going slowly, economic liberalization halted halfway through, along with half-baked realization of the September 15 announcement of the so-called political transformation program, and moreover, not even 3 years in office, I would think there is hardly anything that could be transformed. Tweak yes, but transform? Far from it.

Remember, transformation is a big word. It connotes an action that changed something completely into something else. Maybe the ETP has it right when it uses (and overuses) the word transform. At least, the objective of being (yet another overused phrase) high-income nation suggests a completely different Malaysian economic reality that prevails today.

A moth into a butterfly, that is transformation. Ass to a donkey? Maybe not so.

In the past three years, what transformation have we seen? Is Malaysia today any different that in 2009? Some potholes in the city have been there even before the PM assumed office with Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s mandate. It will not take a transformation to cover the potholes. Yet, here we are living in transformation, so claimed Michael Yeoh.

You cheapen the word Mr. Yeoh. But I guess, since everybody uses it so cheaply, it does not hurt much. How more cheaply can the cliché get, eh?

A mere less-than-three-years, and Mr. Yeoh and the WCEF granted the PM a lifetime award.

If anything, the supposedly transformation has hardly begun in earnest. The jury is still out there but Mr. Yeoh and the WCEF have jumped the gun. Overwrought, them.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved
[1] — PUTRAJAYA, Jan 25 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak was crowned today the “Father of Moderation and Transformation” by the World Chinese Economic Forum (WCEF), which said the prime minister’s “fair and just leadership” had benefited the Chinese community “tremendously”.

Najib was also conferred the “Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award” by the WCEF for his work and commitment towards transforming Malaysia.

“You (Najib) have contributed significantly to the transformation of the Malaysian nation.

“The Chinese community has benefitted tremendously from you for your fair and just leadership,” WCEF chairman Datuk Michael Yeoh said in his speech at the conferment ceremony here today. [Chinese economic group calls Najib ”˜Father of Transformation and Moderation’. Clara Chooi. The Malaysian Insider. January 25 2011]