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Mafia Sinks Ships Containing Toxic Waste
Hugh Pickens writes "For years there have been rumors that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board as part of a money-making racket. Now, BBC reports on a sunken vessel that has been found 30km off the coast of Italy. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact, and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels with labels indicating the contents are toxic. The ship's location was revealed by Francesco Fonti, an ex-member of Calabria's feared 'Ndrangheta crime group, who confessed to using explosives to sink this vessel and two others as part of an illegal operation to bypass rules on the disposal of toxic waste. Experts are now examining samples taken from the wreck, and an official says that if the samples prove to be radioactive then a search for up to 30 other sunken vessels believed scuttled by the mafia would begin immediately. 'The Mediterranean is 0.7 percent of the world's seas. If in this tiny portion there are more than 30 (toxic waste) shipwrecks, imagine what there could be elsewhere,' says Silvestro Greco, head of Calabria's environment agency."
So then what? Nothing happens to these people? If they are connected to this mess and convicted they should press them into service as part of the clean up process of all this crap. Make them work cleaning up the lethal crap they felt no qualms about exposing everyone else to.
This has long been suspected, and there's a connection to Somali piracy. The mysterious blogger "TokyoTom" has an excellent summary of the research indicating that European companies were using the lack of a government in Somali to dump toxic waste illegally near the coast of Somali, which really wreaked havoc after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, which washed a lot of the crap onshore and caused mass illness.
There were always suspicious that this illegal dumping was a money source for the Mafia, although even legit businesses seem to have no problem with it. I don't defend Somali pirates, but people forget that it originated from fishers trying to get illegal dumpers to leave the area, then to try to get compensation for what the dumpers did. This doesn't justify piracy, but it does give lie to the notion that they lack a legitimate grievance and are simply out for money, and it helps to explain why they enjoy such support from Somalians.
I'm surprised the Mafia didn't screw up so bad sooner.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
The line between major corporations and the mafia is a grey one. Do we really think that if a major corporation could get away with this, that they wouldn't do it, if it contributed significantly to their bottom line? Corporate behavior is all about cost-benifit analysis. The mafia operates by a slightly different risk profile. It also seems likely that what we think of as the mafia owns substantial portions of equity in our major corporations.
Why do I think this comment is appropriate to the discussion? Because I watch the behavior of legitimate corporations and see similarities. Gold mining companies often create huge pools of arsenic waste. The oil sands companies in Canada create huge and persistent pools of massively polluted water, sucking away and polluting water that would have otherwise gone for agriculture or human consumption. Major shipping companies routinely dump their oil laden bilge water in the open ocean. How exactly does this behavior not fall under the category of "organized crime"?
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Because, in Southern Italy, the mafia has taken over a lot of the roles more commonly associated with a government (given that they are not a government, this presumably makes Southern Italy a Libertarian Utopia). Removing them is not easy when they are entrenched into every layer of society. In some places they actually receive higher approval ratings than the government; they don't interfere too much with the general populous and the protection money that they pay actually does buy them protection (what the Mafia will do to you if you rob a shop that is under their protection is a lot more of a deterrent to petty thieves than what the police will do to you, and the Mafia are a lot more likely to catch you because they also control the fences you would use to shift the stolen goods).
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There are people who are simply not like us; just not the same.
They may not be like us, but we are a lot more like "them" then we'd like to admit. Human decency and morality are slender threads keeping us from falling into the abyss. With the right motives and situation, they are easily severed (e.g. the Milgram experiment).
Morals and ethics are not relative. There is a difference between the specific and the general. The general: it is immoral to coerce someone to have sex with you. The specific: a fourteen year old is unable to make an uncoerced decision to have sex with a 40 year old.
Hundreds of years ago society did not agree with the specific rule, but it did agree with the general rule. If you examine the moral rules from society to society you will discover that they all follow the same general rules even though the specific rules vary (there may be some exceptions, but those are immoral societies).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Actually, I think the emphasis was a bit wrong on "ethics" and "morals". A more correct definition is that some people lack "empathy". See, psychopathy.
Morals and ethics can be see as an agreed upon code, but empathy is something built in and arguably hard-wired. See, mirror neurons.
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
To address your objection: We agree to not have sex with a 14 year old, basically because nowadays we understand that it would cause some psychological harm and that it would make her parents very unhappy. And we're nicer than that.
But it's a bit deeper, actually. It's not just about direct harm, it's that we tend to understand that others have the same needs on Maslow's pyramid, so to speak. Even without knowing what those are. We tend to realize that others need to feel safe too, for example. Or that they need their private space too. Etc.
Basically while the actual social contract may vary and is subjective, it's based upon something which doesn't. Sure, we may find different solutions to the same problem, but that problem is real and pretty objective. (You can actually see it on an MRI scan, if you want something which isn't dependent of subjective interpretations.)
A second factor is that, essentially, we're social animals and want to belong in a group of our peers. (See Maslow's pyramid again.) We want to be accepted, maybe even appreciated, etc. We're prepared to work out a compromise to that end, so the group can function or even exist.
There are rules and morals and ethics which, basically, solve _that_ problem. They're how the group organizes itself, so it can exist as a group. I won't stress you, if you won't stress me, and all that, in a nutshell.
That's something that all the moral relativists seem to miss. They dig up some seemingly arbitrary rule, like "don't have sex with too young people", and wave it as a banner for the idea that all rules are just arbitrary conventions. But they miss the foundation for that body of rules, and the purpose they serve. But I digress.
Sociopaths are amoral basically because they lack that foundation which makes the other people be moral and ethical. The difference is basically at a different level than the morals and ethics themselves.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.