Classic failure to establish a (close to) pareto optimal regulatory structure to avoid ending up in the self-organizing Nash equillibrium which is worse for everyone.
Pakistan is a country that launch satellites to the space and spend solid money on building atomic bombs. They are perfectly capable to develop new antibiotics to fix their problem. They may also want to support and teach more people doing microbiology research on the country.
That will contribute to the well-being of every children in the world, providing also the state with a lot of political leveraging and allies.
The Japanese company that developed the antibiotic currently used on Pakistan will never have the same resources as the state of Pakistan.
They do manufacture antibiotics. That’s in some sense the source of the problem: they don’t regulate them enough resulting in excessive usage. This breeds resistant strains.
Manufacture and develop are different words. Same as with clone vs create.
We all know since decades that the antibiotics are failing. We all know that the misuse of the extant antibiotics cause this damage. We can't just at this state to pretend that weren't warned about that.
There are many points here that could improve the problem and don't depend on anything except the will of Pakistan government to do it. A lot of low hanging fruit here.
1. How much could take for the government to regulate better the use of antibiotics? A week? Four hours and a pen?
2. What about building a scientific team to develop new antibiotics?
3. Could be the unreliable water system made more reliable? Maybe just adding a filter made with sand and cheap industrial materials would help. Dunno.
4. What about a campaign to teach your citizens about the correct use of antibiotics?
As an outsider looking in, I have to wonder why the rest of the world, and especially the western world sit by silently while countries run themselves into the ground?
Pakistan is one of the most poorly governed countries in the world. If the Netherlands or Japan for example was equally poorly governed, the relative human toll would be much higher than it is in Pakistan.
Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
I see similar problems coming in South Africa, also, it's quickly approaching crisis, but the population just keeps electing the most corrupt politicians that are not interested in good governance at all.
Who wins by letting these countries run themselves into the ground and then create problems for everyone else?
Because people don't listen? We try and tried to warn (voice concerns I think it's called) for voting in a rasberry pi nano running a markov chain trained on a few pages of the redneck bible and dressed up in an orange baboon suit as president of the most powerful country on earth; considering how close the results were and seem to be again, it's apparently not the way.
Try the US after a few decades of trump-level 'leaders'; won't be very different from those places anymore. Probably won't happen if the constitution remains in place, but it can and does. That's what the warnings are for.
Trying to bring the racist card to the discussion maybe; but "they don't help us because they are racists" is a dusty and very worn out argument at this moment.
Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?
It's pretty condescending to expect a lecture from a foreign government official to be well received and to tell them something they don't already know.
> Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?
Given that the trajectory has not changed, I think they don't care to fix it. South Africans also know their government is corrupt, and they consciously vote for it. Whether this is similar in Pakistan I don't know, but clearly if they cared to change trajectory it would not get worse all the time.
Pakistan has had a western nation rule over it before and it didn't exactly go well. It's also not exactly a well-run nation that can tweak a few things to solve excesses like with antibiotics. Warnings about the overuse of antibiotics go back to the 1950s. This isn't something that will come to a surprise to anyone, and it isn't even an impossible challenge to overcome.
Here in the Netherlands, antibiotics usage in the meat industry was absurdly high until a bit over a decade ago, despite decades of warnings. And as a side note, I would classify the way the country has been run for all of my adult life as poorly governed, with elected officials constantly lying, government parties trying to work around the law rather than comply leading to several crises, and just general mismanagement. It's not Pakistani army bad, but it certainly warrants warnings from other countries.
As for Pakistan: If I were their leader, knowing about things like vaccination centres ran by the CIA to secretly hunt down and kill Taliban soldiers in search of Bin Laden, I'd be wary of warnings coming from the West. I wouldn't much trust foreign charities to install clean water infrastructure either, because that's far from the only time they've been used as a front.
Are your leaders listening to the warnings coming from Bejing, Brussels, Israel, the Kremlin, and Washington? Would you even trust what they say is in your interest? I wouldn't exactly put it past foreign intelligence agencies to spread typhoid in areas of interest just so they could come in and "help cure" everyone.
> As an outsider looking in, I have to wonder why the rest of the world, and especially the western world sit by silently while countries run themselves into the ground?
Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
So good luck to the people of those countries but the change has to come from within. And if they don't have enough people who want the change, well... Inch'Allah.
>> Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
And after that, "two drone strikes a week, every week, for 14 years".
> do they know change has to come?
If they don't, then it doesn't. "Change is needed" is a basic sense a human being is able to feel and express by the time they turn 3.
> When was the last time this message was clearly proclaimed to them?
It's not something that needs proclaiming. Again, this is obvious to them. What's missing is motivation and coordination.
What would be useful is to have a positive example of what the changes needed would lead to. Unfortunately, modern West is doing its best to provide the opposite externally, all while spinning apart internally. Even though the life here may be objectively better to life there, oppressive regimes and rebel wannabes all get plenty of rhetorical ammunition to say otherwise.
The reality is, people there are trying as hard as they can to survive, and it’s shitty and hard, largely due to sociopolitical factors + economic factors which interrelate with their identity.
So good luck changing that without it getting much worse.
For a US comparison, check out the gun control and abortion ‘debate’.
> The reality is, people there are trying as hard as they can to survive, and it’s shitty and hard, largely due to sociopolitical factors + economic factors which interrelate with their identity.
Repeatedly voting for the most corrupt politicians imaginable that mismanage a country into crisis, as the South African electorate does, is not "trying as hard as they can to survive". It's, in fact, doing everything possible to put make surviving more difficult.
> For a US comparison, check out the gun control and abortion ‘debate’.
I'm not really talking about the US, but if Paksitan and South Africa was even 1/10th as well governed as the US it would be awesome.
And when those politicians are using industrialized propaganda and actively pushing everyone’s buttons in a way they can barely see straight, surely it’s the poor farmers fault?
That’s the sociopolitical side.
Why do you think Trump is a still a viable candidate (per the numbers)?
You can call them lazy idiots all you want, it doesn’t change what is happening.
When we can successfully pry the parasite that is what is going on with Trump from out ass, then we can be all high and mighty. Right now the only reason we aren’t literally in the same boat is momentum and capital.
> Why do you think Trump is a still a viable candidate (per the numbers)?
I don't know why you are talking about US politics. I'm not an American, I'm not interested in the US other than for the fact that their rapidly collapsing hegemony is quickly accelerating the world into global conflicts, but even so, the world is not entitled to global peace guaranteed by an American hegemony.
> Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
The current Pakistani administration is a product of an American-backed coup on Imran Khan because he was getting cozy with China.
Considering how Pakistan has been a military dictatorship with a foil of an ostensibly elected government ever since its formation, this is least credible explanation of three situation yet somehow this what you came up with
Foreign interference is only something other countries do to us. We never interfere in their politics. /s
I think you need to look into the CIA playbook. They're doing this actively, have been doing this for decades. Even lots of allied "democratic" countries are effectively just puppet states of the US: yeah people get to elect, but their foreign policy is solidly controlled by the US. They don't have real sovereignty, and without sovereignty they don't have real democracy.
Wisdom cannot be taught, only self-learned. Think about all the wisdom that people tried to pass down to you when you were young, how much of it you actually internalised at the time vs what you had to learn by yourself and then had an "a-ha moment" when you noticed someone years before had warned you of it.
There's nothing Western governments or societies can do to steer a whole other society/culture, and I think you haven't really experienced other cultures truly if you think you can steer the voting population into better decisions.
It requires a well educated population to understand what "good governance" even means, it requires a stable, out of survival mode, society to reason about long term consequences to society vs short term individual benefits. When someone is barely surviving they will most often vote for someone who promises them a better life, without critical thinking (stemming from my 1st point on education) there's no way for the individual to understand complex issues and why a populist won't solve it.
What exactly would you have the other countries do? What does "warn them" even mean? As if the only problem Pakistan has is that its politics arent sufficiently dictated by the West? I mean, thing would probably be better if that were something the West were actually capable of doing, but Afghanistan shows what that experiment looks like.
Every western and really non-western government should publicly state that the trajectory of Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, etc is concerning and that if these countries do not change trajectory the human toll will be catastrophic.
Instead we just have silence, and some effective pretence that what is going on in these countries is entirely acceptable merely because the people have voted for their own destruction.
I'm not saying the west should invade and replace the governments as they tried in Afghanistan, but the poor governance in Africa, Asia and South America is incredibly costly for the west. If the west has to pick up the tab when it all comes crashing down, it should have some say.
Some people think that the west (and others) are doing similar things, for example: focusing on some migrants rather than tackling climate change. This too will have a catastrophic human toll in my opinion, I think people are warned, and still the focus is on basically anything else.
To be honest, I would have a different issue with "the civilized countries" (whatever east/west/etc.). They should be a role model, and while they are a bit better than some on the list, they are quite far from what they could be.
So, probably, rather than worry about how bad has it someone hundreds of miles away, try to improve something in the local vicinity.
We (the rest of the world) are not omniscient. Its always possible that we are wrong, and they are right.
Our assumption that the only valid way to happiness is a capitalist democracy, and we force it on everyone with our military strength, then thats just a crusade.
> We (the rest of the world) are not omniscient. Its always possible that we are wrong, and they are right.
I would care less if the collapse of Pakistan did not have consequences for the west, but it does.
And Pakistan and South Africa are far from Communist utopias, and regardless, continuing as they are will have massive human toll, regardless of how much you hate capitalism.
I’m not sure what you mean by that, your post was about the wests dependence on Pakistan, I assume you mean economically. ECHR is important, but I don’t see the relevance in the context of a powerful nations dependence on a less powerful one.
The west is rapidly losing any kind of credibility and moral leadership due to its hypocritical stance where on the one hand they denounce the invasion of Ukraine, but on the other hand simultaneously support/enable the Gaza genocide. "Warn them" — why should they trust that western governments are being sincere rather than yet again just feigning humanitarian concern while having a political agenda? This extends to outside just central Asia: African leaders have been complaining for some time now that while every time China visits, they get a bridge or a hospital, every time a western leader visits, they only get a lecture (on how $COUNTRY is bad, how $STUFF is bad) and nothing ever gets done.
Frankly it concerns me that so few people know that the global south is rapidly losing trust in the west because of our own hypocritical, politicized, insincere behavior. Western media pretty much never talks about this sort of stuff and so most people are still in lala land.
As usual, the measures come too late. It isn't mentioned in the article, but the anti-biotics apparently were not regulated: https://en.dailypakistan.com.pk/04-Aug-2024/antibiotics-in-p...
Classic failure to establish a (close to) pareto optimal regulatory structure to avoid ending up in the self-organizing Nash equillibrium which is worse for everyone.
The Price of Anarchy strikes again.
> Ukasha needed meropenem – a “last-resort” drug reserved for the most serious illnesses. He was given 22 injections, two a day.
Meropenem resistant typhi is described since 2022.
But don‘t worry, we have IV meropenem + colistin left. Don‘t mind the seizures, neuro- and nephrotoxicity.
It says "for the most serious illnesses", not "to heal/cure the ... illnesses".
Pakistan is a country that launch satellites to the space and spend solid money on building atomic bombs. They are perfectly capable to develop new antibiotics to fix their problem. They may also want to support and teach more people doing microbiology research on the country.
That will contribute to the well-being of every children in the world, providing also the state with a lot of political leveraging and allies.
The Japanese company that developed the antibiotic currently used on Pakistan will never have the same resources as the state of Pakistan.
They do manufacture antibiotics. That’s in some sense the source of the problem: they don’t regulate them enough resulting in excessive usage. This breeds resistant strains.
Manufacture and develop are different words. Same as with clone vs create.
We all know since decades that the antibiotics are failing. We all know that the misuse of the extant antibiotics cause this damage. We can't just at this state to pretend that weren't warned about that.
There are many points here that could improve the problem and don't depend on anything except the will of Pakistan government to do it. A lot of low hanging fruit here.
1. How much could take for the government to regulate better the use of antibiotics? A week? Four hours and a pen?
2. What about building a scientific team to develop new antibiotics?
3. Could be the unreliable water system made more reliable? Maybe just adding a filter made with sand and cheap industrial materials would help. Dunno.
4. What about a campaign to teach your citizens about the correct use of antibiotics?
As an outsider looking in, I have to wonder why the rest of the world, and especially the western world sit by silently while countries run themselves into the ground?
Pakistan is one of the most poorly governed countries in the world. If the Netherlands or Japan for example was equally poorly governed, the relative human toll would be much higher than it is in Pakistan.
Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
I see similar problems coming in South Africa, also, it's quickly approaching crisis, but the population just keeps electing the most corrupt politicians that are not interested in good governance at all.
Who wins by letting these countries run themselves into the ground and then create problems for everyone else?
> [..] western government [..] warning Pakistan, and it's population
People hate being told what to do/told that what they're doing is wrong.
Especially when the advice is unsolicited and coming from people from a different country.
I'm not saying whether that is or isn't rational.
> elect
Pakistan is and has always been run by the army. It sounds bad, but in 2024, radical populists such as Imran Khan sound even worse.
One option is to twist their arm into good economic policy using loans. Wold Bank has already attempted this and failed.
The other option is to intervene. Pakistan has nukes. You can't intervene.
[dead]
Because people don't listen? We try and tried to warn (voice concerns I think it's called) for voting in a rasberry pi nano running a markov chain trained on a few pages of the redneck bible and dressed up in an orange baboon suit as president of the most powerful country on earth; considering how close the results were and seem to be again, it's apparently not the way.
If Pakistan and South Africa were even 1/10th as well governed as the US they would be beacons of hope.
Try the US after a few decades of trump-level 'leaders'; won't be very different from those places anymore. Probably won't happen if the constitution remains in place, but it can and does. That's what the warnings are for.
Sure! The fact remains, people don't like to be told what to do.
Take up the White Man's burden—
Go bind your sons to exile To wait in heavy harness Your new-caught, sullen peoples, (...and six more verses)- Rudyard Kipling
Not sure I follow. Running a country right off a cliff is not helping anyone in the country.
Is a well known racist poem praising colonialism.
Trying to bring the racist card to the discussion maybe; but "they don't help us because they are racists" is a dusty and very worn out argument at this moment.
Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?
It's pretty condescending to expect a lecture from a foreign government official to be well received and to tell them something they don't already know.
> Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?
Given that the trajectory has not changed, I think they don't care to fix it. South Africans also know their government is corrupt, and they consciously vote for it. Whether this is similar in Pakistan I don't know, but clearly if they cared to change trajectory it would not get worse all the time.
I thought colonialism was a bad thing?
Pakistan has had a western nation rule over it before and it didn't exactly go well. It's also not exactly a well-run nation that can tweak a few things to solve excesses like with antibiotics. Warnings about the overuse of antibiotics go back to the 1950s. This isn't something that will come to a surprise to anyone, and it isn't even an impossible challenge to overcome.
Here in the Netherlands, antibiotics usage in the meat industry was absurdly high until a bit over a decade ago, despite decades of warnings. And as a side note, I would classify the way the country has been run for all of my adult life as poorly governed, with elected officials constantly lying, government parties trying to work around the law rather than comply leading to several crises, and just general mismanagement. It's not Pakistani army bad, but it certainly warrants warnings from other countries.
As for Pakistan: If I were their leader, knowing about things like vaccination centres ran by the CIA to secretly hunt down and kill Taliban soldiers in search of Bin Laden, I'd be wary of warnings coming from the West. I wouldn't much trust foreign charities to install clean water infrastructure either, because that's far from the only time they've been used as a front.
Are your leaders listening to the warnings coming from Bejing, Brussels, Israel, the Kremlin, and Washington? Would you even trust what they say is in your interest? I wouldn't exactly put it past foreign intelligence agencies to spread typhoid in areas of interest just so they could come in and "help cure" everyone.
> As an outsider looking in, I have to wonder why the rest of the world, and especially the western world sit by silently while countries run themselves into the ground?
Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
So good luck to the people of those countries but the change has to come from within. And if they don't have enough people who want the change, well... Inch'Allah.
> So good luck to the people of those countries but the change has to come from within.
Agreed, but do they know change has to come? When was the last time this message was clearly proclaimed to them?
>> Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
And after that, "two drone strikes a week, every week, for 14 years".
> do they know change has to come?
If they don't, then it doesn't. "Change is needed" is a basic sense a human being is able to feel and express by the time they turn 3.
> When was the last time this message was clearly proclaimed to them?
It's not something that needs proclaiming. Again, this is obvious to them. What's missing is motivation and coordination.
What would be useful is to have a positive example of what the changes needed would lead to. Unfortunately, modern West is doing its best to provide the opposite externally, all while spinning apart internally. Even though the life here may be objectively better to life there, oppressive regimes and rebel wannabes all get plenty of rhetorical ammunition to say otherwise.
I don’t know, look out the window?
The reality is, people there are trying as hard as they can to survive, and it’s shitty and hard, largely due to sociopolitical factors + economic factors which interrelate with their identity.
So good luck changing that without it getting much worse.
For a US comparison, check out the gun control and abortion ‘debate’.
> The reality is, people there are trying as hard as they can to survive, and it’s shitty and hard, largely due to sociopolitical factors + economic factors which interrelate with their identity.
Repeatedly voting for the most corrupt politicians imaginable that mismanage a country into crisis, as the South African electorate does, is not "trying as hard as they can to survive". It's, in fact, doing everything possible to put make surviving more difficult.
> For a US comparison, check out the gun control and abortion ‘debate’.
I'm not really talking about the US, but if Paksitan and South Africa was even 1/10th as well governed as the US it would be awesome.
And when those politicians are using industrialized propaganda and actively pushing everyone’s buttons in a way they can barely see straight, surely it’s the poor farmers fault?
That’s the sociopolitical side.
Why do you think Trump is a still a viable candidate (per the numbers)?
You can call them lazy idiots all you want, it doesn’t change what is happening.
When we can successfully pry the parasite that is what is going on with Trump from out ass, then we can be all high and mighty. Right now the only reason we aren’t literally in the same boat is momentum and capital.
> Why do you think Trump is a still a viable candidate (per the numbers)?
I don't know why you are talking about US politics. I'm not an American, I'm not interested in the US other than for the fact that their rapidly collapsing hegemony is quickly accelerating the world into global conflicts, but even so, the world is not entitled to global peace guaranteed by an American hegemony.
I would dare to say that the Netherlands is poorly governed given the extreme time it took to form a government both in 2021-22 and 2023-24.
We also had something similar in Sweden after the last two elections.
Well, I would agree the Netherlands and Sweden are rapidly approaching total collapse, but it's still significantly better governed than Pakistan.
Sweden could be without a government for the next 5-10 years and the state would chug along just fine.
> Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
The current Pakistani administration is a product of an American-backed coup on Imran Khan because he was getting cozy with China.
No, it's not. It's a product of the Pakistani people.
Considering how Pakistan has been a military dictatorship with a foil of an ostensibly elected government ever since its formation, this is least credible explanation of three situation yet somehow this what you came up with
Foreign interference is only something other countries do to us. We never interfere in their politics. /s
I think you need to look into the CIA playbook. They're doing this actively, have been doing this for decades. Even lots of allied "democratic" countries are effectively just puppet states of the US: yeah people get to elect, but their foreign policy is solidly controlled by the US. They don't have real sovereignty, and without sovereignty they don't have real democracy.
Because then you get outcry that West colonizes everything.
Wisdom cannot be taught, only self-learned. Think about all the wisdom that people tried to pass down to you when you were young, how much of it you actually internalised at the time vs what you had to learn by yourself and then had an "a-ha moment" when you noticed someone years before had warned you of it.
There's nothing Western governments or societies can do to steer a whole other society/culture, and I think you haven't really experienced other cultures truly if you think you can steer the voting population into better decisions.
It requires a well educated population to understand what "good governance" even means, it requires a stable, out of survival mode, society to reason about long term consequences to society vs short term individual benefits. When someone is barely surviving they will most often vote for someone who promises them a better life, without critical thinking (stemming from my 1st point on education) there's no way for the individual to understand complex issues and why a populist won't solve it.
What exactly would you have the other countries do? What does "warn them" even mean? As if the only problem Pakistan has is that its politics arent sufficiently dictated by the West? I mean, thing would probably be better if that were something the West were actually capable of doing, but Afghanistan shows what that experiment looks like.
> What does "warn them" even mean?
Every western and really non-western government should publicly state that the trajectory of Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, etc is concerning and that if these countries do not change trajectory the human toll will be catastrophic.
Instead we just have silence, and some effective pretence that what is going on in these countries is entirely acceptable merely because the people have voted for their own destruction.
I'm not saying the west should invade and replace the governments as they tried in Afghanistan, but the poor governance in Africa, Asia and South America is incredibly costly for the west. If the west has to pick up the tab when it all comes crashing down, it should have some say.
Some people think that the west (and others) are doing similar things, for example: focusing on some migrants rather than tackling climate change. This too will have a catastrophic human toll in my opinion, I think people are warned, and still the focus is on basically anything else.
To be honest, I would have a different issue with "the civilized countries" (whatever east/west/etc.). They should be a role model, and while they are a bit better than some on the list, they are quite far from what they could be.
So, probably, rather than worry about how bad has it someone hundreds of miles away, try to improve something in the local vicinity.
> They should be a role model, and while they are a bit better than some on the list, they are quite far from what they could be.
The endless stream of illegal aliens put the lie to this claim.
God forbid you want a growing economy. Getting upset about immigration, legal or illegal, is just stupid.
Pakistan itself is also a (historical) example of the same problem. It is like GP doesn't know why the European empires were bad.
We (the rest of the world) are not omniscient. Its always possible that we are wrong, and they are right.
Our assumption that the only valid way to happiness is a capitalist democracy, and we force it on everyone with our military strength, then thats just a crusade.
> We (the rest of the world) are not omniscient. Its always possible that we are wrong, and they are right.
I would care less if the collapse of Pakistan did not have consequences for the west, but it does.
And Pakistan and South Africa are far from Communist utopias, and regardless, continuing as they are will have massive human toll, regardless of how much you hate capitalism.
That sounds like a problem the west has created for themselves.
By adopting the ECHR?
I’m not sure what you mean by that, your post was about the wests dependence on Pakistan, I assume you mean economically. ECHR is important, but I don’t see the relevance in the context of a powerful nations dependence on a less powerful one.
I am not sure if this is satire or not.
The west is rapidly losing any kind of credibility and moral leadership due to its hypocritical stance where on the one hand they denounce the invasion of Ukraine, but on the other hand simultaneously support/enable the Gaza genocide. "Warn them" — why should they trust that western governments are being sincere rather than yet again just feigning humanitarian concern while having a political agenda? This extends to outside just central Asia: African leaders have been complaining for some time now that while every time China visits, they get a bridge or a hospital, every time a western leader visits, they only get a lecture (on how $COUNTRY is bad, how $STUFF is bad) and nothing ever gets done.
Frankly it concerns me that so few people know that the global south is rapidly losing trust in the west because of our own hypocritical, politicized, insincere behavior. Western media pretty much never talks about this sort of stuff and so most people are still in lala land.