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anonymous

F'd: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World's Worst New Warplane - War is... - 0 views

medium.com/...5c95d45f86a5

shared by anonymous on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter was developed in a breakneck 30 months by a close-knit team of 50 engineers led by an experienced fighter designer named Alan Brown and overseen by seven government employees. Brown said he exercised strict control over the design effort, nixing any proposed feature of the plane that might add cost or delay or detract from its main mission.The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight. The sprawling JSF staff, partially a product of the design’s complexity, has also added to that complexity like a bureaucratic feedback loop, as every engineer or manager scrambles to add his or her specialty widget, subsystem or specification to the plane’s already complicated blueprints … and inexperienced leaders allow it.
  • Instead of revitalizing the Pentagon’s air arsenal as intended, the JSF is eating it — and putting future war strategy at risk. In 2012 an embarrassed Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, called the F-35 “acquisitions malpractice.”
  • Jet design like any engineering practice requires disciplined choices. The JSF is the embodiment of ambivalence — a reflection of the government and Lockheed’s inability to say that some things could not or should not be done.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • By contrast, the Chinese J-31 does not appear compromised at all. Surrounded by rivals with powerful air forces — namely India, Russia, Japan and U.S. Pacific Command — and with no grudge-holding Marine Corps to hijack fighter design, it would make sense that China prioritized the air-combat prowess of its new jet over any historical score-settling.
  • Ward said any future warplane should have clear and narrow requirements, as opposed to the F-35's broad, incompatible guidelines. Development timelines should be fast, budgets should be inexpensive, the overall concept should be simple and hardware should be as tiny as possible, Ward recommended. “What you don’t do is hold up complexity as a desirable attribute,” he said.
  • anonymous on 20 Aug 13
     
    "The price tag -currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 2,400 copies-is steadily going down. Production of dozens of the planes a year for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps is getting easier. Daily flight tests increasingly are hitting all the right marks. Or so proponents would have you believe."
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey: The U.S.-European Relationship, Then and Now - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pean-relationship-then-and-now

shared by anonymous on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • We have spoken of the Russians, but for all the flash in their Syria performance, they are economically and militarily weak -- something they would change if they had the means to do so. It is Europe, taken as a whole, that is the competitor for the United States. Its economy is still slightly larger than the United States', and its military is weak, though unlike Russia this is partly by design.
  • American intervention helped win World War I, and American involvement in Europe during World War II helped ensure an allied victory. The Cold War was a transatlantic enterprise, resulting in the withdrawal of Soviet forces from the European Peninsula.
  • The question now is: What will the relationship be between these two great economic entities, which together account for roughly 50 percent of the world's gross domestic product, in the 21st century? That question towers over all others globally.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • The Syrian crisis began not with the United States claiming that action must be taken against al Assad's use of chemical weapons but with calls to arms from the United Kingdom, France and Turkey.
  • The United States was rather reluctant, but ultimately it joined these and several other European countries. Only then did the Europeans' opinions diverge.
  • Most important to note was the division of Europe. Each country crafted its own response -- or lack of response -- to the Syrian crisis. The most interesting position was taken by Germany, which was unwilling to participate and until quite late unwilling to endorse participation.
  • Their differences have not manifested as virulently as they did before 1945, but still, it can no longer be said that their foreign policies are synchronized. In fact, the three major powers on the European Peninsula currently are pursuing very different foreign policies.
  • Nothing has ruptured in Europe, but then Europe as a concept has always been fluid. The European Union is a free trade zone that excludes some European countries. It is a monetary union that excludes some members of the free trade zone. It has a parliament but leaves defense and foreign policy prerogatives to sovereign nation-states. It has not become more organized since 1945; in some fundamental ways, it has become less organized.
  • Where previously there were only geographical divisions, now there are also conceptual divisions.
  • no individual European nation has the ability by itself to conduct an air attack on Syria. As Libya showed, France and Italy could not execute a sustained air campaign. They needed the United States.
  • I am old enough to remember that Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.
  • After some irrational exuberance from the European left, Obama has now been deemed naive, just as George W. Bush was deemed a cowboy.
  • Amid profound differences and distrust, U.S. and Soviet leaders managed to avoid the worst. Given their track record, Europe's leaders might have plunged the world further into disaster.
  • The Europeans think well of the sophistication of their diplomacy. I have never understood why they feel that way.
  • We saw this in Syria.
  • First, Europe was all over the place. Then the coalition that coaxed the Americans in fell apart, leaving the United States virtually alone. When Obama went back to his original position, they decided that he had been outfoxed by the Russians. Had he attacked, he would have been dismissed as another cowboy.
  • Whichever way it had gone, and whatever role Europe played in it, it would have been the Americans that simply didn't understand one thing or another.
  • The American view of Europe is a combination of indifference and bafflement. Europe has not mattered all that much to the United States since the end of the Cold War.
  • all of Europe became Scandinavia. It was quite prosperous, a pleasure to visit, but not the place in which history was being made.
  • When Americans can be bothered to think of Europe, they think of it as a continent with strong opinions of what others should do but with little inclination to do something itself.
  • The American perception of Europe is that it is unhelpful and irritating but ultimately weak and therefore harmless.
  • The Europeans are obsessed with the U.S. president because, fool or cowboy or both, he is extraordinarily powerful. The Americans are indifferent to the Europeans not because they don't have sophisticated leaders but because ultimately their policies matter more to each other than they do to the United States.
  • But the most profound rift between the Americans and Europeans, however, is not perception or attitude. It is the notion of singularity, and many of the strange impressions or profound indifferences between the two stem from this notion.
  • The dialogue between Europe and the United States is a dialogue between a single entity and the tower of Babel.
  • For example, a friend pointed out that he spoke four languages but Americans seem unable to learn one. I pointed out that if he took a weekend trip he would need to speak four languages. Citizens of the United States don't need to learn four languages to drive 3,000 miles.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Sep 13
       
      This is an absolutely crucial point and another reason why geography is a very powerful - and perplexingly invisible - determiner of action.
  • The United States is a unified country with unified economic, foreign and defense policies. Europe never fully came together; in fact, for the past five years it has been disintegrating.
  • Division, as well as a fascinating pride in that division, is one of Europe's defining characteristics. Unity, as well as fascinating convictions that everything is coming apart, is one of the United States' defining characteristics.
  • Europe's past is magnificent, and its magnificence can be seen on the streets of any European capital. Its past haunts and frightens it. Its future is not defined, but its present is characterized by a denial and a distance from its past. U.S. history is much shallower. Americans build shopping malls on top of hallowed battlefields and tear down buildings after 20 years. The United States is a country of amnesia. It is obsessed with its future, and Europe is paralyzed by its past. 
  • Where once we made wars together, we now take vacations. It is hard to build a Syria policy on that framework, let alone a North Atlantic strategy.
  • anonymous on 24 Sep 13
     
    "Most discussions I've had in my travels concern U.S. President Barack Obama's failure to move decisively against Syria and how Russian President Vladimir Putin outmatched him. Of course, the Syrian intervention had many aspects, and one of the most important ones, which was not fully examined, was what it told us about the state of U.S.-European relations and of relations among European countries. This is perhaps the most important question on the table."
anonymous

U.S. Defense Policy in the Wake of the Ukrainian Affair - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...e-policy-wake-ukrainian-affair

shared by anonymous on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • There was a profoundly radical idea embedded in this line of thought. Wars between nations or dynastic powers had been a constant condition in Europe, and the rest of the world had been no less violent. Every century had had systemic wars in which the entire international system (increasingly dominated by Europe since the 16th century) had participated. In the 20th century, there were the two World Wars, in the 19th century the Napoleonic Wars, in the 18th century the Seven Years' War, and in the 17th century the Thirty Years' War.
  • Those who argued that U.S. defense policy had to shift its focus away from peer-to-peer and systemic conflict were in effect arguing that the world had entered a new era in which what had been previously commonplace would now be rare or nonexistent.
  • The radical nature of this argument was rarely recognized by those who made it, and the evolving American defense policy that followed this reasoning was rarely seen as inappropriate.
  • ...47 more annotations...
  • There were two reasons for this argument.
  • Military planners are always obsessed with the war they are fighting. It is only human to see the immediate task as a permanent task.
  • That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war.
  • The second reason was that no nation-state was in a position to challenge the United States militarily.
  • After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States.
  • No matter how benign a leading power is -- and the United States is not uniquely benign -- other nations will fear it, resent it or want to shame it for its behavior.
  • The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent. 
  • It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars.
  • Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars.
  • They can appear overwhelmingly important at the time. But just as the defeat of Britain by the Americans did not destroy British power, the outcomes of asymmetric wars rarely define long-term national power and hardly ever define the international system.
  • Asymmetric warfare is not a new style of war; it is a permanent dimension of warfare.
  • Peer-to-peer and systemic wars are also constant features but are far less frequent. They are also far more important.
  • There are a lot more asymmetric wars, but a defeat does not shift national power. If you lose a systemic war, the outcome can be catastrophic. 
  • A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important.
  • Military leaders and defense officials, obsessed with the moment, must bear in mind that the war currently being fought may be little remembered, the peace that is currently at hand is rarely permanent, and harboring the belief that any type of warfare has become obsolete is likely to be in error.
  • Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.
  • But the events in Ukraine point to some realities.
  • First, the power of countries shifts, and the Russians had substantially increased their military capabilities since the 1990s.
  • Second, the divergent interests between the two countries, which seemed to disappear in the 1990s, re-emerged.
  • Third, this episode will cause each side to reconsider its military strategy and capabilities, and future crises might well lead to conventional war, nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
  • Ukraine reminds us that peer-to-peer conflict is not inconceivable, and that a strategy and defense policy built on the assumption has little basis in reality. The human condition did not transform itself because of an interregnum in which the United States could not be challenged; the last two decades are an exception to the rule of global affairs defined by war.
  • U.S. national strategy must be founded on the control of the sea. The oceans protect the United States from everything but terrorism and nuclear missiles.
  • The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises. 
  • The main goal here is to avoid the emergence of a regional hegemon fully secure against land threats and with the economic power to challenge the United States at sea.
  • The U.S. strategy in World War I was to refuse to become involved until it appeared, with the abdication of the czar and increasing German aggression at sea, that the British and French might be defeated or the sea-lanes closed.
  • At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done.
  • Even then, it was only after Hitler's declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Congress approved Roosevelt's plan to intervene militarily in continental Europe.
  • And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.
  • In order for this strategy, which the U.S. inherited from the British, to work, the United States needs an effective and relevant alliance structure.
  • The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.
  • If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia.
  • The American relationship in all alliances is that the outcome of conflicts must matter more to the ally than to the United States. 
  • The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians.
  • And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.
  • It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power.
  • In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia.
  • In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against.
  • The only thing certain is that it will be far away and take a long time to build up a force. During Desert Storm, it took six months to go on the offensive.
  • American strategy requires a force that can project overwhelming power without massive delays.
  • In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over.
  • The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States.
  • Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment.
  • It also follows that the tempo of operations be reduced. The United States has been in constant warfare since 2001.
  • There need to be layers of options between threat and war. 
  • Defense policy must be built on three things: The United States does not know where it will fight. The United States must use war sparingly. The United States must have sufficient technology to compensate for the fact that Americans are always going to be outnumbered in Eurasia. The force that is delivered must overcome this, and it must get there fast.
  • Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered.
  • Losing an asymmetric war is unfortunate but tolerable. Losing a systemic war could be catastrophic. Not having to fight a war would be best.
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 14
     
    "Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been an assumption that conventional warfare between reasonably developed nation-states had been abolished. During the 1990s, it was expected that the primary purpose of the military would be operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and the change of oppressive regimes. After 9/11, many began speaking of asymmetric warfare and "the long war." Under this model, the United States would be engaged in counterterrorism activities in a broad area of the Islamic world for a very long time. Peer-to-peer conflict seemed obsolete."
anonymous

How a far-sighted 17th-century scientist saw the future - 0 views

www.smh.com.au/...-the-future-20100604-xkn5.html

predictions

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 Jun 10
     
    By Richard Alleyne at Sydney Morning Herald on June 5, 2010.
anonymous

Iraq: A Bleak Future for the Islamic State of Iraq? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...leak_future_islamic_state_iraq

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Over the last 90 days, Iraqi and U.S. forces have eliminated more than 80 percent of the Islamic State of Iraq’s (ISI’s) top leadership, including its Egyptian chief of military operations and its Iraqi figurehead, according to the top U.S. commander in Iraq. These personnel losses are compounded by the fact that the al Qaeda-inspired jihadist group has been struggling financially and is reportedly having problems getting foreign fighters into the country. These setbacks will invariably complicate the ISI’s efforts to continue its campaign. While it is unlikely that the ISI’s propensity for violent attacks will wane, the group’s diminished leadership, operational capacity and logistics infrastructure make the militant organization’s future seem bleak.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    June 29, 2010
anonymous

Future New York, The City of Skyscrapers (1925) - 0 views

www.paleofuture.com/...-city-of-skyscrapers-1925.html

shared by anonymous on 09 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 09 Jul 10
     
    From Paleofuture on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

Amusing Ourselves to Death - 0 views

www.acceleratingfuture.com/...amusing-ourselves-to-death

utopia dystopia media

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 10
     
    "Aldous Huxley and George Orwell… which was right?" By Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future on July 27, 2010.
anonymous

How Max Headroom predicted my job, 20 years before it existed - 0 views

io9.com/...job-20-years-before-it-existed

predictions fiction media

shared by anonymous on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Aug 10
     
    "The entire 80s cyberpunk Max Headroom TV series is available today on DVD, and one of the pleasures of rewatching the series is discovering how many things it got right about the future." By By Annalee Newitz at io9 on August 10, 2010.
anonymous

Russia's Focus Shifts to the East - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0929_russias_focus_shifts_east

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 30 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • Russia is a country that spans nearly the entire Eastern Hemisphere. As such, while its core and core interests are in the West, it has natural interests in the East as well.
  • Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are hungry for military, energy, nuclear and space technology — something that Russia also happens to have copious amounts of and is increasingly sending their way.
  • Even better for Russia, the East Asia region is one where Moscow does not need to attempt to exert hegemony the way it does in Europe.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In geopolitics there is no such thing as permanent allies — only alliances of necessity or convenience — and while a dynamic East Asia could present some convenient relationships now, this convenience can quickly change, whether through economic stagnation, political realignment or other means.
  • Russia is becoming more involved in the region at a time when the region’s economic and security conditions are changing rapidly, and changing in ways that suggest heightening competition.
  • anonymous on 30 Sep 10
     
    "Over the past few years, Russia has finally achieved a degree of security that allows it to turn its attention to its neighbors to the east. It is true that these eastern neighbors are thousands of desolate Siberian miles from the Russian core of Moscow and St. Petersburg. But they are important to Russia nonetheless, as Medvedev's comments about the Kurils indicate. This eastern front, which not only includes the heavyweights of China and Japan but also dynamic players like Vietnam and Indonesia, has of late seen a notable increase in attention from Russia. These interactions raise interesting questions, not only about what is going on now, but also what this could bring - in terms of opportunities, risks and challenges - in the future." At StratFor on September 30, 2010
anonymous

Militancy and the U.S. Drawdown in Afghanistan - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...itancy_us_drawdown_afghanistan

geopolitics war afghanistan

shared by anonymous on 02 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Indeed, with the United States having set a deadline of July 2011 to begin the drawdown of combat forces in Afghanistan — and with many of its NATO allies withdrawing sooner — the Taliban can sense that the end is near. As they wait expectantly for the departure of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Afghanistan, a look at the history of militancy in Afghanistan provides a bit of a preview of what could follow the U.S. withdrawal.
  • First, it is very important to understand that militant activity in Afghanistan is nothing new. It has existed there for centuries, driven by a number of factors.
  • One of the primary factors is the country’s geography.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • A second, closely related factor is culture. Many of the tribes in Afghanistan have traditionally been warrior societies that live in the mountains, disconnected from Kabul because of geography
  • A third factor is ethnicity. There is no real Afghan national identity.
  • Finally, there is religion. While Afghanistan is a predominantly Muslim country, there is a significant Shiite minority as well as a large Sufi presence in the country.
  • Any of these forces on its own would pose challenges to peace, stability and centralized governance, but together they pose a daunting problem and result in near-constant strife in Afghanistan.
  • Militant activity in Afghanistan is, therefore, not just the result of an outside invasion. Rather, it has been a near constant throughout the history of the region, and it will likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
  • Foreign Influence
  • The United States does not want the country to revert to being a refuge for al Qaeda and other transnational jihadist groups.
  • Russia does not want the Taliban to return to power.
  • Facing enemies on its borders with India and Iran, Pakistan must control Afghanistan in order to have strategic depth and ensure that it will not be forced to defend itself along its northwest as well.
  • This is exactly why India wants to play a big part in Afghanistan — to deny Pakistan that strategic depth.
  • Iran also has an interest in the future of Afghanistan and has worked to cultivate certain factions of the Taliban by providing them with shelter, weapons and training.
  • It may seem counterintuitive, but following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the casualties from militancy in the country declined considerably.
  • Although Mullah Omar is the dominant force and is without peer among Afghan insurgent leaders, there are a number of local and regional militant commanders who are fighting against the U.S. occupation beside the Taliban and who have post-U.S. occupation interests that diverge from those of the Taliban.
  • With the sheer size of the Taliban and its many factions, and the fact that many factions are receiving shelter and support from patrons in Pakistan and Iran, it is simply not possible for the U.S. military to completely destroy them before the Americans begin to withdraw next summer. This will result in a tremendous amount of pressure on the Americans to find a political solution to the problem. At this time, the Taliban simply don’t feel pressured to come to the negotiating table — especially with the U.S. drawdown in sight.
  • anonymous on 02 Sep 10
     
    "The drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq has served to shift attention toward Afghanistan, where the United States has been increasing its troop strength in hopes of forming conditions conducive to a political settlement." By Scott Stewart at StratFor on September 2, 2010.
anonymous

What will future generations condemn us for? - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010092404113_pf.html

morality history longnow

shared by anonymous on 06 Oct 10 - Cached
  • First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
  • a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.
  • Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")
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  • And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
  • four contenders
  • Our prison system
  • Industrial meat production
  • The institutionalized and isolated elderly
  • The environment
  • Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China's rate is less than half of ours.
  • People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they're doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.
  • Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.)
  • Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you'll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That's the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe's first man-made desert.
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of "The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen."
  • anonymous on 06 Oct 10
     
    "Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today." By Kwame Anthony Appiah at The Washington Post on September 26, 2010.
anonymous

The Myth of the Yellow Peril: Overhyping Chinese Migration into Russia - 0 views

www.russiablog.org/...post_15.php

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 20 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Since 1989 the population of the Russian Far East declined by 14% to 6.7 million in 2002; shorn of subsidies from the center, it is now dependent on the rest of East Asia for food and consumer imports. It sits next to Chinese Manchuria (the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin), an environmentally-strained rust belt of 108 million souls. Thus it is not surprising to see American geopolitical jockeys, Russian xenophobes and anti-Putin "liberals" alike (i.e. Radio Free Europe's Aleksandr Golts and Echo Moskvi Radio's Yulia Latynina, etc) claiming that a stealth demographic invasion of Russia is well underway which will in a few years result in a Chinese Far East.
  • The issue of Chinese migration to Russia and its political consequences starts with one main question - how many of them are there? All reputable estimates are in the range of 200,000 to 400,000, with 500.000 as the absolute maximum, most of them shuttle traders or seasonal laborers. The academic Gel'bras first came with these figures in 2001, based on adding up numbers from separate towns and regions.
  • Most migrants come from cities or small towns, and only 20% from villages - although the latter figure is higher in Moscow. Only 5% were employed in agriculture back in China. 38% were "workers" and 11% were "worker-peasants". Although only 6% admitted they had been unemployed, the real figure is much higher since 70% of workers and 68% of worker peasants said they migrated because they couldn't find a job in China.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Chinese Migration - Facts, Objectivity and Subjectivity: a Kazakh perspective. As in Russia, they massively overstate the Chinese presence, mixed marriages, etc. Ironically twice as many Kazakhs visit China every year than vice versa. What's happening with Chinese expansion in Russia?: a comprehensive and sarcastic recounting of prior alarmist estimates of the numbers of Chinese in Russia. The Russian vector in global Chinese migration: notes that the alarmism of the 1990's and early 2000's is dwindling away and being replaced by more scientific views of Chinese migration to Russia. Notes that Russian migration as a share of total Chinese global migration is tiny - as of 1990, the total number of Chinese overseas was about 37mn, including 30% of the population in Malaysia, 10% in Thailand, 17% in Brunei and 4% in Indonesia. Lots of other stuff.
  • I will now go beyond demography into geopolitics. China is not the monolith that it is usually painted as in the West; its strong central government conceals a greater deal of simmer, dynamism and regionalism.
  • China aimed to achieve three geopolitical aims in the following order:
  • 1) Maintain central authority over the commercial seaboard and the peasant hinterland 2) Surround itself by a buffer of vassal states on land - Tibet, Sinkiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, etc. 3) Build a strong navy to repel sea-based foreign predation, protect its trade and extend its influence over East Asia. Now and in the future, China is going to have cope with a panoply of threats to those geopolitical goals - rising inequalities, a disconnected bureaucracy, ethnic separatism and American and Japanese sea power. In other words, it's going to have its hands full and Chinese willingness to pursue reconciliation and friendship with Russia is a reflection of its need for a safe strategic rear (see Sino-Russian Relations in China Debates the Future Security Environment, Michael Pillsbury).
  • anonymous on 20 Oct 10
     
    "One of the staples of alarmist, pessimistic and/or Russophobic (not to mention Sinophobic) commentary on Russian demography is a reworking of the yellow peril thesis. In these fevered imaginations, Chinese supposedly swim across the Amur River in their millions, establishing village communes in the taiga, and breeding prolifically so as to displace ethnic Russians and revert Khabarovsk and Vladivostok back to their rightful Qing Dynasty-era names, Boli and Haisanwei." By Anatoly Karlin at Russia Blog on April 1, 2009.
anonymous

Somehow I Am Now Wishing I Had Read More Nietszche When I Was Younger... - Grasping Rea... - 0 views

delong.typepad.com/...tszche-when-i-was-younger.html

politics criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 15 Oct 10
     
    "Last week I spent some time with a group of people I don't usually spend much time talking to. They were not rich--by which I don't mean that they had overstretched themselves by buying a seven-figure principal residence but rather that they weren't rich: their household income was in the five or, for some of them, perhaps the very low six figures. And (which is unusual for Berkeley) they were not lefties, neither cultural nor sociological. They were deeply concerned with the future of our country. And they were desperate to figure out how to engage in effective political action--but had few illusions that the politicians they would vote for in November were their kind of people with their interests at heart." By Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality with Both Hands on October 13, 2010.
anonymous

Can't play, won't play | Hide&Seek - Inventing new kinds of play - 0 views

www.hideandseek.net/cant-play-wont-play

videogames ideas

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Gamification, as it stands, should actually be called poinstification, and is a bad thing because it’s a misleading title for a misunderstood process, although pointsification, in and of itself, is a perfectly valid and valuable concept which nonetheless needs to be implemented carefully with due concern for appropriateness and for unintended consequences, just as actual gamification, namely the conversion of existing systems into functioning games, is also a valid and valuable process which carries its own concerns, but which now cannot with any clarity be referred to as gamification since that term is already widely associated with the process of what should more properly be called poinstification, and which we therefore propose be instead termed ‘luding’, mostly because it sounds a bit like ‘lewding’.
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "'Gamification', that said, can go take a long walk off a short pier. I'm heartened beyond measure to see that it's been deleted from Wikipedia. 'Gamification', the internet will tell you, is the future. It's coming soon to your bank, your gym, your job, your government and your gynaecologist. All human activity will be gamified, we are promised, because gamifying guarantees a whole bunch of other buzz-words like Immersion! and Emotional Engagement! and Socialised Monestisation! You'll be able to tell when something's been gamified because it will have points and badges. And this is the nub of the problem."
anonymous

The Love of One's Own and the Importance of Place - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...one_s_own_and_importance_place

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 10 - Cached
  • The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power.
  • there is a huge gulf between the uncertainty of a prediction and the impossibility of a prediction.
  • There is no action taken that is not done with the expectation, reasonable or not, erroneous or not, of some predictable consequence.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Nature is the most predictable thing of all, since it lacks will and cannot make choices. Scientists who like to talk about the “hard sciences” actually have it easy.
  • First, human beings have choices as individuals. Second, and this is the most important thing, we are ourselves human. Our own wishes and prejudices inevitably color our view of how things will evolve.
  • Successful forecasting should begin by being stupid.
  • By being stupid we mean that rather than leaping toward highly sophisticated concepts and principles, we should begin by noting the obvious.
  • we should begin by noticing the obvious about human beings.
  • they are born and then they die
  • Human beings are born incapable of caring for themselves
  • Humans protect themselves and care for their young by forming families
  • Who should you ally with and where would you find them?
  • Why should you trust a relative more than a stranger?
  • The idea that romantic love should pre-empt the love of one’s own introduces a radical new dynamic to history, in which the individual and choice supersede community and obligation.
  • Which love is prior? Is it the love to which you are born — your family, your religion, your tradition — the love of one’s own? Or is it the acquired love, the one you have chosen because it pleases you as an individual?
  • one married out of love for one’s parents, and out of the sense of duty that grew out of that love.
  • Romantic love is acquired love.
  • This notion is embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, which elevates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over obligation.
  • Ideology is an acquired value. No child can be a Jeffersonian or a Stalinist. That can only be chosen after the age of reason, along with romantically acquired spouses.
  • Tradition is superseded by reason and the old regime superseded by artificially constructed regimes forged in revolution.
  • As a citizen, you have a relationship to an artificial construct, the constitution, to which you swear your loyalty. It is a rational relationship and, ultimately, an elective relationship. Try as one might, one can never stop being an American. One can, as a matter of choice, stop being a citizen of the United States. Similarly, one can elect to become a citizen of the United States. That does not, in the fullest sense of the word, make you an American. Citizenship and alienage are built into the system.
  • Loving America is simple and natural. Loving the United States is complex and artificial.
  • For modern regimes, birth is an accident that gives no one authority.
  • In post-revolutionary society, you may know who you were but that in no way determined who you would become.
  • Traditional society was infinitely more constrained but infinitely more natural.
  • This leads us to nationalism — or, more broadly, love and obligation to the community to which you were born, be it a small band of nomads or a vast nation-state.
  • Modern liberalism and socialism do not know what to do with nationalism.
  • For economists, self-interest is a natural impulse. But if it is a natural impulse, it is an odd one, for one can see widespread examples of human beings who do not practice it. Consider the tension between the idea that the United States was created for the purpose of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the decision of a soldier to go to war and even willingly give his life.
  • Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of one’s own makes a great deal of sense. But the modern understanding of man has difficulty dealing with this idea.
  • There is an important paradox in all this. Modern liberal regimes celebrate the doctrine of national self-determination, the right of a “people” to choose its own path. Leaving apart the amazing confusion as to what to do with a nation that chooses an illiberal course, you have the puzzlement of precisely what a nation is and why it has the right to determine anything.
  • Europe had been ruled by dynasties that governed nations by right of birth. Breaking those regimes was the goal of Europe’s revolutionaries.
  • In the case of the American founders, having acted on behalf of national self-determination, they created a Bill of Rights and hoped that history would sort through the contradiction between the nation, the state and the individual.
  • Why should we love those things that we are born to simply because we are born to them? Why should Americans love America, Iranians love Iran and Chinese love China? Why, in spite of all options and the fact that there are surely many who make their lives by loving acquired things, does love of one’s own continue to drive men?
  • Wherever one chooses to go, whatever identity one chooses to claim, in the end, you cannot escape from who you are.
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 10
     
    The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power. What it finds frequently runs counter to common sense. More precisely, geopolitical inquiry seeks not only to describe but to predict what will happen. Those predictions frequently - indeed, usually - fly in the face of common sense. Geopolitics is the next generation's common sense. William Shakespeare, born in 1564 - the century in which the European conquest of the world took place -- had Macbeth say that history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If Macbeth is right, then history is merely sound and fury, devoid of meaning, devoid of order. Any attempt at forecasting the future must begin by challenging Macbeth, since if history is random it is, by definition, unpredictable. By George Friedman at StratFor on May 26, 2008.
anonymous

Efficient Isn't Moral - 0 views

www.overcomingbias.com/...efficient-isnt-moral.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Mar 10 - Cached
  • When our distant ancestors sat around debating if to change locations, expel a troublemaker, or attack neighbors, they were often ambiguous about whether they were choosing what they wanted or what was moral; they preferred to pretend these were the same.  We similarly prefer ambiguity when we argue policy today.
  • Frameworks for finding win-win deals should also try to include as many things as possible that can have wants and participate in deals.  This includes racists, pedophiles, slaves-owners, robots, animals, distant past and future folk, and future folk who may or may not end up existing.  Yes many may be morally offended if racists get what they want, but that offense counts in what other folks want, and therefore enough offense will ensure that win-win deals will not give racists much of what they want.
anonymous

A Book For All Seasons - 0 views

www.sciencemag.org/...832

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 10 - Cached
  • We act in the hope that the world will continue into the 21st century much as it is now. Few travelers would go to sub-Saharan Africa, or Bosnia, with such insouciance. They would at least take antimalarial and other drugs and check on the state of local wars. By comparison, we are amazingly unprepared for our journey into the future.
  • We see ourselves as sensible and do not agonize over hypotheses of doom. We prefer to assume that global disasters will not happen in our lifetime.
  • We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or switches?
  • My wife Sandy and I enjoy walking on Dartmoor, a mountain moorland near our home. On such a landscape it is easy to get lost when it grows dark and the mists come down. Our way to avoid this fate is to make sure that we always know where we are and how we got there. In some ways, our journey into the future is like this.
  • We live in adversarial, not thoughtful, times and tend to hear only the views of special-interest groups. None of them are willing to admit that they might be mistaken.
  • I doubt if there is anyone, apart from the authors and their fellow specialists, who can understand more than a few of the papers published in specialized scientific journals.
  • We are so ignorant of the facts upon which science and our scientific culture are established that we give equal place on our bookshelves to the nonsense of astrology, creationism, and junk science.
  • Imagine a survivor of a failed civilization with only a tattered book on aromatherapy for guidance in arresting a cholera epidemic. Yet, such a book would more likely be found amid the debris than a comprehensible medical text.
  • Modern media are more fallible instruments for long-term storage than was the spoken word. They require the support of a sophisticated technology that we cannot take for granted. What we need is a book written on durable paper with long-lasting print. It must be clear, unbiased, accurate, and up to date. Most of all we need to accept and to believe in it at least as much as we in the United Kingdom believed in, and perhaps still do believe in, the World Service of the BBC.
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 10
     
    An essay on science and society. By James Lovelock in the May 8, 1998 issue of Science.
anonymous

A world without planes - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8626927.stm

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The philosopher, writer and recent writer-in-residence at Heathrow airport imagines a world without aircraft.
  • In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea. The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship - and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.
  • At Heathrow, now turned into a museum, one would be able to walk unhurriedly across the two main runways and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on their centrelines, a gesture with some of the same sublime thrill as touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one's fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator's marble bathroom.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Despite all the chaos and inconvenience of our disrupted flight schedules, we should feel grateful to the unruly Icelandic volcano - for allowing us briefly to imagine what a flight-less future would envy and pity us for.
  • How we would admire planes if they were no longer there to frighten and bore us. We would stroke their steel dolphin-like bodies in museums and honour them as symbols of a daunting technical intelligence and a prodigious wealth.
anonymous

Will Arizona Be America's Future? - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...0428_arizona_frey.aspx

politics longnow

shared by anonymous on 29 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Demographically, there is no doubt Latinos and other immigrant minorities are America’s future, and on this, Arizona stands on the front lines. Over the past two decades the state has seen its Latino population grow by 180 percent as its racial composition shifted from 72 to 58 percent white. 
  • It is the fact that the state’s swift Hispanic growth has been concentrated in young adults and children, creating a “cultural generation gap” with largely white baby boomers and older populations, the same demographic that predominates in the recent Tea Party protests.
  • boomers grew up in a more insular America than did their parents or their children. Between 1946 and 1964, the years of the boom, the immigrant share of the nation’s population shrunk to an all-time low (under 5 percent) and those who did arrive were largely whites from Europe. Most boomers grew up and lived much of their lives in predominantly white suburbs, residentially isolated from minorities. 
  • anonymous on 29 Apr 10
     
    Hat Tip from Andrew Sullivan: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/a-generational-struggle.html By William H. Frey at Brookings on April 29, 2010. A look at the demographics driving new racial tensions.
anonymous

The United States and Iran on the Lebanese Chessboard - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-and-iran-lebanese-chessboard

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 13 Jan 11 - Cached
  • because Lebanon lacks sovereignty in any true sense of the word, it is an arena for geopolitical struggles involving regional and international players. Thus, the formation and collapse of governments in Beirut carry immense significance.
  • Hezbollah forcing the collapse of the Lebanese government allows Iran to telegraph to the United States that it is in a very comfortable position in Mesopotamia and the Levant, and can negotiate with Washington from a position of strength.
  • anonymous on 13 Jan 11
     
    "Lebanon's Shiite Islamist movement Hezbollah on Wednesday engineered the collapse of the country's coalition government. Eleven ministers representing the Hezbollah-led March 8 Coalition resigned their Cabinet positions, forcing their main opponent, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri (whose Future Movement leads the rival March 14 Coalition), out of office. The move was designed to thwart al-Hariri from working with the U.S.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) to indict Hezbollah members for their alleged involvement in the 2005 assassination of his father, former Lebanese Premier Rafik al-Hariri."
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