The Isocracy Network

The Australian government has made the wrong decision to commit to purchasing up to eight nuclear-powered submarines as part of AUKUS, forecast to cost up to $368bn between now and the mid-2050s. Criticism against the decision can be expressed on three main points. Firstly, there's the matter of opportunity costs. This expense is far in excess of the benefits gained (or costs prevented). Secondly, the submarines are not actually designed to defend Australia, but rather they are an aggressive purchase that does not bode well for international peace and cooperation. Finally, as nuclear submarines, the purchase runs a real risk of weakening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in which Australia is a signatory.

The question of opportunity costs is something that was evocatively illustrated in Dwight D. Eisenhower in his famous 1953 speech, "A Chance for Peace". Eisenhower was no pacifist by any stretch of the imagination; during World War II, he was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and became a five-star General. He was responsible for supervising the liberation of North Africa from Nazi and fascist control and the successful liberation of Normandy. Yet, he would also say several years later:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

This article is part of keeping up with the humanitarian and political consequences of the devastating earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey at the dawn of February 6th. I am writing this content more than three weeks after the earthquake in Syria and Turkey. Throughout these weeks, whenever I begged myself to sleep, a series of images, scenes, and moments I experienced during the earthquake in Turkey flashed through my head. Sometimes, they all overlap in my head at once, so I can't separate them, or suddenly one of them jumps out without the other, repeating itself dozens of times. In some of them, faces and people are absent and their voice remains, or their voice is absent and their images remain, and in others, voices and faces are cut off. And in miserable times I tried to deceive the cruelest of them to beautify it, to banish it, to make it only a nightmare, and I failed, got up, and had a severe headache.

Will I die today?

The place: a small room in an old house consisting of three floors in the Mazrlik neighborhood in Antakya. The time: at dawn on Monday, February 6, 2023, at 4.17 am.

My bed shakes, and I wake up, it's not a fleeting little shake that Antakya is used to from time to time, I tell myself. The tremor intensifies, it's an earthquake, I get it. I quickly stand under (the door lintel ) the door of my room, knowing in advance that standing under the doors is a safe place during an earthquake. The earth does not stop shaking and becomes more intense, so I rush out of my room towards (the yard) of the house in front of it, I fall, swaying right and left, with difficulty getting up, and the shaking becomes more violent, will I die today? I talk to myself, and my neighbor Fatima and her husband, who live on the first floor of the house, come to my mind. I scream" Fatima Fatima" I see her and her husband go out to the (yard) of the house, without covering her head screaming like crazy, then I see my neighbor, his wife, and two daughters who live on the second floor, and the young daughter of the owner of the Turkish house “Dilay” who lives on the third floor, they all go down to the yard of the house, all of us Fine, we hold each other and go out into the street, the ground is still shaking, we all stand up and I embrace Dilay.

The definition of when a person becomes an adult varies according to culture, history, and discipline. In the English language a sequence is derived from etymology; "adult", from the French "adulte", from the Latin "adultus" ("grown up"), the perfect passive participle of adolescō ("I grow up"), itself from "adolescentem", the accusative form of "adolescens", present participle of "adolēscere" ("to become adult, grow up"), from ad- ("to") + alēscere ("to grow or become nourished"). With the subjectivity of individual differences it should be an uncontroversial point that individuals mature physically and cognitively at different ages.

A cultural or religious marker are various "coming of age" ceremonies which fit into the anthropological concept of "liminality", a transition from a pre-ritual status to a post-ritual status (Turner, 1974). Religous-cultural ceremonies are also a foundation in traditional law. For example, in the Christian tradition the Rite of Confirmation or anabaptism is usually at early adolesence, similar to the Judiac Bar and Bat mitzvah, and even in the secular form in Germany's secular "Jugendweihe". This can be compared to the provision of a courtesy name in East Asia, typically for men at aged twenty, and sometimes women typically at marriage (Wikinson, 2018).

Numerous cultural, legal, and historical examples are readily available which illustrate a wide divergence of the definition of when a person becomes an adult. Rather than engage in an extensive ethnological listing this essay will outline the methodological approach of formal pragmatics, conduct a literature review of some competing definitions, and apply a critical evaluation, before offering some useful conclusions.

Jiang Zemin, who died in late November, was arguably the most consequential Chinese leader of the post-Mao era. And at what feels like a pivotal moment for the People's Republic, it is worth considering why so many Chinese are looking back fondly on the Jiang era. And also what his rise and rule can reveal about power politics in China.

Under Jiang's stewardship as general secretary the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rebuilt itself after the Tiananmen Square massacre, he helped China navigate uncertain global politics after the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, join the World Trade Organisation and be awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics. Most importantly he oversaw consistent strong economic growth, with GDP quadrupling during his tenure, which has constituted the Party's major response to the Tiananmen challenge. Since then the CCP's unspoken, but clearly understood, social contract with the Chinese people has been “Do not ask for freedom and democracy and we will allow you to become rich”.

Michael Haines has spent over 50 years working at senior levels across construction, manufacturing, and logistics. In 2011, he set up a not-for-profit to work with major companies across the property, construction, and facilities management sector, along with global technology providers, to develop a governance framework for the emerging Digital Built Environment. Its purpose is to reduce complexity, while maintaining privacy and security, to deliver better outcomes more quickly, at less cost, and with less risk.

Since his retirement in 2019, he's been working with an advocacy group Basic Income Australia. The group's aim is to have a Universal Basic Income fully implemented in Australia by 2030, to eliminate systemic poverty, and to provide a new tool to help balance the labour market, as automation, virtualization, and AI change the job landscape.

Reading the 2000 edition of James Lovelock’s book "Gaia, the practical science of planetary medicine" (Lovelock, 2000) one find they adopt and retain many of Lovelock's perspectives. The term "Gaia" is emotively loaded, and Lovelock had received some very biased coverage on when interviewed and when he was advocating for nuclear energy. The term "Gaia" itself can inspire mistaken impressions in many - myself included initially - as they might envisage a Greek goddess from which the name comes and dismiss it as a "New Age" delusion but it is not. Lovelock's Gaia is the most utilitarian description of our dynamic living Earth from a top-down perspective, a biogeophysical self-regulating super organism, not necessarily sentient or intelligent but the same could be said for the deluded species destroying it. "Delusion" is the nicest explanations for our idiotic (Parker, 2005) ecocidal actions.

In any case, I highly recommend Lovelock's book, as he covers the human shortcomings of reductionist individuals and the institutions they form. He defines the nature of "Gaia" as he meant it to be used in a way that should satisfy any intelligent scientist or logical mind. One must also acknowledge in this context another visionary author; Fritjof Capra and his book "The web of Life" (1996). In summary, Lovelock outlines ecological interactions that possibly underlie the evolution of individual organisms, ecosystems and the emergent non anthropocentric nonsexual Gaia – an amazingly complex, resilient self-regulating emergent system of biogeophysical systems.

Every day in the past months it has become increasingly clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being reversed. Those who are attentive will see a familiar pattern; extensive and ill-directed Russian shelling across the frontline, numerous piecemeal incursions by Russia, especially along their western front, all of which are invariably repelled, followed up with Ukraine recapturing villages and townships with occasional well-directed counter-shelling. Recent weeks have witnessed Ukrainian forces take centres like Kupiansk, Lyman, and Borova in the north along with a large number of territories and settlements near Kherson. Russia's responses - a confusing partial mobilisation, sabre-rattling on the potential use of nuclear weapons, and a stage-managed referendum with implausible results - have not changed the reality on the ground that they are losing this war.

Putting aside the amorality of initiating an invasion of another country in the first place, on paper and viewed with an entirely instrumental perspective, it did look like the invasion was a worthwhile gamble. The Ukrainian government had shown itself completely unable to even begin to recapture Crimea from Russia, let alone the Russian-supported separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, heavily populated (Donetsk first, Luhansk seventh), industrialised, and with substantial and concentrated mineral resources. Despite this, the country was progressing well in other regards; the GDP per capita reaching its highest point in history by 2021, for example (still the lowest in Europe and with widespread corruption)

Many economic reformers have proposed replacing many taxes by broad-based taxes on land ownership, specifically the 'unimproved' value of land (commonly called a Land Value Tax or LVT). Advocacy for an LVT goes back to 18th century economist David Ricardo1 and 19th century populist reformer Henry George.2 While usually considered a 'progressive' proposal, it has adherents on both the left and right of politics.3 In Australia, the case for an LVT was most recently made in the 2010 Australia's Future Tax System Review ('the Henry review').4

The Henry review proposed excluding low market-value land, and the partial LVTs leveled by many state governments currently contain a large number of exceptions, including for primary production (agricultural) land. As the Henry review's proposals were mostly un-enacted, most land claimed as native title is agricultural or low-value, and native-title related payments are currently tax-exempt, whether an LVT or other taxes can or should be levied on native title (or other Indigenous) land is currently a largely theoretical question.5 As the ABS's recently released National Land Account figures show, the majority of Australia's land value is in urban residential land:6

Water conservation consists of activities and policies that are designed to manage a necessary and natural resource in a manner that meets human needs. It is a challenge that crosses multiple disciplines, including environmental science and climatology, geography and demographics, engineering, behavioural and resource economics, and social psychology. For the purposes of this inquiry, an emphasis is placed on social learning biases and the mechanisms of cooperation to design a feasible intervention from the perspective of the Auckland Council. Other disciplines will be allocated emphasis according to their approriateness to this central task. For example, as fascinating as various engineering contributions to water conservation might be, they are largely mentioned in this context in reference to human behaviour.

The structure of this inquiry consists of three main parts. The first is a literature review with an emphasis on existing research into water conservation behaviours. The second part is a discussion of the multiplicity of social learning biases and cooperation mechanisms, their relevance, and potential application to this intervention. The third section offers feasible solutions that can be employed to promote water conservation that integrates content from both the literature review and discussion. Concluding remarks will both summarise the content, but also offer possibilities for further research on how to integrate matters of human behaviour with those more distal disciplinary solutions that have only been mentioned in passing.

Many are saddened and angry at the decision of the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
case. As can be expected most of the anger has justifiably been directed on a principle of natural justice - the idea that a woman actually has control of her own body. Whilst this direction has broad appeal, because there is an intuitive sense that adults of adult reasoning do have an ontological command of themselves, it also does illustrate strength of Bentham's famous attack on assertions of "natural rights" as "Nonsense on Stilts"; it is ultimately the government that does determine what rights individuals have, positive and negative because "rights" exist as permissible social conduct. One may very well ask Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts, whether they would agree to a "post-natal" abortion against their own body if it were legal to do so. Of course, if they would find such an arbitrary law a threat to their life, perhaps they would gain an inkling of how many women in the United States feel today.