Lit Apropos of Nothing - ACKBAR IN CAPITALS - The Lit Forum Social Thread, v2.0.15

If ever it was appropriate...

 

Crazy. I heard that Qatar stat today, I could not believe it. I also would not have guessed that the Beijing Olympics number would be lower than some of the others.

 

And entirely justified! It's a great supervillain song!

 

^This

^And this

A few other things, but mostly those

 

Minor relevant addendum:

That having been said, by the time they're done, it's been estimated that the final death toll for World Cup-related deaths will be several times that number.

 

I took a class on globalization a couple years back and it talked a lot about migrant workers in wealthy Middle East countries being basically borderline slaves--so I'm totally prepared to believe that.

 

It's especially bad along that coastline, particularly in the UAE ("fifth-largest international migrant stock in the world," 7.8 million migrants out of 9.2 million people), where you have basically the entire labor force being imported from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

 

Yeah, once you look into it you can never look at **** like this the same way again.

 

That is quite a thing to say in the middle of a discussion of the brutality and corruption of the absolute monarchy of Qatar (and..well, monarchy seems to be involved in the UAE though I admit I find their system of government kind of confusing).


In more upbeat news

 

I'd note that the cultural difference isn't about Arabic or Muslim culture, it's about Aristocratic culture.
The Arab States went through a wave of populism and revolutionary thought during the breakup of the Ottomans, which the West supported until they became inconvenient; since then we've been propping up exactly the kind of regimes European States went through centuries of strife to get rid of. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen there.

 

Les then 15 minutes now...

 

So, Kung Fury was radically extreme 80's and even more crazy then I expected. I liked it!

 

Thought this was an interesting article from io9. I knew Marvel had made some merchandising moves in the past such to not promote the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, but I can't believe they went as far to cut them out of T-Shirt of old Secret Wars comic book covers.

 

The situation is... complicated. And different in every country. I can give an example:

In 2009 I lived with one of these migrant worker's families in Syria for the summer. Over the last couple of decades the Syrian government had been cracking down on the Bedouin groups and forcing them to live in sedentary communities. This was both sudden (the people were not necessarily prepared for it) and on land that the government specified, so the Bedouins had little choice in the matter.

The community I was in had about 25-30ish families, and they lived in the desert out of sight of the nearest next community. There was water but the soil was this pebbly awful stuff that they couldn't grow much with, and so their crops were only in the immediate vicinity of the village. Since most of the people had been formerly accostomed to managing sheep/goats, a lot of them were still trying to do that, despite the fact that there was not enough room to graze (Bedouins usually have a seasonal route they take throughout the year).

The "wealthiest" man in the village was the one who was gone most of the time as a migrant construction worker in Beirut (Lebanon). Beirut's basically like a massive tourist trap in the Mid-East. This gave him a certain amount of prestige in the community, because he was one of the few to ever leave their island in the desert and bring back news about what was happening elsewhere in Syria and the Mid-East. At the time I was there, there were no cell phones (except for the ones the government officials had who drove through sometimes), so being able to physically leave the community, let alone the country, was a big deal.

When I was there I was told that a lot of the forced-settlement Syrian Bedoiuns were choosing to become migrant workers outside the country. They could not survive on their own crops and they needed money (I was shocked to see gas prices were as high there as they were in the US), and the government was mainly interested in keeping them in line by forcing them into these settled communities rather than let them roam around everywhere, so they had no choice. But despite the income and the prestige, on the down side these workers rarely saw their families. And it really wasn't... that much... more money. Their house looked more or less like everyone else's in the community, with maybe more tiles outside on the walkway. Most of it went into buying a dozen porcelain dowry sets and a stack of mattresses for the same purpose that were kept hidden away in a hut. The children's most prized possession was one of those pull string toys (like this one) because it could speak English.

So yeah, it was sort of a... frustrating... situation. I got the impression most people there were frustrated. And from what everyone was saying, this Bedoiun situation was going on everywhere, so they they had no choice but to turn to the big cities along the Mediterranean where all the construction was going on.

 

Yeah, that's kind of my reaction when I hear about the crazy Chinese iPhone factories and stuff--it's despicable by Western standards, but it seems like it's impossible (at least when dealing with real businesses) to modernize a country full of farmers without starting out in something akin to Industrial Revolution conditions. I have to think that it's just a process, and a generation or two from now they'll have gone through the same periodic boosts the West did.

 

Being from an agricultural background myself, I've often wondered the same thing, because there are parallels in Western society too.

Despite the common cliches you get of farmers chewing on sticks of corn like in the Wurzels' song, it's actually a very, very lucrative industry, which-- at least in the UK-- suffers a lot of inaccurate stereotypes. The most common is probably the belief that it's full of cheap migrant labour, but that's false and no more prevalent than it is with illegal cleaners or dodgy builders, as most farm workers actually earn well above the minimum wage and frequently take home more than your average low skilled worker would in the service industry or at the bottom level in offices. The cliches, though, put too many Westerners off the work, thinking they'll be earning a pittance-- although that is slowly changing in England, as I've seen more actual Brits taking up outdoors work recently.

Anyways, translating that over to Third World countries, it's what makes me feel the same way you do: that fancy high-tech cities are nothing but bling that looks flashy to the tourist trade, and to a lot of people make these countries look "modern", but... technology doesn't make you modern in a social sense, that requires better redistribution of wealth, which is just as possible to achieve even when people are still low skilled and "only" growing corn, because it ultimately still boils down to employment conditions, whether it's guys dying building flashy football stadiums, or "just" digging a hole for a well to irrigate a field of crops-- which to most Westerners might seem like a meaningless job, but I view its benefits to a society as far more valuable than wasting money on a stupid stadium.

Which is where it always saddens me that too many people look down on work like that in the West as well, even when growing food is up there with health and education as one of the most important industries there are, but which just lacks the "glamour" that's seen as "valuable", even when the guy who digs the well deserves a lot more money than the dude who kicks a football around. But the Westerner who goes to these countries still thinks he should get more money to kick a football around than the guys who grew his dinner, and I feel the West itself is as much to blame for some of that as the kings and sultans themselves, as we're just as responsible for feeding the whole celebrity bling value culture.

 

Yeah... this is why it saddens me so much that more aid work isn't spent on developing stronger farming communities.

It does happen, I know, but... I frequently get the impression most Westerners see it only as a beginning, and not as an important end in itself, which, going back to my previous point about how many people in England view agricultural labour as "beneath" them, so often makes me question if our own society's negativity toward our own agricultural industry consequently has a knock-on effect on the direction we try to steer developing countries, even if we're not consciously realising that our own personal biases are doing that? I mean, I would have thought that people would rather be proud that their village grew its own food than needed to survive on handouts for the same reason as how a lot of people think the vegetables they grow in their back garden taste better (even if it's only in their heads), but for the West I often get the impression we've just started to find it easier to just hand out food packages and pat ourselves on the back for doing a good job, rather than getting our own hands dirty trying to develop one of those nasty agricultural industries that we all so loath having to do ourselves in the West either.

I'm sure people who actually work in aid probably know it's important to do all this, but... when it comes to the people who cough up the money to help make it possible, showing them a farm just doesn't excite most people, which being a farmer really saddens me.