29 September 2017
Haaretz: Israel Is Arming Criminals
Despite the UN stating that Myanmar’s army is carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya Muslim minority, Israel refuses to stop selling arms to the country’s military. Israel is doing so despite the fact that the European Union and the United States have both banned arms sales to Myanmar, making it the only Western nation supplying the country formerly known as Burma with weapons. [...]
In the part of the hearing held behind closed doors, the state’s representatives explained Israel’s relations with Myanmar to the justices. It is unclear why the state is concealing information from its citizens about the factors it uses to conduct trade. Even in the open part of the hearing, the state refused to say that Israel would stop selling weapons to Myanmar. [...]
Lieberman is lying. This is not the first time that Israel has taken such a course of action. It lied when it supported war crimes in Argentina, ignoring the American embargo, and it lied when it armed the Bosnian forces that perpetrated massacres, ignoring a UN embargo. It armed the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and the Contras in Nicaragua, and it is arming the forces of evil in South Sudan.
Jakub Marian: Average hours worked per worker per week in Europe
The following map shows the number of hours workers in each country work per week, on average, including both full-time and part-time workers. It based on the following table by OECD (2016).
Here’s the methodology used: The total number of hours worked in the year 2016 in each country is divided by the number of people who worked during that year (which is what the OECD table shows) and then it is divided by 52.14 (the number of weeks in a typical year). The result is then rounded.
The quantity shown in the map is unusual in that it is not immediately clear whether higher or lower numbers are better. However, since the number of hours worked is negatively correlated with other economic indicators that are generally considered positive, such as GDP per capita, I decided to show low numbers in green and high numbers in red: [...]
For comparison, other OECD members scored as follows (with the same methodology): Canada 33, Japan 33, United States 34, New Zealand 34, Israel 36, Chile 38, Korea 40, Mexico 43.
IFLScience: The Mystery Of The Vanishing People Of Easter Island Just Got A Lot Weirder
When the Dutch arrived on Easter Island in 1722, they estimated a population size of 1,500 to 3,000 people. Even then, they expressed bewilderment at how such a tiny population could create the giant stone statues that the island is famous for.
But current ethnographic and archeological evidence suggests the population wasn't always as small as it was when the Europeans found it, and just last week a group of academics gave us the best estimate so far. Based on the island's farming potential, they calculated a peak population size of 17,500. The results were published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. [...]
The team discovered that 19 percent of the island could have been used to grow sweet potatoes, the Islanders' primary food crop. By looking at birth and death rates and how they are affected by food availability, the researchers worked out how many people could have survived on the island.
28 September 2017
The New Yorker: What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?
Recently, I travelled to Myanmar and interviewed dozens of people to assess what had gone wrong. Many of them pointed out that Suu Kyi’s power is sharply limited. She has no authority over the Army, while military officers still control key areas of government and have the power to reverse democratic reforms. Some believe that she has made a political calculation not to risk domestic popularity for the sake of a hated and powerless minority; others regard her as lacking political skills. There are also those who think that she shares the Army’s authoritarian reflexes and the anti-Muslim prejudices of the Buddhist Bamar majority. But almost everyone I talked to expressed surprise at the speed and the scale of her transformation. “We never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would get us this far,” a former student activist and political prisoner who once served as her bodyguard told me. “But, at the same time, we never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would have changed so much herself once she got into power.” [...]
Last week, I met with Wai Wai Nu again, but outside Myanmar. She now believed that her people might be facing extinction. She told me she worried that there was a plan to drive the entire Rohingya community from the country. She had been monitoring Burmese social media, and was horrified by what she read. Burmese officials were saying that mass rape couldn’t have occurred because Rohingya women were too filthy. “Because the civilian government is saying these things, people are becoming more and more full of hate,” Wai Wai Nu said. “Before, it was a military dictatorship, so no one believed them when they said awful things. But now it’s the civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi saying these ignorant things and that legitimizes the hate.” [...]
Buddhist ultranationalism has eroded the center ground of Burmese politics. In the 2015 elections, the N.L.D., anxious to avoid accusations that it was a “Muslim party,” refused to field a single Muslim candidate. For the first time since independence, no Muslims currently serve in parliament. And Suu Kyi’s government has made no attempt to revoke laws that limit the number of children Muslims can have and that create obstacles for marriages between Muslim men and Buddhist women. [...]
He was right that Suu Kyi has little alternative but to work with the people she once campaigned against. The euphoria that surrounded her ascent obscured how extensive the military’s power remains. The Army controls the ministries for defense, home affairs, and border affairs, and a quarter of the seats in parliament are reserved for men in uniform. Even ministries that are in civilian hands, such as finance, are full of holdovers from the previous regime, and much of the country’s budget is reserved for military use. Myanmar’s constitution, written by the military in 2008, presents additional difficulties. It allows the Army to declare a state of emergency and seize power, and it also contains a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the Presidency. (Her current official title, State Counsellor, is a workaround.) Suu Kyi wants to amend the Constitution and become President, but this requires military support. Her defenders often cite the precariousness of her constitutional position as a reason for her reluctance to speak out about Army abuses. While pushing the military for constitutional reform, she must also avoid antagonism and a return to military rule. [...]
“Aung San Suu Kyi has the benefit of having become an icon without saying a whole lot,” Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Havel came to his position by saying a lot, by being a moral voice. Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t say much at all. She was a moral symbol, and we read into that symbol certain virtues, which turned out to be wrong when she actually began speaking.” Suu Kyi was not an intellectual, like Havel, or a freedom fighter, like Mandela, or an organizer, like Walesa. And, unlike her father, she did not die before her legend could be tarnished.
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