Anyways. The hot topic these days is about piracy off the coast of Somalia (and beyond!) and how the world's major powers are powerless to really do anything about it.
A line I've been hearing lately: To solve the piracy problem coming from Somalia, poverty in Somalia must be eradicated.
The truth: Piracy will stop when it stops being profitable. i.e. once a dude goes out to sea with an AK-47, sharks start getting a hard on.
Seriously. When you have the most advanced warships in the world unable to tackle a bunch of dudes with AK-47s travelling on crappy "speed" boats, you have to ask yourself some serious questions. This is the same sort of problem that was tackled pretty successfully in the past and that was when the technological gap between pirates and the authorities were not as big as they are now.
AEGIS Cruisers have nothing on these guys
You see, what's changed fundamentally between the world back then and now is that back in the old days, if there was no law regarding fighting pirates, it meant everything was OK. Now when there aren't any laws about them, it means you can't lift a finger. Yeah, your local law now is in effect in those cases but laws that apply back home don't neccessarily apply half way around the world. Shit, the rules even change from one side of the city to the other.
Like an event that happened a few days ago:
The Dutch had to let seven pirates go because... "They can only arrest them if the pirates are from the Netherlands, the victims are from the Netherlands, or if they are in Netherlands waters."
(Source: Sky News)
Yeah a few hostages were saved, but the trade is still lucrative enough for pirates to still take to the seas.
So how do you solve it? Stop making it profitable.
Create an exclusion zone where any small vessel discovered will be blown out of the water.
Imagine you are a pirate or a guy thinking about going into piracy and your buddies are coming back rich and even those who fail come back in one piece. Why on earth WOULDN'T you want to take part in piracy? But if not a soul who went out to sea to hijack a large vessel made it home alive, that's something to think about isn't it?
But wouldn't eradicating poverty also work?
Some places are hell holes and are meant to be hell holes. If they want to get out of poverty, they'll have to do it themselves. Certain things about people don't change and one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make is to think that other people think like you do. Sending aid to these countries is a complete waste of time and the fact that aid does arrive there means that those in power will have no motivation to end the poverty. In fact, it will be in their best interest to keep the people poor and starving, so that some NGO can show up, snap another photograph of a starving child which will inevitably fuck our consciousness into donating aid money which will be ripped off just enough to pay for some corrupt dude's new Mercedes and his son's gold AK-47 and have just enough aid go through to keep the regular folks starving, but not starving to death.
PHEW. That's a run on sentence isn't it?
Hell I think I tackled more than one subject:
- Violence doesn't solve anything: BULLSHIT!
- Eradicating poverty will work: BULLSHIT!
- Motivating people through fear doesn't work: BULLSHIT!
All the high tech weaponry we have is only as good as the will to use them.
Make the ROEs work and let fly some steel rain.
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