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Here’s a nice dilemma for Lefties. What if UN peacekeepers in the Congo turn out to have been encouraging elephant poaching ? Would they continue to give the organisation their unconditional support? Elephant poaching in Africa: sanctioned by the UN? The UN gets away with an extraordinary amount . Because it is thought to embody a lofty ideal, many liberal-minded people are prepared to overlook what it actually does. Never mind that it betrayed the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Never mind that its officials were illicitly running oil-for-food scams with Saddam. Never mind that it ordered its local commander not to seize the arms caches that were about to be used for the Rwandan genocide. Never mind that its officials have now been accused of selling arms to the Congolese militias . At l
Posted by:
WindSon
05-May-2008 12:51
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blogs.telegraph.co.uk
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Category:
Culture/ Society/ Morality
05-May-2008 12:51
Source:
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
Type:
Blog
Category:
Culture/ Society/ Morality
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39 Comments
The UN is garbage.
No, but it only has the value that we (and other sovereign nations) place on it’s policies. I also think the domination of the few superpowers of the world take away from the weight of the policies it does make.
I don’t think the article has enough substance without the links to grant its opinion merit.
The problem with ivory is that it is not a renewable resource when it comes to individual elephants. Trying to protect them wholesale would be the only way to keep their numbers from dwindling. All of the nations with elephant populations desperately need any kind of capital. If we provided that capital, or programs that give the actual needs of the population- food, water, shelter- in exchange for protection of the elephants, the outcome would be much more beneficial than a simple resource oriented policy from the local government. The problem is that you have to make the living elephant worth much more than the dead one. That represents a net capital loss for any proposed program, but hopefully a gain for the populace in the short and long runs.
I assure you that this time battlecat is right – the UN is garbage because the ability to be an “observer” has no risk in it – the UN never takes any risks and without risks…no rewards. They “observed” in Kosovo for years, in Lebanon…hey they even filmed the last 3 israeli soldiers kiddnaped and didn’t budge – useless organization
You’re only talking about their “police force.” And yeah, that’s pretty useless. But as a forum for discussion and global consensus, it works pretty well.
I’m sorry, you’re going to have to define “works pretty well”, then. Certainly not on any rational cost-benefit basis. It’s a hugely expensive paliative to the conscience of those who believe that talking about problems is the same thing as solving them. It’s an opaque bureaucracy and subject to all of the corruption and cronyism that always accompanies opaque bureaucracies.
Cost benefit? Not the realm of democracy.
As a palliative, yes talking about the cure is equivalent to the solution to those interested in the solution- inasmuch as not talking about them does not constitute a cure.
It is an opaque bureaucracy, but that can be fixed.
Uh. I’ve never heard that democracy was somehow antithetical to cost-benefit analyses nor that it is immune to it. Since democracies are the home of the world’s free(ish) markets, I’d have to say that if anything democracy lends itself to and encourages cost-benefit analyses.
That said, I’m wondering about this equation you keep making between the UN and democracy. Since when is the UN in any way a democracy? Because it includes voting? You might as well call a corporation a democracy because shareholders vote. The UN is a collection of representatives from the leaders of many countries around the world. Here’s a clue: representing leaders is not at all the same as representing people. Given the number of countries in the UN lead by dictators and other tyrants, the UN functions as much as an anti-democratic institution as it does a democratic one. I see no reason to give a collection of tyrants any more power than they’ve already managed to wrest from their poor citizens. Certainly not through a body with the track record of the UN.
I have to admit that I’m interested in your (to me blind) assertion that the opacity of the UN can be fixed. How? Forgive me for not simply taking your word for it. And here’s the thing: as long as the UN remains as opaque as it is, I can see no reason to trust it to do any good thing. Any at all. So how about if we get back together once that pesky opacity is fixed? Because as long as it remains the haven for corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats it is today, it will be unworthy of the trust and funds (let alone faith) it currently possesses.
Democracies are harbors for cost-benefit analysis because they start with the basic assumption that rules out wantonly bartering with human lives.
The UN is not a democracy. It is, in a way, equivalent to a democracy of nations. I believe that any rational reform of the UN should include more democratic institutions.
I’m definitely not qualified to take on the task of making the UN less opaque. I’m not qualified to do the same for the US government. But I feel qualified enough to analyze any proposals to do so. I hope you would agree that our government has the same opacity as the UN, but that it can be trusted to an extent, and that it can and should be made more open.
What?!? I most certainly do not agree that the US government is as opaque as the UN. That’s an important part of my point. The US has checks and balances. The UN just has checks—mostly blank ones made out to “cash” signed by the US…
Let’s be clear- are we talking about:
1. Obscurity; impenetrability.
or
2. Dullness of mind.
I think that it is clear that we are 1. Certainly, I don’t believe in 2.
We have secret agencies. We have defense initiatives that require secrecy. We secretly monitor phone calls. The UN is nowhere near that level of opacity.
Oh please. Are you seriously telling me that you can’t distinguish between the US secret services that have oversight committees and whistle-blower policies to protect those who report abuses and the UN’s current operating procedure that has neither? The US secret services and military initiatives aren’t obscure or impenetrable. They’re secret. There’s a difference and an important one. And just to be perfectly clear here, I’ll spell it out explicitly: secrecy is used to keep unauthorized people from knowing something while obscurity and impenetrability are used to keep those who are authorized from knowing something.
Further, even if every conspiracy theory and wild-eyed accusation about the US secret services were true, they’d still be a very small part of the US government as a whole. Which means that your equation inherently discounts FOIA, the GAO, whistle-blower laws, and a culture that priveleges disclosure. Equating the US government with the UN is like equating the US military to the mafia because they both carry guns and sometimes kill people on purpose. Come to think of it, your line of reasoning is exactly like that used by people who make that exact comparison…
Also, show me a military in the history of the world that didn’t require secrecy for their initiatives and I’ll show you a military whose presence was violent, bloody, and above all short.
Classic example(s) of what you are talking about.Iran-Contra,Watergate in the US and Oil for Food UN.
I’m going dizzy trying to decipher that.
Oh gads. Do you seriously believe that giving all dictatorships and fascists more control would help?!? I’m sorry, but that’s just incredibly naive. Have you seen the kinds of things that the US, UK, and even France have been busy vetoing? Just look into any resolution passed by the farce in the Human Rights Commission (whatever label it’s wearing these days).
And I’m sorry, but you couldn’t be more wrong about the elephants. Giving South African nations money and food and water doesn’t remove the desire to exploit the elephants because the elephants would still be available. There are two (and only two) ways to help the elephants. One is to remove them physically from danger. That is impractical so you’re really only left with one way.
The only way to “protect” the elephants is to give the individual nations an interest in the long term health of the species. Right now, with the UN asserting control with outright harvesting bans, you have an extreme incentive to get as much as you can get away with short-term because there is no legitimate way to profit from them long-term. Yeah, I’m talking about what amounts to treating elephants as a farmer would. There’s a reason cows aren’t endangered…
Technically, there’d be a third way to help elephants and that’s with artificial ivory production. I’m not sure that’s even feasible, but as ivory prices go up, the incentive to produce synthetic ivory will rise as well.
In any case, the meddling of the UN is counter productive at best and directly harmful at worst. Which is kind of typical of that organization.
I believe giving people more control would help. Weight their votes by the level of democracy in the nation.
The more I think about it, the more hopeless it seems.
A conditional program would have to provide more benefit than the component value of the elephant AND the amount it consumes. For every individual.
Removal is difficult enough to seem ridiculous.
Farming still won’t help if the elephants are worth more dead. You don’t have to feed wild elephants.
Artificial ivory is just a poor knockoff. If you can detect that it’s artificial, there will be a market for the real stuff.
Removing the value from ivory is just about the only thing you can do to prevent it from being harvested.
See, I’m not sure that elephants are worth more dead if you actually owned the elephant. It’s a certainty, though, that someone else’s elephant is worth more to me dead if I can kill it and take its tusks. Give me ownership of the elephant (and its offspring) and we can start doing the math. Right now, nobody seems willing to seriously explore anything like this for whatever misguided reasons.
I’m not sure that artificial ivory is even possible. And I’m not denying that there would still be a market for the real stuff. I’m just saying that the market would likely diverge if people can get “good enough” at a substantial discount, thus taking a lot of the pressure off the real thing.
I’m not sure either. But wild elephants are worth infinitely more dead. Owned elephants are at least a liability, and before you invest any food in them, they are still worth more dead than alive.
Good enough is not good enough for the wealthiest. The privilege of authenticity has a premium for those who can afford it.
Infinitely? Now that’s just a silly statement. A live elephant that you own has at a minimum the future value of it’s tusks. A dead elephant that you own has the very finite value of those same tusks. The only question is if it makes sense as an investment to breed them instead of collecting the tusks immediately. Wisely handled, I suspect that the answer is yes. Particularly if, as is clearly the case, demand is growing and the price of ivory continually rising. Heck, someone who owns ivory of any kind benefits from hanging onto it for as long as the price of the commodity climbs at a higher rate than comparable investments. That rise alone will cover the cost of maintaining a live animal even if you ignore the potential to breed more.
Also, I can’t say that I’m impressed much by what looks to me like raw class envy. It comes across to me as petty and a bit bigotted. The demand for ivory from the “wealthiest” is minuscule. It’s the growing middle class in China that is spiking the ivory price.
But for the tusks to be utilized, the elephant must be dead.
I’m not trying to insert class into this. I’m saying that you or I might settle for a print of the Mona Lisa. Maybe have a good living painter make a replica. But it’s not the image that concerns the collector- it’s the authenticity.
I don’t envy the ability to purchase the authentic. I’m of the digital generation- the copy is effectively the original to me.
Arm the elephants.
What? They already have an unfair limb advantage!
This is the best suggestion so far. Genius.
Amen. Four legs is too many.
Fuck the UN. I can’t think of anything useful it’s ever done. Except delude many people into thinking more advanced societies won’t bilk less advanced ones whenever they get the chance. Hey, wait a minute, that’s a useful thing it does all the time. It screws over the poor part of the world on our behalf, while claiming to help them.
Elephant farming is ridiculous. Africans can’t farm them like cows. They can’t even farm cows like cows.
By listening to how most people talk about solving Africa’s problems you’d think no one noticed it’s a fucking wasteland. Things human beings need are in short supply over there. Well I guess if all you know about Africa is what you learned from Christian Children’s Fund commercials…
I know the concept of scarcity is hard to comprehend. We don’t know shit about resource shortages. To us a food crisis is when McDonald’s won’t let us buy more than 8 cheeseburgers for 67 cents.
In Africa there is not enough usable land. A billion people live on 12 million square miles. North America has 500 million people on 10 million square miles. Our farming methods don’t rape the land nearly as badly.
And what reason do we have to fix it? None! What could we possibly gain from having all those people sucking up the Earth’s precious resources? Better to just observe as they reduce their own population to a sustainable level. Permanent members of the UN security council gain nothing by solving problems there. They just want to sound like they don’t want the chaos in Africa to continue.
Living up to the latter half of your name?
Why not teach better farming methods? They could use less of the world’s expendable resources by more effectively using renewable resources.
Why should we fix it? They’re human beings, goddammit.
Well said! Except that I’d ship the UN to Darfur. Maybe the idiots would finally notice the place.
If you mean rather than the Hague I am 100% behind you. When do they start packing?
Yeah, that’s great. That’s the kind of lip service we like to hear. That’s exactly what I’d say if I didn’t have the pseudo anonymity this web site provides.
By all means, help them out. Go teach them how to farm. $20k can provide a village with a source of water. You can make a real difference, and I’m not being sarcastic. If you can’t afford to fund a well then you can always sponsor a child. It’ll make you feel good. That is after all why people really do such things – to make themselves feel good.
The ugly truth is that the people who make up the rich nations would slaughter every person on that God forsaken continent if we had anything to gain by doing so. The way our leaders behave reflects this.
“They’re human beings” hasn’t been a very compelling reason to any human society so far. Unfortunately you will need to come up with a better reason if you want the greater public to take action.
The problem with “that God forsaken continent” is the governments of those countries.If they all had democracies we wouldn’t even be having these discussions.