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China's Expanding Drone Program | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-expanding-drone-program geopolitics china drones
shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • In the security sphere, these machines are very useful for patrolling the East and South China seas, allowing Beijing to maintain a presence in the disputed waters, and play a role in China's anti-access/area denial strategy.
  • China's equivalent to a Global Hawk, the Soar Eagle, was introduced at Zhuhai in 2006. China already has drones that are comparable to the U.S. Predator and Reaper known as the Yilong/Wing Loong, or "Pterodactyl," and the CH-4. Like the United States, China also has many smaller drones, the most common being the ASN-15.
  • The United States and Israel are currently the leaders in this technology.
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  • While China's drones are not as advanced, tested or capable of the same ranges, they do allow Beijing to monitor its borders and waters more effectively due to extended loiter time.
  • They also help China deter countries from intervening in the area by helping detect and target potential violators of the area they are trying to deny. This is at the heart of the anti-access/area denial strategy and China's motivation for devoting resources to the program.
  • Beijing has plans to build 11 coastal drone bases by 2015 to increase its ability to survey the region for possible intrusions or threats.
  • Reports say the Japanese Defense Ministry hopes to introduce Global Hawks near the disputed islands by 2015 in an attempt to counter Beijing's increasingly assertive naval activity in the area.
  • According to some reports, Chinese drones similar to U.S. models are cheaper. China has exported several types to countries including Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, although Pakistan has also purchased some from the United States.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "China is rapidly expanding its research into and production, deployments and sales of unmanned aerial vehicles, colloquially known as drones. The primary role of this growing program is to help Beijing control and monitor disputed territories in the Asia-Pacific region."
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Look at This Visualization of Drone Strike Deaths - 0 views

www.motherjones.com/...nteractive-visualization-pitch geopolitics death
shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 13 - Cached
  • The data is legit; it comes from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, but as Emma Roller at Slate notes, the designers present it weirdly, claiming at the beginning of the interactive that fewer than 2 percent of drone deaths have been "high profile targets," and "the rest are civilians, children and alleged combatants." At the end of the visualization, you find out that a majority of the deaths fall into the "legal gray zone created by the uncertainties of war," as Brian Fung put it at National Journal.
  • But the "legal gray zone" itself is alarming enough—highlighting the lack of transparency surrounding the administration's drone program—as are the discrepancies in total numbers killed. It's between 2,537 and 3,581 (including 411 to 884 civilians) killed since 2004, if you want to go with the BIJ. Or it's between 1,965 and 3,295 people since 2004 (and 261 to 305 civilians), if you want to believe the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Or perhaps it's 2,651 since 2006 (including 153 civilians), according to Long War Journal. (The NAF and Long War Journal base estimates on press reports. BIJ also includes deaths reported to the US or Pakistani governments, military and intelligence officials, and other academic sources.)
  • anonymous on 28 Mar 13
     
    "Pitch Interactive, a California-based data visualization shop, has created a beautiful, if somewhat controversial, visualization of every attack by the US and coalition forces in Pakistan since 2004." Fucking sobering.
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Leaked report shows high civilian death toll from CIA drone strikes - 0 views

www.salon.com/...th_toll_from_cia_drone_strikes
shared by anonymous on 22 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The leaked document – which the Bureau obtained from three separate sources – is based on field reports by government officials rather than on media coverage. The Bureau understands that the document is continually updated as attacks occur – although the copy obtained ends with a strike on October 24 2009.
  • Read the full internal Pakistani document.
  • Each tribal area such as North Waziristan is administered by a Political Agent and his assistants. Beneath them are agents known as tehsildars and naibs who gather information when drone strikes occur – the names and identities of those killed, damage to property and so on. Additional information is also drawn from the khassadar - the local tribal police – and from paid informants in villages.
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  • Ambassador Rustan Shah Mohmand, who was a senior administrator in the tribal areas for 25 years between 1973 and 1998, cautions that the released file might not be the fullest data available.Noting that Pakistan’s military is responsible for security in FATA, he told the Bureau: ‘Tribal documents might present a broad picture. But any accuracy is dependent on what data the military chooses to release to or withhold from the political agents. In the last eight years, for example, no precise casualty figures have ever been submitted to Pakistan’s parliament.’
  • ‘How come the same civil servants are feeding one kind of data to the Peshawar High Court and another kind of data to the FATA secretariat?’ asked Shahzad Akbar, the Pakistani barrister behind the successful Peshawar case. ‘Are they fudging the numbers based on who was on the receiving end?’US counter-terrorism officials declined to comment on the specifics of the leaked document, though referred the Bureau to recent comments by both President Obama and CIA Director Brennan stating that the US goes to great lengths to limit civilian deaths in covert drone strikes.
  • anonymous on 22 Jul 13
     
    "A secret document obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals for the first time the Pakistan government's internal assessment of dozens of drone strikes, and shows scores of civilian casualties."
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The Real David Petraeus Scandal - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...265127 geopolitics
shared by anonymous on 13 Nov 12 - Cached
  • It might behoove us, before we accept this nauseating spectacle as a permanent feature of life, to fill in as many of these blanks as possible. You can't do that in the dark.
  • At the risk of raising a question that is by custom excluded from discussion of American foreign policy: What if other nations behaved as we do? What if they started firing drones into countries that house people they'd rather were dead? Couldn't this get kind of out of control? Shouldn't the U.S. be at least thinking about trying to establish a global norm against this sort of thing (except, conceivably, under well-defined circumstances that have a clear basis in international law)?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Nov 12
       
      Imagine if Mexico did this kind of thing (targeting in the U.S.) in their cartel war. We would go ape-shit.
  • But in many ways this president is no improvement over the last one, and Exhibit A is the acceleration of a far-flung drone-strike program that is shrouded in the secrecy of the CIA. The vision implicit in this program is of an America whose great calling is to lead the world into a future of chaos and lawlessness.
  • anonymous on 13 Nov 12
     
    "When, in the fall of 2011, David Petraeus moved from commanding the Afghanistan war effort to commanding the CIA, it was a disturbingly natural transition. I say "natural" because the CIA conducts drone strikes in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region and is involved in other military operations there, so Petraeus, in his new role, was continuing to fight the Afghanistan war. I say "disturbingly" because this overlap of Pentagon and CIA missions is the result of a creeping militarization of the CIA that may be undermining America's national security."
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Hellfire, Morality and Strategy - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...hellfire-morality-and-strategy
shared by anonymous on 19 Feb 13 - Cached
  • On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets.
  • On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.
  • Let's begin with the weapons systems, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. The media call them drones, but they are actually remotely piloted aircraft. Rather than being in the cockpit, the pilot is at a ground station, receiving flight data and visual images from the aircraft and sending command signals back to it via a satellite data link.
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  • Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.
  • Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.
  • The Argument Against Airstrikes
  • The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.
  • This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began.
  • There are those who object to all war and all killing; we are not addressing those issues here. We are addressing the arguments of those who object to this particular sort of killing. The reasoning is that when you are targeting a particular individual based on his relationships, you are introducing the idea of culpability, and that that culpability makes the decision-maker -- whoever he is -- both judge and executioner, without due process.
  • Again excluding absolute pacifists from this discussion, the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed. To put it simply, the critics regard what they call drone strikes as summary executions, not acts of war.
  • The Argument for Airstrikes
  • The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war.
  • The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.
  • The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.
  • The argument in favor of using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes is, therefore, that the act of killing the individual is a military necessity dictated by the enemy's strategy and that it is carried out with the understanding that both intelligence and precision might fail, no matter how much care is taken.
  • It would seem to me that these strikes do not violate the rules of war and that they require no more legal overview than was given in thousands of bomber raids in World War II.
  • Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.
  • Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths.
  • the onus on ascertaining the nature of the target rests with the United States, but if there is error, the responsibility for that error rests with jihadists for not distinguishing themselves from civilians.
  • There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially.
  • In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.
  • If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States.
  • since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.
  • There are two points I have been driving toward.
  • The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds.
  • The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.
  • The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.
  • In this sort of war, the problem of killing innocents is practical. It undermines the strategic effort. The argument that it is illegal is dubious, and to my mind, so is the argument that it is immoral. The argument that it is ineffective in achieving U.S. strategic goals of eliminating the threat of terrorist actions by jihadists is my point.
  • The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.
  • In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.     
  • In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles.
  • anonymous on 19 Feb 13
     
    "Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process."
  • Erik Hanson on 21 Feb 13
     
    I'm starting to come around to the objections of expeditionary troops trying to put down the American colonial revolt. There's something to having to look someone in the face when you kill them.
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Repulsive progressive hypocrisy - Salon.com - 2 views

www.salon.com/...singleton politics partisan hypocritical
shared by anonymous on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 12
     
    "During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the "assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution": so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices - rather than a big, bad, scary Republican - all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates" Thanks to Erik Hanson for the pointer.
  • Erik Hanson on 09 Feb 12
     
    I don't know that this was me. My take on this whole thing is that liberals mostly feel that Obama has let them down by being too centrist, but that they'll still vote for him over Rom-tor-rich anyday.
  • anonymous on 09 Feb 12
     
    I coulda sworn you did...sorry. And I share your sentiment. That's the kind of trap left-centrists and leftists have. I surely don't hate Obama. I think I understand that presidents make concessions. But when you made such a big, _big_ stink about it during the race, at the very least, don't... say... _increase_ drone strikes. The crux, though, doesn't have anything to do with this stuff. It's about rhetorical inconsistency. Someone yesterday remarked "This is why I think Obama is not the lesser of evils." Keeping Guantanamo open and increasing drone strikes is exactly the kind of thing that self-described Conservatives *supported* during G.W.'s administration. But, we're really not that different after all. Once 'our man' gets the office, we make retroactive justifications. Isn't it fun to be a human animal?
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Whoa; capitalism is like The Matrix, dude - 0 views

futurismic.com/...talism-is-like-the-matrix-dude economics politics culture change
shared by anonymous on 30 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The latest book in the wave of economics-for-the-layman texts, piggybacking on the global sense of “WTF just happened?” in the wake of the subprime collapse and its ripples, is 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism from Cambridge economist Doctor Ha-Joon Chang, who apparently manages to play a currently popular theme (“free markets are bad”) with a less-popular counterpoint (“the welfare state should be expanded”)
  • Kudos to any pundit honest enough to admit that they don’t have a silver bullet in the breech.
  • anonymous on 30 Aug 10
     
    "I'd agree that what are usually described as "free markets" are indeed broken (there's too much evidence to ignore), but I remain to be convinced that those markets are truly "free" in any way that Adam Smith himself would have recognised. I'm no economics boffin, of course, and as such I'm not going to state with certainty that truly free markets would be the solution to all our economic woes… but I think it's fair to say that regulation is never going to prevent disasters and abuses in a system wherein certain groups and individuals are given (or simply invent for themselves) ways of avoiding or circumventing such." By Paul Raven at Futurismic on August 30, 2010.
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Bipartisan Spring - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...bipartisan_spring longgame foreignpolicy
shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 10 - Cached
  • How to explain this surprising if well-concealed comity? Some is due to the inevitable transformation that every party goes through when it moves from the opposition to the White House. Being in power tends to breed responsibility, just as being out of power breeds irresponsibility. Many Republicans during the Clinton years turned toward quasi-isolationism and opposed Clinton's policies -- even his hawkish policies -- simply because they hated Clinton. Many Democrats  showed great solidarity with Bush after September 11, 2001 -- a bipartisan moment that Bush helped squander. But they soon came to oppose almost everything Bush did, even policies traditionally associated with the Democratic Party, such as democracy promotion and nation-building, and even when, as in the case of the surge in Iraq, the most likely beneficiary of success would be a Democratic president.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      This is classically predictable behavior. To add to the example: Note how every time a Democrat inhabits the Oval Office, Republicans "rediscover" small government. You can practically set your watch to it.
  • The irony is that in some ways Obama has been fighting the war on terror at least as vigorously as his predecessor. He escalated the war in Afghanistan. He greatly increased drone attacks on suspected terrorists in Pakistan. Indeed, the Obama administration carried out more drone strikes in its first year than the Bush administration carried out in the previous five years combined, producing a record number of enemy casualties. Although the Obama administration may be more generous in providing legal defense to captured terrorists than the Bush administration, it also makes a greater effort to assassinate them, thus obviating the need for trials. 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      A hypothetical president Nader would have even done this stuff, however reluctantly. I think the American electorate deeply misunderstands the degree of pressure on any sitting president to continue policies. *Inertia* is a powerful force in all politics.
  • The most absurd of the "un-Bush" policies of this administration has been its deliberate turn away from helping democrats against autocracies abroad.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Mar 10
       
      We have never seriously cared about the whole "democracy vs. autocracy" issue. It's a white-bread tool used to sway the electorate. It makes for good flag-waving but, in matters of foreign policy, is practically irrelevant.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 10
     
    "Washington may be deeply polarized on domestic matters, but when it comes to foreign affairs, a remarkable consensus is taking shape." By Robert Kagan on March 3, 2010 I've maintained for a while that foreign policy is one of those arenas where even when Republicans and Democrats differ, it's not *enough* difference to matter - obligatory histrionics aside.
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Anarchy and Hegemony - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...anarchy-and-hegemony
shared by anonymous on 17 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. For centuries Europe had a rough equality between major states that is often referred to as the balance-of-power system. And that led to frequent wars
  • East Asia, by contrast, from the 14th to the early 19th centuries, had its relations ordered by a tribute system in which China was roughly dominant. The result, according to political scientist David C. Kang of the University of Southern California, was a generally more peaceful climate in Asia than in Europe.
  • The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      That is quite the statement. On the surface, it *feels* true. Let's see the follow-through.
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  • Columbia University's Kenneth Waltz, arguably America's pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of "anarchy" is not stability, but "hierarchy."
  • Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly "more equal" than others, and it is this formal inequality -- where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others -- that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace.
  • Government is the most common form of hierarchy.
  • It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and that requires "some coercive power."
  • The best sort of inequality is hegemony.
  • Whereas primacy, as Kang explains, is about preponderance purely through military or economic power, hegemony "involves legitimation and consensus."
  • That is to say, hegemony is some form of agreed-upon inequality, where the dominant power is expected by others to lead.
  • When a hegemon does not lead, it is acting irresponsibly.
  • hegemony has a bad reputation in media discourse.
  • But that is only because journalists are confused about the terminology, even as they sanctimoniously judge previous historical eras by the strict standards of their own. In fact, for most of human history, periods of relative peace have been the product of hegemony of one sort or another. And for many periods, the reigning hegemonic or imperial power was the most liberal, according to the standards of the age.
  • Rome, Venice and Britain were usually more liberal than the forces arranged against them.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      I call BULLSHIT on the Rome thing. There is some strong evidence that they were quite lacking in human rights relative their northern Gaulish neighbors (which they smashed to claim their gold mines).
  • There are exceptions, of course, like Hapsburg Spain, with its combination of inquisition and conquest. But the point is that hegemony does not require tyrannical or absolutist rule.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      I'll buy it. I remember how John Green noted that the Greek city states won a war against the Persians - who had abolished slavery and had greater rights of expression for the multiplicity of ethnicities within their borders.
  • there are few things messier in geopolitics than the demise of an empire.
  • The collapse of the Hapsburgs, of the Ottoman Turks, of the Soviet Empire and the British Empire in Asia and Africa led to chronic wars and upheavals. Some uncomprehending commentators remind us that all empires end badly. Of course they do, but that is only after they have provided decades and centuries of relative peace.
  • Obviously, not all empires are morally equivalent.
  • Therefore, I am saying only in a general sense is order preferable to disorder.
  • Though captivating subtleties abound: For example, Napoleon betrayed the ideals of the French Revolution by creating an empire, but he also granted rights to Jews and Protestants and created a system of merit over one of just birth and privilege.
  • In any case, such order must come from hierarchal domination.
  • Indeed, from the end of World War II until very recently, the United States has performed the role of a hegemon in world politics. America may be democratic at home, but abroad it has been hegemonic.
  • That is, by some rough measure of international consent, it is America that has the responsibility to lead. America formed NATO in Europe, even as its Navy and Air Force exercise preponderant power in the Pacific Basin. And whenever there is a humanitarian catastrophe somewhere in the developing world, it is the United States that has been expected to organize the response.
  • Periodically, America has failed. But in general, it would be a different, much more anarchic world without American hegemony.
  • But that hegemony, in some aspects, seems to be on the wane. That is what makes this juncture in history unique.
  • When it comes to the Greater Middle East, Americans seem to want protection on the cheap, and Obama is giving them that. 
  • We will kill a terrorist with a drone, but outside of limited numbers of special operations forces there will be no boots on the ground for Libya, Syria or any other place.
  • Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were noted for American leadership and an effective, sometimes ruthless foreign policy.
  • Since the Cold War ended and Bill Clinton became president, American leadership has often seemed to be either unserious, inexpertly and crudely applied or relatively absent.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Apr 13
       
      Yeah, that pussy Clinton, who couldn't get UN support for the Balkans and then proceeded to move through Nato. Sure, it was airstrikes and logistics, but it was no equivocal. Whether you like the action or not. ::raspberry:: [citation needed]
  • Nevertheless, in the case of the Middle East, do not conflate chaos with democracy. Democracy itself implies an unequal, hierarchal order, albeit one determined by voters. What we have in the Middle East cannot be democracy because almost nowhere is there a new and sufficiently formalized hierarchy. No, what we have in many places in the Middle East is the weakening of central authority with no new hierarchy to adequately replace it.
  • Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy -- be it an American hegemon acting globally, or an international organization acting regionally or, say, an Egyptian military acting internally -- we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy to look forward to.
  • anonymous on 17 Apr 13
     
    "Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. For centuries Europe had a rough equality between major states that is often referred to as the balance-of-power system. And that led to frequent wars. "
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How Conservative Media Lost to the MSM and Failed the Rank and File - Conor Friedersdor... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...264855
shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes.
  • Those audiences were misinformed.
  • Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election '08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected.
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  • The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver's expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan. 
  • Sure, Silver could've wound up wrong. But people who rejected the possibility of his being right? They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.
  • Conservatives should be familiar with its contours. For years, they've been arguing that liberal control of media and academia confers one advantage: Folks on the right can't help but be familiar with the thinking of liberals, whereas leftists can operate entirely within a liberal cocoon. This analysis was offered to explain why liberal ideas were growing weaker and would be defeated.
  • It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thing; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.
  • Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.  
  • Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously? 
  • Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.How many months were wasted on them?
  • How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.
  • In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.
  • On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.  
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 12
     
    "Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?""
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Obama the moderate Republican: What the 2012 election should teach the GOP. - Slate Mag... - 3 views

www.slate.com/...tion_should_teach_the_gop.html
shared by anonymous on 07 Nov 12 - No Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.
  • Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush.
  • Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990.
  • Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.
  • Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation.
  • Same with Wall Street reform: There’s nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other people’s money in ways that would force us to bail them out again.
  • Remember how Democrats ridiculed George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq? Obama copied it in Afghanistan. He escalated the drone program, killing off al-Qaida’s leaders. He sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden. He teamed up with NATO to take down Muammar Qaddafi. He reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He put together a globally enforced regime of sanctions that is bringing Iran’s economy to its knees. That’s why Romney had nothing to say in last month’s foreign policy debate. No sensible Republican president would have done things differently.
  • Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.
  • anonymous on 07 Nov 12
     
    "Dear Republicans, Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. I've been there many times. You're crestfallen. You can't believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country. Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican."
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Congrats, Millennials. Now It's Your Turn to Be Vilified - 0 views

www.wired.com/...thompson_generation
shared by anonymous on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • But then something funny happened. Gen X punditry died—very suddenly.
  • Check the data. If you plug “Generation X” into Google’s Ngram search engine—which tracks the occurrence of words and phrases in books—you find that the term exploded in use around 1989, climbing steeply throughout the ’90s. But in 2000 it peaked and began declining just as rapidly.
  • Despite constant handwringing over generational shifts, the basic personality metrics of Americans have remained remarkably stable for decades, says Kali Trzesniewski, a scholar of life-span changes.
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  • No, only one thing has changed. Generation X stopped being young.
  • The real pattern here isn’t any big cultural shift. It’s a much more venerable algo­rithm: How middle-aged folks freak out over niggling cultural differences between themselves and twentysomethings.
  • In the ’50s, senators fretted that comic books would “offer courses in murder, mayhem, [and] robbery” for youth. In the ’80s, parents worried that Dungeons and Dragons would “pollute and destroy our chil­dren’s minds”—and that the Walkman would turn them into antisocial drones. This pattern is as old as the hills. As Chaucer noted in The Canterbury Tales, “Youth and elde are often at debaat.”
  • I bring this up because it seems that we Gen Xers are now doing our part to perpetuate the cycle. We write many of today’s endless parade of op-eds snarking at “millennials,” intoning darkly about the perils of Snapchat and sighing nostalgically over the cultural glory of the mixtape.
  • Hold fast, millennials. This current wave of punditry will peak and then start declining six years from now. In 2020, about half of you will have turned 30. You’ll no longer be young—and therefore no longer scary—and today’s rhetoric about your entitlement and narcissism will evaporate. You’ll be in charge. I can’t imagine what you’re going to say about the kids being born today.
  • anonymous on 31 Jan 14
     
    "Back in the early '90s, boomer pundits across America declared Generation X a group of apathetic, coddled, entitled slackers. Born between roughly 1961 and 1981, they lacked any political idealism-"stuck in a terminal cynicism," as The Dallas Morning News observed. Gormless narcissists, their "intimacy and communication skills remain at a 12-year-old level," one expert wrote. Even Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons-one of Generation X's most influential masterworks-com­plained that "there's no intellectual pride or content to this generation. The domi­nant pop culture is MTV and the Walkman.""
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Defending Against Drones - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...print military
shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • All told, two thirds of worldwide investment in unmanned planes in 2010 will be spent by countries other than the United States.
  • Just as we once failed to imagine terrorists using our own commercial aircraft against us, we are now underestimating the threat posed by this new wave of technology. We must prepare for a world in which foreign robotics rivals our own, and terrorists can deliver deadly explosives not just by suicide bomber but also by unmanned machine.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Mar 10
       
      That comment from Tuttle is classic and is a poignant reminder that many experts routinely miss bit shifts in institutional framework changes.
  • We've channeled billions into UAVs, initiating what has been called the largest shift in military tactics, strategy, and doctrine since the invention of gunpowder.
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  • That means widening the threat scenarios our agencies plan and train for.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 10
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