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anonymous

The Technium: Bootstrapping the Industrial Age - 0 views

www.kk.org/...bootstrapping_t.php

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 13 - Cached
  • In February 1942, R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food.
  • But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe.
  • It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more sophisticated items.
  • During the two years of their interment the lathe remade the tools -- like taps and dies -- which were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive qualities.
  • Over years of tinkering, Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make real stuff.
  • Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. This was a small 5-gallon bucket packed with sand.
  • In its center was a coffee can of smoldering BBQ charcoal. Inside the can of charcoal was a small ceramic crucible into which he threw scrap aluminum – cans, etc. Gingery forced air into this crude furnace via a fan, burning the charcoal with enough heat to melt the aluminum. He poured the molten metal into a mold of wet sand carved out in the shape he wanted. When the cast was cool he had a workable metal holding plate, which became the heart of a homemade lathe. Other lathe parts were cast. He finished these rough parts with hand tools. His one “cheat” was adding a used electric motor – although it is not impossible to imagine a wind or water powered version.
  • When the rough lathe was up and running he used it to turn out the parts for a drill press. With the drill press and lathe operating he constantly reworked pieces of the lathe itself, replacing parts with improved versions. In this way, his tiny machine shop was an upcreation device, capable of generating higher a machine of precision than itself.
  • Gingery recapitulated the evolution of technology, the great pattern by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on infinitum. This expansion of upcreation power is the means by which an entire culture lifts itself out of mud by pulling up on its bootstraps.
  • Yet is it obvious this little demonstration is not pure. As a way to make your own machine tools, Gingerys’ plans are fine and dandy. He uses cast off washing machine motors and other junkyard scrap parts to grow a fairly robust machine shop. But as an example of relaunching a technological society in a kind of Robinson Crusoe maneuver – landing somewhere and starting civilization up -- it’s a cheat because in this latter game you don’t get to start with discarded aluminum cans, scavenged nuts and bolts, old electric motors and waste sheet metal.
  • To really navigate the minimum bootstrap path through the industrial web, you’d have to start with finding your own ore, mining and refining it with primitive tools, firing up bricks, rolling out sheet metal, developing screws and bolts by hand – all just to get you to the point where you’d have enough tools and materials to make the simple 5-gallon bucket foundry that Dave Gingery started with.
  • Select at random any one of the many thousands items within the reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.
  • Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
  • This is why restarting a sophisticated society after a devastating setback is so hard. Without all the adjacent items in a given ecological bundle, a single technology can have no effect
  • you need them all working to get one working
  • The conundrum of disaster relief is a testimony to this deep interdependency: one needs roads to bring petrol but petrol to clear roads, medicines to heal people, but healthy people to dispense medicines, communications to enable organization but organization to restore communications. We see the interdependent platform of technology primarily when it breaks down.
  • This is also the explanation of why we should not confuse a good clear view of the future with a short distance. We can see the perfect outlines of where technology is going, but we tend to overestimate how soon it will come. Usually the delay (in our eager eyes) is due to the invisible ecology of other needed technologies that aren’t ready yet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 13
       
      Classic example that's relatable to nerds: Virtual Reality. In the '90's, the graphics tech wasn't close to where it needed to be. Also, ram prices and other hardware limitations (speed) made implementing it in any serious way a joke. Now, of course, the Oculus Rift is a consumer good. We don't call stuff "VR" anymore (as a buzzword), we just know we can buy a cool attachment that makes everything 3D.
  • The invention will hang suspended in the future for many years, not coming any closer the now. Then when the ignored co-technologies are in place it will appear in our lives in a sudden, with much surprise and applause for its unexpected appearance.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 13
     
    "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?"
anonymous

The Inequality That Matters - 1 views

www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm

shared by anonymous on 07 Jul 13 - Cached
  • there’s more confusion about this issue than just about any other in contemporary American political discourse.
  • The reality is that most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize. If our economic churn is bound to throw off political sparks, whether alarums about plutocracy or something else, we owe it to ourselves to seek out an accurate picture of what is really going on.
  • Let’s start with the subset of worries about inequality that are significantly overblown.
  • ...107 more annotations...
  • Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points.
  • First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well.
  • by broad historical standards, what I share with Bill Gates is far more significant than what I don’t share with him.
  • Compare these circumstances to those of 1911, a century ago. Even in the wealthier countries, the average person had little formal education, worked six days a week or more, often at hard physical labor, never took vacations, and could not access most of the world’s culture.
  • when average people read about or see income inequality, they don’t feel the moral outrage that radiates from the more passionate egalitarian quarters of society. Instead, they think their lives are pretty good and that they either earned through hard work or lucked into a healthy share of the American dream.
  • In narrowly self-interested terms, that view may be irrational, but most Americans are unwilling to frame national issues in terms of rich versus poor.
  • There’s a great deal of hostility toward various government bailouts, but the idea of “undeserving” recipients is the key factor in those feelings. Resentment against Wall Street gamesters hasn’t spilled over much into resentment against the wealthy more generally.
  • their constituents bear no animus toward rich people, only toward undeservedly rich people.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Which is how the policy can be reframed to the benefit of those that understand this more cleanly.
  • in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers—not even corrupt ones. It’s directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Provincialism!
  • The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most. That class composes a very small group, however
  • All that said, income inequality does matter—for both politics and the economy.
  • To see how, we must distinguish between inequality itself and what causes it. But first let’s review the trends in more detail.
  • Income inequality has been rising in the United States, especially at the very top.
  • The data show a big difference between two quite separate issues
  • income growth at the very top
  • greater inequality throughout the distribution
  • When it comes to the first trend, the share of pre-tax income earned by the richest 1 percent of earners has increased from about 8 percent in 1974 to more than 18 percent in 2007. Furthermore, the richest 0.01 percent (the 15,000 or so richest families) had a share of less than 1 percent in 1974 but more than 6 percent of national income in 2007. As noted, those figures are from pre-tax income, so don’t look to the George W. Bush tax cuts to explain the pattern. Furthermore, these gains have been sustained and have evolved over many years, rather than coming in one or two small bursts between 1974 and today.1
  • Caution is in order, but the overall trend seems robust. Similar broad patterns are indicated by different sources, such as studies of executive compensation. Anecdotal observation suggests extreme and unprecedented returns earned by investment bankers, fired CEOs, J.K. Rowling and Tiger Woods.
  • At the same time, wage growth for the median earner has slowed since 1973.
  • But that slower wage growth has afflicted large numbers of Americans, and it is conceptually distinct from the higher relative share of top income earners. For instance, if you take the 1979–2005 period, the average incomes of the bottom fifth of households increased only 6 percent while the incomes of the middle quintile rose by 21 percent. That’s a widening of the spread of incomes, but it’s not so drastic compared to the explosive gains at the very top.
  • The broader change in income distribution, the one occurring beneath the very top earners, can be deconstructed in a manner that makes nearly all of it look harmless. For instance, there is usually greater inequality of income among both older people and the more highly educated, if only because there is more time and more room for fortunes to vary.
  • Since America is becoming both older and more highly educated, our measured income inequality will increase pretty much by demographic fiat.
  • Economist Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia estimates that these demographic effects explain three-quarters of the observed rise in income inequality for men, and even more for women.2
  • Attacking the problem from a different angle, other economists are challenging whether there is much growth in inequality at all below the super-rich. For instance, real incomes are measured using a common price index, yet poorer people are more likely to shop at discount outlets like Wal-Mart, which have seen big price drops over the past twenty years.3 Once we take this behavior into account, it is unclear whether the real income gaps between the poor and middle class have been widening much at all.
  • And so we come again to the gains of the top earners, clearly the big story told by the data.
  • It’s worth noting that over this same period of time, inequality of work hours increased too. The top earners worked a lot more and most other Americans worked somewhat less. That’s another reason why high earners don’t occasion more resentment: Many people understand how hard they have to work to get there.
  • A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more.
  • If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure—whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.
  • It’s not obvious what causes the percentage of threshold earners to rise or fall, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the more single-occupancy households there are, the more threshold earners there will be, since a major incentive for earning money is to use it to take care of other people with whom one lives.
  • For a variety of reasons, single-occupancy households in the United States are at an all-time high.
  • The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice.
  • Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings only marginal increments of happiness.
  • What isn’t so widely advertised is that those same critics have basically been telling us, without realizing it, that we should be acting in such a manner as to increase measured income inequality.
  • Why is the top 1 percent doing so well?
  • Their data do not comprise the entire U.S. population, but from partial financial records they find a very strong role for the financial sector in driving the trend toward income concentration at the top.
  • The number of Wall Street investors earning more than $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public company executives earning that amount.
  • The authors also relate that they shared their estimates with a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, one who also has a Wall Street background. He thought their estimates of earnings in the financial sector were, if anything, understated.
  • Many of the other high earners are also connected to finance.
  • After Wall Street, Kaplan and Rauh identify the legal sector as a contributor to the growing spread in earnings at the top.
  • Finance aside, there isn’t much of a story of market failure here, even if we don’t find the results aesthetically appealing.
  • When it comes to professional athletes and celebrities, there isn’t much of a mystery as to what has happened.
  • There is more purchasing power to spend on children’s books and, indeed, on culture and celebrities more generally. For high-earning celebrities, hardly anyone finds these earnings so morally objectionable as to suggest that they be politically actionable.
  • We may or may not wish to tax the wealthy, including wealthy celebrities, at higher rates, but there is no need to “cure” the structural causes of higher celebrity incomes.
  • If we are looking for objectionable problems in the top 1 percent of income earners, much of it boils down to finance and activities related to financial markets. And to be sure, the high incomes in finance should give us all pause.
  • some investors opt for a strategy of betting against big, unexpected moves in market prices.
  • Most of the time investors will do well by this strategy, since big, unexpected moves are outliers by definition. Traders will earn above-average returns in good times. In bad times they won’t suffer fully when catastrophic returns come in, as sooner or later is bound to happen, because the downside of these bets is partly socialized onto the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and, of course, the taxpayers and the unemployed.
  • To understand how this strategy works, consider an example from sports betting.
  • if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad
  • Does that kind of pattern sound familiar? It happens in finance, too. Betting against a big decline in home prices is analogous to betting against the Wizards. Every now and then such a bet will blow up in your face, though in most years that trading activity will generate above-average profits and big bonuses for the traders and CEOs. To this mix we can add the fact that many money managers are investing other people’s money.
  • If you plan to stay with an investment bank for ten years or less, most of the people playing this investing strategy will make out very well most of the time. Everyone’s time horizon is a bit limited and you will bring in some nice years of extra returns and reap nice bonuses.
  • And let’s say the whole thing does blow up in your face? What’s the worst that can happen? Your bosses fire you, but you will still have millions in the bank and that MBA from Harvard or Wharton.
  • For the people actually investing the money, there’s barely any downside risk other than having to quit the party early.
  • Moreover, smart shareholders will acquiesce to or even encourage these gambles.
  • They gain on the upside, while the downside, past the point of bankruptcy, is borne by the firm’s creditors.
  • Perhaps more important, government bailouts minimize the damage to creditors on the downside.
  • Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis. The U.S. government guaranteed these loans, either explicitly or implicitly.
  • For better or worse, we’re handing out free options on recovery, and that encourages banks to take more risk in the first place.
  • In short, there is an unholy dynamic of short-term trading and investing, backed up by bailouts and risk reduction from the government and the Federal Reserve. This is not good.
  • But more immediate and more important, it means that banks take far too many risks and go way out on a limb, often in correlated fashion. When their bets turn sour, as they did in 2007–09, everyone else pays the price.
  • And it’s not just the taxpayer cost of the bailout that stings. The financial disruption ends up throwing a lot of people out of work down the economic food chain, often for long periods.
  • In essence, we’re allowing banks to earn their way back by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the U.S. government. This is rarely called a bailout and it doesn’t count as a normal budget item, but it is a bailout nonetheless. This type of implicit bailout brings high social costs by slowing down economic recovery (the interest rate spreads require tight monetary policy) and by redistributing income from the Treasury to the major banks.
  • The more one studies financial theory, the more one realizes how many different ways there are to construct a “going short on volatility” investment position.
  • In some cases, traders may not even know they are going short on volatility. They just do what they have seen others do. Their peers who try such strategies very often have Jaguars and homes in the Hamptons. What’s not to like?
  • The upshot of all this for our purposes is that the “going short on volatility” strategy increases income inequality.
  • In normal years the financial sector is flush with cash and high earnings. In implosion years a lot of the losses are borne by other sectors of society. In other words, financial crisis begets income inequality. Despite being conceptually distinct phenomena, the political economy of income inequality is, in part, the political economy of finance.
  • If you’re wondering, right before the Great Depression of the 1930s, bank profits and finance-related earnings were also especially high.8
  • There’s a second reason why the financial sector abets income inequality: the “moving first” issue.
  • The moving-first phenomenon sums to a “winner-take-all” market. Only some relatively small number of traders, sometimes just one trader, can be first. Those who are first will make far more than those who are fourth or fifth.
  • Since gains are concentrated among the early winners, and the closeness of the runner-ups doesn’t so much matter for income distribution, asset-market trading thus encourages the ongoing concentration of wealth. Many investors make lots of mistakes and lose their money, but each year brings a new bunch of projects that can turn the early investors and traders into very wealthy individuals.
  • These two features of the problem—“going short on volatility” and “getting there first”—are related.
  • Still, every now and then Goldman will go bust, or would go bust if not for government bailouts. But the odds are in any given year that it won’t because of the advantages it and other big banks have.
  • It’s as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw.
  • In any given year, this practice may seem tolerable—didn’t the bank earn the money fair and square by a series of fairly normal looking trades?
  • Yet over time this situation will corrode productivity, because what the banks do bears almost no resemblance to a process of getting capital into the hands of those who can make most efficient use of it.
  • And it leads to periodic financial explosions. That, in short, is the real problem of income inequality we face today. It’s what causes the inequality at the very top of the earning pyramid that has dangerous implications for the economy as a whole.
  • A key lesson to take from all of this is that simply railing against income inequality doesn’t get us very far.
  • We have to find a way to prevent or limit major banks from repeatedly going short on volatility at social expense. No one has figured out how to do that yet.
  • It remains to be seen whether the new financial regulation bill signed into law this past summer will help.
  • The bill does have positive features.
  • First, it forces banks to put up more of their own capital, and thus shareholders will have more skin in the game, inducing them to curtail their risky investments.
  • Second, it also limits the trading activities of banks, although to a currently undetermined extent (many key decisions were kicked into the hands of future regulators).
  • Third, the new “resolution authority” allows financial regulators to impose selective losses, for instance, to punish bondholders if they wish.
  • We’ll see if these reforms constrain excess risk-taking in the long run. There are reasons for skepticism.
  • Most of all, the required capital cushions simply aren’t that high, so a big enough bet against unexpected outcomes still will yield more financial upside than downside
  • What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control
  • It’s also not clear how well regulators can identify risky assets.
  • Some of the worst excesses of the financial crisis were grounded in mortgage-backed assets—a very traditional function of banks—not exotic derivatives trading strategies.
  • Virtually any asset position can be used to bet long odds, one way or another. It is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.
  • For the time being, we need to accept the possibility that the financial sector has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism.
  • It’s no longer obvious that the system is stable at a macro level, and extreme income inequality at the top has been one result of that imbalance. Income inequality is a symptom, however, rather than a cause of the real problem.
  • The root cause of income inequality, viewed in the most general terms, is extreme human ingenuity, albeit of a perverse kind. That is why it is so hard to control.
  • Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy.
  • More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking.
  • Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense.
  • We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.
  • That’s an underappreciated way to think about our modern, wealthy economy: Smart people have greater reach than ever before, and nothing really can go so wrong for them.
  • How about a world with no bailouts? Why don’t we simply eliminate the safety net for clueless or unlucky risk-takers so that losses equal gains overall? That’s a good idea in principle, but it is hard to put into practice.
  • Once a financial crisis arrives, politicians will seek to limit the damage, and that means they will bail out major financial institutions.
  • Had we not passed TARP and related policies, the United States probably would have faced unemployment rates of 25 percent of higher, as in the Great Depression. The political consequences would not have been pretty.
  • Bank bailouts may sound quite interventionist, and indeed they are, but in relative terms they probably were the most libertarian policy we had on tap. It meant big one-time expenses, but, for the most part, it kept government out of the real economy (the General Motors bailout aside).
  • So what will happen next?
  • One worry is that banks are currently undercapitalized and will seek out or create a new bubble within the next few years, again pursuing the upside risk without so much equity to lose.
  • A second perspective is that banks are sufficiently chastened for the time being but that economic turmoil in Europe and China has not yet played itself out, so perhaps we still have seen only the early stages of what will prove to be an even bigger international financial crisis.
  • A third view is perhaps most likely. We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are.
  • Yet neither is another crisis immediately upon us. The underlying dynamic favors excess risk-taking, but banks at the current moment fear the scrutiny of regulators and the public and so are playing it fairly safe.
  • They are sitting on money rather than lending it out. The biggest risk today is how few parties will take risks, and, in part, the caution of banks is driving our current protracted economic slowdown. According to this view, the long run will bring another financial crisis once moods pick up and external scrutiny weakens, but that day of reckoning is still some ways off.
  • Is the overall picture a shame? Yes. Is it distorting resource distribution and productivity in the meantime? Yes. Will it again bring our economy to its knees? Probably. Maybe that’s simply the price of modern society. Income inequality will likely continue to rise and we will search in vain for the appropriate political remedies for our underlying problems.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Jul 13
       
      Painfully straightforward.
  • anonymous on 07 Jul 13
     
    "Does growing wealth and income inequality in the United States presage the downfall of the American republic? Will we evolve into a new Gilded Age plutocracy, irrevocably split between the competing interests of rich and poor? Or is growing inequality a mere bump in the road, a statistical blip along the path to greater wealth for virtually every American? Or is income inequality partially desirable, reflecting the greater productivity of society's stars?"
anonymous

Borderlands: The View Beyond Ukraine - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...orderlands-view-beyond-ukraine

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • from Poland to Azerbaijan, I heard two questions: Are the Russians on the move? And what can these countries do to protect themselves?
  • Moscow is anxious too, and some Russians I spoke to expressed this quite openly. From the Russian point of view, the Europeans and Americans did the one thing they knew Moscow could not live with: They installed a pro-Western government in Kiev.
  • A pro-Western government now controls Ukraine, and if that control holds, the Russian Federation is in danger.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • When the Russians look at a map, this is what they see: The Baltic states are in NATO and Ukraine has aligned with the West.
  • The anti-Western government in Belarus is at risk, and were Minsk to change its loyalties, Russia's potential enemies will have penetrated almost as deeply toward the Russian core as the Nazis did. This is a comparison I heard Russians make several times.
  • For them, the Great Patriotic War (World War II), which left more than 20 million Soviet dead, is a vivid, living memory, and so is Hitler's treachery. Russians are not a trusting people and have no reason to be. The same is true of the Central Europeans, the Turks and the Caucasians. Nothing in their past permits them the luxury of assuming the best about anyone.
  • In recent weeks, three things have become obvious.
  • The first is that the Russians will not invade Ukraine directly.
  • Equally clear is that no European power can defend the line running from Poland to Romania with the decisive force needed to repel a Russian attack -- or even support these countries against Russian pressure and potential subversion.
  • Berlin does not want another Cold War. Germany depends on Russian energy and ultimately is satisfied with the status quo. The rest of Europe cannot intervene decisively.
  • Finally, this means that any support to Europe's eastern flank must come from the United States.
  • Washington is not ready to outline the nature and extent of its support, and from the American point of view, so long as the Russians are focused on Ukraine, there is still time to do so.
  • The primary concern for the United States would logically be Poland, the most vulnerable country on the North European Plain.
  • we see the United States beginning to adopt a Black Sea strategy centered on Romania.
  • Put simply, a competent rival Black Sea fleet would create problems for Russia, particularly if the Ukrainian regime survives and Crimea is isolated.
  • It is important to note the extensive diplomacy ongoing between the United States and Turkey
  • What we are seeing is regional players toying with new alliance structures. The process is in its infancy, but it is already forcing the Russians to consider their future.
  • An added dimension to this is of course energy. The Russians would appear to have the advantage here: Many of the nations that fear Moscow also depend on it for natural gas.
  • Natural gas is a powerful lever, but it is not particularly profitable.
  • Deployment of military force, while necessary, is therefore not the core element of the developing Western strategy.
  • Rather, the key move is to take steps to flood the world market with oil -- even knowing that implementing this strategy is extremely difficult.
  • It will be years before these and other alternative sources of energy come online -- indeed, some may never be available -- and there are many constraints, especially in the short term.
  • U.S. companies and oil-producing allies who depend on high oil prices would suffer alongside Russia -- an expensive collateral to this policy. But the game here is geopolitical futures.
  • For the United States, the game is not to massively arm Poland, build a Romanian navy or transform the world oil markets. It is simpler than that: Washington wants to show that it is ready to do these things.
  • Such a show of will forces the Russians to recalculate their position
  • The future for Russia becomes the one thing no nation wants: uncertain.
  • Russia now has two choices.
  • The first is to destabilize Ukraine. Success is uncertain, and Moscow cannot predict the U.S. response.
  • The fallback for Russia is to neutralize Ukraine.
  • Russia would leave the current government in place so long as Kiev pledges not to join Western-led multinational structures
  • The Western strategy is to create a credible threat to fundamental Russian interests.
  • From the U.S. point of view, a Western-oriented but neutral Ukraine would create a buffer zone without forcing a confrontation with Russia.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 14
     
    "I traveled between Poland and Azerbaijan during a rare period when the forces that shape Europe appear to be in flux, and most of the countries I visited are re-evaluating their positions. The overwhelming sense was anxiety. Observers from countries such as Poland make little effort to hide it. Those from places such as Turkey, which is larger and not directly in the line of fire, look at Ukraine as an undercurrent rather than the dominant theme. But from Poland to Azerbaijan, I heard two questions: Are the Russians on the move? And what can these countries do to protect themselves?"
anonymous

Explaining the Monty Hall problem - 0 views

www.geeksaresexy.net/...laining-the-monty-hall-problem

math problem criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • There are three doors with a car and two goats placed behind them at random. The game show host knows which is placed where.You must start off by choosing a door.The game show host opens one of the two doors which you did not choose, revealing a goat. (He or she will always open a door that will reveal a goat. He will never open a door which will reveal the car.)The host then offers you the chance to change your original pick.The question is whether it is better to change or stick with your original choice. The answer — which can be and regularly has been demonstrated by running the scenario over and over — is that you are more likely to win if you change. But many, if not most people simply can’t process this and insist that it cannot make any difference whether or not you switch and that your chances of winning are the same either way.
  • What is physically behind the doors never changes. That’s why you can’t apply mathematical “logic” after the reveal and call it a 50-50 chance. The prize goes behind one door at the start. Either it’s behind the door you choose first, or it isn’t. What happens with the reveal doesn’t physically change that by making it more or less likely.
  • To say the same thing a different way: Probability relates to random events, not to states. The random event in this situation is the placing of the car and goats. Selecting a door to open, whether that be by the contestant or the host, has no bearing on this event.
  • anonymous on 04 Jun 10
     
    By JLister at Geeks are Sexy on May 28, 2010.
anonymous

Game overs that let you know you messed up big time - 0 views

gamovr.mx981.com/2534

gaming

shared by anonymous on 20 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 20 Aug 10
     
    You have ignited an accidental nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.
anonymous

The Geopolitics of Google Earth - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...he_geopolitics_of_google_earth

geopolitics technology

shared by anonymous on 18 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 18 Aug 10
     
    "It's way beyond crop circles, blood-red lakes in Iraq, and half-hidden UFOs. Officials from Greece to New York to Switzerland are using the free satellite images to find tax cheats with undeclared swimming pools and illegal pot plantations. Armchair cartographers are also getting in on the game, uncovering -- and creating -- political minefields." By Benjamin Pauker at Foreign Policy on August 6, 2010.
anonymous

Curing the Noobonic Plague - 0 views

www.escapistmagazine.com/...930-Curing-the-Noobonic-Plague

gaming

shared by anonymous on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
  • One thing is clear: You, as a casual gamer, lack knowledge that seems to be part of a collective consciousness among a specific group of people. Thus, you are an outsider. You are a potential target for ridicule and remarks that can be, at times, downright hateful.
  • The internet is filled with hate, and it's certainly not limited to the gaming community. But it seems that some of the rudest, most arrogant feedback on the net can come from gamers, especially those who self-identify as "hardcore."
  • anonymous on 03 Aug 10
     
    "In the words of Will Ferrell, you "are a division manager, drive a Dodge Stratus and can do 100 push-ups in twenty minutes!" You'll be damned if someone bites your head off for a simple question about Bullet Bills." By Bryan Lufkin at The Escapist on August 3, 2010.
anonymous

Why Americans Hate the Media - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...5060

media politics america

shared by anonymous on 14 Oct 10 - Cached
  • But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners. What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked. Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Oct 10
       
      This was a powerful moment that I *still* remember to this day.
  • Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army or considering their deaths before his eyes "simply a story."
  • Meet the Press, moderated by Tim Russert, is probably the meatiest of these programs. High-powered guests discuss serious topics with Russert, who worked for years in politics, and with veteran reporters. Yet the pressure to keep things lively means that squabbling replaces dialogue.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?
  • Earlier in the month the President's performance had been assessed by the three network-news anchors: Peter Jennings, of ABC; Dan Rather, of CBS; and Tom Brokaw, of NBC. There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors. None of the questions from these news professionals concerned the impact of legislation or politics on people's lives. Nearly all concerned the struggle for individual advancement among candidates.
  • The CBS Evening News profile of Clinton, which was narrated by Rather and was presented as part of the series Eye on America, contained no mention of Clinton's economic policy, his tax or budget plans, his failed attempt to pass a health-care proposal, his successful attempt to ratify NAFTA, his efforts to "reinvent government," or any substantive aspect of his proposals or plans in office. Its subject was exclusively Clinton's handling of his office—his "difficulty making decisions," his "waffling" at crucial moments. If Rather or his colleagues had any interest in the content of Clinton's speech as opposed to its political effect, neither the questions they asked nor the reports they aired revealed such a concern.
  • When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public's representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public's views much less than they reflect the modern journalist's belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.
  • The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.
  • The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals.
  • when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.
  • Whether or not that was Clinton's real motive, nothing in the broadcast gave the slightest hint of where the extra policemen would go, how much they might cost, whether there was reason to think they'd do any good. Everything in the story suggested that the crime bill mattered only as a chapter in the real saga, which was the struggle between Bill and Newt.
  • "In some ways it's not even the point," she replied. What mattered was that Clinton "looked good" taking the tough side of the issue. No one expects Cokie Roberts or other political correspondents to be experts on controlling terrorism, negotiating with the Syrians, or the other specific measures on which Presidents make stands. But all issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have:the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders.
  • When the Clinton Administration declared defeat in 1994 and there were no more battles to be fought, health-care news coverage virtually stopped too—even though the medical system still represented one seventh of the economy, even though HMOs and corporations and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies were rapidly changing policies in the face of ever-rising costs.
  • Health care was no longer political news, and therefore it was no longer interesting news.
  • In interviews and at the news conferences he conducted afterward Bradley did his best to talk about the deep problems of public life and economic adjustment that had left him frustrated with the political process. Each of the parties had locked itself into rigid positions that kept it from dealing with the realistic concerns of ordinary people, he said.
  • What turned up in the press was almost exclusively speculation about what the move meant for this year's presidential race and the party lineup on Capitol Hill. Might Bradley challenge Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries? If not, was he preparing for an independent run? Could the Democrats come up with any other candidate capable of holding on to Bradley's seat? Wasn't this a slap in the face for Bill Clinton and the party he purported to lead? In the aftermath of Bradley's announcement prominent TV and newspaper reporters competed to come up with the shrewdest analysis of the political impact of the move. None of the country's major papers or networks used Bradley's announcement as a news peg for an analysis of the real issues he had raised.
  • Every one of Woodruff's responses or questions was about short-term political tactics. Woodruff asked about the political implications of his move for Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Bradley replied that it was more important to concentrate on the difficulties both parties had in dealing with real national problems.
  • As soon as he finished, Woodruff asked her next question: "Do you want to be President?" It was as if she had not heard a word he had been saying—or couldn't hear it, because the media's language of political analysis is utterly separate from the terms in which people describe real problems in their lives.
  • Regardless of the tone of coverage, medical research will go on. But a relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics threatens public life itself, by implying day after day that the political sphere is nothing more than an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather than a structure in which citizens can deal with worrisome collective problems.
  • Fourteen prominent journalists, pollsters, and all-around analysts made their predictions
  • One week later many of these same experts would be saying on their talk shows that the Republican landslide was "inevitable" and "a long time coming" and "a sign of deep discontent in the heartland."
  • But before the returns were in, how many of the fourteen experts predicted that the Republicans would win both houses of Congress and that Newt Gingrich would be speaker? Exactly three.
  • As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part.
  • useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.
  • The deadpan restraint with which Kurtz told this story is admirable. But the question many readers would want to scream at the idle correspondents is Why don't you go out and do some work?
  • Why not imagine, just for a moment, that your journalistic duty might involve something more varied and constructive than doing standups from the White House lawn and sounding skeptical about whatever announcement the President's spokesman put out that day?
  • The list could go on for pages. With a few minutes' effort—about as long as it takes to do a crossword puzzle—the correspondents could have drawn up lists of other subjects they had never before "had time" to investigate. They had the time now. What they lacked was a sense that their responsibility involved something more than standing up to rehash the day's announcements when there was room for them on the news.
  • How different the "Better safe than sorry" calculation seems when journalists are involved! Reporters and pundits hold no elected office, but they are obviously public figures. The most prominent TV-talk-show personalities are better known than all but a handful of congressmen.
  • If an interest group had the choice of buying the favor of one prominent media figure or of two junior congressmen, it wouldn't even have to think about the decision. The pundit is obviously more valuable.
  • Had Donaldson as a journalist been pursuing a politician or even a corporate executive, he would have felt justified in using the most aggressive reportorial techniques. When these techniques were turned on him, he complained that the reporters were going too far.
  • Few of his readers would leap to the conclusion that Will was serving as a mouthpiece for his wife's employers. But surely most would have preferred to learn that information from Will himself.
  • ABC News found that eight out of 10 approved of the president's speech. CBS News said that 74 percent of those surveyed said they had a "clear idea" of what Clinton stands for, compared with just 41 percent before the speech. A Gallup Poll for USA Today and Cable News Network found that eight in 10 said Clinton is leading the country in the right direction. Nielsen ratings reported in the same day's paper showed that the longer the speech went on, the larger the number of people who tuned in to watch.
  • The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers.
  • The difference between the "welcoming committee" and the congressional committees headed by fallen Democratic titans like Tom Foley and Jack Brooks was that the congressmen can be booted out.
  • Movies do not necessarily capture reality, but they suggest a public mood—in this case, a contrast between the apparent self-satisfaction of the media celebrities and the contempt in which they are held by the public.
  • the fact that no one takes the shows seriously is precisely what's wrong with them, because they jeopardize the credibility of everything that journalists do.
  • when all the participants then dash off for the next plane, caring about none of it except the money—when these things happen, they send a message. The message is: We don't respect what we're doing. Why should anyone else?
  • anonymous on 14 Oct 10
     
    "Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems" By James Fallows at The Atlantic on February, 1996
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey, Part 2: Borderlands - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...cal_journey_part_2_borderlands

geopolitics europe fsu

shared by anonymous on 17 Nov 10 - Cached
  • A borderland is a region where history is constant: Everything is in flux.
  • The countries we are visiting on this trip (Turkey, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland) occupy the borderland between Islam, Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.
  • My interest in the region is to understand more clearly how the next iteration of regional geopolitics will play out. Russia is far more powerful than it was 10 years ago. The European Union is undergoing internal stress and Germany is recalculating its position. The United States is playing an uncertain and complex game. I want to understand how the semicircle of powers, from Turkey to Poland, are thinking about and positioning themselves for the next iteration of the regional game.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • I have been accused of thinking like an old Cold warrior. I don’t think that’s true. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and U.S. influence in Europe has declined. Whatever will come next will not be the Cold War. What I do not expect this to be is a region of perpetual peace. It has never been that before. It will not be that in the future. I want to understand the pattern of conflict that will occur in the future. But for that we need to begin in the past, not with the Cold War, but with World War I.
  • he Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, the Russian empire was replaced by the Soviet Union, and the German empire was overthrown and replaced by a republic.
  • The Carpathian Mountains form a rough boundary between the Russians and the rest of Europe from Slovakia to the south.
  • The northern part of Europe is dominated by a vast plain stretching from France to Moscow.
  • Following World War I, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign nation.
  • Pilsudski is an interesting figure
  • The Russians defeated the Ukrainians and turned on Poland. Pilsudski defeated them.
  • It is interesting to speculate about history if Pilsudski had lost Warsaw. The North European Plain was wide open, and the Soviets could have moved into Germany. Undoubtedly, the French would have moved to block them, but there was a powerful Communist Party in France that had little stomach for war. It could have played out many different ways had Pilsudski not stopped the Russians. But he did.
  • His vision was something called the Intermarium — an alliance of the nations between the seas built around Poland and including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Finland and the Baltic states.
  • Pilsudski’s Intermarium makes a kind of logical if not historical sense. It is not historical because this borderland has always been the battleground for others. It has never formed together to determine its fate.
  • As always, the Intermarium is caught between Russia and Europe.
  • the entire question of the price and value of the European Union became a central issue in Germany.
  • Germany has not thought of itself as a freestanding power since 1945. It is beginning to think that way again, and that could change everything, depending on where it goes.
  • For Poland, the specter of a German-Russian entente is a historical nightmare. The last time this happened, in 1939, Poland was torn apart and lost its sovereignty for 50 years.
  • geopolitics teaches that subjective inclinations do not erase historical patterns.
  • The question in Ukraine is whether their attempt to achieve complete independence is over, to be replaced by some informal but iron bond to Russia
  • There is no more important question in Europe at the moment than the future of Ukraine.
  • The area east of the Dniester, Transdniestria, promptly seceded from Moldova
  • Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Its primary export is wine, sent mostly to Russia. The Russians have taken to blocking the export of wine for “health reasons.” I think the health issue is geopolitical and not biological.
  • Romania is oriented toward the European Union but is one of the many countries in the union that may not really belong there.
  • as its power increases in the Balkans, Turkey will be one of the forces that countries like Romania will have to face.
  • Russia as seen through the eyes of its neighbors is the purpose of this trip, and that’s the conversation I will want to have.
  • It is a theory that argues that the post-Cold War world is ending. Russia is re-emerging in a historically recognizable form. Germany is just beginning the process of redefining itself in Europe, and the EU’s weaknesses have become manifest. Turkey has already taken the first steps toward becoming a regional power. We are at the beginning of a period in which these forces play themselves out.
  • I am going to the region with an analytic framework, a theory that I will want to test.
  • Those who argue that the Turkish government is radically Islamist are simply wrong, for two reasons.
  • First, Turkey is deeply divided
  • Second, the Islamism of the Turkish government cannot possibly be compared to that of Saudi Arabia
  • The single greatest American fear should not be China or al Qaeda. It is the amalgamation of the European Peninsula’s technology with Russia’s natural resources. That would create a power that could challenge American primacy.
  • This is not a time of clear strategic thinking in Washington. I find it irritating to go there, since they regard my views as alarmist and extreme while I find their views outmoded and simplistic.
  • The United States is a vast nation, and Washington thinks of itself as its center, but it really isn’t. The United States doesn’t have a center. The pressures of the world and the public shape its actions, albeit reluctantly.
  • I regard NATO as a bureaucracy overseeing an alliance whose mission was accomplished 20 years ago.
  • The Intermarium countries remain infatuated with the European Union and NATO, but the infatuation is declining. The year 2008 and Germany’s indifference to these countries was not pleasant, and they are learning that NATO is history.
  • Washington still thinks of Russia as the failed state of the 1990s. It simply doesn’t take it seriously. It thinks of the European Union as having gone over a speed bump from which it will recover. But mostly, Washington thinks about Afghanistan. For completely understandable reasons, Afghanistan sucks up the bandwidth of Washington, allowing the rest of the world to maneuver as it wishes.
  • Nothing, of course, could be further from Washington’s mind.
  • I am not making strategy but examining geopolitical forces. I am not planning what should be but thinking about what will likely happen.
  • anonymous on 17 Nov 10
     
    "This is the second installment in a series of special reports that Dr. Friedman will write over the next few weeks as he travels to Turkey, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine and Poland. In this series, he will share his observations of the geopolitical imperatives in each country and conclude with reflections on his journey as a whole and options for the United States. "
anonymous

The Russian Swagger is Back - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20101202_russian_swagger_back

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 10 - Cached
  • A timeline helps to understand the statements surrounding the case, and broader U.S.-Russian relations.
  • The 10 intelligence officers, working secretly in the United States, were arrested almost simultaneously on June 28 in a major FBI operation. A quick spy swap was orchestrated by July 9; the spies were returned to Moscow.
  • a handful of these agents had been tracked for years in ongoing counterintelligence investigations, so something important triggered the sudden arrests.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • we suspect the leak occurred for one of three reasons:
  • Officials within or overseen by the U.S. Department of Defense wanted to counteract Putin’s claims of the spies’ relative innocence; second, U.S. counterintelligence investigators could be using the leak to “shake the trees” and watch for unusual communications traffic or activities by possible suspects; and this could be another move as Washington combats Russia’s push to spread its side of the story, that it is back on the world stage as a counterbalance to the United States.
  • Putin’s entire interview on Larry King was meant to remind the U.S. public that Russia still has many capabilities to challenge the United States. He spoke of the vast nuclear arsenal, regional alliances and — of course — spies. This was directed at a U.S. audience.
  • Putin identified the reality that every country “operates a foreign intelligence network.” U.S.-Russian intelligence and counterintelligence activities have changed little in decades, and no doubt is back in public view.
  • anonymous on 03 Dec 10
     
    "As the world mulls Thursday's naming of Russia as the 2018 World Cup host, as well as the Wednesday CNN interview with Russian Premier Vladimir Putin and the U.S. response, we should not overlook two new claims about the case of 10 Russian spies arrested in the United States in June. Answering a question from American high-profile interviewer Larry King, Putin said the "deep-cover agents" did not damage U.S. interests and would only have been activated in a crisis. Before the interview aired, The Washington Times journalist Bill Gertz published a report sourced to a retired intelligence official that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was undergoing a counterintelligence investigation linked to Russians who were charged with acting as undeclared agents of a foreign country. In the murky world of state espionage, both countries are playing games of deception. " At StratFor on December 3, 2010.
anonymous

PlanetSide 2: what we know so far - 0 views

www.pcgamer.com/...anetside-2-what-we-know-so-far

videogames planetside

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The majority of your customization is done through the amazingly large skill trees.
  • Skills, also called certifications, are trained very similarly to EVE Online (over time, and continuing while you’re offline), but also go faster when you’re actively playing.
  • Skills “will affect everything” in PlanetSide 2.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • There is not a single use of instancing in the entire game
  • Unlike PS, you can capture any territory at any time, but you do get “significant bonuses” to capturing a territory adjacent to your own.
  • SOE is really pushing the idea of wanting to make PlanetSide 2 into a full “sandbox” game in the future
  • Expect to see a lot of influence from top modern shooters
  • The developers mentioned several times that they want to allow players to design their own structures in the future.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "This information will be pretty straight-forward; we'll host more in-depth discussions on the site later today with our interviews of SOE president John Smedley and PlanetSide 2′s creative director Matt Higby."
anonymous

U.S. and Pakistan: Afghan Strategies - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...and-pakistan-afghan-strategies

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Any withdrawal from Afghanistan, particularly an accelerated one, will leave a power vacuum in Afghanistan that the Kabul government will not be able to fill.
  • There is a prior definition of success that shaped the Bush administration’s approach to Afghanistan in its early phases. The goal here was the disruption of al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan and the prevention of further attacks on the United States from Afghanistan.
  • It was more modest and, in many ways, it was achieved in 2001-2002. Its defect, of course, was that the disruption of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, while useful, did not address the evolution of al Qaeda in other countries.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The ultimate Iraq strategy was a political settlement framed by an increase in forces, and its long-term success was never clear. The Obama administration was prepared to repeat the attempt in Afghanistan, at least by using Iraq as a template if not applying exactly the same tactics.
  • However, the United States found that the Taliban were less inclined to negotiate with the United States, and certainly not on the favorable terms of the Iraqi insurgents, simply because they believed they would win in the long run
  • As we pointed out after the death of Osama bin Laden, his demise, coupled with the transfer of Petraeus out of Afghanistan, offered two opportunities.
  • The first was a return to the prior definition of success in Afghanistan
  • Second, the departure of Petraeus and his staff also removed the ideology of counterinsurgency
  • The conventional understanding of war is that its purpose is to defeat the enemy military. It presents a more limited and focused view of military power.
  • Counterinsurgency draws its roots from theories of social development in emerging countries going back to the 1950s.
  • In the view of this faction, defeating the Taliban was impossible with the force available and unlikely even with a more substantial force. There were two reasons for this.
  • First, the Taliban comprised a light infantry force with a superior intelligence capability and the ability to withdraw from untenable operations
  • Second, sanctuaries in Pakistan allowed the Taliban to withdraw to safety and reconstitute themselves, thereby making their defeat in detail impossible.
  • The United States can choose to leave Afghanistan without suffering strategic disaster. Pakistan cannot leave Pakistan.
  • while Afghanistan is a piece of American global strategy and not its whole, Afghanistan is central to Pakistan’s national strategy. This asymmetry in U.S. and Pakistani interests is now the central issue.
  • After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States became indifferent to Afghanistan’s future. Pakistan could not be indifferent. It remained deeply involved with the Islamist forces that had defeated the Soviets and would govern Afghanistan, and it helped facilitate the emergence of the Taliban as the dominant force in the country.
  • Sept. 11, 2001, posed a profound threat to Pakistan.
  • On one side, Pakistan faced a United States in a state of crisis, demanding Pakistani support against both al Qaeda and the Taliban.
  • On the other side Pakistan had a massive Islamist movement hostile to the United States
  • The Pakistani solution was the only one it could come up with
  • they did as much as they could for the United States without completely destabilizing Pakistan while making it appear that they were being far more cooperative with the Americans and far less cooperative with their public.
  • The United States wanted to disrupt al Qaeda regardless of the cost. The Pakistanis wanted to avoid the collapse of their regime at any cost. These were not compatible goals.
  • The United States accepted this publicly because it made Pakistan appear to be an ally at a time when the United States was under attack for unilateralism. It accepted it privately as well because it did not want to see Pakistan destabilize. The Pakistanis were aware of the limits of American tolerance, so a game was played out.
  • That game is now breaking down, not because the United States raided Pakistan and killed bin Laden but because it is becoming apparent to Pakistan that the United States will, sooner or later, be dramatically drawing down its forces in Afghanistan.
  • First, Pakistan will be facing the future on its western border with Afghanistan without an American force to support it.
  • Second, Pakistan is aware that as the United States draws down, it will need Pakistan to cover its withdrawal strategically.
  • Finally, there will be a negotiation with the Taliban, and elements of Pakistan, particularly the ISI, will be the intermediary.
  • Publicly, it is important for them to appear as independent and even hostile to the Americans as possible in order to maintain their domestic credibility.
  • From the American point of view, the war in Afghanistan — and elsewhere — has not been a failure. There have been no more attacks on the United States on the order of 9/11, and that has not been for al Qaeda’s lack of trying.
  • In the end, the United States will leave Afghanistan (with the possible exception of some residual special operations forces). Pakistan will draw Afghanistan back into its sphere of influence.
  • A play will be acted out like the New Zealand Haka, with both sides making terrible sounds and frightening gestures at each other.
  • The United States is furious at Pakistan for its willingness to protect American enemies. Pakistan is furious at the United States for conducting attacks on its sovereign territory. In the end it doesn’t matter. They need each other. In the affairs of nations, like and dislike are not meaningful categories, and bullying and treachery are not blocks to cooperation. The two countries need each other more than they need to punish each other. Great friendships among nations are built on less.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama will give a speech on Afghanistan on June 22. Whatever he says, it is becoming apparent that the United States is exploring ways to accelerate the drawdown of its forces in the country. It is also clear that U.S. relations with Pakistan are deteriorating to a point where cooperation - whatever level there was - is breaking down."
anonymous

Technological Superstition - 0 views

www.kk.org/...technological_s.php

technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The genius of modern mass production was the machine's ability to make cheap identical copies of any invention -- unlike the uneven creations of mortal craftsmen.
  • Hemingway's personal typewriters (he had more than one) are treated like relics. They are roped off, no touching them, they've become the object of pilgrimages, fetching more than $100,000. Yet, the venerated typewriter itself is indistinguishable from other units made on that assembly line.
  • Relics are common in all the major religions of the world.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The logic of relics is supernatural.
  • This relic magic operates at full throttle in the world of modern celebrity collectors. The $3 hockey puck used in the 2010 gold medal Olympics championship game later sold for $13,000 because of the unique properties it acquired during the game.
  • Provenance is a key notion in relics and collectables.
  • It establishes a chain of claims about previous ownership.
  • But provenance itself does not explain why we assign any special meaning to the artifact, or to the clone.
  • Yet as we approach the tenth anniversary of the disasters of 9/11, there is an official campaign to assign supernatural potency to the remains of the World Trade Center. The twisted bits of steel salvaged from the site of the fallen towers are being treated as holy relics, taken on a long processions for public viewing, while the disaster site itself is being described as a "sacred place."
  • There is certainly value in keeping old things. Museums that collect artifacts, like say the Computer History Museum, contain both original prototypes and arbitrary production-run units, and these contain great historical information and lessons. But it doesn't (or shouldn't) matter who touched or used them previously. Manufactured artifacts can't be relics. They are all clones.
  • Of course, there is no difference, which is why we place so much emphasis on provenance ("it's been in our family forever!"). In the end, a historical technological artifact is one of the reservoirs in the modern world where superstition still flows freely.
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 11
     
    By Kevin Kelly at The Technium: "Superstition is alive and well in the high tech world. It is visible most prominently in our technological artifacts, some of which we treat like medieval relics. Recently, supernatural superstition has crept into American treatment of 9/11."
anonymous

Gaming Israel and Palestine - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...gaming-israel-and-palestine

shared by anonymous on 29 Jul 14 - Cached
  • The most interesting aspect of this war is that both sides apparently found it necessary, despite knowing it would have no definitive military outcome.
  • An argument of infinite regression always rages as to the original sin: Who committed the first crime?
  • For the Palestinians, the original crime was the migration into the Palestinian mandate by Jews, the creation of the State of Israel and the expulsion of Arabs from that state.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • For Israel, the original sin came after the 1967 war, during which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.
  • Cease-fires are the best that anyone can hope for.
  • Under these circumstances, the Gaza war is in some sense a matter of housekeeping. For Hamas, the point of the operation is demonstrating it can fire rockets at Israel.
  • For the Israelis, the point of the operation is that they are willing to carry it out at all.
  • Israel can't go far enough to break the Palestinian will to resist; it is dependent on a major third-party state to help meet Israeli security needs. This creates an inherent contradiction whereby Israel receives enough American support to guarantee its existence but because of humanitarian concerns is not allowed to take the kind of decisive action that might solve its security problem.
  • The question therefore is not what the point of all this is -- although that is a fascinating subject -- but where all this ends.
  • Palestine has two population centers, Gaza and the West Bank, which are detached from one another.
  • Within its current borders, a viable Palestine is impossible to imagine.
  • Given its history, Israel is unlikely to take that risk unless it had the right to oversee security in the West Bank in some way. That in turn would undermine Palestinian sovereignty.
  • Geography simply won't permit two sovereign states. In this sense, the extremists on both sides are more realistic than the moderates. But that reality encounters other problems. 
  • Currently, Israel is as secure as it is ever likely to be
  • Israel can't radically shift its demography. But several evolutions in the region could move against Israel.
  • there are many things that could weaken Israel -- some substantially. Each may appear far-fetched at the moment, but everything in the future seems far-fetched.
  • Israel is now as strong as it is going to be. But Israel does not think that it can reach an accommodation with the Palestinians that would guarantee Israeli national security, a view based on a realistic reading of geography.
  • In these circumstances, the Israeli strategy is to maintain its power at a maximum level and use what influence it has to prevent the emergence of new threats. From this perspective, the Israeli strategy on settlements makes sense. If there will be no talks, and Israel must maintain its overwhelming advantage, creating strategic depth in the West Bank is sensible; it would be less sensible if there were a possibility of a peace treaty.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 29 Jul 14
       
      What is sensible is horrifying. How mundane?
  • The primary Palestinian problem will be to maintain itself as a distinct entity with sufficient power to resist an Israeli assault for some time. Any peace treaty would weaken the Palestinians by pulling them into the Israeli orbit and splitting them up.
  • By refusing a peace treaty, they remain distinct, if divided. That guarantees they will be there when circumstances change.
  • Israel's major problem is that circumstances always change.
  • Time is not on Israel's side. At some point, something will likely happen to weaken its position, while it is unlikely that anything will happen to strengthen its position. That normally would be an argument for entering negotiations, but the Palestinians will not negotiate a deal that would leave them weak and divided, and any deal that Israel could live with would do just that.
  • The Palestinians need to maintain solidarity for the long haul. The Israelis need to hold their strategic superiority as long as they can.
  • anonymous on 29 Jul 14
     
    "We have long argued that the Arab-Israeli conflict is inherently insoluble. Now, for the third time in recent years, a war is being fought in Gaza. The Palestinians are firing rockets into Israel with minimal effect. The Israelis are carrying out a broader operation to seal tunnels along the Gaza-Israel boundary. Like the previous wars, the current one will settle nothing. The Israelis want to destroy Hamas' rockets. They can do so only if they occupy Gaza and remain there for an extended period while engineers search for tunnels and bunkers throughout the territory. This would generate Israeli casualties from Hamas guerrillas fighting on their own turf with no room for retreat. So Hamas will continue to launch rockets, but between the extreme inaccuracy of the rockets and Israel's Iron Dome defense system, the group will inflict little damage to the Israelis."
anonymous

The Virtue of Subtlety: A U.S. Strategy Against the Islamic State - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...strategy-against-islamic-state

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 14 - Cached
  • It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted.
  • A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
  • Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Given the situation, the United States has an unavoidable strategy.
  • The United States has been concerned about the status of Russia ever since U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905. The United States has been concerned about the Middle East since U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the British to retreat from Suez in 1956. As a result, the United States inherited -- or seized -- the British position.
  • A national strategy emerges over the decades and centuries. It becomes a set of national interests into which a great deal has been invested, upon which a great deal depends and upon which many are counting. Presidents inherit national strategies, and they can modify them to some extent. But the idea that a president has the power to craft a new national strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of realities crafted by all those who came before him.
  • The American strategy is fixed: Allow powers in the region to compete and balance against each other. When that fails, intervene with as little force and risk as possible.
  • For example, the conflict between Iran and Iraq canceled out two rising powers until the war ended. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to overturn the balance of power in the region. The result was Desert Storm.
  • This strategy provides a model. In the Syria-Iraq region, the initial strategy is to allow the regional powers to balance each other, while providing as little support as possible to maintain the balance of power.
  • For the United States, there is no threat to sovereignty, but that makes the process harder: Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.
  • The American experience in Iraq highlighted the problems with counterinsurgency or being caught in a local civil war. The idea of major intervention assumes that this time it will be different. This fits one famous definition of insanity.
  • There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions.
  • the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago.
  • Finally, the Islamic State -- engaged in war with everyone around it -- is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack.
  • In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.
  • Because the Islamic State operates to some extent as a conventional military force, it is vulnerable to U.S. air power.
  • There is no reason not to bomb the Islamic State's forces and leaders. They certainly deserve it. But there should be no illusion that bombing them will force them to capitulate or mend their ways.
  • In the first place, is it really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges.
  • The United States does not have the force needed to occupy Iraq and Syria at the same time. The demographic imbalance between available forces and the local population makes that impossible.
  • The Turks are emerging as a regional power. Their economy has grown dramatically in the past decade, their military is the largest in the region, and they are part of the Islamic world. Their government is Islamist but in no way similar to the Islamic State, which concerns Ankara.
  • The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.
  • It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins.
  • The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance.
  • The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.
  • It is not clear why he thinks those NATO countries -- with the exception of Turkey -- will spend their national treasures and lives to contain the Islamic State, or why the Islamic State alone is the issue.
  • U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must -- with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait -- and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed.
  • In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition.
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 14
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama said recently that he had no strategy as yet toward the Islamic State but that he would present a plan on Wednesday. It is important for a president to know when he has no strategy. It is not necessarily wise to announce it, as friends will be frightened and enemies delighted. A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it."
anonymous

Americans Voting Smarter About Crime, Justice At Polls - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ica-crime-drugs_n_2125639.html

shared by anonymous on 14 Nov 12 - Cached
  • Just 15 or 20 years ago, headlines like these were unimaginable. But marijuana legalization didn't just win in Washington and Coloardo, it won big.
  • In Colorado, it outpolled President Barack Obama. In Washington, Obama beat pot by less than half a percentage point. Medical marijuana also won in Massachusetts, and nearly won in Arkansas. (Legalization of pot lost in Oregon, but drug law reformers contend that was due to a poorly written ballot initiative that would basically have made the state a vendor.)
  • But it wasn't just pot. In California, voters reined in the state's infamous "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, passing a measure that now requires the third offense to be a serious or violent felony before the automatic life sentence kicks in. The results don't negate the law, but they do take some of the teeth out of it. And the margin -- the reform passed by more than a 2-to-1 margin -- has significant symbolic value. Three Strikes was arguably the most high-profile and highly touted of the get-tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and 1990s. It epitomized the slogan-based approach to criminal justice policy that politicians tended to take during the prison boom.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "I definitely think we're seeing a shift in the public opinion," he says. "This election was really a game changing event."
  • The recent results seem to indicate that at least in some parts of the country, the electorate is paying more attention to criminal justice issues, is more willing to hold law enforcement officials accountable and is less credulous when it comes to tough-on-crime posturing.
  • "While it’s refreshing to know that voters in the initiative states understand that reforms were necessary and good, I hear from prisoners every day who are being sentenced to decades behind bars for nonviolent drug offenses. We still have a very long way to go to reach the tipping point that will significantly change our national affection for over-punishment."
  • Even if the public mood has shifted, Congress is usually way behind. "There's always an innate caution among politicians about doing anything they perceive as controversial," Sterling says. "They're really sensitive to what cops say. They don't want the police unions opposing them, and no politician wants to pick a fight with a police chief. When I was on Capitol Hill, and this was 20-25 years ago, I had lawmakers tell me that it made perfect sense to them to legalize drugs. But they'd always say, 'You can never quote me on that.' None of them wanted to appear soft on crime, even if it was the right thing to do."
  • The conservative flagship think tank the Heritage Foundation recently launched its "overcriminalized" project, which critiques the ever-growing criminal code and the expanding power of prosecutors. A number of conservative voices have recently come out against the death penalty, including Brent Bozell, Richard Viguerie, and David Brooks.
  • "I think with the soaring prison population, and with groups like Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, many conservatives have started to come into contact with people who are or have been in prison," Sterling says. "Having personal contacts like that can change your views. When you're close to it, you start to realize how excessive it has become. And I think it can speak to religious values. Too little punishment is wrong. But they're seeing that too much punishment is just as wrong."
  • The one thing the 2012 results may do at the federal level is begin to convince some politicians that advocating reform is no longer political suicide. "This year’s initiatives in California, Colorado and Washington do indicate a changed public perception about punishment and marijuana in those states," Stewart says. "That should give legislators the freedom, if they choose to exercise it, to ease their tough-on-crime positions and not have to worry about surviving the next election." Sterling agrees. "I think it could give some cover to political leaders who already thought these things but were afraid to say them. My contacts close to the Obama administration say they were really taken aback by the results in those states. They didn't expect the vote to be as lopsided as it was. I think they really don't know what to do right now. But when medical marijuana first passed in California 16 years ago, you saw (Clinton Drug Czar) Barry McCaffrey preparing his counterattack within hours. I haven't heard of anything like that in the works this time around. I think that's a good sign."
  • anonymous on 14 Nov 12
     
    "A headline from the Denver Post this week read: "Colorado Drug Force Disbanding." Another from the Seattle Times announced, "220 Marijuana Cases Dismissed In King, Pierce Counties.""
anonymous

Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - 0 views

www.psmag.com/...-up-psychology-economics-53135

shared by anonymous on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • For instance, the different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion likely reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions.
  • As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve.
  • In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • The trio of researchers are young—as professors go—good-humored family men. They recalled that they were nervous as the publication time approached. The paper basically suggested that much of what social scientists thought they knew about fundamental aspects of human cognition was likely only true of one small slice of humanity. They were making such a broadside challenge to whole libraries of research that they steeled themselves to the possibility of becoming outcasts in their own fields.
  • “We were scared,” admitted Henrich. “We were warned that a lot of people were going to be upset.” “We were told we were going to get spit on,” interjected Norenzayan. “Yes,” Henrich said. “That we’d go to conferences and no one was going to sit next to us at lunchtime.”
  • Still, I had to wonder whether describing the Western mind, and the American mind in particular, as weird suggested that our cognition is not just different but somehow malformed or twisted. In their paper the trio pointed out cross-cultural studies that suggest that the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group. WEIRD minds are also more analytic, possessing the tendency to telescope in on an object of interest rather than understanding that object in the context of what is around it.
  • The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world.
  • Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      I did a shit ton of this. I was very internal, didn't have many friends, and came to identify with 'things' as though they were people.
  • Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”
  • The three insisted that their goal was not to say that one culturally shaped psychology was better or worse than another—only that we’ll never truly understand human behavior and cognition until we expand the sample pool beyond its current small slice of humanity.
  • Despite these assurances, however, I found it hard not to read a message between the lines of their research. When they write, for example, that weird children develop their understanding of the natural world in a “culturally and experientially impoverished environment” and that they are in this way the equivalent of “malnourished children,” it’s difficult to see this as a good thing.
  • THE TURN THAT HENRICH, Heine, and Norenzayan are asking social scientists to make is not an easy one: accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban—there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      This is another place where my love of long-term thinking rears its head. So modern as we imagine ourselves, with all our fancy machines, we are still bareinfants when it comes to reckoning about ourselves.
  • Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.
  • Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
  • As Norenzayan sees it, the last few generations of psychologists have suffered from “physics envy,” and they need to get over it.
  • The job, experimental psychologists often assumed, was to push past the content of people’s thoughts and see the underlying universal hardware at work. “This is a deeply flawed way of studying human nature,” Norenzayan told me, “because the content of our thoughts and their process are intertwined.” In other words, if human cognition is shaped by cultural ideas and behavior, it can’t be studied without taking into account what those ideas and behaviors are and how they are different from place to place.
  • This new approach suggests the possibility of reverse-engineering psychological research: look at cultural content first; cognition and behavior second. Norenzayan’s recent work on religious belief is perhaps the best example of the intellectual landscape that is now open for study.
  • “I remember opening textbook after textbook and turning to the index and looking for the word ‘religion,’ ” he told me, “Again and again the very word wouldn’t be listed. This was shocking. How could psychology be the science of human behavior and have nothing to say about religion? Where I grew up you’d have to be in a coma not to notice the importance of religion on how people perceive themselves and the world around them.”
  • He has suggested that there may be a connection between the growth of religions that believe in “morally concerned deities”—that is, a god or gods who care if people are good or bad—and the evolution of large cities and nations.
  • If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine. They may have climbed the ladder of religion and effectively kicked it away. Or perhaps, after a thousand years of religious belief, the idea of an unseen entity always watching your behavior remains in our culturally shaped thinking even after the belief in God dissipates or disappears.
  • almost every major theorist on human behavior in the last 100 years predicted that it was just a matter of time before religion was a vestige of the past. But the world persists in being a very religious place.
  • HENRICH, HEINE, AND NORENZAYAN’S FEAR of being ostracized after the publication of the WEIRD paper turned out to be misplaced. Response to the paper, both published and otherwise, has been nearly universally positive, with more than a few of their colleagues suggesting that the work will spark fundamental changes. “I have no doubt that this paper is going to change the social sciences,” said Richard Nisbett, an eminent psychologist at the University of Michigan. “It just puts it all in one place and makes such a bold statement.”
  • At its heart, the challenge of the WEIRD paper is not simply to the field of experimental human research (do more cross-cultural studies!); it is a challenge to our Western conception of human nature. For some time now, the most widely accepted answer to the question of why humans, among all animals, have so successfully adapted to environments across the globe is that we have big brains with the ability to learn, improvise, and problem-solve.
  • Henrich has challenged this “cognitive niche” hypothesis with the “cultural niche” hypothesis. He notes that the amount of knowledge in any culture is far greater than the capacity of individuals to learn or figure it all out on their own.
  • He suggests that individuals tap that cultural storehouse of knowledge simply by mimicking (often unconsciously) the behavior and ways of thinking of those around them. We shape a tool in a certain manner, adhere to a food taboo, or think about fairness in a particular way, not because we individually have figured out that behavior’s adaptive value, but because we instinctively trust our culture to show us the way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Mar 13
       
      Goodness, though! I'm in TOTAL control of everything! :P
  • The unique trick of human psychology, these researchers suggest, might be this: our big brains are evolved to let local culture lead us in life’s dance.
  • People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home.
  • Because of our peculiarly Western way of thinking of ourselves as independent of others, this idea of the culturally shaped mind doesn’t go down very easily.
  • That we in the West develop brains that are wired to see ourselves as separate from others may also be connected to differences in how we reason, Heine argues. Unlike the vast majority of the world, Westerners (and Americans in particular) tend to reason analytically as opposed to holistically.
  • That is, the American mind strives to figure out the world by taking it apart and examining its pieces.
  • Shown another way, in a different test analytic Americans will do better on something called the “rod and frame” task, where one has to judge whether a line is vertical even though the frame around it is skewed. Americans see the line as apart from the frame, just as they see themselves as apart from the group.
  • Heine and others suggest that such differences may be the echoes of cultural activities and trends going back thousands of years. Whether you think of yourself as interdependent or independent may depend on whether your distant ancestors farmed rice (which required a great deal of shared labor and group cooperation) or herded animals (which rewarded individualism and aggression).
  • These psychological trends and tendencies may echo down generations, hundreds of years after the activity or situation that brought them into existence has disappeared or fundamentally changed.
  • And here is the rub: the culturally shaped analytic/individualistic mind-sets may partly explain why Western researchers have so dramatically failed to take into account the interplay between culture and cognition. In the end, the goal of boiling down human psychology to hardwiring is not surprising given the type of mind that has been designing the studies. Taking an object (in this case the human mind) out of its context is, after all, what distinguishes the analytic reasoning style prevalent in the West. Similarly, we may have underestimated the impact of culture because the very ideas of being subject to the will of larger historical currents and of unconsciously mimicking the cognition of those around us challenges our Western conception of the self as independent and self-determined. The historical missteps of Western researchers, in other words, have been the predictable consequences of the WEIRD mind doing the thinking.
  • anonymous on 02 Mar 13
     
    "The growing body of cross-cultural research that the three researchers were compiling suggested that the mind's capacity to mold itself to cultural and environmental settings was far greater than had been assumed. The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do-the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like-but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception."
anonymous

Nigerian Characteristics - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nigerian-characteristics

shared by anonymous on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
  • To talk about an individual's personality and tendencies is easy for those who know the person well; to talk about the personality and tendencies of millions of people who form a nation is much trickier and fraught with moral risk.
  • For the result is often simplistic stereotyping of what are often very complex identities.
  • national traits are the product of a people's experience of living on a singular terrain for centuries and longer, leading to an identifiable national or ethnic culture and thus to specific characteristics.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • To deny this altogether is to immobilize observation, which, in turn, leads to analysis that is both unrealistic and naive.
  • Thus, we come to Nigeria, a country of more than 166 million people with severe overcrowding due to the fact that much of the country is desert and swamps where few people can live.
  • For too many Nigerians, life is a Hobbesian, zero-sum game that adds up to an aggressive, predatory system of survival of the fittest. Nigeria is a place where life is too often a matter of who can intimidate whom. Indeed, war, crime and thuggery are the province of young males, and Nigeria's population is composed of many of them.
  • Nigeria is an assemblage of several British-ruled territories: specifically a Muslim north that the British governed indirectly through traditional rulers and a non-Muslim south that the British ruled directly. The tension between the different parts of Nigeria has dominated political life for decades, leading to coups and counter-coups and significant periods of democracy characterized by exceedingly high levels of corruption, which is, in turn, part of the spoils system that staves off civil war.
  • For Nigerian politics at the highest levels is as predatory as life on the street.
  • There are essentially three geographical parts to Nigeria:
  • a Muslim-dominated north of desert and semi-desert, which produces the Hausa officers' corps that for decades has dominated the military and, by association, politics for significant periods
  • a southwestern region dominated by the Yoruba people, which contains the commercial capital of Lagos
  • and the southeast where much of the oil is located, dominated by the Igbo tribe.
  • Abuja, to no one's surprise, is less the capital city than the point of arbitration for a weak and sprawling empire otherwise known as the state of Nigeria. Abuja is where the economic spoils are distributed -- the benefit of upwards of 2.5 million barrels of oil pumped daily.
  • Ignored for decades and violently intimidated during the 1990s, the Ijaw in the 2000s waged an increasingly militant campaign to assert their presence. Pipeline sabotage and bombings of oil facilities effectively held the country's economy for ransom. The Ijaw were accommodated in 2007 and were rewarded with the vice presidency, in exchange for curtailing the sponsorship of militant groups like the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND.
  • Indeed, Nigeria attests to the triumph of naked power and geography over the realm of ideas. Nigeria's strength is evinced in the fact that its peacekeepers have successfully led intervention forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and in the fact that Nigerian businessmen are all over West Africa playing pivotal roles in local economies.
  • Nigerians can be found as captains of continental and even global industry, if the black market sectors of business scams and drug, human, car and crude oil smuggling rackets are included. But Nigeria is weak in the sense that its own condition of semi-anarchy makes it impossible for Nigeria to police the region the way a great regional power should.
  • Nigeria and South Africa both should be imperial powers in West Africa and southern African respectively, helping to stabilize places like Mali and the Congo. But they clearly are not due to their own internal weaknesses.
  • Nigeria will totter onwards. It will not descend into civil war because all the regional and ethnic groups understand limits -- and how they can all, at one point or another, benefit from a flagrant system of spoils and kickbacks. Corruption, make no mistake, while it contributes to misrule, is also a pacifying force in Nigeria. But neither will there be the emergence of a strong state.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Mar 13
       
      Corruption = Semi-stability. Depressing.
  • It is a maxim of Western elites that economic development and global integration will lead to civil societies in places like Nigeria. There is an important element of truth in that, but such a truth has severe limits. Economic growth also leads to wider disparities as well as more spoils to fight over.
  • In the case of Nigeria, there is effectively one spoil: those 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day. And global society has sunk roots mainly among the elites, not among the tens of millions of people in a place like Nigeria for whom life is a constant, predatory struggle. Nigeria should keep us humble about the human condition and the persistence of national characteristics.
  • anonymous on 06 Mar 13
     
    "Individuals are more concrete than the national or ethnic group of which they form a part. To talk about an individual's personality and tendencies is easy for those who know the person well; to talk about the personality and tendencies of millions of people who form a nation is much trickier and fraught with moral risk. For the result is often simplistic stereotyping of what are often very complex identities. Nevertheless, to assume Danes harbor the same national characteristics as, say, Chinese, is absurd. The fact is, national traits are the product of a people's experience of living on a singular terrain for centuries and longer, leading to an identifiable national or ethnic culture and thus to specific characteristics. To deny this altogether is to immobilize observation, which, in turn, leads to analysis that is both unrealistic and naive."
anonymous

Dragon in a Bathtub: Chinese Nuclear Submarines and the South China Sea - 0 views

www.carnegieendowment.org/...fpjl

geopolitics asia

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Despite America’s best efforts to construct stronger ties with China, relations in-between both countries have been repeatedly buffeted by a series of tensions and misunderstandings. Many of these frictions appear to have resulted from a more assertive Chinese posture in the South China Sea.
  • When attempting to explain this upsurge in Chinese pugnacity, analysts have pointed to the rising power's selective interpretation of the law of the sea and growing unwillingness to compromise over what it calls its “blue national soil”, particularly when confronted with an increasingly intransigent domestic populace.
  • Others have pointed to the more immediately tangible benefits to be derived from the presence of numerous offshore oil and gas deposits within contested waters.
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  • not only is the South China Sea one of the world’s busiest trade thoroughfares, it also happens to be the roaming pen of China’s emerging ballistic missile submarine fleet, which is stationed at Sanya, on the tropical Island of Hainan.
  • The United States, with its array of advanced anti-submarine warfare assets and hydrographic research vessels deployed throughout the region, gives Beijing the unwelcome impression that Uncle Sam can’t stop peering into its nuclear nursery.
  • When Chinese naval strategists discuss their maritime environs, the sentiment they convey is one of perpetual embattlement.
  • Applying this maritime siege mentality to naval planning; they fret that the US Navy could locate and neutralize their fledgling undersea deterrent in the very first phases of conflict, before it even manages to slip through the chinks of first island chain.
  • This concern helps explain China's growing intolerance to foreign military activities in the South China Sea. Tellingly, some of the most nerve-wracking standoffs involving US and Chinese forces have unfolded in close proximity to Hainan.
  • The infamous Ep-3 crisis, during which a US spy plane entered into collision with a Chinese fighter jet, occurred while the plane’s crew was attempting to collect intelligence on naval infrastructure development.
  • Similarly, the USNS Impeccable incident, during which a US hydrographic vessel was dangerously harassed by five Chinese ships, took place approximately seventy miles to the south of Hainan. During the confrontation, Chinese sailors reportedly attempted to unhook the Impeccable’s towed acoustic array sonars.
  • In public, China's protests over foreign military activities are couched in territorial terms. In private, however, Chinese policymakers readily acknowledge the centrality of the nuclear dimension.
  • Thus in the course of a discussion with a former Chinese official, I was told that “even though territorial issues are of importance, our major concern is the sanctity of our future sea-based deterrent.”
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      See also: China as an 'island' due to its massive and expansive (mostly useless) western side. There's (hopefully) some StratFor post saved to Diigo. It's a fascinating read.
  • He then went on to describe, with a flicker of amusement, how fishermen off the coast of Hainan regularly snag US sonars in their nets, and are encouraged to sell them back to the local authorities in exchange for financial compensation.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      Ha.
  • Of course, such cat and mouse games are nothing new-and are perfectly legal- provided they occur within international waters or airspace.
  • Unlike the Soviets, however, who could confine the movements of their boomers to the frigid, lonely waters of the Barents and Okhotsk seas, the Chinese have chosen to erect their nuclear submarine base smack-bang in the middle of one of the world’s busiest maritime highways. 
  • Needless to say, this location is hardly ideal.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      Never say "Needless to say"
  • China’s naval ambitions are simply too broad and grandiose for its constricted maritime geography. This perceived lack of strategic depth provides a partial explanation to Beijing’s increased obduracy over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
  • Absolute control over the remote Spratly islands, in addition to the more proximate Paracels, would greatly facilitate this concentric defensive configuration.
  • Until not long ago, China’s strategic submarine force wasn’t really taken seriously.
  • China could soon equip its new class of Jin submarines with the JL-2 ballistic missile, which has a range of approximately 4 600 miles. This would enable Beijing, the report adds, to establish a “near-continuous at-sea strategic deterrent”.
  •  In all likelihood this force will be berthed at Hainan. The second Obama Administration will therefore have the unenviable task of dealing with tensions in a region which is not only riddled with territorial divisions, but is also rapidly morphing into one of the world’s most sensitive nuclear hotspots.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      I agree that Obama might find himself with a little heat to deal with, but "most sensitive nuclear hotspots." Really? Nukes would fuck everything up for *everyone*, friend, foe, other. This is an otherwise sober article, though.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "When Chinese naval strategists discuss their maritime environs, the sentiment they convey is one of perpetual embattlement. Pointing to the US's extended network of allies in the Indo-Pacific region, and to their own relative isolation, Chinese strategists fear that Beijing's growing navy could be ensnared within the first island chain-a region which they describe as stretching from Japan all the way to the Indonesian archipelago."
anonymous

Can Eric Cantor Redeem the Republican Party and Himself? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130304fa_fact_lizza

shared by anonymous on 27 Feb 13 - Cached
  • On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.
  • Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist.
  • “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June, Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July 21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the Democrats in the election.
  • Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.
  • The bet failed spectacularly. Just as Cantor had urged, Obama and Romney spent much of the campaign debating tax and spending policies that the House Republicans had foisted on the Romney-Ryan ticket. What’s more, by scuttling the 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations, Cantor, more than any other politician, helped create the series of fiscal crises that have gripped Washington since Election Day. The failure of the Grand Bargain led to a byzantine deal: if the two parties could not agree on a new deficit plan, then a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—cuts known, in budget jargon, as a “sequester”—would automatically kick in on New Year’s Day.
  • Since the 2012 elections, the Republicans have been divided between those who believe their policies are the problem and those who believe they just need better marketing—between those who believe they need to make better pizza and those who think they just need a more attractive box. Cantor, who is known among his colleagues as someone with strategic intelligence and a knack for political positioning, argues that it’s the box.
  • As he gamed out G.O.P. strategy for the budgetary showdowns with Obama in January and February—including this week’s clash over the sequester—Cantor was happy to make himself available for several long interviews. He persistently struck a diplomatic note and mentioned again and again how much he looked forward to working with Obama, a position that he said he’s been articulating for a long time.
  • There are several ways to think of the divide in the Republican conference.
  • One is regional. The House has two hundred and thirty-two Republican members; nearly half of them—a hundred and ten—are from the South.
  • The rest are scattered across the Midwest (fifty-eight), the mid-Atlantic (twenty-five), the mountain West (eighteen), and the Pacific (twenty-one). There are no House Republicans from New England.
  • Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.” He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
  • The other divide in the House is generational.
  • If Democrats vote as a bloc, which they often do, it takes only sixteen dissenting Republicans for the leadership to lose a vote. There is a rump group of some forty or fifty restless Republicans. At its core are two dozen younger members, most of whom have been elected since 2010 and have what generously might be called a dismissive attitude toward their leaders, whom they see as holdovers from the big-spending era of George W. Bush.
  • Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, who is sixty-three and has served for a decade in the House, recently emerged as the leader of a large faction of House Republicans who believe that the Tea Party-inspired congressmen are dooming the Party.
  • Cole is no fan of Obama. “The President is so self-righteous and so smug,” he told me. But Cole is one of the few House Republicans who have worked closely with the White House. On one of his walls, which is decorated with Native American artifacts, were framed copies of two laws that Obama signed regarding tribal issues. “He’s the best President in modern American history on Native American issues,” Cole said.
  • anonymous on 27 Feb 13
     
    "Two months earlier, Republicans had lost the Presidential election and eight seats in the House. They were immediately plunged into a messy budget fight with a newly emboldened President, which ended with an income-tax increase, the first in more than twenty years. A poll in January deemed Congress less popular than cockroaches, head lice, and colonoscopies (although it did beat out the Kardashians, North Korea, and the Ebola virus). It was time to regroup."
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