Well That Went By Quickly : Best and Worst of 2012

As this is the last 2012 post for Academy, I believe it's appropriate to become a little bit nostalgic. This year has been big for Academy and it's all because of you, the readers. Before I get on with my list of the best and worst of the year, I would like to thank you all for taking the time to read this real first year of Academy's existence. Without you, I'd merely have a pointless soapbox on which to stand on. 

Anyway, onward with the list. 

Best of 2012

Women Representing Arab Countries at the Olympics

London had one very important job while hosting the Olympics this year; make its mark in Olympic history as the country that had to follow China's Olympic opening. They did so, not with Danny Boyle but instead with Sarah Attar. Ms. Attar was the first female athletic representative from Saudi Arabia to ever compete in the Olympics, and was part of a swell of women athletes from countries that are historically tied to not encouraging such a behavior. But Saudi Arabia did not stop at one female competitor as Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani also competed in women's judo. This came after what could only be described as a Saudi internal scuffle between conservatives on twitter and dazed Saudi Olympic officials sprang up conversation as to whether or not women could even be allowed to practice sports and be seen in sporting events at all by the general public. Thankfully for viewers of the Olympics and the brave girls who didn't let internet trolls get to them, they were allowed to compete and they showed the rest of the world that progress for women's rights is indeed possible anywhere, even at the Olympics. If there ever was a question as to whether or not the Olympics serves as a greater purpose than the sports themselves, you can cite 2012 as one prime example of the power of humanism that the Olympics are able to evoke, even under obtuse circumstances.

Mario Draghi Keeping them Honest

Let's be frank, the Eurozone has been severely crippled by this economic downturn more by political inactivity than by a lack of a recovery. Everywhere in the Eurozone, you have leaders that have had to broker agreements between their interest groups, their weakened parties and coalitions, their people, the rest of Europe and the banks. This has led to mixed results across Europe. Germany teetered on dropping out of the Euro until the German courts decided to bite the Nth bullet for the Euro by backing the bailout fund in September. Italy decided to politically implode in the later months of 2012 by destroying a technocratic government and pushing for elections which will pit an unelectable former communist against an electable former felon, if only to add a bit of drama to the scene. To top it all off, Greece checked its balance sheets in February of this year and came to the conclusion that the recovery was going to cost slightly more and take more time, hinting at a possible third bailout later in the year. Is there a rock to be found among these tall waves? Mr. Draghi is probably the closest thing to it. For the entirety of 2012, financial news like this one depicting Mr. Draghi's honesty about the health (or lack thereof) of the Eurozone injected a sense of humanity when many state leaders looking to justify higher emergency taxes were wary of explaining to their people exactly why their taxes had gone up. If anything, Mr. Draghi's honest approach is constantly extending a political lifeline to EU leaders looking to use this crisis as a way to strengthen bonds between nations and ensure that future crises like this one are managed better with greater tools in the EU toolkit. 

Coalition of the Outnumbered

The 2012 American Presidential Election told pollsters everywhere (except for perhaps Nate Silver) that this time around it wasn't the economy, stupid. Instead, it was all about offering an honest progressive package to minority voters on the part of the Obama team. The electoral college landslide and the popular vote win that ensued was painted by some Republicans as being proof of promising gifts as Gov. Romney put it to those constituents, but the fact of the matter is that the Democratic ticket merely involved minorities in the conversation about what progressive reform looked like in 2012, whereas the Republicans opted to avoid the issue altogether on ideological and moral grounds. More importantly, the Obama campaign won the heart-vote, that gut instinct that simply cannot be persuaded by numbers alone, of these constituencies. Instead of alienating Latinos with talk of heavy deportation or alienating African Americans by enacting "voter-fraud" turned "vote-suppression" laws like the Republicans did, Democrats were much more moderate in their rousing of the base, making their platform effectively more centrist and more approachable. Why does the coalition then make it on the list of the best of 2012? Simply because regardless of what either campaign said or promised, it still was up to them to give President Obama the victory by going to the polls. Some mailed them in, others sat in lines for hours even after the election was called simply because they believed in what they were doing. Their vote is more than just a political expression, it's their stake in a rapidly demographically changed country, and that is something to celebrate regardless of what party you come from. 

Worst of 2012

Taliban Assassination Attempt of Malala Yousafzai

The Taliban are not nice people. This much is evident. They proved this fact earlier this year when they attempted to assassinate Malala Yousafzai in October in an effort to silence her call for greater rights for girls. The backlash that the Taliban received in Pakistan was not enough to derail it, but it was enough to genuinely challenge their notion of being right about suppressing women's rights in Pakistan. It takes a real idiot to think that creating a martyr for an opposing cause will prove fruitful, but it takes a real coward to do so by trying to shoot a little girl. If only by the grace of God Malala was able survive the attack, let alone recover in Britain in the months following, only adding on to the failure of the Taliban attack and their supposed need to take out a little girl. I really do wish that once Malala is fully recovered that she go back to Pakistan, even with death threats still out there for her, and continue her work of giving women a voice in life under the Taliban, and remind the twisted cowards who tried to kill her that they essentially failed in all facets of their plan and have been reduced to child killers instead of the religious warriors they make themselves out to be.

Benghazi Consulate Attack

I have been meaning to return to this topic ever since more intelligence came in, but I have had to postpone it for more pressing issues that needed to be covered. Here you can read what I had to say about the attack in the days that followed, but I figure that this needs a final wrap up here. The terrorist attack that unfolded that night told the world three things. One, that terrorism is still alive. It may not be as strong as it once was, but radical militant elements of the Jihadi sort are still quite operational in some parts of the world, especially where unrest is high as it is in new Libya's Benghazi. Two, the United States needs to drastically re-evaluate its preparedness for defense of its diplomatic missions in hot-spots around the world. This is being made evident by murmurs coming from Senate hearings as well as the raised levels of unrest in the Arab world after the Arab Spring as mentioned before. This seems like a simple fix but in reality it raises a lot of separate issues. For example, what does something like the Fiscal Cliff say about funding for diplomatic mission security? Also what sort of message do extra armed forces surrounding diplomatic missions say to host countries and their populations? The worst part of this is that all these questions must be answered on a country-by-country basis, multiplying the severity of the challenge. Thirdly and lastly, in this new world of ours, are diplomats safe as they once were? Historically speaking, diplomats have always been regarded as untouchable entities of foreign states. They were to be treated as gold dust, but in a world where there are constantly new questions about the rules of war and who follows them, are diplomats inherently safe anymore? This question unfortunately will be answered with time, but here's to hoping that diplomats of any country are still regarded as off-limits by combatants. 

Anti-Scientists

The title is a bit obscure, but anti-scientists are exactly what they sound like. They are people that inherently doubt expert opinions on concepts that they find obscure or unimportant in the realm of science. 2012 has been an absolute treasure chest in terms of scientific advances and discovery, for instance the Higgs Boson particle was discovered this July, giving researchers a depth of the universe like never before. Meanwhile on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover landed much to the relief and joy of NASA scientists and began transmitting an insane amount of information about a foreign planet millions of miles across the solar system to Earth. While all that was going on, there were still people who doubted and belittled the work of these scientists who spend their lives giving hard meaning to everyone else's lives. Those sorts of people are the ones who really drag humanity through the mud instead of helping everyone else raise it and try to avoid getting dirty for no reason. Even worse, many are proud of their skepticism to such a tee that they run on it as political platforms. If it wasn't for scientists' logic-induced stoicism, I'd hate to wonder what sort of contraption they would come up with to try to teach these anti-scientists a lesson. Fortunately, scientists have better things to do than worry about what some people who shy away from enlightenment have to say or think; they just keep going, discovering wonderful things about our universe and our world that deserve amazing praise day in and day out. In 2013, let's try to be a little more trusting of the people who have done their work on problems of the universe instead of taking the easy way out and criticizing from the get-go.

And so here we are, at the end of what has been a fantastic year for this blog and I truly hope your readership as well. I wish you all a wonderful New Year and hope to see you back here on Academy in 2013. 

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Grow Up About Gun Control; A Serious Talk on Why Guns Are Such An Issue In the United States

There are few things that can really be considered tough to talk about. I don't necessarily mean tough in the sense that the content material is too difficult or too sensitive, but instead tough as in the potential the topic creates for tangents of different political leanings to take up and effectively take off with, rendering the initial topic mute to the world. Gun rights in the United States are one such topic. To the right, talking about whether or not people have the right to own guns is immediately taken as the first domino in a series of quickly falling rights, leading to a cataclysmic showdown with the federal government in the second Civil War. To the left talking about whether or not people have the right to own guns quickly becomes a starting point for first bashing the NRA and subsequently any "evil" right-wing interest group with ties in Washington.

Against my better judgement, I'd like to try to foresee those tangents and ask that anyone reading this abandon prejudices for the sake of having a real conversation about gun rights and gun control. This conversation doesn't need to include the NRA, nor does it need to include talks of secession. It needs to be able to stop, look at the gun attacks we've had this year and say that lives were lost due to some sort of error down the line of people purchasing, owning, and keeping guns. So let's start from the top.

Is there an absolute human right to own a gun? I'm tempted to say yes, but not on grounds of divine intervention (I don't think God cares one way or another whether or not you own a .308, the same way he doesn't care if you own a Ford Taurus), nor on grounds of state endowment of a right to own a gun (states have historically struggled with the idea of "rights by majority" and "rights by necessity") so we can't really use either as an argument for or against. There is simply too much subjectivity on both sides to successfully garner an objective answer. Perhaps the right to own a gun falls under a category of owning any other thing that may be dangerous. But there is something to be said about a difference between owning a handgun and owning a firecracker, so maybe ownership of dangerous things does not quite take into account the scope of owning firearms. What I can say is this; ownership of any thing could in theory be fine if that thing is not putting anyone in danger of any negative externality.

Perhaps then ownership of any thing really comes down to a utilitarian approach; a "do least harm" sort of idea where even a nuclear weapon would be theoretically legal to own should it pose no objective threats to anyone else. So is that the case with firearms? I can imagine that to some extents, this rule does not really apply. There are some types of firearms that overstate their purpose of providing hunting or defense interests, in the sense that it would be, not trying to be cruel here, virtually overkill. For instance, a military grade fully automatic M16 is overkill whether you take it hunting or keep it at home to ware off petty burglars. This overkill extends itself to being dangerous to the public should it fall into the wrong hands. So in a certain sense, ownership of some weapons, while endorsing rights of ownership do not provide an adequate utilitarian response for the danger they inherently provide as firearms always do (to the extent of their power obviously).

On the opposite side of the coin, most firearm ownership is very much insufficient when it comes to satisfying what in the U.S at least is the second portion of the second amendment. If the allowance of a militia is to be interpreted as private citizens having a fighting chance against a tyrannical government, then that particular portion of the second amendment may as well be null and void. There is simply no way that armed citizenry can width-stand the force of the entire American army. There isn't even a sense of having an honorable end to it all because of the  use of airstrikes or drones don't make it a fair fight. Better yet, there is historical evidence of people having tried to enforce that second amendment against the federal government and having failed even when the technology gap was much smaller; see Civil War.

Either way then whether to maintain rights of ownership or rights of defense, having highly capable and consequently very dangerous weapons available to the general public seem to bring present danger with little tangible positives to be found.

BJS - Homicides 1974-2004

So then what of less capable, perhaps less dangerous firearms like for instance pistols? Yes, the capacity for these weapons to inflict unwarranted damage has a much lower rate than rifles or automatic weapons so they are definitely safer on an individual basis. But the Bureau of Justice has shown that between 1976 and 2004 homicides by handguns are incredibly higher than any other sort of weaponry used in such cases. So while handguns theoretically offer less danger in terms of bullets per second or bullets fired, we cannot ignore the fact that the statistics make handguns the most deadly of any sort of weapon in the United States.

Is this because there is an amendment allowing citizens to keep weapons? Not quite. Execute a quick Wikipedia search like I did and you will find that other countries with some sort of acceptance of the right to bear arms have lower per capita gun related deaths than the U.S. Is this because the United States has a deep gun culture? Not really. In that same list from before, many countries have rich gun-making histories yet significantly lower gun related deaths than the U.S. What could it possibly be then?

The answer I believe lies somewhere outside statistics. It sounds strange, knowing that the more objective proof you have of a phenomenon the more reason you should have to believe in it but if that were the case then this problem would have been resolved by now. I am also fairly confident that it doesn't start at the societal level either; there is no "Godlessness" that is forcing evil onto the U.S nor have video games ever brought about slaughter of innocents in real life (only ignorance to individual problems have caused that).

At the end of the day, I believe it all comes down to a mixture of different issues, explaining exactly why this issue is so contentious. It is not divisive because there are rights of people at stake or because there isn't a good enough scapegoat. It is divisive because so many relatively small issues feed onto themselves in a continuous feedback loop ever promoting the issue; the trouble is nobody knows where to start fixing it. I will describe it as follows.

You, a normal human being, have an inherent sense of duty to protect yourself. As a citizen, as a business owner, or as a crook, you know that the best form of defense that is accessible, cheap, and effective is a gun. You can go to your local Walmart right now and check that fact yourself. Now in theory there is nothing wrong with that; nobody should tell you your life isn't worth protecting. The feedback loop starts when everyone begins walking around with a gun given the fact that guns are readily accessible. People are not thick, they pick up on the fact that everyone else has the same opportunity to have a gun as a form of protection. So, like the very first caveman who realized his caveman neighbor could also pick up a rock, the "modern caveman" quickly begins looking for a much bigger gun. What happens next is right up Adam Smith's alley; someone decides that seeing as how everyone is in the market for better guns, there's money to be made in all this. So gun companies begin to cash in on this very big demand. Again, nothing wrong with exposing a high demand market.

But when that market starts to produce items that in some way shape or form fall through the cracks and into the hands of those not looking to protect themselves but instead looking to cause havoc among us, that creates a big problem. Ironically, the only logical response anyone can have to knowledge of this fact is to go out and buy more guns in order to protect him or herself from these criminals. So, the loop becomes bigger, and more guns end up getting on both the regular market and the darker markets. Fear leads to more guns leads to more fear and back again it goes. Compounding that loop are the intangibles of society that tend to provide the most hurt of all when applied to loose weapons; the mentally unstable, the gun shop owner looking to make a quick buck instead of screening correctly, the lobbyist looking to keep gun companies out of the loop entirely, all throw wrenches in an already malfunctioning system.

Is there a solution to all this? Perhaps you can start by looking at whether or not the gun control laws that are in effect already are being looked after in a good way. Then you can start to see where the holes really are. Is there a place that has gun control laws on the books but isn't doing much to solve the issue? Well then perhaps it's time for a reassessment of that particular community. Is there a place where gun control has worked? If so, what can that particular community tell us about what works well? Also, considering that no law abiding citizen who owns a gun would use that gun to murder someone (hence the "law abiding" characteristic) what objection would they have to registering their firearm with their local police station, or perhaps their state? We've already ruled out hiding the possibility of a massive pro-gun insurgency and we've eliminated criminality from law abiding gun carriers, so what is the issue with forcing gun owners to tell others that they do indeed have a gun which they would never use for nefarious purposes?

Gun registration would also help keep unregistered firearms from ending up in the wrong hands (assuming hefty prison time would be served for such an offense by both the owner and the dealer of the gun). But for this to work there needs to be a more open dialogue between the individual and the state with regards to the liberties of the individual and how the state is trying to help them maintain said liberties. There is a characterization of anti-establishment, anti-government, pro-conspiracy theory Americans out there among us which to some extent is as true as the foil of that very characterization, but that all stems from poor efforts on both sides to reach a consensus on what the government is there for. Essentially, there needs to be an abandonment of this overblown individualism in exchange for legal assurance of both physical defense and defense of rights.

With that sort of transaction, gun politics can begin to become a thing of the past. There will still be generations who would never agree to these sorts of things on archaic principles alone, but if they truly believe in a robust sense of individualism then they will allow the loss of some privacy for the gain of many spared lives who otherwise would never have had a chance of experiencing individualism at all. It is a societal trade, but it is a trade that should be done for the sake of innocents everywhere. Historically speaking self protection and the right to correct injustices have slowly been handed over to the state as dangers have been proved to be neutralized by the state itself. The attitude of some living in the United States needs to follow on this trend, because it is their justified fear that drives the issues we still have today.

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Where's The Manual for This Thing? Arab Spring and Democracy in the Middle East

If 2011 was the sunrise of the Arab Spring, 2012 might very well be the third time the snooze button has been violently slammed in an attempt to not leave a very comfortable dream. Before the Arab Spring's day will be over, many years will have passed, but those that we have seen so far have created more questions than anyone could ever have anticipated. Recent events in Egypt and the ongoing civil war in Syria have not just asked questions about what democracy would look like in an Islamic setting, but also what democracy means for sectarian struggles in each specific country. Regardless of what you make of these bits of news, one thing is certain; democracy does not come naturally to the Middle East.

There is a special distinction to be made here. Democracy does not come naturally to the Middle East, not the people of the Middle East. It seems odd to think that genetics have anything to do with understanding the concept of Democracy. What instead might have something to say about how well Democracy sticks is the culture that gives way to it. Democracy cannot be considered just a form of government or a heavy ideal. It is, for better or worse, a culture in its own right, always at odds with the state of the current level of Conservatism that roots itself in mainly socio-religious camps. Historically Democracy has always followed this path. The very start of Democracy in ancient Athens was a fight between the conveniently named Democrats who wanted to maintain a democracy and Conservatives who wanted to maintain an oligarchy that supported the status quo. It should not come as a surprise that this is still the way in which Democracy is practiced in parts of the world that have adopted it and for the most part strive to perfect the idea.

But to get from Athens to Venice to Cromwellian England to the United States and supposedly to the United Nations, you need several hundreds of years to, putting it lightly, work out some kinks. Concerns regarding who could vote, who could work, who could learn, who could own property, and even who could be considered to be a human being were all questions that society at one point answered at the very slow pace of generational turnover. Needless to say the secular portion of Democracy was not built overnight. The important thing to remember is that it was indeed built, and today's Democracy is not only more flexible in its approach to modern issues of inclusiveness, but it is without a doubt the moving force rather than the reactionary force it once was. Conservatism is still its foil, but it is no longer its oppressive parent.

That being said, this is a very narrow and concise view of Democracy as it transgressed in the Western World. It is enough though to draw sharp comparisons between the history of the Western World and that of the Islamic World in order to explain why Democracy is having such a troubled and violent period of integration in the latter.

For one, there has never been an expansion of popular rights in traditionally Islamic countries. This has for a long time been wrongly attributed to the "Islamic" portion of that particular phrase when instead the emphasis should have been on the "countries" portion. The greatest changes in the way people saw rights and entitlement to social benefits (to be completely cautious, social benefits here does not connote modern social benefits such as retirement security, healthcare, etc., but instead to benefit from a functioning society through complete access to services and goods as citizens) came about between the Renaissance and the First World War. In this time Western cultures established the precedent and procedures for extending rights of citizenship and humanity to demographics that lacked them.

At the same time, the Muslim world was really one world; the Ottoman Empire. Because of its relative power, its internal stability, and half-baked tolerance, there was very little reason for anyone to think of expanding political rights and inclusion. Because the situation for many was just "good enough" for so long, there was no emphasis that mirrored the truly terrible conditions of feudalism and its social remnants that lingered into the age of mercantilism in Europe. The Ottoman millet system allowed for major religions to have their own space within the Ottoman empire, something European states struggled for a long time to achieve. Although Jews and Christians were considered lesser than their Muslim counterparts, they were still subject to their own religious laws and could carry out their cultures without significant if any interference (so long as they remained loyal subjects of course). The major point to begotten out of this is the following; the Ottoman tolerance was enough to stifle any calls for more tolerance, but its lack of updating caused it to slowly become more draconian in nature when put up against European suffrage movements.

The greater part of the 20th century continues the same motif of the state not being conducive to changing of social tendencies if you look at what happened after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. While civil rights were being sorted in the United States, European powers were slowly but surely returning their Middle Eastern play-things to the global toy-box. The only problem was who do you put in charge of colonies that you are abandoning? De facto dictators seemed to be their best bet in most places. These dictators however were not state-builders, they were status-quo maintainers (if there is such a thing). Because of this, sectarian issues that European powers neglected when drawing the lines were never planned to be resolved. Instead, the ruling class normally made it a point to establish itself as the indisputable leader not out of religious fervor but instead to simply remain in power often not for the sake of being in power but instead for the sake of being alive.

Fast forward to just before the Arab Spring, you found yourself with countries formerly under Ottoman rule, currently under dictatorships, and with stagnation at the middle to lower class level. Essentially, you found yourself with countries that had an outdated understanding of tolerance, ruled by those hellbent on maintaining the status quo supporting a cultural struggle that had it not been for an error in judgement would have never happened. Of course rage had to have been the most appropriate answer given the lack of a system of governmental turnover. But the changes in the Middle East were not made to secularize the countries involved, they were made to expand the number of people who could benefit under the current socio-political system. 

The Arab Spring was never about instituting Democracy over-night, instead it was made to retake resources, both tangible and not, from the few political elite who had them and disperse them to traditional family leaders of the more powerful cultural castes. There were more banners calling for respect of the "people" than banners calling for an expansion of who can be considered "people". The reason is not that Muslim majorities cannot possibly be tolerant; there are almost infinite cases of this in countries outside the Middle East. Instead it is because there is no cultural history shared among any of the people living in these states that points to an expansion of tolerance, only the maintaining of whatever tolerance is already in play. Without this history, the whole idea of secularization simply escapes most of the people in the Middle East, citizens and leaders included, making the prospect of true democratization much further away than it was anticipated. 

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