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anonymous

Three arguments against the singularity - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...reality-check-1.html

singularity sf criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • economic libertarianism is based on the same reductionist view of human beings as rational economic actors as 19th century classical economics — a drastic over-simplification of human behaviour. Like Communism, Libertarianism is a superficially comprehensive theory of human behaviour that is based on flawed axioms and, if acted upon, would result in either failure or a hellishly unpleasant state of post-industrial feudalism.
  • I am not an extropian
  • I'm definitely not a libertarian:
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely. The reason it's unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology, and it only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Jun 11
       
      In other words: what we call 'consciousness' is a bundle of physiological responses, not some tightly designed status.
  • it's possible that just as destructive research on human embryos is tightly regulated and restricted, we may find it socially desirable to restrict destructive research on borderline autonomous intelligences ... lest we inadvertently open the door to inhumane uses of human beings as well.
  • whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project.
  • Consciousness seems to be a mechanism for recursively modeling internal states within a body.
  • Uploading ... is not obviously impossible unless you are a crude mind/body dualist. However, if it becomes plausible in the near future we can expect extensive theological arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire.
  • Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril
  • Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either. And it has a deeper-than-superficial appeal, insofar as it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues involved in creating ancestor simulations are ignored.
  • This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.
  • We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions.
  • our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it.
  • Therefore I conclude that, while not ruling them out, it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    Over at Charlie's Diary, Mr. Stross articulates why he's not super-enamored of the Singularity. He begins: "I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think. Short version: Santa Claus doesn't exist." The Long version commences...here are excerpts.
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

The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...n-an-interview-with-bruce-hood

shared by anonymous on 25 May 12 - No Cached
  • LEHRER: If the self is an illusion, then why does it exist? Why do we bother telling a story about ourselves? HOOD: For the same reason that our brains create a highly abstracted version of the world around us. It is bad enough that our brain is metabolically hogging most of our energy requirements, but it does this to reduce the workload to act. That’s the original reason why the brain evolved in the first place – to plan and control movements and keep track of the environment. It’s why living creatures that do not act or navigate around their environments do not have brains. So the brain generates maps and models on which to base current and future behaviors. Now the value of a map or a model is the extent to which it provides the most relevant useful information without overburdening you with too much detail.
  • anonymous on 25 May 12
     
    "Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, picks up where Woolf and the modernists left off. In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below:" This whole thing is like one long advertisement for why tabula rasa adherents (ie: Ayn Rand) are highly uncritical.
anonymous

What Is The Singularity And Will You Live To See It? - 0 views

io9.com/...ty-and-will-you-live-to-see-it

longnow technology

shared by anonymous on 11 May 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 May 10
     
    By Annalee Newitz at io9 on May 10, 2010.
anonymous

Europe: The New Plan - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20101220-europe-new-plan

europe geopolitics euro

shared by anonymous on 21 Dec 10 - Cached
  • the euro, has suffered from two core problems
  • the lack of a parallel political union
  • the issue of debt
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Taxation and appropriation — who pays how much to whom — are essentially political acts. One cannot have a centralized fiscal authority without first having a centralized political/military authority capable of imposing and enforcing its will.
  • the checkbook is not the ultimate power in the galaxy. The ultimate power comes from the law backed by a gun.
  • Americans fought the bloodiest war in their history from 1861 to 1865 over the issue of central power versus local power.
  • Northern Europe is composed of advanced technocratic economies, made possible by the capital-generating capacity of the well-watered North European Plain and its many navigable rivers
  • a people that identifies with its brethren throughout the river valleys and in other areas linked by what is typically omnipresent infrastructure. This crafts a firm identity at the national level rather than local level and assists with mass-mobilization strategies.
  • Southern Europe, in comparison, suffers from an arid, rugged topography and lack of navigable rivers.
  • identity is more localized; southern Europeans tend to be more concerned with family and town than nation, since they do not benefit from easy transport options or the regular contact that northern Europeans take for granted.
  • southern European economies are highly dependent upon a weak currency
  • While states of this grouping often plan together for EU summits, in reality the only thing they have in common is a half-century of lost ground to recover, and they need as much capital as can be made available.
  • European Union is now made up of 27 different nationalities
  • With Europe having such varied geographies, economies and political systems, any political and fiscal union would be fraught with complications and policy mis-prescriptions from the start. In short, this is a defect of the euro that is not going to be corrected, and to be blunt, it isn’t one that the Europeans are trying to fix right now.
  • The ECB’s primary (and only partially stated) mission is to foster long-term stable growth in the eurozone’s largest economy — Germany — working from the theory that what is good for the continent’s economic engine is good for Europe.
  • Smaller, poorer economies are more volatile, since even tiny changes in the international environment can send them through either the floor or the roof.
  • The question is not “whither the euro” but how to provide a safety net for the euro’s less desirable, debt-related aftereffects.
  • When the not-so-desperate eurozone states step in with a few billion euros — 223 billion euros so far, to be exact — they want not only their money back but also some assurance that such overindulgences will not happen again.
  • The second is that the Dec. 16 agreement is only an agreement in principle.
  • Three complications exist,
  • First, when a bailout is required, it is clearly because something has gone terribly wrong.
  • The third complication is that the bailout mechanism is actually only half the plan. The other half is to allow states to at least partially default on their debt
  • tates that just squeaked by in 2010 must run a more difficult gauntlet in 2011 — particularly if they depend heavily on foreign investors for funding their budget deficits.
  • anonymous on 21 Dec 10
     
    "Europe is on the cusp of change. An EU heads-of-state summit Dec. 16 launched a process aimed to save the common European currency. If successful, this process would be the most significant step toward creating a singular European power since the creation of the European Union itself in 1992 - that is, if it doesn't destroy the euro first."
anonymous

Eurozone Crisis: Not a Greek Drama - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...urozone-crisis-not-greek-drama

geopolitics eu greece

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Lost in the coverage is the fact that Greece constitutes 2.5 percent of Eurozone GDP and Eurozone member states’ direct exposure to Greece is manageable.
  • After a year and a half of watching the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis unfold, we should put one notion to rest: no one event, crisis or decision will cause the Eurozone to collapse. Such a complex system of financial and monetary relationships will not unravel in a day, a month or a year.
  • Eurozone member states have proven highly flexible in their handling of the crisis.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Skeptics contend that because the Eurozone was primarily a political creation, its economic logic is fundamentally flawed. A singular economic or political shock — such as the collapse of the Greek government — could therefore unravel the entire bloc by exposing a slew of economic problems.
  • Precisely because the Eurozone is a political creation, however, fundamental changes in the geopolitics of Europe are required to undermine it. Furthermore, the greater the imminent financial crisis, the greater the likelihood that Eurozone member states will find flexible means to resolve it. This resourcefulness has been evidenced throughout the crisis.
  • Therefore if all else fails, the ECB will print money.
  • The idea that the ECB would participate in its own dissolution because it is committed to its independence, or to maintaining 2 percent inflation, is a theoretical assumption that takes little account of the ECB’s behavior over the last 24 months.
  • This analysis leads us to two conclusions.
  • First, the Eurozone is not going to collapse in the middle of the sovereign debt crisis.
  • Second, fundamental political changes underway in Europe — such as the weakening of the NATO alliance, the regionalization of security alliances, and especially the developing Russian-German relationship — are far more important to the future of the Eurozone than a Greek confidence vote.
  • Because the Eurozone is fundamentally a political project, the weakening of the political bonds that tie Eurozone member states into a currency union are what will ultimately lead to its dissolution or modification.
  • Monumental shifts are underway in Europe. We have no reason to believe that Greece is at the center of them. What is most interesting is that the focus, both in terms of risks and solutions, continues to be on both short-term effects and singular events. This myopia is in part because Eurozone member states, in particular Germany, have not offered a long-term solution or plan.
  • The question that needs to be asked is: what do Europeans, and specifically the Germans, plan to do with Europe’s security and political architecture in the long term? The answer to that question cannot be found in the financial databases of Eurostat or the Bank of International Settlement, nor especially in the coverage of 24-hour investor-news stations.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "It has been 2,000 years since Athenian legislators last received the kind of global attention fixed upon them Tuesday. News coverage of the Greek parliament's June 21 confidence vote captivated the global financial sector. The vote was carried live on most global 24-hour investment-news stations and links to live online feeds of the Greek vote were posted across the world wide web. The vote passed, giving Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou the political authority to try to pass further austerity measures mandated by the Eurozone in another vote on June 28."
anonymous

Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
anonymous

I Got No Ecommerce. How Do I Measure Success? - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik - 0 views

www.kaushik.net/...merce-how-do-i-measure-success

analytics google metrics engagement

shared by anonymous on 01 May 13 - Cached
  • My recommendation: Measure the four metrics that are under the "Visitor Loyalty" button in Google Analytics (or in your favorite web analytics application). Loyalty, Recency, Length of Visit, Depth of Visit.
  • The goal is to use web analytics data to interpret success of a visit to your website.
  • There is one singular reason I loved 'em: they showed distribution and not simply averages for each of the metric!
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Visitor Loyalty: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?
  • The number you are used to seeing is "average visits per visitor". That is usually one point something. It hides the truth.
  • For example you update your website ten times each month. If you have 100% loyal visitor base then they should be visiting your website ten times each month. Are they? What's your number? Is it going up over time?
  • Action: 1) Identify a goal for your non-ecommerce website for the # of visits you expect from the traffic to your website in a given time period (say week, month etc). 2) Measure reality using above report. 3) Compare your performance over time to ensure you are making progress, or potentially not as in my case…
  • Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website? Sounds confusing? Don't worry it is cool (it even has a psychedelic border! :)……
  • As would be the case for a jobs site. Or craigslist. Or any website that wants lots lots of repeat visits. Using this simple report you can now see how you are doing when it comes to the distribution of visitors in terms of their propensity to visit your site.
  • Length of Visit: During the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds.
  • But it has always been frustrating to me how hard it is to get away from the average and measure the distribution of the visits to check if the average time on site is 50 seconds because one person visited for one second and the other person for 100 seconds. The average hides so much. Here's a better alternative……
  • Ain't that better? I think so. So many things jump out at me, but notice that either I lose 'em right away or if some how I can suck them in for one minute then they tend to stay for a long time. Hurray! I have a better idea of how to interact with my visitors.
  • 1) Identify what the distribution is for your website for length of visits. 2) Think of creative ways to engage traffic – what can I do to keep you for sixty seconds because after that you are mine! 3) Should I start charging more for ads on my site – if I have 'em – after 60 seconds? 4) If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!
  • Depth of Visit: During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website.
  • You are used to seeing average page views per visitors, above is something that is a lot more helpful. I was also able to get this exact metric from my indextools implementation…..
  • Action: There has been so much said about this already so I'll spare your the pain. You can easily imagine how wonderful and fantastic this data is as you go about analyzing experience of your customers (and so much more powerful, a million times more, than average page views per visitor!).
  • Recommendations for all of the above metrics:
  • Socialize them to your key stake holders and decision makers to make the realize what is really happening on your website.
  • Absolutely positively work with your leadership to create goals and then measure against goals over time
  • Segment the data! For Visitor Loyalty or Length of Visit what are the most important acquisition sources? What are the keywords that drive valuable segments of traffic to the website?
  • Segmentation is key to insights that will drive action.
  • anonymous on 01 May 13
     
    "A vast majority of discourse in the web analytics world is about orders and conversions and revenue. There is not enough of it about non-ecommerce websites, metrics and KPI's."  - Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik
anonymous

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

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

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

The Origins and Implications of the Scottish Referendum - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...plications-scottish-referendum

shared by anonymous on 16 Sep 14 - Cached
  • the idea that the union of England and Scotland, which has existed for more than 300 years, could be dissolved has enormous implications in its own right, and significant implications for Europe and even for global stability.
  • In many ways, this union was a pivot of world history. To realize it might be dissolved is startling and reveals important things about the direction of the world.
  • Scotland and England are historical enemies. Their sense of competing nationhoods stretches back centuries, and their occupation of the same island has caused them to fight many wars. Historically they have distrusted each other, and each has given the other good reason for the distrust.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • The British were deeply concerned that foreign powers, particularly France, would use Scotland as a base for attacking England. The Scots were afraid that the English desire to prevent this would result in the exploitation of Scotland by England, and perhaps the extinction of the Scottish nation.
  • From an outsider's perspective, Scotland and England were charming variations on a single national theme -- the British -- and it was not necessary to consider them as two nations.
  • We need a deeper intellectual framework for understanding why Scottish nationalism has persisted.
  • The French Enlightenment and subsequent revolution had elevated the nation to the moral center of the world. It was a rebellion against the transnational dynasties and fragments of nations that had governed much of Europe.
  • After the French Revolution, some nations, such as Germany and Italy, united into nation-states.
  • After World War I, when the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanov and Ottoman empires all collapsed
  • A second major wave of devolution occurred in 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed
  • The doctrine of the right to national self-determination drove the first wave of revolts against European imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, creating republics in the Americas.
  • The second wave of colonial rising and European withdrawal occurred after World War II.
  • the entire world could not resist the compulsion to embrace the principles of national self-determination through republican democracy. This effectively was codified as the global gold standard of national morality in the charters of the League of Nations and then the United Nations.
  • The incredible power of the nation-state as a moral principle and right could be only imperfectly imposed. No nation was pure. Each had fragments and minorities of other nations. In many cases, they lived with each other. In other cases, the majority tried to expel or even destroy the minority nation. In yet other cases, the minority demanded independence and the right to form its own nation-state. These conflicts were not only internal; they also caused external conflict over the right of a particular nation to exist or over the precise borders separating the nations.
  • After the war, a principle emerged in Europe that the borders as they stood, however imperfect, were not to be challenged. The goal was to abolish one of the primary causes of war in Europe.
  • The point of all this is to understand that the right to national self-determination comes from deep within European principles and that it has been pursued with an intensity and even viciousness that has torn Europe apart and redrawn its borders.
  • One of the reasons that the European Union exists is to formally abolish these wars of national self-determination by attempting to create a framework that both protects and trivializes the nation-state.
  • The possibility of Scottish independence must be understood in this context.
  • Nationalism, the remembrance and love of history and culture, is not a trivial thing. It has driven Europe and even the world for more than two centuries in ever-increasing waves. The upcoming Scottish election, whichever way it goes, demonstrates the enormous power of the desire for national self-determination. If it can corrode the British union, it can corrode anything.
  • There are those who argue that Scottish independence could lead to economic problems or complicate the management of national defense. These are not trivial questions, but they are not what is at stake here.
  • At best, the economic benefits are uncertain. But this is why any theory of human behavior that assumes that the singular purpose of humans is to maximize economic benefits is wrong.
  • Humans have other motivations that are incomprehensible to the economic model but can be empirically demonstrated to be powerful.
  • If this referendum succeeds, it will still show that after more than 300 years, almost half of Scots prefer economic uncertainty to union with a foreign nation.
  • This is something that must be considered carefully in a continent that is prone to extreme conflicts and still full of borders that do not map to nations as they are understood historically.
  • The right to national self-determination is not simply about the nation governing itself but also about the right of the nation to occupy its traditional geography. And since historical memories of geography vary, the possibility of conflict grows.
  • Consider Ireland: After its fight for independence from England and then Britain, the right to Northern Ireland, whose national identity depended on whose memory was viewing it, resulted in bloody warfare for decades.
  • England will be vulnerable in ways that it hasn't been for three centuries.
  • This is not an argument for or against Scottish nationhood. It is simply drawing attention to the enormous power of nationalism in Europe in particular, and in countries colonized by Europeans.
  • the idea that Scotland recalls its past and wants to resurrect it is a stunning testimony less to Scottish history than to the Enlightenment's turning national rights into a moral imperative that cannot be suppressed.
  • At a time when the European Union's economic crisis is intense, challenging European institutions and principles, the dissolution of the British union would legitimize national claims that have been buried for decades.
  • But then we have to remember that Scotland was buried in Britain for centuries and has resurrected itself. This raises the question of how confident any of us can be that national claims buried for only decades are settled.
  • For centuries, nationalism has trumped economic issues. The model of economic man may be an ideal to some, but it is empirically false.
  • I think that however the vote goes, unless the nationalists are surprised by an overwhelming defeat, the genie is out of the bottle, and not merely in Britain. The referendum will re-legitimize questions that have caused much strife throughout the European continent for centuries, including the 31-year war of the 20th century that left 80 million dead.
  • anonymous on 16 Sep 14
     
    "The idea of Scottish independence has moved from the implausible to the very possible. Whether or not it actually happens, the idea that the union of England and Scotland, which has existed for more than 300 years, could be dissolved has enormous implications in its own right, and significant implications for Europe and even for global stability."
anonymous

Searching for Superguy in Gotham - 0 views

schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/...arching-for-superguy-in-gotham

education superman

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • For an exceptional review of charter school research, I would recommend Robert Bifulco and Katrina Bulkley’s chapter on Charter Schools in the Handbook of Research on Education Finance and Policy. Neither of these scholars are charter school naysayers, yet they conclude: Research to date provides little evidence that the benefits envisioned in the original conceptions of charter schools – organizational and educational innovation, improved student achievement, and enhanced efficiency – have materialized.
  • Of course, the true believers in Superguy (as charter operator) will argue vehemently that the finding that charters, on average, are average does not shake their belief… because the “upper half of charter schools is really good!, better than average, in fact!” Skeptically, I respond – isn’t the upper half of all schools better than average? If so, might Superguy actually be found in any school that’s better than average? But who am I to nitpick?
  • Those pesky, curmudgeonly,  academics are at it again… denying the true believers that Superguy comes in the singular form of a New York City charter school operator!
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Arguably, charter pundits and the media outlets who uncritically go along with them have created a “market for lemons” with charters – making bad charters sustainable. I expect (though haven’t gathered the data yet) that many dreadfully failing charters have long waiting lists and plenty of kids enrolled. Parents are being convinced that charters are better – all charters are better – simply because they are charters. For the average parent, the flood of pop media on charters (like The Lottery and Superman) is creating a significant asymmetry of information. The sellers of charters are deceiving the consumers and no-one is stepping in to counterbalance the asymmetry.
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "Who is Superguy? By most popular accounts, Superguy is a figure of mythical proportion (urban legend proportion) capable of swooping down into the poorest of urban neighborhoods of America's largest cities, gaining immediate access to schooling facilities, rounding up unthinkable private contributions from wealthy philanthropists and quite simply saving the lives of low-income urban school children trapped in bleak, adult-centered, perpetually failing traditional public schools." By Bruce D. Baker at School Finance 101 on September 6, 2010.
anonymous

9/11 and the 9-Year War - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20100907_911_and_9_year_war

geopolitics stratfor 9_11

shared by anonymous on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • It has now been nine years since al Qaeda attacked the United States. It has been nine years in which the primary focus of the United States has been on the Islamic world.
  • Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after.
  • At the root of all of this was a profound lack of understanding of al Qaeda, particularly its capabilities and intentions. Since we did not know what was possible, our only prudent course was to prepare for the worst. That is what the Bush administration did.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Sep 10
       
      This is another example of the American tradition of underestimating your opponents and then suddenly overestimating them once caught off guard.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Al Qaeda learned from Soviet, Saudi, Pakistani and American intelligence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and knew how to launch attacks without tipping off the target. The greatest failure of American intelligence was not the lack of a clear warning about 9/11 but the lack, on Sept. 12, of a clear picture of al Qaeda’s global structure, capabilities, weaknesses and intentions.
  • American policy became ready, fire, aim.
  • In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11.
  • Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.
  • an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy.
  • the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy.
  • The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush.
  • as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.
  • The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.
  • The fact that Afghanistan was the base from which the attacks were launched does not mean that al Qaeda depends on Afghanistan to launch attacks.
  • But let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attack. That is a tragedy, but in a nation of over 300 million, 3,000 deaths cannot be permitted to define the totality of national strategy.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Sep 10
       
      Play the numbers again and you find that far more Americans died that year of far more mundane reasons. But this is never considered as one factor among many when tempers are flaring.
  • The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world.
  • anonymous on 08 Sep 10
     
    "In order to understand the last nine years you must understand the first 24 hours of the war - and recall your own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the attack was a shock, its audaciousness frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next. The attack had destroyed the right to complacent assumptions. Were there other cells standing by in the United States? Did they have capabilities even more substantial than what they showed on Sept. 11? Could they be detected and stopped? Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after." By George Friedman at StratFor on September 8, 2010.
anonymous

USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...x-2011-keynote-network-se.html

whimsy technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.
  • The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?
  • a few basic assumptions about the future
  • ...82 more annotations...
  • it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.
  • The idea of an AI singularity
  • the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men.
  • if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.
  • at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down
  • My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.
  • We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.
  • engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems
  • Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.
  • without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.
  • if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.
  • we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology
  • We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.
  • it’s quite likely that within another century the mechanisms underlying cellular senescence will be understood and treatable like other inborn errors of metabolism
  • another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.
  • Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide
  • Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it
  • but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent.
  • there are problems
  • . In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years
  • Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies
  • The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents
  • Finally, representative democracy scales up badly
  • Nor are governments as important as they used to be.
  • the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
  • we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.
  • At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
  • The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.
  • Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.
  • a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa
  • In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.
  • by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.
  • And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk.
  • It’s a normative projection
  • I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.
  • And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.
  • Let’s imagine that, circa 1961 – just fifty years ago – a budding Nikolai Tesla or Bill Packard somewhere in big-city USA is tinkering in his garage and succeeds in building a time machine. Being adventurous – but not too adventurous – he sets the controls for fifty years in the future, and arrives in downtown San Francisco. What will he see, and how will he interpret it?
  • a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar
  • Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted
  • Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions
  • He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.
  • But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves
  • The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber.
  • Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings
  • But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks
  • Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.
  • The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.
  • Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places
  • For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.
  • to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house
  • The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.
  • We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.
  • So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.
  • the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication
  • funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.
  • These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.
  • This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian
  • the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?
  • Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.
  • wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.
  • What can you do with 2 terabits per second per human being on the planet?
  • One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.
  • the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.
  • Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.
  • Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.
  • The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
  • if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.
  • whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.
  • at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.
  • We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing.
  • In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.
  • full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.
  • Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.
  • These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system.
  • Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.
  • A second crisis we face is that of cancer
  • we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.
  • If our metagenomic environment is routinely included in lifelogs, we have the holy grail of epidemiology within reach; the ability to exhaustively track the spread of pathogens and identify how they adapt to their host environment, right down to the level of individual victims.
  • In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.
  • With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.
  • the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.
  • So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 11
     
    "Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security." A fun read by Charlie Stoss."
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    I feel like cancer may be a bit played up. I freak out more about dementia.
anonymous

Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ervention-wars-humanitarianism

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 11 - Cached
  • Since World War II, a new class of war has emerged that we might call humanitarian wars — wars in which the combatants claim to be fighting neither for their national interest nor to impose any ideology, but rather to prevent inordinate human suffering.
  • In humanitarian wars, the intervention is designed both to be neutral and to protect potential victims on one side.
  • That no one intervened to prevent or stop these atrocities was seen as a moral failure. According to this ideology, the international community has an obligation to prevent such slaughter.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • In international wars, where the aggressor is trying to both kill large numbers of civilians and destroy the enemy’s right to national self-determination, this does not pose a significant intellectual problem.
  • In internal unrest and civil war, however, the challenge of the intervention is to protect human rights without undermining national sovereignty or the right of national self-determination.
  • I call humanitarian wars immaculate intervention, because most advocates want to see the outcome limited to preventing war crimes, not extended to include regime change or the imposition of alien values.
  • They want a war of immaculate intentions surgically limited to a singular end without other consequences. And this is where the doctrine of humanitarian war unravels.
  • What we are seeing in Libya is a classic slow escalation motivated by two factors.
  • The first is the hope that the leader of the country responsible for the bloodshed will capitulate.
  • The second is a genuine reluctance of intervening nations to spend excessive wealth or blood on a project they view in effect as charitable.
  • The expectation of capitulation in the case of Libya is made unlikely by another aspect of humanitarian war fighting, namely the International Criminal Court (ICC).
  • While a logical extension of humanitarian warfare — having intervened against atrocities, the perpetrators ought to be brought to justice — the effect is a prolongation of the war. The example of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia, who ended the Kosovo War with what he thought was a promise that he would not be prosecuted, undoubtedly is on Gadhafi’s mind.
  • But the war is also prolonged by the unwillingness of the intervening forces to inflict civilian casualties.
  • The application of minimal and insufficient force, combined with the unwillingness of people like Gadhafi and his equally guilty supporters to face The Hague, creates the framework for a long and inconclusive war in which the intervention in favor of humanitarian considerations turns into an intervention in a civil war on the side that opposes the regime.
  • It should be remembered that many of Libya’s opposition leaders are former senior officials of the Gadhafi government. They did not survive as long as they did in that regime without having themselves committed crimes, and without being prepared to commit more.
  • At some point, the interveners have the choice of walking away and leaving chaos, as the United States did in Somalia, or staying for a long time and fighting, as they did in Iraq.
  • Regardless of the United States’ other motivations in both conflicts, it would seem that those who favor humanitarian intervention would have favored the Iraq war. That they generally opposed the Iraq war from the beginning requires a return to the concept of immaculate intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Apr 11
       
      For those generally anti-war, this is a less-than-delightful realization, but (I think) jibes with reality more. However, former President Bush and his advisers established justification (WMD's) that affected both intentions and expectations from people on all sides of the debate. Notwithstanding the good intentions of those who advocate humanitarian wars, the effect can never be what is desired.
  • Hussein was a war criminal and a danger to his people. However, the American justification for intervention was not immaculate.
  • That it also had a humanitarian outcome — the destruction of the Hussein regime — made the American intervention inappropriate in the view of those who favor immaculate interventions for two reasons.
  • First, the humanitarian outcome was intended as part of a broader war.
  • Second, regardless of the fact that humanitarian interventions almost always result in regime change, the explicit intention to usurp Iraq’s national self-determination openly undermined in principle what the humanitarian interveners wanted to undermine only in practice.
  • for the humanitarian warrior, there are other political considerations.
  • In the case of the French, the contrast between their absolute opposition to Iraq and their aggressive desire to intervene in Libya needs to be explained. I suspect it will not be.
  • Perhaps it was about oil in this case, but Gadhafi was happily shipping oil to Europe, so intervening to ensure that it continues makes no sense.
  • Sometimes the lack of a persuasive reason for a war generates theories to fill the vacuum. In all humanitarian wars, there is a belief that the war could not be about humanitarian matters.
  • Therein lays the dilemma of humanitarian wars. They have a tendency to go far beyond the original intent behind them, as the interveners, trapped in the logic of humanitarian war, are drawn further in. Over time, the ideological zeal frays and the lack of national interest saps the intervener’s will.
  • My unease with humanitarian intervention is not that I don’t think the intent is good and the end moral. It is that the intent frequently gets lost and the moral end is not achieved. Ideology, like passion, fades. But interest has a certain enduring quality.
  • A doctrine of humanitarian warfare that demands an immaculate intervention will fail because the desire to do good is an insufficient basis for war.
  • In the end, the ultimate dishonesties of humanitarian war are the claims that “this won’t hurt much” and “it will be over fast.”
  • If you must go in, go in heavy, go in hard and get out fast. Humanitarian warfare says that you go in light, you go in soft and you stay there long.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 11
     
    "There are wars in pursuit of interest. In these wars, nations pursue economic or strategic ends to protect the nation or expand its power. There are also wars of ideology, designed to spread some idea of "the good," whether this good is religious or secular. The two obviously can be intertwined, such that a war designed to spread an ideology also strengthens the interests of the nation spreading the ideology."
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