Science and politics

In a previous post, I brought up the fact that no matter how weird government leaders' ideas may seem economically, they do know the basics of the field and do have advisors well versed with the intricacies of high level economics. With the current issues I felt like broadening this idea a bit.

Earlier this week, the European parliament has voted to ban seal products from Canada. In the meantime, in a seemingly weird move, Egypt has decided to kill all pigs on its territory becoming the real life equivalent of this comic. All of these situations have in common the fact that they don't really have any scientific reason behind them. The seals in question are not an endangered species and while the hunt is graphic, it does not incur an abnormal amount of suffering to the animal. The reason the decision was taken was that it was politically profitable. Very few people in Europe use seal product, so no "seal industry" would be destroyed by such a decision. The same is true with European relationships with Canada. Even though we are talking about it now, the "seal embargo" will not have much of an effect on seal hunters as only 5% of their exports are to Europe. The end results are European governments winning the votes of the part of their population that are easily impressed by pictures of a cute baby seal while not really bothering the rest. From the Canadian point of view, the PM will try to fight it as he can but he probably won't succeed. This will however give us good munitions in order to break a profitable free trade agreement with Europe in the coming years.

Egypt's reaction to swine flu first made me smile. Personally, I somehow pictured Mubarak huddled in a cave in fear of anything that would dare sneeze next to him. But really, such a measure is not targeting animals, or even a virus. It is aimed at the Christian minority in Egypt which are the only ones affected by this. I want to say this is not a conspiracy per say. It is simply that Mubarak's power is based on the Muslim majority in his country while he also wants to increase Egypt's influence with the other Muslim countries. With this in mind, it really is the same as in Europe. The government is catering to the people that will get them more power in the future while only angering, in Egypt's case, people that have very little power of their own.

Swine flu