Anup Shah: Global Issues That Effect Everyone

Anup Shah's archive site Global Issues That Effect Everyone. Site introduction:

This web site looks into global issues that affect everyone and aims to show how most issues are inter-related.

Over 6,500 links to external articles, web sites reports and analysis are used to provide credence to the arguments made on this web site. The issue categories range from trade, poverty and globalization, to human rights, geopolitics and the environment.

Some of these issues may be misrepresented by the mainstream for various reasons such as politics, profit motives, to oppress dissent, and so on. Some of these issues may not be receiving enough — or any — mainstream media attention and therefore there is a lack of enough open and public debate, while other concerns seem to be getting a biased attention only. However, I hope you will see that all these issues are closely related, affecting and being affected by one another.

Constructive criticism and debate should be a necessary part in the development and continual improvement process in all of us so that we can always evaluate ourselves, as individuals, collective peoples and societies. This helps avoid stagnation, complacency and blind conformity, while enhancing democracy and diversity.

As more and more people become aware of the various issues, more and more ideas on ways to tackle these can come to the fore. Yet, oftentimes, the mainstream media, which is perhaps the most influential source to help shape people's opinions and knowledge about the world, is subject to the political interests of powerful people or groups and therefore affects the ability to see issues debated in public to the fullest. As a result, the range of discourse in the mainstream, the presuppositions and assumptions are never questioned or realized as limiting factors.

I feel these issues and their backgrounds are important because it opens our eyes as to how we got to where we are today, and hints as to where we are headed and how, and what that implies for the societies and peoples of today and of tomorrow.

Society by its very nature is conformist. To be a non-conformist one has to take criticism because it disturbs people's confidence in what they always took to be true.