Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 October 18

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October 18

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and legal cannabis

Question one: is the above UN convention an explanation for why many western countries seem to be dragging their heels about cannabis? If I understand correctly, they risk sanctions on imports and exports if they make it legal.

Question(s) two: full legalization of cannabis happened in 2018 in Canada, so were they ready to face sanctions, or is the UN convention in fact toothless? Or did they perhaps exploit the loophole where the country's constitution takes priority over the convention?  Card Zero  (talk) 02:15, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

The sanctions that can result from not being in strict compliance with the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (and other similar legal texts, such as the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) are minimal and largely limited to being mentioned in documents emanating from the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. Before Canada and others joined the cannabis legalization movement in the 2010s, the Netherlands had not been following the letter of the conventions either for decades with its coffeeshops and faced minimal consequences beyond the occasional stern talking-to. Policies on legalization or not of cannabis in western countries are based on internal political debates that touch on reducing criminality and improving public health, and not on the wording of conventions that a large number of observers, including the UN itself [1], view as being outdated (the Single Convention was adopted in 1961) because they do not discriminate sufficiently between different types of narcotic drugs and follow a very repressive approach that has not proven effective over the years. Xuxl (talk) 13:24, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

The convention in question explicitly allows a party to unilaterally withdraw from it. See article 46 ("denunciation"). To quote, After the expiry of two years from the date of the coming into force of this Convention (article 41, paragraph 1) any Party may, on its own behalf or on behalf of a territory for which it has international responsibility, and which has withdrawn its consent given in accordance with article 42, denounce this Convention by an instrument in writing deposited with the Secretary-General. No need for any excuses, it's a straightforward process. There is a similar clause in the Convention on Psychotropic Substances (article 29). As to why international law prefers the term denounce rather than renounce, I do not know. Eliyohub (talk) 14:54, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Are there enough resources for every living human being on this planet to have standards of living equal to an average American?

Individuals who have complained and/or worried about human overpopulation and its negative impacts on the natural environment and ecosystem due to the population exceeding the carrying capacity like His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, David Attenborough, and Jane Goodall have been labeled "racists" and "ecofascists" particularly by left-wing pro-breeders such as George Monbiot and Farhana Sultana. I honestly do not get why some people are so opposed to the notion that too many humans lead to destruction of the environments and climate change. To me the notion that more humans = less fewer animals is as true as the notion that rain is wet.

More humans --> more demands for commodities and resources --> more lands needed for agriculture and industrialization --> more habitat destruction and greenhouse gas emission --> extinctions and climate change

Take Brazil for an example of this. Brazil's population has more than doubled in the last 50 years and as a result, the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest to make room for agriculture and mining is at a new height.

Nicaragua is another one to keep an eye on. Its population has doubled in the last 40 years and the Nicaraguan government has been planning to build the Nicaragua Canal in an attempt to improve the economy standing of the country. Considering the alternatives are either larger areas getting deforested for agriculture or eternal poverty for almost half of Nicaraguans. This canal plan seems like the best option for the Nicaraguan people.

In the past 50 years, the population of Java has doubled. As a result, the Indonesian government has been moving landless people from there to less populous more forested parts of the country thus increasing deforestation rates as well as air pollution.

Meanwhile, China's greenhouse gases emission has already exceeded all developed nations combined and some would even say the entire Western Hemisphere.

In any case, let's cut to the chase. To me the question of whether or not human overpopulation is a real issue hinges on whether or not there are enough resources for every living human being on this planet to have standards of living equal to an average American. StellarHalo (talk) 03:04, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

I observe that despite all this discussion of extinctions and climate change, your actual question is about available resources, correct? Usually this is question framed in terms of food, in fact, and farmland. I don't know whether you have oil and gas in mind as well, not to mention coal (for steel). That complicates the question given that we vaguely expect to leave those resources behind. Then there's uranium, which again might be superseded, and rare earths, and sand.

Usually this leads to a discussion about distribution: having the resources on the planet is one thing, moving them to all the potential consumers is another.  Card Zero  (talk) 03:20, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Okay I admit that the original question is too vague, my bad. What I meant is that if the world population already exceeds the number of people who could live like an average citizen of a developed country based on the available natural resources without suffering a climate catastrophe, then overpopulation is an issue. In other words, could we achieve global justice and end global inequality without degrowth while still saving the planet from environmental ruin? StellarHalo (talk) 04:35, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like a rehash of The Population Bomb. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:47, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

This speaks to questions of ecological footprint. There's a range of estimates of this, but to quote one from the Overshoot Day website (more here Earth Overshoot Day) "The Ecological Footprint for the United States is 8.1 gha per person (in 2018) and global biocapacity is 1.6 gha per person (in 2018). Therefore, we would need (8.1/ 1.6) = 5.1 Earths if everyone lived like Americans." There are always criticisms of these figures, but for the most part any reasonable estimates fall somewhere in the same ballpark, i.e., we use more than one-Earth's worth of resources.

As Card_Zero indicates above this figure may also be impacted by how we use resources, for example switching to renewable energy and using far more efficient devices, or having developing countries move straight to renewables and efficient practices rather than passing through the fossil fuel/inefficient stages that the west have done may well mean that that figure could be reduced, even if the standard of living was maintained. There's also talk of things like Asteroid mining to help allow us to keep living beyond our means.

But long story short, we can't keep utilising 5.1 Earths per person. It's like withdrawing money from your bank account at five times your annual income to fund an extravagant lifestyle - at some stage the bank account will run dry, and your lifestyle can't be maintained. But perhaps your initial question is lacking one thing, and that's a timeframe. So the simple answer to your questions would be "yes", but that's because there's no timeframe; yes we could do it, but only for a limited time. Add any sort of decent timeframe that we'd like to think about in there, especially 'forever', and the answer is "no". But unfortunately our politicians, religious leaders, etc, - and most regular people for that matter - don't think in terms of 'forever', they operate only on much shorter timescales (in fact we're stunningly bad as a species at genuinely comprehending long timescales). --jjron (talk) 06:38, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

I once heard something that anytime someone starts talking about "the long run", the rebuttal is "in the long run, we're all dead." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:49, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

I found four articles mentioning the "Malthusian moment", which is not a rebuttal, in the Encyclopedia. Not to be denied that most of the people who were involved in the design of its mediatisation are today anyway mostly in phase with the assertion. I never understood the "green" in the second movie was about what? Greengrocers? Golf courses, carts and equipments? --Askedonty (talk) 10:29, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. John Maynard Keynes (1923), A Tract on Monetary Reform. However, Keynes himself used the term quite freely (Indeed the latest concessions are such as to make one feel even more than before that in the long run frontier revision is a cleaner and safer remedy. — It is not certain that the present settlement may not be a good thing in the long run. — On the one hand, Europe must depend in the long run on her own daily labor and not on the largesse of America; ... — When we consider the most probable proportion in which balls will be drawn in the long run, if after each withdrawal they are replaced, the question of probable error enters in, and we find that the greater evidential weight of the argument on the first hypothesis is accompanied by the smaller probable error.) The quip should only be used as a rejoinder when someone uses long-run considerations as a guide to current affairs.  --Lambiam 11:28, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Looking into it (1923) - not for now that much apt for getting into it - found a curious ( dystopian?) appearance of Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace in our article Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic --Askedonty (talk) 17:28, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

This is an old question asked by every generation. In the 1980s and 1990s someone claimed that the answer was yes, provided that families had a maximum of two children and two only. I would have to dig deep to find the sources and the data. Keep in mind, social scientists today believe that inequality is at the root of political conflict and violence. It is often argued by those on the progressive left that society is intentionally distracted by manufactured culture wars to keep people from closely examining the roots of inequality, which are hard coded into our institutions. Others, often in the center, leaning towards technocracy and libertarianism, argue instead that the root of the problem is energy generation, and if you solve problems like fusion, you will have unlimited abundance, making the arguments of the social scientists moot. Futurists like Drexler argued that all we need to do is master nanotechnology, and we would have the "engines of creation" at our disposal for unlimited abundance. Viriditas (talk) 07:26, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

The wastefulness of how resources are currently used (directly or indirectly) by those enjoying first-world living standards is staggering. If the present population explosion could subside, I firmly believe that a much more economic use of resources is as much a key to allowing everyone a decent standard of living as is global economic justice. However, this requires investments, and time is running out for a feasible path.  --Lambiam 11:39, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

• When dealing with population economics, one of the actual, data-based results that it turns out happens is that at higher standards of living, population growth slows, and the birth rate actually drops below replacement rate. Without getting too deep into the weeds here, that means that the best way to reduce demands on the system is to raise the standard of living of the poorest people. The kind of Malthusian argument is often used as a way to justify keeping poor people poor and starving because "we don't have enough resources to feed them", but if people in, say, Gabon, had the standard of living as existed in, say, Germany, the growth rate would plateau. --Jayron32 11:46, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Remember also that poverty is not always just the result of a lack of resources. Do not underestimate government's potential for plain sheer incompetence. Incompetence that is usually inversely proportional to their skill in blame-shifting. You can check the book Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot. Cambalachero (talk) 12:37, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Poverty is always a problem due to resource allocation and distribution, and not with the availability of resources. It has to do with getting resources to the people that need it, and not the existence of those resources. --Jayron32 13:41, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Just CO2 for 2020 or 2021 (I don't understand the description).

The title mentions average Americans, the actual question mentions "developed countries". They are not the same. List of countries by greenhouse gas emissions per person has for 2018 24,63 metric tons of CO2e for Australia, 18,44 for the US, and 9,72 for Germany. All of them are developed countries but their emissions are quite different. List of countries by freshwater withdrawal has for 2000 1,386 m3/person for Canada and 123 for Denmark (I don't see the data for the US).

Carrying capacity is related to the question.

--Error (talk) 14:48, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Some of that data is misleading, because "per person" amounts imply that it is being used by people for their personal consumption, or perhaps as some part of a secondary usage that is involved in the citizens of that country and their lifestyle. I guaran-damn-tee you that the difference in freshwater usage between Canada and Denmark is entirely due to the fact that corporations use Canadian water for resource extraction. Simply put, much of the water used in Canada (which is not the same as being used by Canadians) is used in mining and oil and gas extraction, and not because Doug McKenzie likes taking excessively long showers. See economy of Canada where you can see, taken in total, they are one of the major locations in the world where resources are being extracted in terms of mining metals, oil and gas extraction, etc. Much of the ownership of the companies involved in these industries is by non-Canadian companies, and much of the resources are exported abroad; for example while nominally much of the oil and gas companies extracting those resources are being done by Canadian-based companies, those companies are often subsidiaries of other companies like the Sinopec Group, SASAC, CNOOC. I'm not saying this to denigrate anything or any part of the global economy, but it IS a global economy, and in a global economy, it often isn't useful (without context) to quote these kinds of statistics without understanding the economic situation behind the statistic. Contextless statistics will often lead one to incorrect conclusions about how different countries (and more to the point, how the residents of those countries) may be responsible for the story the statistics are telling. Why does Canada have such higher water usage than Denmark? Because multinational resource-extraction companies are using that water to supply raw materials on the global market. Because Canada has a lot of land, and under that land are those resources. A small, maritime focused country like Denmark in no way has anything like that going on. Understanding a global economy, largely run by corporations, on a purely on the level of national borders, isn't usually very elucidating. --Jayron32 20:12, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Having an economy with a large primary sector is one of the reasons of the standard of living of the Canadians. It is not as if they are a colony. They (or their leadership) can choose to reduce or increase their water consumption (though water usage affects the rest of the world less than fossil fuel) and subsequently affect their standard of living. The point is that "developed countries" can have quite different direct environmental impacts. There is also the question of exporting environmental impacts. For example, Monaco produces some electricity from waste burning but most of its electricity is imported from France. Malta has imported food for all its history. Those indirect effects are harder to calculate. --Error (talk) 01:00, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes and no... Denmark doesn't have a large extraction-based sector of its economy, and has a high standard of living. Venezuela does have a large primary sector to its economy, and has a much lower standard of living. There must be something other than that to explain Canada's high standard of living (hint: political stability may go a long way towards ensuring a high standard of living...) --Jayron32 11:50, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

These sound like examples of the Dutch disease and the resource curse. Viriditas (talk) 23:04, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Sort of, but I always found those terms...Lacking. Because they imply that the existence of natural resources was the cause of the poverty, when in fact the poverty existed before the extraction of the resources. Canada is one of the most developed economies in the world. It has not been hurt by the "Dutch Disease". Countries that were generally are countries that had been colonies; the entire infrastructure of a colony is set up to extract for the purpose of enriching the colonizing country; the value of extracting minerals from the Congo Free State didn't go to the citizens of that place; it went to Leopold II of Belgium. When we look today at the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to say "Well, they aren't a developed economy because they have a lot of natural resources" misses the point. They aren't a developed economy because their economy spend a century being pillaged by the Belgian nobility. Canada didn't have that problem. It was not established as an exploitative economy. Now, that's largely because instead of enslaving the locals to mine resources, they simply pushed them off the land and took it over for themselves (a different model of colonization). The fact that natural-resource-rich countries are, worldwide very poor, is both a true fact and a largely irrelevant one; as the causes of the wealth of a particular society has more to do with politics, history, and power dynamics than it does with resources. --Jayron32 14:40, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

When examining standards of living, there are a very wide variety of measures that might be used. One is GDP per capita, which while not perfect, is a way of dividing an economy evenly among residents. Global GDP per capita in 2021 was roughly $12,000; that of the US was $70,180, or nearly 6 times as much. Another measure would be dividing all the calories, or shoes, or barrels of oil, but such data are more difficult to find, so we use a proxy to tell us the simple answer: no. DOR (HK) (talk) 16:30, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Royal Navy rank

Henry Frederick Warden is called a vice-admiral in Channel Fleet#Vice-Admiral Commanding Channel Squadron, but reference 21 says he was a rear-admiral. Is this some weird ranking quirk (akin to a naval officer commanding a ship being called a captain, regardless of actual rank) or is this a mistake? Clarityfiend (talk) 08:03, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't know the answer I'm afraid, but I think you mean Frederick Warden. --Viennese Waltz 09:03, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

• Perhaps the confusion is that the ref is dated to 1857, 10 years before Warden became commanding admiral (in 1867)… so he may have been promoted. Blueboar (talk) 12:10, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

According to this, Frederick Warden was made Rear Admiral on 12 September 1863, but no mention of Vice-Admiral, which is a higher rank. I suspect an error. Will look for a better source later. Alansplodge (talk) 13:02, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

"No. 22772". The London Gazette. 18 September 1863. p. 4561. says:

"Captain Frederick Warden, C.B., to be Rear-Admiral of the Blue". Alansplodge (talk) 18:15, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

"No. 8008". The London Gazette. 19 November 1869. p. 1432. refers to:

"the late Rear-Admiral Frederick Warden, C.B., Senior Officer of Her Majesty's Ships and Vessels on the coast of Ireland".

So that confirms that he still held that rank when he died. Alansplodge (talk) 18:15, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

It seems his wife Ellen's father, Henry Garrett: O'Byrne, William Richard (1849). "Garrett, Henry (a)" . A Naval Biographical Dictionary . John Murray – via Wikisource. was the one forgotten instead in a R.N. vice-Admiralty list somehow. --Askedonty (talk) 18:43, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

I think our Channel Fleet article may be flawed; picking at random Robert Smart who commanded the fleet 1861- April 1863, his article says that he was "promoted to vice admiral in December 1863" although the Channel Fleet article claims he was the "Vice-Admiral Commanding Channel Squadron". Alansplodge (talk) 19:40, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Is there perhaps some confusion with a vice-admiral of the coast? DuncanHill (talk) 21:00, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

This terminology gets very confusing, as we have the modern ranks of "read admiral" and "vice admiral", and we also have historic positions that used that terminology, many of which are still in place, that also use the words, without regard for the rank of the person that holds them. For example, the Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom is always held by a person who holds the rank of full (4-star) admiral or Royal Marine general. Even more confusingly, the Vice-Admiral of the United Kingdom is a post held by a 5-star Admiral of the Fleet, meaning that both posts are held by an officer two pay grades higher than the name of the post itself. Both of those posts report to the Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom, who is not normally an operational admiral of any kind. In a country with traditions as old as the UK, these things can apparently get messy. --Jayron32 21:29, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Although this was an active sea-going command, so it seems to me more likely (to me) that the Wikipedia article has it wrong, considering the somewhat shakey references that it is based on. More work required. Alansplodge (talk) 22:39, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

The UK apparently also has (had?) a First Sea Lord, Second Sea Lord, Third Sea Lord, Fourth Sea Lord and Fifth Sea Lord. Very interesting names this UK. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:44, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Not to be confused with the First Lord of the Admiralty who before 1964 was the civilian minister in charge of the navy department, much to the annoyance of the army counterpart who only got to be called Minister of War. Alansplodge (talk) 08:39, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

BTW, the current First Sea Lord is Sir Ben Key, the 103rd holder of the office. Alansplodge (talk) 08:42, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

I remember first becoming aware of the job title "Minister of War" during the Profumo affair, and even then as a 10-year-old I thought it was an extremely weird thing to have a ministry about. War is something we're supposed to have as an absolutely last resort to the solution of international disagreements, not something we do whenever we change our underwear. There's a Minister for Health, not a Minister for Cancer, etc. But hey, who am I to argue with the British way of doing things?-- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:05, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

One of the things about UK government jobs and quasi government jobs is that the UK is very old, and has time to go through a very peculiar cycle of job titles: 1) An important job is created. 2) The job is given to an important person the King can trust. 3) That person is going to be in the nobility. 4) Nobility, work? HAHAHAHAHAHA 5) No one is doing the work of the actual job. We need someone to do this work! 6) Return to step 1 and repeat the process ad infinitum. That's how we get things like the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Lord Chamberlain, neither of which actually do what the office of "Chamberlain" was, which was an office originally something like "head servant", managing the staff of the King's private chambers. Another rather interesting one is the Groom of the Stool, who was the servant who wiped the kings ass; and eventually grew into the role as the King's personal treasurer; presumably, once he started doing that, he hired someone else to wipe the king's ass. These kinds of offices that sound like particular (often useful jobs) but really just exist to give wealthy nobles more titles to put in their resume and little else, are all over the UK. --Jayron32 12:10, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Yes, but the commander of the C, hannel Squadron was a real job, not a sinicure or honorary rank. In the early 1860s, the French were considered a serious invasion threat - see Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom which in 1860 recommended spending £11 million on coastal fortifications (in the end only £9 million was spent on the Palmerston Forts). So this post was really in the front line and would be given to the best man available. Alansplodge (talk) 12:29, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Terminology is a bit of a nightmare. The squadron was commanded by Rear-Admirals, Vice-Admirals and one Admiral who were at one time or another referred to as Senior Officer in Command, Vice-Admiral Commanding or Commander-in-Chief (the last is a very specific title). Even the name of the squadron is occasionally difficult to nail down with certainty, even in official papers. The best option is possibly to just go Senior Officers in Command which is both a title and an accurate description. —Simon Harley (Talk | Library). 15:38, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks Simon Harley; I see you have amended the article's section header accordingly. Alansplodge (talk) 11:50, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

civil case

"civil suit" and "civil prosecution" the same thing? Grotesquetruth (talk) 17:34, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

In what context? Every jurisdiction around the world uses the own terminology in different ways. You ask a LOT of these questions, and never indicate the context for the question. It is very hard to answer unless we know the source of the question. In what jurisdiction are you asking about? --Jayron32 19:52, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps this article answers your question.  --Lambiam 07:45, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

But note, Grotesquetruth, that the procedure described in the article Lambiam pointed to is not a "prosecution" in the normal sense of the word. "Civil prosecution" appears to be a farly recent and specialized term of art - it's not in the OED, or in Wiktionary, or in Merriam Webster. In the iWeb corpus it gets only 194 hits: 119 of these are "Criminal and/or civil prosecution", which makes no sense in the context of that article, and looks to me like people using a convenient phrase without thinking if it makes sense. Many of the others appear to mean "private prosecution". ColinFine (talk) 13:08, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

please explain what you think it means Grotesquetruth (talk) 18:12, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Are you a native speaker of English? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baseball Bugs (talk • contribs) 18:58, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Grotesquetruth, maybe you didn't give due attention to the remark of ColinFine or you're not aware of much of the basics from the matter you're enquiring about. So please just see Jargon§Positivity ( regarding what there is to be found in references about civil prosecution ). --Askedonty (talk) 19:29, 19 October 2022 (UTC)