A brief glimpse at recent events in Egypt | Hacker News Reader

A brief glimpse at recent events in Egypt

omarshehata.me

57 pointsOmarShehata63 comments

We've seen a similar "buy your way our of military conscription" policy in America's past.

> Many healthy men who were eligible to serve in the military during the Civil War never ended up enlisting. The Enrollment Act of 1863 provided that a draftee could pay a “substitute” enrollee the sum of $300 (about $5,000 in today’s terms) in order to enlist in his place. Such famous Americans as Grover Cleveland and John D. Rockefeller took advantage of this provision, in effect buying their way out of service.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/abraham-lincoln-the...

not quite the same, but the police used to work the same way. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Policing.jsp#constabl...

   Traditionally, householders served in the office of constable by appointment 
   or rotation. During their year of office they performed their duties part-time
   alongside their normal employment. Similarly, householders were expected to 
   serve by rotation on the nightly watch. From the late seventeenth century,
   however, many householders avoided these obligations by hiring deputies to 
   serve in their place.

Essentially being a police man was sort of like jury duty.

We would probably benefit from going back to that model.

I was going to post the same thing! But I'm glad I didn't because now I get to post on the remarkable coincidence that the price is almost exactly the same - $5000 in today's dollars. It's an interesting sum, from the perspective of say, American minimum wage (which is approx $30k/year). It's painful, but doable. It's probably the amount most ordinary lower-middle and middle-class people pay for a (used) car. I wonder how the USG came up with the figure, and if their thinking was the same as Egypt's?

This reminds me of a sitcom line from some years ago where a business exec comes in an offers (Drew Carrey maybe?) $10,461 or something like that and he asks "Why that amount?" and she says, "Oh, we spent $10M figuring out how much money poor people would think is a lot."

It's about 11K: https://www.in2013dollars.com/1860-dollars-in-2017?amount=1

You could argue that colleges served the same purpose in the 1960s.

I just got back from a family reunion a week ago. Half of the people flew out from Egypt to attend. I learned a lot about their opinions on Egyptian domestic politics. A disclaimer, they are all educated Muslims (only 1 Copt). They also strongly prefer democracy but are realists about it. They all drink, don't wear hijabs, and are very moderate.

They do not agree with the revolution. They believe the revolution was fueled by fake news. They liked Mubarak, as far as military dictators go. They strongly disliked the Muslim Brotherhood and many fled to America when it became clear the MB was going to take power.

Mubarak did not flee. He was arrested, tried, and found not guilty on all accounts. Morsi (MB) was arrested soon after taking power. He was tried, convicted, and jailed. Morsi sold national security information to Qatar and the UAE. They respect Mubarak as truly caring for Egypt but losing control of the elites in his old age.

The new guy, Sisi, is still very new and they are waiting to see how he does. Mubarak sold government contracts to his posse of businessmen. Sisi sells contracts to the military. They dislike this because it stifles domestic companies and a strong military can get out of control quickly. They're waiting to see if Sisi's infrastructure plans actually kickstart more domestic economic growth.

I don't know what to think. I do remember Anderson Cooper getting in front of the American people and cheering for the MB. Calling Mubarak a dictator. Mubarak was a dictator but the MB was a fundamentalist, crazy organization. My Egyptian family in the US lost their shit when American media supported the MB. Mubarak never mowed down protestors in Cairo. He didn't flee the country. Whatever your opinion, whatever the truth may be, the situation is complicated.

Didn’t Sisi basically threaten to nationalize or nationalize one of Egypt’s largest dairy companies?

It all sounds rather disorganized and unfair and arbitrary but maybe just barely functional. Which, really, is a lot like government in the USA, not that I'm saying there aren't also differences.

I think it really sounds much more disorganized and arbitrary than the US, and it's a salutary reminder: state capacity in most of the world is low, like astonishingly low.

Here's the Italian website for their startup visa scheme: https://italiastartupvisa.mise.gov.it

Notice how the website looks like something your cousin cooked up? And how you can't even really tell how the scheme works? ... how, to apply, you need to get two paper stamps at the post office (LOL)?

And Italy, despite the stereotypes, has a relatively high-capacity state in a global context.

The world is really, really different from big developed countries.

Everything is a mess, but it’s not fun to think about, so we don’t.

And then if we do stop to look closely and think about it, we are surprised to see how messy things are.

Still, things are rarely as bad as they seem. We are resilient and adaptable, often far more than we realize, and can get quite far on very little.

The unthinkable happens, yet life goes on. Joy is found in the smallest of places.

Sometimes what seems like an unsolvable disaster just needs one little variable to change and all of the sudden it isn’t so scary and impossible.

Life is full of paradoxes and complex half-truths :)

OTOH when I went to Sri Lanka they had posters in the airport warning that possession of drugs would be met with the death penalty that looked like they were made in MS paint lol

This is significant because historically the most common way for men to avoid conscription was to emigrate for school/work and just not come back until they'd acquired dual citizenship (which usually* exempts you from conscription).

A nice side effect of this is a pretty significant brain drain, when your people are motivated to leave because they want to avoid 1-3 years of military service for basically no pay (3 if you're selected to serve as an officer, so Doctors, Engineers, and I believe certain other specializations, 1 otherwise).

It's funny (and depressing) to think about how were it not for some luck and some hard work, I'd probably be in my first of 3 years of conscription right this second. Instead I'm on HN :)

* Subject to the feelings and competence of the bureaucrats processing the paperwork, as well as any presidential decrees which might interfere with this policy.

This same system applied in the US through the civil war at least ($300 would exempt you from the union draft -- about $11K in today's dollars).

Also, up to WW1, in the US and UK at least you became a commissioned officer by purchasing your rank. Of course during the war there were field promotions on merit.

i don't think the 19th-century usa would prosecute natural-born us citizens who had committed the 'crime' of living abroad during the years when they were eligible for the draft

egypt is doing this

I was talking about buying your way out of a draft.

Passports are a (supposedly temporary) invention of the 20th century. They aren’t prosecuting, just keeping you from leaving before you fulfill your legal obligation.

Egypt is hardly alone in this regard (e.g. Turkey, and before they abolished compulsory military service, France and Germany).

Compulsory military service is not a good idea but that is orthogonal to the issue being discussed.

the article explains that they do in fact prosecute tho

otherwise i agree

Are we reading the same blog post? The words "prosecute" and "punish" are not in the article.

Maybe the confusion is that it is illegal to not do your service (I mean, that's what "obligatory" means) but that's unrelated to where you live, and again, a common rule in most countries with obligatory service that I know of. I don't know how serious a crime that is, except as the blogger points out you can't renew your passport.

he also pointed out that they prosecute you and fine you 500 dollars (which sounds a lot milder than i think it actually is in a country where 3500 dollars is a normal yearly income)

> Facebook is also how I found out what happens if you avoid military service completely (& illegally), which is what I was planning to do. What happens is you fly back home after you are 30 years old (that's past the age cut off for service), you get a lawyer, go to a military court, you plead guilty & pay $500. And finally, for your crime of military desertion you are barred from running for parliament. All of this is what you skip when paying this new $5000 thing.

it's true that he doesn't use the words 'prosecute' and 'punish', just the words 'military court', 'plead guilty', 'crime', and 'barred from running for parliament', which i think pretty strongly imply prosecution and punishment?

I haven’t had any upper middle class or rich Egyptians ever noting being concerned about the draft. I assume corruption permitted it to be completely avoidable. What value is this new system offering given the existing ‘infrastructure’ to avoid it?

How is 5k per head enough? How many conscription age Egyptian males are there abroad?

Average yearly Egyptian salary is only 3.5K USD. The place is really poor.

Yes but this is aimed at people who aren't in Egypt. According to the article.

How many people are there abroad that they can contribute a meaningful amount of foreign currency?

Many people in this age group might be low skilled laborers, students etc. Especially since the majority of Egyptian expats are in gulf countries.

Unskilled labor in the Gulf is mostly South Asian in origin (from poorer regions like UP, Bihar, Nepal, Northern Bangladesh, Sindh, Balochistan, Afghanistan).

Egyptian nationals in the Gulf in 2023 now tend to work skilled jobs that require Arabic fluency like Medicine, Nursing, Teachers, Civil Service, Administration, Military, etc.

It doesn't hurt that Egyptian degrees are relatively respected in Kuwait, Saudi, and a couple other Gulf countries.

This must be a typo! $3.5k per year?

I'll do you one better: I was making $8k annually as a developer a decade ago in my very much EU member country.

I was getting shafted, but I learned that my co-worker lowballed and had $5k - I think this was below minimum wage at the time, but the employer took advantage of a loophole in temporary contracts.

Back in 2003 $8k per annum was good money.

Not a typo! This was my source: https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/average-salary-in-egypt/

Also, that's not even like necessarily poor. A software engineer in Alexandria (2nd biggest city after Cairo) makes $5k annually (according to this https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/alexand...) and that matches my experience (from people I knew who worked in egypt ~5 years ago, adjusting a bit for inflation).

Rent in a good apartment in a good part of town would be $160-ish a month.

According to this [1], there are 9.5 million Egyptian expats, with over half of them in the Arab world, and less than 2.5 million in North America and Europe. So it could be they are targeting the majority, who are in countries not quite rich.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_diaspora

> majority, who are in countries not quite rich.

It looks like the majority are in Saudi, UAE and Kuwait though.

So generously, 1M of them would be conscription eligible, and if they all paid the 5K, Egypt would have 5B as a one-time fee.

How is that going to help you run a government for 100M people? $50 bucks a head if they all pay.

Interesting but can't beleive how author didn't spend more time on how crazy discriminatory this practice is, which is also common in other countries in the middle east. No war but class war.

If you're already drafting people based on their genitals (sexism), a little class discrimination on top of that barely moves the needle.

Biological male draft has always made sense from a population maintenance standpoint. If you did a biological female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft.

> If you did a female draft only you'd see an even more massive population drop from any hot war that you see with a male-only draft.

Not so much a greater immediate drop as a much slower bounce back.

That only works in a polygamous society. In monogamous societies like the UK the deaths of many men in the world wars led to "marriage gaps" where a roughly equivalent number of women were unable to marry and have children.

So X people dead in war led to 2X people not reproducing. If the draft had been 50/50, then X dead would have only led to X not reproducing.

No need to go full polygamy. After WW II (or the Great Patriotic War), USSR didn't exactly became polygamous but put policies to support single motherhood, that works too.

Quoting https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dv3u8t/what_...

"The shortage of men also meant a very important shift, in which the Soviets worked to try and both destigmatize single-motherhood by increasing state benefits they could receive and featuring mothers of ambiguous marital status in propaganda, while also tacitly encourage even married men to sleep around by preventing the single mothers from suing the father for child support, and making it harder for their irate wives to divorce them. The result being that many men would have numerous affairs, and even unmarried men would often bounce from relationship to relationship."

The interbellum period in France and Germany also saw an increase in sexual freedom leading to more single mothers, without going to polygamy.

To put it in a different context, life find a way.

> That only works in a polygamous society.

Most societies are polygamous when you look in terms of sex and reproduction, even if they aren’t when it comes to socially recognized family bonding.

> In monogamous societies like the UK the deaths of many men in the world wars led to "marriage gaps" where a roughly equivalent number of women were unable to marry and have children.

Unable to marry, maybe, unable to have children, less so, hence the spike in unmarried share of births around the end of WWII (probably even moreso in WWI, too, but the information I have starts in the 1920s.)

Does serial polygamy still count as polygamy? Doesn’t scale as well but achieves a similar effect up to a point.

As a father of two daughters, I have to say conscription of young women is a barbaric logical outcome of egalitarian ideology. Perhaps in modern militaries there are less brutal work environments where 'sexism' could still come into play by providing differing roles for men and women - but that would already break the purity of the original conclusion.

Sure, for the sake of argument, if women and men are no different at all they should both be forced to go to the front lines in Ukraine and die for their country. I for one say men and women are different enough that conscription should work differently for them. I guess I'm sexist then!

If men have extra duties (conscription) then shouldn't they have extra privileges to make up for that?

Feminism wants to erase all male privileges, seems unfair to do that while still saddling men with extra duties.

It all comes down to instincts we developed as chimps. Men fight to protect (or expand) tribe and territory. Women don't fight. It's in our DNA. If you have to apply logic to it, use the biological basis as your guide. Men shoulder all the fighting to enable female reproduction, and women reproduce. It seems asymmetrical but pretty equal to me.

> Feminism wants to erase all male privileges, seems unfair to do that while still saddling men with extra duties.

There are different types of Feminism.

The first wave of Feminism is defined in terms of trying to gain rights that males had:

> Originating in late 18th-century Europe, feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, run for public office, work, earn equal pay, own property, receive education, enter contracts, have equal rights within marriage, and maternity leave.

I think that you may be referring to more recent strands of Feminism that may be going in more radical directions.

Conscription is barbaric. Conscription regardless of sex just distributes the barbarism fairly.

Paying to skip conscription has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years

In the US, the government pays you to conscript yourself.

in other words, we the taxpayers pay so that someone else can serve (voluntarily for a market salary) instead of everyone getting drafted.

The taxpayers pay so that someone else can protect them (or invade other countries so some oil corporation gets dibs). Socialized defense, a fair deal. If only the same collective principle could work for healthcare ... shots fired!

https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/mil-money/2021/11...

> The average cost per active duty service member for the department in fiscal 2021 was $136,000

How many service members could command salary/benefits like this in the private sector? Most count beans and clean things. I bet that doesn't factor in pensions and lifetime benefits either. The US military is the country's largest welfare program.

> The US military is the country's largest welfare program.

If they were all as successful as the military is at inculcating middle-class habits in people raised without them, welfare would be a lot more popular.

I wish we'd stop using euphemisms like "conscription" for the practice of slavery.

Slave armies are still slave armies even if it's the government doing the enslaving.

But conscription is neither slavery nor forced labor (like taxes aren't theft), because parties to ECHR agreed to give themselves exemption on that.

I do think it's slavery too. Especially because as a soldier you have no rights and you have to follow orders barked at you by most likely less intelligent people just because they have a few stripes on their shoulder.

We still had conscription in the Netherlands when I was young but luckily I got a medical disqualification.

Think of it as less of a euphemism, and more of a specific type of slavery.

well... it is, but mostly for economic reasons. Contract army is the privilege of the very richest countries, and in most favorable conditions, too. To me, the idea to be obligated to go and die in some random place like Vietnam on the other side of the planet is obscene. But no society seems to escape this to a certain extent. Except... a few ultra-privileged ones, in peaceful times.

Equating conscription with slavery conveys strictly less useful information.

There are many social constructs that forcibly remove rights from someone while retaining others.

The set of rights a conscript loses is radically different from the set of rights a slave loses.

As a citizen of the US who is not of cosncription age, am I "slave" because the government has removed my right to own nuclear weapons or kill bald eagles? No, obviously not. While conscripts are forced to do some things, they maintain many rights and are treated as people, not property, under law.

Interestingly, Egypt is precisely one of the countries most historically influenced by the politically influential Mamluk slave-soldiers.

From a Utilitarian approach, it makes sense to leave the economy's more critical members in their roles (rich people, kind of) and put the fungible folks out in the field.

Not moral; not gonna say it's right. But societies that did this, won more wars. So they're the ones we have around today. Cultural natural selection of a sort. Like it or not.

Which societies did this? Up until ~100 years ago, it was common and expected for the elites to lead the people in times of war, from the frontlines!

Like, 2 or three rich men I guess.

You tell me what a billionaire is doing for society

They were never going to be drafted.

We're talking about business owners, professionals. Folks who can easily afford that fee.

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