Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

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My favorite analogy for US security policy during the past two decades is a huge allergic reaction. It seems quite likely that allergies are caused by the immune system lacking antagonists and instead latching onto factors that are not real threats [1]. Similarly, the early '90s saw serious reductions in objective threats that US security was organized to deal with, internal (a sustained decline in crime [2]) and external (the disappearance of a second superpower). The resulting reaction is... what else if not allergic? Police is more militarized than ever and drives tanks into the living rooms of nonviolent offenders. The military's budget is unprecedentedly large and it hunts down shepherds in the Afghan hills at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per kill. Any claim that such threats are comparable with those that were adequately met in the '80s (crack epidemic, nuclear-tipped ICBMs etc.) is nothing short of risible. Yet the response is, if anything, even more aggressive than it was back then.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim...

May I propose "Acquired democracy deficiency syndrome"?

The little humans have recently developed "Useless People Pestering Imminent Totalitarian International Expansion Syndrome"

U.P.P.I.T.I.E.S.

While I agree largely in sentiment, you're incorrect about some things. For example, military spending during WW2 absolutely dwarfs spending on the current two wars.

Well those wars actually had armies fighting back.

The current "wars" ended a decade ago. What you have now is extremely dangerous police work, not war. You have thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles, and aircraft against disorganized groups of criminals on bicycles wielding decade-old guns and DIY bombs.

War against China will make up for that.

This will never happen. Nothing outside of purely symbolic rhetoric can posit China as an actual adversary of the United States. A war between the US and China would destroy the world; not with weapons and violence, but with the catastrophic collapse of global trade and finance that would immediately accompany it.

The economic viability of the United States and the economic viability of China are so closely intertwined today that any idea of open hostility between the two is quite absurd.

Regardless of rhetoric, the US will only continue harassing sclerotic third-world countries with negligible relevance to the American economy.

I agree it's insane, but the US is apparently working towards it (and China is responding in kind).

http://yalejournal.org/2013/06/12/who-authorized-preparation...

Militaries develop strategic plans for wars that will never occur all the time. It's an effective form of contingency planning, and an effective way to practice strategic planning.

I believe there have been plans developed by the Pentagon for a war with Canada, too.

The first sentence in the linked article is: "The Pentagon has concluded that the time has come to prepare for war with China, and in a manner well beyond crafting the sort of contingency plans that are expected for wide a range of possible confrontations."

I didn't bother reading all of it (it's not something that interests me), but that beginning seems to kind of undermine your point.

The issue is complex, hence why the article is so long:

> To judge by several published reports which will be discussed in greater detail below, including those by government “insiders,” there is no indication—not a passing hint— that the White House has ever considered earnestly preparing the nation for a war with China. Nor is there any evidence that the White House has compared such a strategy to alternatives, and—having concluded that the hegemonic intervention implied by ASB is the course the United States should follow—then instructed the Pentagon to prepare for such a military showdown

How do you want to fight a war against China? Not that I think it is impossible, in fact I think the world looks increasingly like 1913. ( Shifting power centers, convenient located powder kegs and large scale military alliances to ensure that everyone gets pulled into a war.) But there is simply not a staging area, so that it would be rather complicated to have a large war.

I don't think it would happen. With some exceptions, both countries enjoy economic activity with one another.

It we accept this analogy, the question that arises is - if nature hasn't figured out how to eliminate allergies over millions of years of evolution, what magic do we expect a government to perform?

Not everyone is susceptible to allergic reactions. Without modern medicine, the people who are susceptible tend to die relatively quickly. Seems like the analogy leads to the decline of the united states and the rise of some other country that doesn't suffer from this particular affliction. They will probably have other problems though.

So the corrupt govt challenge is to be a benign allergy?

Well, an analogy can only take you so far.

The hygiene hypothesis "is used to explain the increase in allergic diseases that has been seen since industrialization, and the higher incidence of allergic diseases in more developed countries."

This is to say that it's a relatively recent problem; one that has not applied selective pressure over the millions of years of evolution you're talking about, but rather the past ~200 years or so. My non-biologist understanding is that you can expect evolution to a relatively good job of adapting to slowly changing conditions over a long period by selecting for the vanishingly small number of mutations that happen to be beneficial.

My citizen understanding of government is that we should expect more of it than that, or it will continue to suck.

You don't need magic, you only need to be able to think; nature cannot think. Otherwise you would see nature making spacecraft or using binary search everywhere.

Assuming those would be beneficial adaptations, which is arguable :). Why binary search when you can pattern-match?

It's not a reaction. It's a well-planned mission to make hundreds of billions of dollars by scaring the population with relatively trivial terrorists acts into spending said billions without much resistance on the weapons and programs nobody really needs.

EXACTLY!!!

People who are not truly paying attention are under the impression this is all a mistaken over-reaction and we have had "some bad apples" that have more-or-less accidentally brought us into this situation.

Anyone who, in the past 40 years, has pointed out the concerted and deliberate efforts of the MIC to ring us here have been dismissed as "wild conspiracy theorists" -- now though, its just to difficult to keep people from the truth.

This is why the distractions have been larger and larger -- but they are coming to a head. The problem is that the MIC is so extraordinarily well funded and well positioned - that now they are looking for the excuse to use their totalitarian machine against all Humanity. They want the next war.

It plays into their next agenda: depopulation.

I am generally reluctant to buy into theories about giant conspiracies, not because I think people in power aren't capable of desiring such things, but because I don't think they're capable of pulling it off. However, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. All you need is a group of actors in a similar position/industry, each motivated by their own self-interest and following what is to them, the path of least resistance to their goal. From the outside then, it can look more or less like a big conspiracy and indeed I’d be willing to accept that there may be many minor conspiracies playing out (of the ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ kind).

I don't think anyone is wanting the next war, IMO more likely what has happened is around about the wrap up of Gulf War 2, people in relevant industries started to realise that there won't be that many more fortuitously sized 'sandboxable' (if I may coin a term) hot wars that profit can consistently be extracted from. So what do you do instead? Get on the surveillance gravy train. It certainly seems like a pretty good gig doesn't it? Huge amounts of government spending up for grabs, very little informed oversight or ability for anyone to argue that too much is being spent. It's a government contractor's (or a government offical taking the revolving door's) dream.

I wouldn't credit them with enough foresight to be thinking about depopulation. It's all just about next quarter's profits.

I often say similar things on this topic. It doesn't have to be an explicit conspiracy (though there is certainly likely to be a number of conspiracies along the way).

As a physicist by training I think of these things as the stable attractors we see in complex systems, where out of chaos certain configurations act to pull everything towards them.

A totalitarian world of surveillance and conflict which feed off each other leading to us liquidating more and more of our economy to feed the beast, creating insecurity at home and a knee jerk support of those carrying this stuff out, in the name of attacking some faceless enemy is an attractor with many individuals acting in self interest generating motion in that direction.

Complacency prevents people breaking the cycle. A belief that it's a pendulum swinging back and forth rather than a drift towards a stable attractor from which it's hard to move back again.

>I don't think anyone is wanting the next war

The US is directing significant resources towards war with China and China is responding in kind. It kind of makes sense given the amount of money the US owes China and given the "threat" of China's economic ascendence.

http://yalejournal.org/2013/06/12/who-authorized-preparation...

I fail to see anything new. China has an outstanding claim of sovereignty over Taiwan and the US has entered into treaty obligations to defend Taiwan. China regularly holds military exercises in which it fires shells and missiles into the sea just off Taiwan. This situation has been in place for many decades. Over the last few decades China has greatly increased it's GDP and it's military spending, escalating the level of threat to Taiwan e.g. by buying or building submarines and an aircraft carrier, experimenting with stealth aircraft technology, etc, so the US has responded to that in step. Bear in mind it's the PRC's territorial claim and standing claim of a right to violently enforce it that's the driving force here.

China's posturing isn't limited to military exercises, they're also courting Taiwan for reintegration through economic incentives. It stands to reason that Taiwan's proximity to China could also be construed as a threat, due to her Western allegiance.

If Taiwan integrates with China as a special economic zone then that would be a key Western ally lost, however Taiwanese reintegration has been a hot-button issue for a few decades (in both Chinese and Taiwanese politics) that has quietly remained dormant.

I probably should have qualified that a little better: I don't think anyone sane is wanting the next war - which I agree would most likely be US + allies vs. China + allies and would likely spell Armageddon.

My earlier post was really concerned more with those actors within relevant industries whose motive is to maximise profit, not with those actors whose motive is to win a dick measuring competition between their country/empire and someone else’s. If the latter guys win out then yeah, all bets are off I'd say.

Perhaps I'm overestimating their adherence to logic and reason, but I don't think those actors motivated primarily by greed want such a big, uncontrollable war, the outcome of which is not foregone. They want little controllable ones like Gulf War 1 and 2 (or failing this, the surveillance state).

Really? US owes China 1.3 trillion dollars. So the BIG BAD China debt is only 7-8% or less of a single year's GDP.

In the grand schemes of things it is pocket change.

Really? A pocket change? So why the US don't just, you know, pay the debt with the pocket change and regain its financial independence once again?

A good reason to not pay it off is like the fact that US is borrowing money right now below the inflation rate - people are paying US to keep their money.

Also government debt is rarely paid off - it is usually grown out of and revolved. What US lack is economic growth thanks the "serious" people that push for austerity.

Also rule of thumb - anyone that uses a country budget is like the family budget analogy is - liar, dumb or ignorant. That is very quick filter by which you could judge politicians.

Because nobody wins. Having the world dependent on US stability is a good thing.

Sometimes you do not need a conspiracy which is articulated at the intellectual level. Sometimes a conspiracy can be implicit; emergent; driven by the biology and the natural drives of the authoritarian, power-seeking mind, driven to reinforce their own authority; to proclaim and strut their status, and to demean and chasten their "inferiors". Power is sex, and the domination of an elite over a subjugated population is rape. No intellectual conspiracy here; just an accumulation of drives; an institutional lust for power and control; and a human sexual power dynamic playing itself out on a grand stage.

Yup. The notion of full spectrum warfare goes beyond the paradigm of traditional war, or even non-traditional death-by-drone. The effort to dominate globally will employ finance (manufactured crises to bankrupt countries, speculation to drive up food prices, etc.), industry (embedded surveillance tech in consumer electronics), agriculture (making global crops dependent on pesticides controlled by allied corporations), the pharmaceutical industry (control what countries can get drugs, weaken populations with unneeded, addictive drugs), media (obvious) etc. This kind of skullduggery has been going on, conceptually, for a long time but technology now means it can scale.

I don't think depopulation is even on the agenda.

More realistically: the next business opportunity, the next contract, the next sale, all of these things are very much on the agenda. Lots of short-term decisions leading to long term catastrophe.

Then again, in the long term, we are all dead.

Innit?

FEMA death camps!!!!!111

depopulation? who will pay the taxes?

There is no need for slaves to pay taxes.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world ... and in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.

-- Orwell, 1984

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You are very naive if you think journalists decide which stories get published/aired.

Politicians are PERFECT for this kind of game. Think about it, fewer than a thousand people (congress + high-ranking judges) decide on EVERYTHING. It's trivial to bribe / blackmail them when you have billions and access to their emails and billions of dollars. Think of which major politicians were killed in the last 50 years.

Oh, you're just a conspiracy theorist. The commies, the arabs and the jews hate us for our freedom, thank God we have heroes like Dick Cheney, George W Bush and Barack Obama to protect us.

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