Two major transport disasters and their implications

The past few weeks have been dominated by two major transport disasters, firstly the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean, and secondly and more recently the sinking of a South Korean passenger ferry, the Sewol, travelling from Inchŏn to Cheju-do.

Suspicion that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 – which was scheduled to go to Běijīng of all places – was a terrorist attack or even an act of betrayal on the part of its pilots has by no means disappeared from my mind. Unlike with the September 11 terrorists attacks, I know of no messages that might confirm or disprove hypotheses of terrorism, but there is no doubt that many Muslims in Southeast Asia – despite their relatively peaceful reputation vis-à-vis the Islam of Africa and arid Asia – would have the same motivations that brought Muḥammad Atta, Marwan ash-Sheḥḥi, Hani Ḥanjour and Ziad Jarraḥ to carry out the September 11 attacks.

What is troubling, though, is the fact that passengers on the plane did not call relatives for help if and when they realised the plane was off-course. When I have flown in the past, I have generally been able to recognise where I was by looking down – which is not dangerous though I often have nightmares about it – so I imagine more experience air passengers would have known they were going in the wrong direction. This suggests a possibility that something (more potent than the mace used on Flight 11 and Flight 175 on September 11, 2001) was sprayed to prevent the passengers from recognising they were going in the wrong direction – or that the sign not to use “mobile phones of other electronic devices” was not turned off as it normally is.

The sinking of the Sewol by sixty-five-year-old Lee Chun-sŏk has attracted attention via a comparison with Italian captain Francesco Schettino, whose cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rock and was wrecked in the Mediterranean in 2012. Schettino faces multiple manslaughter charges – still not finalised – yet Lee, who killed fifty-eight people as against thirty-two, may not face manslaughter but merely negligence. Lee deliberately speeded the vessel to cope with delays caused by very wet weather, which makes his offence worse than that of Schettino – though not murder, because unlike (say) with Atta and possibly with flight 370 there was no intent to kill the passengers. Recent news in fact suggests that there were many problems with the Sewol such as overloading that could effect responsibility severely

There are many questions about these two events that I have not asked for a long time beforehand. One of them is whether, as fertility rates decline, people troubled will turn to even more radical politics – as Ross Douthat seems to say about the radical individualism of the Millennial Generation in the Enriched World and seems to be observed in Russia and the Ukraine as we see a potential invasion. It may also be why, as David Goldman suggests in How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), extremism is a natural response when a system cannot respond to social change, as has been ongoing ever since the Industrial Revolution in the Enriched and Tropical Worlds and may be reaching a “critical mass” as more and more nations compete for specialised industrial sectors, whilst a very few monopolise the remaining “high-technology” resources of flat land, aluminum and titanium.

The Sewol disaster may reflect the effects of persistent poor quality and endemic corruption in may parts of the Enriched World – which in turn results naturally from a situation where businesses can become rich by appealing to the very poor or taking advantage of government, as has been characteristics of Asia and Latin America.

We will likely see powerful political radicalism and hostility characterise the Enriched and Tropical Worlds in the future, whilst Australia cloisters itself from these events and moves down a strongly traditional pathway with greater economic growth if at inconceivable environmental costs – which the rest of the world is unlikely to even have the power to demand be paid on an international basis.

An interesting look at gun control

Sixteen years ago, gun control was a hot topic in Australia as a result of the Port Arthur Massacre, whereby Martin Bryant killed thirty-five people and wounded a further twenty-three with a semiautomatic weapon. This led to a controversial tightening of gun control laws which I lukewarmly supported at first but toward which I have since become on the whole less receptive.

The common view is that strict gun control laws are the cause of low murder rates in Eurasia and Canada compared to the United States. This is a view not held by either of the two groups I have been attracted to over the past fifteen years: the radical socialists like Socialist alternative and the Democratic Socialist Party on the one hand; and the Politically Incorrect Guide-type conservatives on the other. Both these groups argue crime to be caused by other social or cultural factors that are not influenced by access to guns, and argue that guns can be useful as a source of self-defence (“armed populace” in two very different ways).

Now, as a reply to Barack Obama’s ongoing attempt to make United States gun laws more similar to those in other so-called “developed” nations, Ross Douthat has made a fascinating argument: that gun control laws do not reduce the rate of murder but do reduce the rate of suicides. At first sight, this is counterintuitive given the high rate of suicides in many European countries compared to that in the United States. However, Douthat shows that in those states where the “Brady Act” was passed, suicide rates fell much more dramatically than murder rates, and Robert Verbruggen shows that the US and Australia experienced similar declines in murder rates even though Australia put in place bans on automatic rifles and extreme restrictions on semiautomatics.

Douthat and Verbruggen emphasise that if guns are banned, there will be an inevitable shift towards non-gun based crime by habitual criminals who lack the self-control to avoid gun use, and that physically weak victims may not have access to guns for defence. Voluntary gun buybacks - suggested as a means of encouraging people to not use guns - are very wasteful financially and will collect few or no weapons from actual criminals because those who use guns will naturally refuse to hand guns in!

Still, other means of dealing with the murder rate in the United States must be taken seriously. An increasingly present-oriented culture that believes people are entitled to everything others create, as Hans Hoppe has said, is certain to be prone to crime and violence regardless of whether guns are available. This is a particularly testing issue for high-tax states like where the mass murder occurred - Connecticut. Moreover, as shown by the riots in Europe over the past couple of years, even a society where guns are much more rigidly regulated can still turn violent.

Is this a breakthrough for rhinoceroses?

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, South Africa has found a kingpin smuggler of rhino horn in Thai Chumlong Lemtongthai, and wants to sentence him to forty years jail for illegally obtaining hunting permits. Forty years jail is a very severe penalty - from what I have recently read about murder and manslaughter it is more severe than any legal penalty for manslaughter and even for some forms of murder. On the other hand, like Australia, South Africa has unique duties in terms of environmental protection since South Africa is:

1. overall the seventh most biologically diverse country in the world
2. easily the most biologically diverse country without tropical rainforests or coral reefs, having twice the number of species of any other
3. an exceptionally fragile land with extremely old soils and an average runoff ratio of less than 10 percent, making its water systems exceedingly sensitive
4. features frequent occurrences of many presently rare and little studied ecological phenomena such as cooperative breeding, unusually low metabolic rates and daily heterothermy

For this reason, punishments for wildlife killing in South Africa have a right to be much more severe than in either the humid tropics or the northern and western hemispheres (the latter of which for ecological purposes includes New Zealand). In fact, given the important ecological role of megafauna like rhinoceroses in reducing the leaching of the very old soils of southern Africa, it is fair to punish people who obtain illegal licences to hunt them with something as severe as forty years - or perhaps even life - imprisonment.

Such killing is ecocide in a way killing in the northern or western hemispheres never can be, so a due punishment stands very different from what people used only to dealing with illegal killing in those sections of the globe would expect. If such punishments were consistent in southern Africa, then rhinoceros poaching would be something few would dare to engage in and rhinoceroses would have a chance of survival.