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The purpose of this blog is to allow me to record my journey, the formation of the No New Wars organisation (whatever form that may take), the Eleven Eleven Twenty-Eighteen campaign and the supporting resources and networks of people and organisations.

This idea crystallised for me in 2012 when I decided it was not enough to be angry about wars being started in my name (that is, by my government) that I could not prevent.  Instead I would do something.  Not march with a banner, or send a letter to my MP, or write to the embassy of the enemy state, but instead stop the war in the first place.

I realised that I could not stop foreign countries starting wars.  But I can do something to influence my own government.  I could start a movement that makes it clear to our politicians that we do not want war, and that we will make them pay if they start one.

In a democracy we have only one tool available: our vote.  If enough of us pledge to remove our vote from any politician promoting an unjust, illegal or unnecessary war and to instead give that vote to an opponent, then we can make the politicians and major political parties too frightened to want to start a war.

It does not even need many of us to sign up to this.  In many constituencies it would only take about half of the MP’s majority to take the pledge to make the MP realise their next election might be their last.  And if people who do not vote – which is most of us – sign this pledge saying we will turn up and make a protest vote, it will make the political parties sit up and think about the consequences of the actions of a few war mongers.

I haven’t done the sums in detail, but if this campaign had been in place by 2003 when the 2nd Gulf War started, and if just 1% of the electorate had signed this pledge, then 170,00 non-voters voting against Labour plus 1% of Labour voters voting for either of the other major parties, would have resulted in Labour losing the 2005 General Election.

Between 750,000 (Police figures) and 2,000,000 (organisers’ figures) people marched in London alone to protest against the 2nd Gulf War.  Just 400,000 registered voters making a pledge would have more effect.

We actually can stop wars from starting by targeting the real cause: politicians who want to start a war.  By telling them we as voters will end their political career and wreck their party’s future prospects of power at the same time.

Would you consider war prevention a big enough cause to change your vote, or to make you go out and vote?

Scarcity of food, overpopulation and CO₂ production

The artificial fertiliser market is worth about $400 billion dollars. Those involved do not want to see that reduced!

Over 50% of that market is production of 200 million tonnes of nitrogenous fertiliser each year.  That fertilizer is required to feed our over-populated planet. Half the world’s population relies on artificial fertiliser.

8 billion people on the planet, half needing that fertiliser. That is about 50 kilos each or 1 kilogramme of fertiliser per person per week.

Each additional person increases the demand. When we have gone from 8 billion to 12 billion people, the fertiliser need will have doubled. The market will have doubled too. Ker-ching!

(Oh, heck. We’re at 8.1 billion people already. I thought we only just heard it was 8.0 billion.)

Production of nitrogenous fertiliser is energy intensive. It is responsible for 2.1% of greenhouse gas emissions. A 50% increase in the population will double those emissions.

To feed our over-sized population, we are using artificial nitrogenous fertiliser, which is a carbon-industry product.

For our population to keep growing we must increase our CO₂ production.

This is why some people keep saying “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TO, umm, thinks, there must be something, oh yeah, LOOK AFTER YOU WHEN YOU ARE OLD!!!!

The carbon industry would love there to be more people on the planet, because without the carbon-based fuels, they would starve to death. Ker-ching!

Eat up your petroleum (and coal and gas) products people! Om, nom, nom!

This is going to get very ugly within a couple of decades.  Seriously, we are so doomed unless we do something about climate change and our increasing overpopulation.

Statistics, Propaganda and Social Media

The first casualty of war is the truth.

Not just the first, but throughout and after.

I saw yet another comment on social media about the death toll in Gaza at the hands of the IDF being unreliable.  I explained how they are checked and considered reliable.  The person replied saying

Despite the statistical anomalies.

How many people reading or posting on social media are good at research, media analysis and statistical analysis? I was trained in the latter a long time ago and qualified in social science research more recently. I like to think I have a fair idea how to check this stuff and the academic marks I got tended to agree.

So, let’s look for sources for statistical anomalies in the Gaza death tolls reporting. They are almost all Jewish media or Israeli media. So there is bias in the reporting if only those sources are doing so.

Checking those articles, they are referring either to one source, or to another media article also using that one source or other media sites using the Jewish or Israeli sites as their source. So this is not widespread conclusion of differing groups, but of one individual.

The source is Abraham Wyner who produced a paper which was published as “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”. It is unusual for an academic title to be editorialised like that. It implies he was starting with a conclusion and looking for the evidence to support it, which is a red flag. So, who agrees with him?

The Gazan death figures, the underlying data on names and ID numbers and the method used to count them, have been analysed by media organisations, academic research departments, mathematicians and social scientists all of whom have been satisfied they are accurate.

He is one lone exception. Could he be right and everyone else wrong?

In his blog a Bit of DNA, mathematician Lior Pachter wrote ‘A note on “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”’. In this he explains how Wyner carefully chose a specific 15 day sample, used graphs arranged as cumulative rather than an x-y plot to mislead, and took advantage of how the statistics come in batches from verification of ID numbers to provide the false answer he sought. If you go through the comments on that post by other specialists, you’ll get explanations of how Wyner was able to produce his misleading article.  It is more to do with how the data is passed from hospitals to be checked and then on for reporting and it being done in batches, and then utilising that fact to identify a cherry-picked sample to suggest all the data is wrong.

(During the Covid-19 pandemic it was noted how few people died at the weekend but lots on Mondays, suggesting the numbers were false.  That was because admin people like me, in the hospitals providing the statistics to National health England, don’t tend to work at weekends.  So the stats for Monday included Saturday and Sunday.  A similar thing happens with how the identification records of the Gazan victims are validated in batches.)

So, the one person challenging the figures has been debunked.

tl:dr: The source of the statistical anomaly suggestion has been debunked. That one poor source It is used, however, by biased sources as counter-propaganda to claim the death toll figures are false, when they are, actually, very reliable.  This poor journalism is then picked up and repeated across the Internet as if it were truth.  And so people propagate the view that killing in war is acceptable because they don’t have to think about the victims because the numbers might be dodgy.

It is amazing the harm can be caused by one bad academic + rubbish journalism + biased media + poorly educated people + social media.

The Study of International Relations

This is a summary of my notes from 12th October 2018 in Major Approaches to the Study of International Relations at Lancaster University.

International Relations – IR – is the name of both the practice and the academic discipline.  It started after The Great War an an attempt to use reasoned debate to develop common interests.  The original IR scholars were liberal internationalists.

Sometimes it is about relations between actors, sometimes the processes.  It is transdisciplinary.  It is eclectic.

The theories help, but can always be criticised in their coverage or assumptions.  The theories let you see better, but also distort part of reality.  All the theories have merits, all have weaknesses.  One needs to be able to criticise them all.  It is a contested discipline. The theories are commensurable: they allow one to see the same world differently and explain different aspects.

Questions posed by IR:

  • Are humans egoist (devoted to their own interests and advancement) or perfectible (capable of being made perfect, improvable)?
  • Is the international system anarchical or an international society?

There are no political opinions in IR.

 

Goodbye tinyurl.com and goodbye to your spam

One of the most useful resources for spammers is the link shortening tool at tinyurl.com .  Because they provide a free service, it is great for mass spamming of comments onto blogs like this.  It also has no way of reporting abuse and that is because there is nothing in their terms of use saying you can’t use it for spamming purposes.

They actually have posts on their blog saying how to avoid spam filters.

tinyurl.com has gone from being a handy idea to become a spamming tool.

I am so fed up with spam that uses tinyurl links that I am going to configure this site to automatically flag any comments referring to it as spam and block the poster.

In contrast, bitly provides the same link shortening service but they actually respond to complaints of spam.  I know, I report them and they react.

Bye bye, tinyurl spam.  Consider yourself spam-flagged, blocked and deleted.

Do cartoons cause bullying?

Looks Good On Paper is a slightly spicy cartoon strip on GoComics.  This one is typical:

A cartoon dog blowing up a cartoon cat

It prompted some discussion about cartoon violence ‘back in the day’ and whether it really caused any harm.  And whether the newer sanitised cartoons have made things better.

“The new cartoons haven’t taught kids not to be bullies”

It’s not the cartoons. Superheroes use violence to do what they want, the TV cops use violence to deliver justice, many movies based on righteous anger-driven violence, the news is full of governments using violence to achieve their aims.

We now know the police going in to schools to show kids knives and other weapons does not deter them, it makes them frightened that everyone else is tooled up and results in them being more likely to carry knives.

We know gun sales go up after every mass-shooting is publicised and guns are glamourised in the media.

Despite almost all of us living peaceful lives from day to day – that is most people’s reality – the media is packed with images and stories about violence, often suggesting it is how people are getting what they want, need or deserve.

I don’t think Jerry making Tom trip on a rake or Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff have much influence on a young mind compared to that lot.

Sowing the seeds of a century of hatred and conflict

From a comment on GoComics:

“between them, hamas and the israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict…”

Not sowed the seeds. It is already a well-established and ancient forest of hatred and conflict. It has been fed and watered frequently with bitterness and blood since before records began.

They like it this way. It is embedded into people’s culture and lore, into their tradition and values.

It can be changed, but not until: they want it to change; the rest of the world stops interfering to make it worse; the privatised arms industry is dismantled or otherwise not allowed to profit from provoking war; the women say “enough!” (which is hard when the cultures suppress women’s voices); they recognise that people with different value and beliefs are equal; they accept compromise and forgiveness over vengeance; they accept mistakes and harm are caused on all sides; they convince one another that getting along without bloodshed is what they want; they recognise that everybody has to live somewhere; they accept we are not entitled to anything when we are born other than what we are given by other people and that means someone else has to go without so we must share.

In the above ‘they’ means ‘everyone’ and anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and not ready for change.

It can be done, and has been done many times around the world. But this one is particularly tricky.

“i’ll stick with what i said, thanks. yes, the conflict has gone on for a long time and both sides have scuppered solutions that have been suggested along the way. but what i said above was that the two sides have given the conflict renewed life with their latest actions…”

Yes, you are right. I did not mean to imply I disagreed.

between them, hamas and the israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict” and “the two sides have given the conflict renewed life with their latest actions

Absolutely.

The ‘leaders’ on both sides with their desires for violence, and those external to the area who provoke and promote it, are terrible people. They are also spineless cowards since they do not take any risks themselves.

There was something more honourable in the days of feudalism and before, when the kings and princes and dukes and chieftains stood amongst their lines. They knew if they were defeated, they would at best be ransomed but as likely killed. And those doing the fighting did it eyeball to eyeball and saw the pain and screaming and blood for themselves. And then came home too ashamed to talk of what they had done.

Politicians now send others to do their dirty work. Safe and rich and powerful and the more people die, the greater they believe their military fantasy. And the more support they get. It is obscene: more sickening than a mass murderer who at least stabs people themselves. Even the sickos who shoot schoolkids in America have the decency to look at their targets and risk being shot themselves. Even they are less contemptible than cowards in tunnels who send suicide bombers to kill women in shopping queues. Or rich men in palaces who send bombers against hospitals and tanks against children.

And the contempt I feel for these ‘people’ will be as nothing compared to the hate and angst and despair felt by orphans, widowers and other relatives of their victims. And we know there can never be justice against the leaders, they always get away with it.

And people – through a lack of empathy and imagination, people with full bellies and nice homes – wonder why other people – starved, widowed, robbed of everything and with no access to justice – resort to terrorism.

Not until the citizens themselves – the women, the widowers, the conscripts, the reserves – refuse to allow it to continue will it stop.

The 1960s line was “Suppose they gave a war and no one came”.

Hopefully, this will be Israel’s Vietnam with the IDF troops going home afterwards traumatised at what they have done, and the atrocities being revealed and realising they were not war heroes after all but victims themselves. Forming an Israeli branch of Veterans For Peace, campaigning for conscientious objection and becoming a generation of pro-peace activists as so many ex-soldiers do after an unfair war.

Hopefully, it will be the Gazan Northern Ireland, where the women find a voice to tell their sons and husbands that this has to stop, that they do not want or need vengeance and just want to live peaceful lives. That there is more honour in working together with one’s enemy for a common good than losing more sons and husbands for a principle. Ultimately forcing the opposing sides to grow up and find a way to tolerate one another.

Hopefully, it will be the Israeli citizens’ Ukraine, realising the world knows their government has done a wrong thing and they have been lied to. That they are considered responsible for what their leaders did by the rest of the world, and not want it to happen that way again.

Hopefully, it will be the businesses’ South Africa, where those who want to make money realise that peace and reconciliation, trading with each other and the world, is better financially for all concerned. On realising the sanctions being imposed by citizens and organisations boycotting Israeli goods and goods from the occupied territories hurts their profits. So they demand a change in government policy, one that supports free trade through peaceful co-existence.

When will Middle East conflict end?

From a social media post:

“Hamas and the Israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict…”

Not sowed the seeds. It is already a well-established and ancient forest of hatred and conflict. It has been fed and watered frequently with bitterness and blood since before records began.

They like it this way. It is embedded into people’s culture and lore, into their tradition and values.

It can be changed, but not until:

  • they want it to change;
  • the rest of the world stops interfering to make it worse;
  • the privatised arms industry is dismantled or otherwise not allowed to profit from provoking war; the women say “enough!” (which is hard when the cultures suppress women’s voices);
  • they recognise that people with different value and beliefs are equal;
  • they accept compromise and forgiveness over vengeance;
  • they accept mistakes and harm are caused on all sides;
  • they convince one another that getting along without bloodshed is what they want;
  • they recognise that everybody has to live somewhere;
  • they accept we are not entitled to anything when we are born other than what we are given by other people and that means someone else has to go without so we must share.
  • In the above ‘they’ means ‘everyone’ and anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and not ready for change.

It can be done, and has been done many times around the world. But this one is particularly tricky.

It is International Women’s Day today.  I wonder how many will be killed in conflict today.  Probably about 10 to 20 in Gaza, some more in Yemen, some more elsewhere.  Does anyone keep count?  Perhaps someone should.  How’s that for a global metric?

This Land is Mine

This simple 3½ minute video This Land is Mine is a superb explanation and demonstration of who started the fighting in Israel, who is right and who is wrong.

This video should be put out instead of the news one day.

If I was working with children, I’d use it as the key part of a discussion.

 

ICC, ICJ and World Court confusion

I have seen comments saying Vladimir Putin should be taken to the World Court.  Individuals are not taken there, it is not that sort of court.  Instead it should be to the International Criminal Court (ICC). ‘World Court’ is the common name for the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The International Court of Justice is a United Nations organisation. It exists to settle questions of international law and give legal opinion on disputes between nations. It has said what Russia is doing in Ukraine is wrong. It is a panel of judges who give an opinion: any action has to be taken by nation states.

The International Criminal Court  is a very different body. Although it is an intergovernmental organisation, it is not part of the United Nations. It exists to prosecute individuals for matters such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It can issue arrest warrants, try people and has a detention centre.

It issued an arrest warrant for Putin on 17th March 2023 for the situation in Ukraine.

Confusingly, both are based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Press release about Putin’s arrest warrant.

 

Artificial Intelligence – the threat

There’s a 9 to 5 cartoon with someone holding a banner:

Down with “Artificial Intelligence”.
Bring back “Natural Stupidity”.

Someone commented:

That’s the exact reason that artificial intelligence is so popular.

Sadly, though, it is only a tool.

Thinks: “I have the solution to society’s problems! It’s This Stupid Thing. We must do This Stupid Thing!

Then go to your AI such as ChatGPT and ask it for all the good in This Stupid Thing, all the reasons This Stupid Thing might help society, how to convince people to support This Stupid Thing and how to counter arguments against This Stupid Thing.

By carefully phrasing your questions (‘prompting’), you can get whatever answer you want.

You are then ready to propose, promote and implement This Stupid Thing.

You even get your AI to write press releases and social media posts promoting This Stupid Thing. It will create memes and fake photos of people protesting in support of This Stupid Thing. It will give you the sound bites and catchphrases for the trolls to repeat.

Whereas wicked and stupid people currently have to find corruptible or evil or spineless people to help them implement stupid ideas, AI has no conscience at all. And it won’t tell the papers what happened or publish a book revealing your secrets.

And you can be absolutely sure that political parties, corporations and hostile states are already very experienced in doing the above.

Believe me, AI will magnify “natural stupidity” to new heights.

Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yeppity yep.

There are almost no controls in place yet; we don’t even understand what the real threats will be.

It’s like the first days of the motor carriage. “Think of the harm it might cause, and all the disruption to existing businesses and people” “Sod all that, think of the profits!”

Car manufacturers still resist proper seat belt designs. Tobacco companies still promote cancer sticks. Governments and corporations really could have fixed spam email thirty years ago. Governments and banks could have done much more to prevent online fraud which funds serious crime and terrorism.

But while it is only the little people suffering and there’s profit to be made, meh, who cares?

With the existing setup, we suspect we are being lied to but struggle to find the truth (and those who leak the truth get locked up). When AI gets being used in anger, we won’t have a clue what is true any more.