Thursday, November 18, 2004

COMMENT : Priorities

First Sudan. Now the West Coast of Africa is being ravaged by locusts, no doubt food will be in short supply.
In the US 33% of people are obese, 33% are fat and everyone else is OK.
The US spent how many Billions to save the people of Iraq? (fewer every day) Lets pretend that it was 100Billion in the first year. So that's 50 Million dollars per Iraqi (and increasing every day).
Well, if the US spent that retiring other country's debt or saving people from starving (which must surely cost less than 50M a year per person) I am sure they would have more friends. As it is they throw their hands up in wonder at the reaction of the Iraqis to an invading force of a different religion.
(BTW I realise that this isn't all americans, I am obviously only talking about Bush and co. Oh yeah, and my own government that I also didn't vote for)
I know that in the Hindu religion, and I believe in Islam as well, it is a 'requirement' to give 10% of your income to the poor. I think I'll start with that, then I can at least say this stuff without quite as much hypocrisy.

2 Comments:

Blogger M said...

You've made me go on a rant in my blog, mainly in reply to a comment from some guy in America. Thanks. ;-)

12:45 am  
Blogger M said...

me again. Had a chat to people at work about the notion of spending the money on a better method of reducing world hunger, poverty and hence terror. A few points were raised:
- how can anyone justify an armed forces so large if they don't use it?
- how can anyone justify getting newer and bigger WMDs if they don't use up the old ones?

Basically, the war is not about terror, WMDs, oil, Saddam, 911, etc, but about logistics and stock management of the US armed forces. Not surprising ideas as I work in procurement...

I'm more interested in the resource economics of wars such as this. In 20 years or so, these activities will be economically unviable. How can a country launch air strikes when they can no lnger afford the fuel? Or if oil is too scarce? We really need to grow a bit as a species and try to figure out where we want to be in 20, 50 and 100 years from now.

12:30 am  

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