the somali pirates

[Jerome Scuggs]

just some quick thoughts on the situation

1. as we know, after 1994 the country of somalia collapsed. i've mentioned how the small area of somaliland has, more or less, become a self-sustained society. i find this interesting because one of the key arguments against 'anarchism' is that an anarchist society could not sustain a self-defense force. this is interesting because this non-existent defense force just hijacked a U.S. ship.

2. after the collapse in 1994, ships from different countries - including the U.S. and England - began illegally dumping all sorts of awesome chemicals off the coast of somalia, destroying their fishing waters.

3. the ship that was recently hijacked, the maersk alabama, was a ship that belonged to the U.S. department of defense. you know, the same kind of ship that had been illegally dumping off somalia for over a decade.

so there's the mainstream media's version - and i think you see my version. just tossing these points out there. what i see is a nation that has managed to build itself up, sans government, to the best of its ability - even with so many odds against it. and this act of 'piracy' is merely an act of self-defense, propagated by a force that, according to mainstream political theory, should not even exist.

[castromarx]

:up: :up:

Good name for a subspace squadron or a garage rock band.

[soup]

nuke it please

[Jerome Scuggs]

:up: :up:

Good name for a subspace squadron or a garage rock band.

fyi this is a brilliant realization.

[kthx]

I am personally offended by this, to think that the chemicals made in the United States weren't potent enough to kill the people as well as the fish.

[Squeezer]

last night while I was eating Easter dinner with my gf's parents, her godsister said she was glad the US rescued that pilot and that we should leave Marines in the North/Eastern African seas so they can "kick some ass."

I bit my tongue. The food was great though.

[DankNuggets]

to insinuate that there is ANY driving reason behind the increase in piracy besides MONEY is completely ludacris.

They make millions upon millions of dollars for EACH hostage they capture and successfully negoiate their release. They don't make anything fishing.

Sure, it may have harmed their ability to feed themselves... but do you honestly think they aren't doing the same things? They don't have a government... so they obviously don't have any sort of regulatory agencies to prevent their own citizens from polluting the ocean, let alone other countries.

I saw in an article on cnn.com (so it's probably pulled out of thin air) where the author had spokend to a "pirate" who told him how they breakdownt the ransom money. Only a third of it actually goes to the pirates. The rest goes to supplies, bribes, and finally to the warlords themselves. This is no different than a cartel or a gang in it's structure. The druglords and ganglords in the Americas do not perpetrate their crimes in retaliation to government... they do it for money. It's really no different in somalia.

[kthx]

America FUCK YEAH!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-mHJ...eature=related

[Jerome Scuggs]

what would the somalis dump into their own water? mud? they are not exactly an industrial nation, which is key when looking at the phrase "industrial waste".

do you seriously blame this on a lack of regulatory agencies? the somalis and wall street have something in common. idea: why dont we dump our toxic assets from banks into their ocean? we could let them hijack 'em, and bam. no more bad economy!!

[DankNuggets]

what would the somalis dump into their own water? mud? they are not exactly an industrial nation, which is key when looking at the phrase "industrial waste".

do you seriously blame this on a lack of regulatory agencies? the somalis and wall street have something in common. idea: why dont we dump our toxic assets from banks into their ocean? we could let them hijack 'em, and bam. no more bad economy!!

How about human waste and agriculture run-off? Those are just as deletrious to the environment as mercury, lead, tetrahydrasodiumbifluezonal disulphate oxidase... Somalia has like 2% arable land, so what little they have to grow on, is heavily abused. Also, livestock in the area leads to desertification and even less arable land. This tends to crowd populations near the only two rivers, where I'm sure they drop their untreated sewage. Not to mention that any nation that wanted to could just as easily drop their waste in international waters as they could off of somalia.



What am I blaming on a lack of regulatory agencies? The fact that no one's going to stop anyone from polluting, that's all. I said I don't think that it contributed one iota to the increased piracy, so in effect, I'm saying the exact opposite... that regulation of industrial waste deserves NO blame. I seriously doubt the pirates have any idea what pollutants are in their waters, or who's putting them there.

This is organized crime. Organized crime doesn't spring from the ground unless there's a huge financial incentive to exist. This is everything to do about making money, and nothing to do with exacting "revenge" for polluting in their ocean, which isn't theirs and is polluted by many countries (including themselves).



edit: Actually i found a source talking about what i'm assuming you've been mentioning. It talks about how a whole lot of radioactive waste washed up on the shores after the tsunami. Funny thing is that the same people who took money to allow those materials to be dumped, are now some of the poeple financing the pirates.

Local warlords, many of them former ministers in Siad Barre’s last government, received large payments from Swiss and Italian firms for access to their respective fiefdoms. Most of the waste was simply dumped on remote beaches in containers and leaking disposable barrels. Somali sources close to the trade say that the dumped materials included radioactive uranium, lead, cadmium, mercury and industrial, hospital, chemical and various other toxic wastes. In 1992, Unep said that European firms were involved in the trade, but because of the high level of insecurity in the country there were never any accurate assessments of the extent of the problem.

http://bariisiyobasto.wordpress.com/...-somali-coast/

another funny thing is that the first comment on that page kinda echos what i was saying. Why pay the warlords to dump right off shore when you could go dump a couple miles out without paying them?

edit 2: i went back and read your link. pretty much echos the link i provided. The thing is, neither one references the US. I'm pretty sure we have SC to dump our nuclear waste in, no need to go to somalia. And there are plenty of holes in the theory that we are stealing their fish: namely, it isn't theirs. If they don't have the means to harvest the fish themselves, and the fishing companies are in international waters or under contract to get them, where's the great injustice? One nation uses it's technology to get food for its people, and somalia just uses piracy to somehow "counter" this? Then why haven't we been reading reports about hijacked fishing ships, instead of large oil carriers, personal yachts, and ships like the Maersk which was carrying humanitarian aid (not toxic waste) ?

And what other means do you see to stop practices such as piracy and illegal dumping besides regulations? It's agreed you can never prevent it physically, but you can make it costly enough that it's not worth the risk to do it.

[ConcreteSchlyrd]

Last week, NPR was running a call-in story about the situation, and a Somali national called in and addressed the same issue: that the piracy was directly related to international overfishing and pollutant dumping.

Now, I don't doubt that there is indeed illegal fishing and dumping going on, but to say that all the piracy is directly related to retaliation is kind of ridiculous. What about the French family whose yacht was hijacked? What exactly were they dumping?

So yeah, I don't necessarily buy the whole "it's all in the name of self-defense" defense. It's a flimsy excuse.

I don't condone the illegal dumping (nor do I condone illegal fishing), but if you're a pirate who's against those two activities, the LOGICAL action would then be to hijack THOSE ships. Blow them up. You know, normal insurgent things. Not to sound callous, but seriously, if you're trying to make some sort of a political or social statement, don't do shit which makes your statement seem disingenuous.

[Soup du Jour]

I have to agree with Dank on the apparent motives. If the coast here was being polluted by the most powerful nations in the world and I was a fisherman, I would probably try to start sinking boats, not kidnap and ask for ransom.

Assuming Somalia had a functioning government and unpolluted waters, there would probably still be pirating because there is potential to make assloads of money and greed is a very strong lure.

to insinuate that there is ANY driving reason behind the increase in piracy besides MONEY is completely ludacris.

(ludicrous) This is definitely something Chris Bridges would do. (/ludicrous)

tetrahydrasodiumbifluezonal disulphate oxidase

Since I have my BSc in chemistry (close enough), this caught my eye. You have piqued my interest and now I want to know what chemical you were actually talking about.

Edit: irate2::chris:

[404 Not Found]

The US pretty much dumps all it's waste off shore when you consider raw sewage. Using NJ as an example, they have sewage pipes that force the sewage into the ocean about a 1/2 mile off shore.

In noting "raw sewage", if you ever visit a shore community on the East Coast in the summer, it's always best to check the daily "Fecal Count" everyday to see if your block/beach area will be closed due to a high poop content.

Oddest thing about the fecal count they report, is that they can close a one block area and the blocks on both sides are ok? Like that floating corn infested dump will not float to another block? Personally I wouldn't swim in the Atlantic off the US coast.

Somalia is just a dump to begin with in what has already been noted that they can't support raising farms and cattle on the land. They have an f'd up govt. that could care less about starvation and genocide of it's own peoples and think a religion will be a save all of their peoples. Somalia, a country in the state of Anarchy that offers absolutely nothing to the rest of the world.

[PaulOakenfold]

America rules, admit it.

[Jerome Scuggs]

alright, this is pretty interesting. i didn't know alot of this information. let's see.

for starters - manure is not as environmentally damaging as radioactive material. that right there is bad enough as is. but the issue of dumping is a mitigating factor, there's more pressing things. such as the issue of "home defense" - how could it be home defense when they hijack, say, a french cruise yacht? i think the answer has many points. first, and this is stated by dank i think: the pirates don't know who is doing what. you're a dude in a small fishing boat and you see a bigass boat, what are you gonna use to identify it? your african-grade computer? are those OLPC's waterproof?

but the biggest point, which is absolutely true, is that it's mainly driven by economic motive. for sure. you're poor, you see an incentive, you have guns, and they don't - i'd do it too, i guess.

but look at that - "you have guns, and they don't". really, international governments? you don't allow oceangoing vessels to properly equip themselves for self-defense? you basically turn the airports and airplanes into 1984-esque zones full of dudes with guns, and you ignore the ocean? kudos. and you wonder why 95 hijackings occured this year alone. allow the owner of a boat to defend his property like he's legally supposed to, and these problems would, off the bat, be dramatically smaller. and... our government wouldn't have to do anything! how absurd.

an example of governments inadvertantly creating problems. it happens. but, speaking of governments creating problems, here's the big elephant in the room:

funding!

what are we gonna do? are you guys willing to put up with more taxes to fund our somalia engagement? or is our intervention somehow not going to cost money? do we have the troops? the international hegemony? the money? the willpower, as a nation, to engage in yet another theater - while the people on our own streets have problems the government can't fix?

the radical part of me even says, what - these pirates get their money by stealing from others, doesn't the government do that as well? but of course the moderate in me says "don't be stupid, the government isn't a band of pirates - because pirates only operate at sea."

you're right - it does boil down to greed. but it's a greed we helped create. my view is, we just need to... just this once, not do anything. it's a start. but it will, at least, prevent future problems from happening that we can't foresee.

edit: oh. btw. you're right - the US hasn't been dumping this waste into their waters. i find it interesting that it's european hospitals that are doing it. you guys claim your socialist system has no exploited victims... i say you just can't see them. out of sight, out of mind!

edit 2:

"Somalis collect up to $100 million a year from pirate ransoms off their coasts. And the Europeans and Asians poach around $300 million a year in fish from Somali waters."