The Isocracy Network

One of the most dramatic global political changes in the last month was the military collapse of the Syrian government and President Bashar al-Assad's Ba'athist government. Starting on November 27, a coordinated attack by opposition groups launched a blitzkrieg against the positions of the government's Syrian Arab Army in Aleppo, then Homs, and Hama as other rebels advanced in the south. Within two days, rebel forces entered Aleppo, and three days after that, Hama. In the meantime, the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) took the city of Deir ez-Zor, as government forces rapidly withdrew to Damascus. By December 8, the Syrian government was overthrown with the Syrian Transitional Government taking power throughout most of the country with the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES, backed by the SDF), as Assad's family escaped and was granted asylum in Russia. Opportunistically, Israel has extended its military presence from the occupied Golan Heights into the Quneitra Governorate.

For many observers, the collapse of the Syrian government was quite a surprise. The war had been running for almost fourteen years. Following violent crackdowns on protests associated with the Arab Spring, outright rebellion against the government when a group of officers defected and declared the establishment of the Free Syrian Army. Opposition groups fragmented and were often in conflict with each other with the rise of Sunni militias led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), jihadist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, and Islamic State (an even more extremist split from al-Qaeda). Kurdish groups, following principles of democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism, led the formation of the Syrian Democratic Forces as the Free Syrian Army fragmented. Except for the SDF, which eventually managed to come into cease-fire agreements with the Assad government, whilst other rebels were eventually pushed into the Idlib governate, with Russia conducting significant airstrikes and ground operations supporting the government and the United States doing the same against the Islamic state. For the past four years, stalemate situations existed, albeit not after the deaths of over half a million civilians, overwhelmingly due to government military operations.

Upon taking control of the Communist Party of China in 1978, new paramount leader Deng Xiaoping inherited an economy that was very primitive for an industrialised nation, so set about replacing Maoist class struggle with reform and development. His famous quote of the time when referring to manners of growth was "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." That might seem very mild, but compared to what the population was used to reading from the late Chairman Mao, bromides such as "The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale", this was a radical proposition. To illustrate the scale of the task Deng and his politburo had before them, in 1980 China's gross domestic product was estimated at around US$191 billion, or about $195 per capita given the population that year was around 982 million. By comparison, in 1980 Australia's GDP was not that much lower than the PRC's at US$150 billion, with a GDP per capita of $10,200. With Australia's population at the time being 14.7 million citizens, that meant that despite China having 66 times as many people, the Australian economy was 52 times more productive.

And Deng's reforms obviously worked. At the time of his death in 1997 Chinese GDP was approaching US$1 trillion, and GDP per capita was almost US$1000. To return to the above listed benchmark, this was now double the size of the Australian economy, and the difference in productivity had roughly halved. In 2006 the PRC overtook the United Kingdom to become the world's fourth largest economy, the following year Germany, and by 2010 China was finally ahead of Japan, with eyes on the global leader for the past century, the United States. In 2008 China hosted the Summer Olympics, and for those with a knowledge of history, the opening ceremony of the games was illustrative. It celebrated thousands of years of Chinese culture, and showed off the dynamic emerging China of the 21st Century. Missing was anything from recent history; at least before the world's gaze the Century of Humiliation had been banished. The term "rising" was inescapable and dragons replaced Russian bears in the editorial cartoons of western broadsheets. Foreign study of Mandarin increased, although it was also said at the time there were more Chinese learning English as a second language than there were native English speakers.

However just three weeks after the Olympics concluded with a spectacular closing ceremony and China topping the medal table, on the other side of the world, on September 15, Lehman Brothers suddenly collapsed. This was a key moment when the United States' subprime mortgage crisis triggered what became the Global Financial Crisis, which lead to The Great Recession. While there were multiple causes including the subprime mortgage sector in the US, the excessive risk taking by investment banks such as Lehman Brothers was symptomatic of mistakes of the broader financial industry that had spent the previous thirty years deliberately unlearning the lessons of the Great Depression. Governments responded with big stimulus spending in order to compensate for the sudden market contraction, but even with all this additional money to prevent job losses and prop up spending almost every major economy went into recession. China was one of the few that did not, yet the very thing that helped it not only avoid an economic contraction but enjoy another decade of strong growth is now strangling the PRC and will contribute to its decline.

There are many reasons why Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 United States presidential election. Most of these proffered will be true, but only to a very limited extent. Because political events are unique and cannot be run again with different variables, simply highlighting one or multiple factors and assigning blame to them without looking at some of more long term and structural reasons will be insufficient. Given the scale of this defeat many smaller tactical errors can be considered essentially meaningless. For example, the charge that Harris picking Minnesota governor Tim Walz rather than Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was a fatal mistake. Or not going on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast in the closing stretch. Or for her comments on "The View" that she couldn't think of an instance where she would have done something different to what President Joe Biden had done. Even if all three of those had a different outcome it's unlikely they would have been sufficient to have swung the election, and ditto for the next 30 factors one can name. Any of these might have moved thousands or even tens of thousands of votes, but this was a contest lost by millions and the consequence of conditions that evolved over a period of years.

Likewise, those blaming Biden and his late abandonment of his own re-election bid as the main reason for Harris' loss will not find a simple explanation there, though many will claim to. A lot of the same journalists now writing their "She didn't have enough time to build her own campaign and had to inherit the weaknesses of her boss's political operation" autopsies will have also their bylines attached to "This truncated campaign is likely to help Harris and the vibes are totally great now that Biden is out of the picture" think-pieces from July and August. Ever since the 2022 midterms the perception had been growing that Biden was too old and shouldn't run for re-election, and it was only his disastrous debate performance in June that convinced him to step aside, finally admitting (after much outside cajoling) he wasn't up to the job. However consider that with all else being equal, what if the president been convinced by his family, staff and party to announce he would not stand for re-election earlier; what would have been the most likely scenario to play out?

Over the past two decades the main story in international politics and the global economy has been the inexorable rise of China. Yet today it is almost certainly the case that Beijing's power and influence has already peaked, just as its population recently has, so the story of the next decades will be how the ruling Communist Party manages this decline if the Party survives. The demise of such a major power is not something the international community has had to reckon with since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and as the war in Ukraine illustrates, over 30 years later the world is still dealing with the fallout from this. China is much larger in terms of population and far more crucial to the global economy than the USSR ever was. And with the bipolar certainties of the Cold War just a fading memory, the world no longer automatically looks to the United States for global leadership, and given the state of American politics of late, Washington cannot be relied upon to provide it. But Chinese decline is not a mere possibility, it is a certainty, the only questions left are when it happens and the form it takes.

The first and most obvious sign of Chinese decline is its population. In 1976 Communist Party General Secretary Mao Zedong died, and after a brief struggle for power in 1978 Deng Xiaoping emerged as China's new paramount leader. His first priority was economic reform to encourage development and growth, but the right sort of growth. China was always a populous nation, in 1949 at the defeat of the Nationalist government and the establishment of communist rule there were already more than half a billion Chinese. (By comparison, at that same time the population of the United States was about 150 million people, and there were close to 180 million in the Soviet Union.) Despite disasters such as the Great Leap Forward and, to a lesser extent, the Cultural Revolution, improvements in the economy and in maternal health plus encouragement from the state for large families meant that China's birthrate accelerated (to over five children per woman from the 1950s to the early 70s), infant mortality greatly diminished and average life expectancy rose from just 35 years in 1949 to 63 by 1975. Within a single generation China had gone from a mostly rural and agrarian society with high mortality to an industrialised and urbanised one with a high birthrate and good basic healthcare. Consequently, the already large population experienced rapid, and to the government in the 1970s, alarming growth.

After a year of warfare between Israel and Hamas, with casualties at around fifty thousand, both sides have been accused of "terrorism". In order to make any sense of these claims, a definition is required by which the claims can be evaluated, whether the terrorist actions have any justification, and what the international community can do about the loss of civilian life, especially in an environment of partisan realism.

There is no universal definition of "terrorism". However, a synthesis of various statements found in international law, the United Nations, academic experts etc, can be made as follows: Terrorism is the systematic use of intimidating violence against civilian non-combatants for the purpose of inducing political change. By "systematic" what is meant is that the terrorist actions are a planned, organised, deliberate, and strategic decision. By "intimidating violence" it is noted the purpose of terrorism is to intimidate the population and to create a climate of fear. By "non-combatants", the target is identified.

Another component that must be mentioned is that "terrorism" can occur by state or non-state actors. The US FBI, for example, defines terrorism as the "unlawful use of unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives". In other words, the US state is excluding itself from being "terrorist" body. Such a claim is patently unjustifiable. States themselves have clearly engaged in terrorist acts against populations, and indeed some have become historically famous, such as the Reign of Terror (la Terreur) of the first French republic and the Great Terror (Большой террор) in the Soviet Union under Stalin and Yezhov.

The story of Timor-Leste is one that is close to my heart. A former Portuguese colony, it declared independence in November 1975, only to be invaded by Suharto's Indonesia less than two weeks later. The subsequent occupation was brutal, to put it mildly. The population of East Timor in 1975 was estimated to be 688,000 people; an estimated 150,000 lost their lives in the years that would follow due to direct violent killings, conflict-induced famine, and so forth. Imprisonment, torture, rape etc was rampant. All during this time, successive Australian governments considered the occupation fait accompli. But the Timorese and their allies for self-determination across the world did not give up, and in 1999 the population overwhelmingly indicated their support for independence and voted overwhelmingly (78.5%) against "autonomy" within Indonesia.

The results led to mass violence by pro-Indonesian militia. As the government dragged its feet, Australians protested and eventually - through a rather concerted mass effort where unions were once again at the forefront - the Australian government reluctantly led a UN military mission, INTERFET to ensure peace (an excellent book on how this occurred is by Clinton Fernandes, "Reluctant Saviour: Australia, Indonesia, and the Liberation of East Timor". INTERFET would be converted into UNTAET, the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor, which prepared the country for independence.

For my own part in was in late 1990s, prior to the independence referendum, that Timor became an area of activism for me when I worked as an electorate officer for the Victorian Parliament. In 2002 I visited the country for the first time as the only nominee of the Australian political party appointed as an observer to the UNTAET-run Presidential elections. Whilst I was there I met with representatives of their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and later in the year I would find myself working as a volunteer for said ministry as the "Information and Communications Technology Policy Advisor" for a year. It is fair to say I worked pretty hard during that year on policy documents, training manuals (translated by the United Nations Development Programme), general network and system maintenance, and even building the first government website. When I left, the Minister (and Nobel Peace Prize recipient) Jose Ramos-Horta provided a rather positive summary of my work. The Australian government's behaviour toward the new country, as Juice Media has pointed out, has not exactly been good.

The snap election called by President Emmanuel Macron for the French National Assembly has resulted in a surprising plurality for the left-wing electoral alliance, Nouveau Front populaire ("New Popular Front") with 180 seats (up 49), followed by the centrist Ensemble coalition ("Together") with 159 (down 86), and the far-right populist and nationalist Rassemblement National ("National Rally") with 142 seats (up 53). The centre-right party, Les Républicains ("The Republicans"), which has a direct lineage from the Gaullist tradition, won a mere 22 seats (down 22), with other left-wing candidates winning 15 seats.

The 577 deputies of the National Assembly are elected for a five-year term by a two-round system in single-member constituencies. A candidate is elected if they receive an absolute majority in the first round and a vote total greater than 25% of the registered electorate. If no candidate reaches this threshold, a runoff election is held between any other candidate who received a vote total greater than 12.5% of registered voters. With an unusual tripolarised electorate and a very high voter turnout (up 20%), the 311 electorates saw three and four-candidate run-off elections ("triangulaires" and "quadrangulaires"), a situation not seen since the 1973 election. By way of comparison, the 2022 election only had 8 such contests, and the 2017 election, had only 1.

If nothing else, the UK election of July 4, 2024 will go down in history as the single biggest loss for any sitting government in that country. Losing almost half their vote (43.6% down to 23.7% from the previous election) and two-thirds of their seats (365 to 121), Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party has landed a landslide victory to Keir Starmer's Labour Party in terms of seats (202 to 412), albeit with only a modest improvement in their primary vote (32.1% to 33.7%). Another big winner was the Liberal-Democrats who, also with a small change in percentage (11.6% to 12.2%) nevertheless gained many seats (11 to 72), their highest since 1923, as the Tory vote collapsed. For their part, the Scottish Nationalist Party have fallen into an existential crisis, losing fourth-fifths of their seats (48 to 9). Also of note was the rapid and late-rise of the populist UK Reform under Nigel Farage, which whilst gaining a few seats (0 to 5), achieved a notable 14.3% of the vote.

Each of these results should be viewed carefully to provide an understanding of the event. For the Tories, the rot began to set in with the Brexit referendum of 2016. Prior to that the neoliberal (socially and economically liberal) Tory Prime Minister, David Cameron, had delivered a largely successful government, albeit one which could only manage the effects of the Global Financial Crisis through austerity measures. However, he critically under-estimated the rise of a populist right which would find an outlet with Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party which gained 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election. After Cameron's resignation, Theresa May's Prime Ministership was dominated over Brexit negotiations, scraping through in the 2017 election, surviving two 'no confidence' motions, and having her Brexit proposal rejected by parliament three times. Resigning in July 2019, she was succeeded by the prominent and "colourful" supporter of Brexit, Boris Johnson.

"At work in the ruins, finding our place in the time of science climate change pandemics & all the other emergencies" by Dougland Hine (2023) is an excellent book for our times. The author is an extremely aware and courageous person, it is not easy facing hard truths let alone try to get others to face them. There are layers of confronting complexity, many things we currently do are unsustainable and even without global warming our destruction of soils, vegetation, ground water, surface water, atmospheric water systems and ecohydrological cycles, and animal driven nutrient cycles - will destroy our life support system and us. People don't like to understand those things which is part of the problems that are already profoundly impacting our lives and will effectively destroy all futures, soon, unless addressed.

The narrow framing of the "problem" while ignoring ~3/4 of the larger problems is producing perverse outcomes and will hasten our demise. Before one can "solve" a complex problem one must first understand the problem as completely as possible - and also understand the limits of their understanding and the limits of our science and technologies and human minds to a utilitarian degree. Civilisation operates on the equivalent of "the answer given to a 4 year old" by an indigenous elder, for analogy, in an excellent talk by Phillip Zylstra on decolonialising fire mismanagement in Australia.

The phrase "cash is king" first appeared with McLean in 1890 under the maxim: ""Avoid credit, remembering that cash is king, credit is a slave" [1]. More recently, the maxim has been repurposed to a propaganda slogan for the most recent culture war with, as is often the case, a notable generational divide. In Australia for example, the Facebook group "Cash Is King" is a wild collection of anecdotal stories, conspiracy theories, plain ignorance, and even the occasional genuine concern. Right-wing populist parties, ever hopeful of public funding in elections and competing over the sizeable witless vote, are earnest in promoting their credentials. For example, Katter's Australia Party states: "Moves towards a fully cashless society must be immediately stopped, and the right to use cash must be safeguarded" [2].

The trajectory of history does not favour such opinions. With increased electronic network density, speed of transactions, increased security, and lower economic transaction costs, electronic transactions are increasingly simply more convenient. Of course, electronic transactions have existed since the early 1900s in some form, but it has been in the 21st century that both the quantity and aggregate value of electronic transactions reached majority status in advanced economies; as early as 2016, only 20% of retail transactions were conducted by cash in Sweden, and only 2% of the value [3]. Even in Australia, in the three years to 2022, cash payments declined from 32% to 16% in number and 8% of value [4]. It is notable that high-cash transaction economies are invariably among the poorest in the world, whereas the higher number of cashless transactions is correlated with advanced technological and economic development.