It seems that fortunes have turned against the Libyan rebels. Quaddafi’s loyalists have retaken a number of key cities in the past few days and seem to be poised to crush the uprising’s strongholds in Libyan east.
I think West’s hypocritical governments (this includes my home country’s gvt) are largely to be blamed for the unfortunate development. They either should have made it easy for Quaddafi to step down or militarily support the rebels. Instead they choose to appear involved (in order to please their electorate), but effectively did nothing to supported the uprising. This strategy has had (hopefully unintended) negative consequences for the pro-democracy rebels.
By freezing Quaddafi’s assets and vowing to prosecute him once toppled (two ridiculous anti-Quaddafi steps taken) the West has left him with only one option: fight tooth-and-nail against the rebels. And that’s precisely what he did. If the West had offered him exile instead, he might have stepped down and Libya might have been on the way towards democracy by now… Such handling of the situation would no have gone down well with the Western electorate, but would have been better for Libya, Middle East, and the World in general…
West’s mismanagement of the Libyan crisis
March 14th, 2011Why I don’t like journalists…
December 19th, 2010
We live in an information society, that is in a society in which the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity ( At least that’s what Wikipedia says).
It’s strange, given the importance of information, how easily it can get distorted. A photo of cardboard cut-out police officer clad in a miniskirt was published in a Czech tabloid. The caption under the picture said something like:”I hope she isn’t cold” – It was meant to be funny.
An editor at a German nespaper liked the picture, and published it along with a short (made up) article. Based on the German article, The Telegraph published a story about a sexy cardboard cut-out police officer causing doubling of car accidents at an intersection in Prague (In fact it stands in a small village about 100 km from Prague). The Telegraph in their article even managed to quote an (imaginary) driver involved in an (imaginary) crash, and claimed that: “The ministry is now rethinking the scheme”.
It is scary how easily can distorted information like this (= lie) get published in a respectable newspaper. I don’t even want to think about the quality of newspaper articles from more distant and rougher places than is Prague. If they can’t even check the reliability of a story from Czech how can they claim to publish reliable news about Afghanistan, Iraq…
Publishing confidential materials is not freedom of speach
December 1st, 2010Despite all the talk about democracy and freedom of speech, I think publishing unedited classified document may do more harm than good. It would have been judged wrong, immoral and evil if during WWII “Wikileaks-like” organization had published a list of spies who were helping European Jews escape from Nazi occupied Europe…
I think both people and governments are entitled to have secrets. People (and governments) keep secrets from others because sometimes it’s best for the others not to know them…
I’m back!
December 1st, 2010After nearly five months of silence, I’m back! I was not posting lately because I was way too busy with my PhD program. The workload should ease from now on, and I should be able to post at least once a week.
What an insightful advice!
June 25th, 2010Europe must focus on growth as well as cutting spending to reduce national deficits, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has told the BBC
Who would have thought of that?!
The most important profession
June 23rd, 2010I have overheard two history PhD students discussing what is the most important profession. It’s a no-brainer: They have concluded that historians are the most important and powerful people in the world. Their reasoning was: Historians are more important than Obama, because everything Obama does will ultimately be judge by historians, and their interpretation will define how Obama will be remembered fifty, hundred, or thousand years later.
The problem is that contemporary historians will become more important than the contemporary US president only fifty, hundred, or thousand years from now. When people won’t remember the beginning of the twenty-first century anymore, and will need to read books by contemporary historians to understand it. By that time both the contemporary US president, and contemporary historians will likely be long deceased.
The importance of history is very elusive, same as the concept of importance…
Talk about a selection bias II
May 27th, 2010Bulgarian phone muber 888 888 888 is suspended, because every user assigned to it dies. In other words, the Bulgarian phone company thinks that the number is cursed.
What they have forgotten about is that correlation does not imply causality:
Why were the owners of the number dying then? Owner of such a phone number is likely to be a rich businessman, politician, or most likely of all (especially in Bulgaria) a mafia boss. Mafia bosses do tend to die prematurely because of the nature of their business (think of Santino Corleone), rather than because they have a nice phone number. So what makes people die, is not the number, but the occupation associated with it…
Innovations in the communist economies
May 24th, 2010I have participated in a debate on innovations in capitalist versus communist economies. All I had to say about it is summarize in this picture:
Talk about a selection bias…
May 21st, 2010The elections are due next week in The Czech Republic. Election polls, which are supposed to give unbiased estimates of voting intentions, give the center-right parties about half of the seats in the parliament, and the left wingers the other half.
What strikes me is that online poll at idnes.cz, widely popular centrist online newspaper, gave 100 percent of the seats in parliament to the right wing parties, that is all left wing parties fell short of the 5 percent threshold, which is required to enter the parliament.
I did not think an average internet user is so UNREPRESENTATIVE of an average citizen…
p.s. Of course the wealthier (more developed) a country is, the less different an average citizen and an average internet user is.
New Economist Debate – Is fair trade more important than free trade?
May 4th, 2010The Economist has started a new debate earlier today. The importance of the freeness vs. fairness of the world trading system is to be discussed. Bhagwati is against the motion, arguing that free trade is more important than fair trade.
Clearly free trade is more important than fair trade. Fair trading system with no free trade (complete protectionism) is clearly inferior to free, but unfair trade.
On the other hand, fairness and freeness of the trading system are complementary. Given the present situation, of relatively free but not so fair world trade, making it fairer would make more sense than making it freer.
So I disagree with the motion that fair trade more important than free trade, but agree that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer.