dkimball

This is a very minor point, but could someone edit the title? "Afghani" means the currency; "Afghan" means the people of Afghanistan (Afghan-i Stan, "Land of the Afghans [originally another name for the Pashtuns]", in Persian).

This is a pretty common mistake, for what it's worth; demonymns in the eastern Middle East are kind of unpredictable.

I think that this reveals the real villain of the previous video: the people who sent these men up to patrol a city in an Apache in the first place! Apaches are attack helicopters, "flying tanks," built to kill armored columns; they are not known for their stealthy approach (which is necessary to be confident that no one with an RPG will move around behind you and put a rocket up your tailpipe), nor for the high resolution and good zoom features of their gun cameras (since a small-screen, black-and-white camera is generally adequate to distinguish that which _is_ a column of tanks and ZSU-23-4s from that which _is not_. Well, maybe not buffalo herds, but there aren't many of those in central Germany).

Not to mention, should it be assumed that a man with an RPG in a dangerous part of Baghdad is hostile? What if he's Iraqi military and the Apache shoots him, thereby robbing his squad of their light-artillery support and giving away their position?

The right way to patrol is to _patrol_, and that means dismounted infantry operating out of forward bases (which the US is now using) -- not convoys of roadbound IFVs, and certainly not heavy helicopters. Counterinsurgency is not war against poorer enemies, it's police work with heavier weapons; and it's taken five or six years (and a _lot_ of incidents like the previous video), but I think that lesson is slowly sinking in.

I agree that the US has a long history of double standards (WWII was particularly shameful: the worst criminals in that war were the Communists, who got away scot-free; and the Western Allies' strategic bombings, especially the deliberate targeting of German civilians by the UK and Japanese civilians by the US, were war crimes); but my point was just the connotations of the word "massacre."

And if we want to talk about US-perpetrated crimes with horribly inadequate prosecutions for them, we should talk torture. Death is death, and that's the end of it; but Guantanamo Bay, or the rendition programs, or the US torture which the rendition programs replaced when it was forbidden, or the employment of torture down to the present day to control prisoners? The mind revolts. A country which trusts in God should remember that He is just.

Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violence they began had been perpetrated by evil, aggressive foreigners against their pure and noble citizens -- the same contemptible monkey-trick that Putin used in Georgia. The South Ossetians began the Russian-Georgian War, by firing artillery at Georgian villages; the Boston rioters began the "Massacre," and the British fired in response to one of their soldiers being knocked down -- not by a thrown rock, but by someone hitting him with a club. That's self-defense, not My Lai or the Katyn Forest; and the verdicts from their trials support that statement.

The US has a nasty history of describing anything it doesn't like as a massacre; this is particularly visible in the Indian Wars, in which every incident in which the US wipes out an American Indian village is a "battle," and every incident in which an Indian tribe wipes out a US village is a "massacre." I'm not saying that the US was always in the wrong or that it was always in the right -- "American Indian tribes" is a pretty broad brush to be painting with, and some tribes (the Cherokee, most prominently) were more civilized than the US while others (the Sioux, for ex.) were honestly pretty barbarous -- but I am saying that traditional US historiography is propagandistic.

However, this is changing (although sometimes only by becoming propagandistic in the other direction); and the connotations of the word "massacre" remain the same regardless of how the word's been abused.

The use of the word "massacre" implies something like My Lai or the Katyn Forest, a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants, especially by infantry.

Attacks by aircraft, like those in this video (as indicated in the article) and the previous one, should be described as something else -- although it remains the case that Apaches, F/A-18s, and B-1s (the US counterpart to the Backfire) do not have the large role in COIN that the Pentagon has assigned them, and their employment in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals a poisonously cavalier attitude towards non-American lives.

The right way to fight COIN campaigns is known (see David Galula, _Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_ (1967)); it is not the same as the Pentagon's -- although in fairness, the US military has been trending in the right direction since the happy day when Rumsfeld was given the boot.

I agree. When it was Lawrence Lessig saying this, there was a certain note of the crank about the idea (very much increased by the performance of Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg in the lead-up to _Eldred v. Ashcroft_). But when the world's magazine of record says it, it's as mainstream as UNICEF. (Not that being as mainstream as UNICEF is necessarily a good thing.)

That's how changes to the world normally occur: not through a revolutionary minority, but through the development of a consensus which serves as a suitable powder keg. Look at British and French SF from the twenty years before WWI, for example.

Suppose he had written a contract: would you support the use of "government bullies" to enforce it in that case? If not, and your tone suggests not, why do you suggest he learn how to write better contracts?

On the subject of copyright: I think the situation is a prisoner's dilemma, and one of the time-honored ways to bring such a dilemma to its Nash solution is indeed to shoot everyone who defects. Nash-equilibrium behavior when all constraints are removed is a mark of a prisoner's dilemma; for such behavior with copyright, look into what happened after the French Revolution overturned it, or at the quality of copies of _It's a Wonderful Life_ after it left copyright (in, IIRC, the early 1950s) and before a copyright was re-imposed. The second of these is sometimes used by the MPAA as an argument for the Mickey Mouse Protection Act; the first, not even they are familiar with yet.

(My position is that culturally significant works should be copyrightable in perpetuity, perhaps by an act of Congress in a perfect world in which lobbyists don't exist and Congress acts for the good of the nation; for all other works, have a 20-year copyright, renewable for 10 years up to 5 times by mailing the relevant government office a dollar.)

You might be interested in _War and Peace and War_, a theory of history focusing on social capital as a driving force, and in _The Fourth Turning_ -- which looks at changes over four-generation intervals, and which, written in 1997, made some surprisingly good predictions about the 2000s (the Aughts?).

Both of these are in the tradition of Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ and Arnold Toynbee's _A Study of History_; I'd recommend the abridged version of the latter, and I'd observe that if you can make it all the way through either of these you have more stamina than I do...

I think the test should be whether the document has moral or just tactical significance. To give examples from the article:

Guantanamo Bay interrogation manual? Moral significance; leak.

Possible US use of chemical weapons? Moral significance; leak.

US order of battle for 2009? No moral significance; don't leak.

And in the interest of fairness:

Al-Qaida interrogation manual? Leak.

We need a picture of both/all sides' dirty laundry, and Wikileaks doesn't really give that.

I think that popular causes with centralized leadership typically have a mix of grassroots and astroturf support; the question is how much support is of which type. For Slashdot, or the Tea Party movement, or the Daily Kos, my guess is that the grassroots-to-astroturf ratio is _very_ high in favor of grass. I would be surprised if Russia doesn't employ a lot of astroturfing, but they also enjoy a lot of support from their population -- cf. http://www.slate.com/id/2197514/, and I've heard the rumor that Vladimir Putin is the only force keeping Russia from going Neo-Nazi.

China, though, probably has a lot more astroturf than grass. I've had trouble determining how much of the passionate defense of China on the Internet is real (with the same mentality as the defenses of the late 1800s and early 1900s, probably -- a somewhat grating but thoroughly justifiable one), and how much is less than real... it looks like most of it, or at least most defense of the PRC government, is in the latter category. You don't see crowdsourced counterattacks and a memetic "Ode to a Grass Mud Horse" when the opposition is small.

With the SSL-subversion boxes mentioned in http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/packet-forensics/ , I don't think it matters who's on the list (though I'm sure China is). A small company selling devices to intercept SSL means that the whole concept is dead. Even if no one else can acquire their devices, the whole world (that cares to find it out) now knows that such a man-in-the-middle attack is possible, so it's just a matter of time before they become much more common.

Worse yet, the company that makes these boxes advertised them at "the world's largest gathering of North American, Caribbean and Latin American Law Enforcement, Intelligence and Homeland Security Analysts and Telecom Operators responsible for lawful interception, electronic investigations and network Intelligence gathering." Any Mexican drug lord worth his cocaine money (or, of course, FARC) will now start bribing or scaring some suitable official into handing over a box or two.

Hopefully we'll discover an alternative approach to ensure online security. Just having fewer, more reliable CAs would be enough -- although, as I pointed out elsewhere, the measure of security is ultimately boots on the ground, not code in the aether.

Update: You're right, there's a trusted Chinese CA. From the Wired article: "[w]hen Mozilla added a Chinese company, China Internet Network Information Center, as a trusted Certificate Authority in Firefox this year, it set off a firestorm of debate, sparked by concerns that the Chinese government could convince the company to issue fake certificates to aid government surveillance."

If that's so, why is Africa still a mess? We have no shortage of knowledge about the scale of corruption south of the Sahara (and north of it); the problem is that those who are prepared to fight in, let's say, Nigeria and those who want to stop corruption in Nigeria are seldom the same people.

In the end, weapons are the most important weapons. If a group of people no longer care about anything but their own power, and they're armed, the thing to do is to deprive them of those arms -- not to catalog their abuses and trust in the power of words.

What he argues is that the 37signals paradigm is that of attacking a status quo for personal or aesthetic reasons, and not, at least not necessarily, because the attacker has a better idea.

I think the counterpart to telling your friends about a news service would be getting them to change operating systems and start contributing patches to the new one: both the "userbase" and the "development" of a submission-driven news site are functions of the number (and activity level, and, certainly, quality) of its users.

I think there's another problem. Arab intelligence services tend to be brutal, so I'm not surprised that _they_ thought that their course of action was a good idea, but was "let's torture this Islamic-fundamentalist blogger into infiltrating al-Qaida for us" really a course of action that raised _no_ moral or common-sense alarm bells at the CIA?

And where do I go to get my money back? I would rather be killed by a suicide bomber than defended by torturers. (I say this as a conservative -- and as someone who believes in objective right and wrong.)

J.G. Ballard makes the same point, in the opposite direction: if we can't have both modern comforts and our hearts' desires, we may eventually give up on what we have in favor of what we want -- and may even be right to do so.

There will always be some who do. G.K. Chesterton spoke of the "rational and deliberate preference which will always to the end trouble the peace of the world, the rational and deliberate preference for a short life and a merry one." (_Napoleon of Notting Hill_, chapter 8.)

Theodore Dalrymple found that preference in many of the English homeless; he was surprised to find that homeless wandering "is not without its compensations," and sounds like he was half-convinced to turn vagrant himself -- but read the article, http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_4_oh_to_be.html. Dalrymple also detects this preference for adventure over security in some of the English underclass... and, more worrisomely, Chesterton -- who knew of what he spoke -- detected it in the Nazis.

In other words: if we value our prosperity and idleness -- or even if we value simpler, more obvious ideals like "not torturing" and "not trying to exterminate the Jews" -- we should probably do something to make life a little less dull for those who prefer something else over dullness.

I don't support Ballard's methods, to say the least (read a book or two of his and you'll see why not); but perhaps permitting Americans to fight as mercenaries abroad, and relaxing our self-defense laws at home, might be a good first step? Or making the military a better-paying and less bureaucratic place?

I always thought that "it doesn't exist" means "we have a test which would prove that it does exist, and it has failed that test." If "it doesn't exist" means "I can't prove it either way and I don't think it matters," what category is left for phlogiston?

I think the real explanation goes back to the Restoration. Charles II and his court wore 17th Century cavalry boots, which were high-heeled as a means of ensuring that the foot stayed in the stirrup, like the modern cowboy boot; this style carried over to women sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century (women's shoes for most of the 17th and 18th centuries were delicate rather than high-heeled; there's an anecdote, I think in Fernand Braudel's _Structures of Everyday Life_, of a lady complaining to her tailor that her shoes had disintegrated; the tailor examined them and replied that of course they did, she had walked in them); and once high heels were established as a female fashion, a sort of sartorial folk etymology came along to explain their popularity.

This is why I don't have much respect for contemporary fashion; the extent to which it's dominated by accidents of English history is even greater than that admitted in the article.

Modern United States clothing is a thin man's, or woman's, game, but this hasn't always been the case; it doesn't have to be the case that the fat are unfashionable. European clothing as late as the 18th century, and especially in the 15th-16th centuries, was designed for a heavier average weight than the current one (and this is without beginning to discuss, for example, traditional Chinese clothing).

I don't know if I'm really crazy enough to recommend that you try dressing like Henry VIII or Benjamin Franklin; but keep in mind that it's hypothetically possible, at least.

(Then again, how much _could_ anyone do to you if you went out to dinner or got on a subway dressed in the best fashions of 250 years ago (other than the Scots Highland style of dress which requires a dagger tucked into the left stocking)? I could see certain sorts of people recommending it as a character- or determination-building exercise...)

More seriously, though, I agree with the idea that Winston Churchill -- or G.K. Chesterton, legendarily overweight but positively dapper -- might be a good starting point.

The "Hacker Diet" is equivocating on the value of "in." What matters is not calories ingested, it's bioavailable calories ingested; see Gary Taubes' _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for details.

Oh, I'm a nut too, and humanity would be much worse off without its nuts, but what concerns me is that particular, Timecube-esque variety of nut -- not particularly creative or ambitious, but turgid and cramped. Why do people end up like that...?

I wouldn't doubt it; and I'd bet it would also work for apartment buildings. This is incredible -- where do the plants even get the energy to grow 347 cherry tomatoes in a year?

This would be a heck of a lot better for the environment, too, than the mess we've currently made of agriculture -- huge quantities of fertilizer producing algae-laden dead zones in the Caribbean. A flexible government not beholden to farm lobbies would subsidize this immediately.

Grow sugarcane in it, and we'd even have energy independence from Saudi Arabia! :)

I think he has a point about the sloppiness and unresponsiveness of the government -- although the sloppiness and unresponsiveness of a large, bureaucratic organization hardly justifies carrying out his own miniature September 11th! Doubly painful in that the people he killed probably liked the IRS no more than he did -- few workers in government bureaucracy _enjoy_ what they have to put up with...

Killing others and committing suicide are both very serious matters, so I hate to say this, but his rant on the IRS reminded me of nothing so much as Timecube. What have we done wrong in this society, that we get people like this, especially the deadly ones? I don't think it's a political, moral, or social-outlook problem; but I hardly know what it is. A more honest and competent government would have removed this man's particular grievance, but it wouldn't have fixed the root problem; someone in his mental state is probably going to find something to be aggrieved with regardless...

I like the idea, always provided that "personal and noncommercial use" is interpreted as "transfer to iPod, reading to one's children, burning CDs for personal use, writing fan fiction, etc." and not as "Napster." We have the problem that our popular culture is all under copyright, and this would do a lot to resolve that -- not impeding the profits of the creators of the works in question, but simultaneously not dampening cultural expression or exposure to the culture.

This sounds particularly appealing as an aspiring content creator: finally a legal standard that neither requires pursuing creators of fan fiction, fan mods, and so on, nor creates a risk of accidentally losing copyright over one's own works!

@anigbrowl: I agree that there's a potential issue with sufficiently negative use of material under the expanded fair use rules; but then again, philosophies, governments and religions aren't given legal protection from rotten eggs. A creative work, too (even the architecture of a mall), becomes part of the culture; other members of the culture have the right to react negatively as well as positively to it.

Unfortunately, I'm not a specialist in the subject -- I have an interest in it, but also an interest in everything from artificial intelligence to Indo-European linguistics -- so I will reluctantly say that I'm out of my league here; but I advise that you look into the field more widely, and not confine yourself to RealClimate.org -- which has long struck me as on the same level of sincere inquiry as the kinds of people who deny the reality of the Sun Streak project or the plausibility of plasma cosmology. (Make of that what you will, of course; you may be proud to be a member of that group...)

Edit: One thing I can say is that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did occur world-wide; following Fernand Braudel's _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and the _Annales Histoire_ school of economic historians in general, the same climate phenomena were encountered in both Europe and China, which are by no means part of the same sub-planetary climate spheres.

On human evolution, human race, and Godwin's Law:

My information is from Wikipedia and from a general amateur interest in the subject. (I find that Wikipedia is reliable when you stay away from the politicized and widely-known subjects.)

For knuckle-walking or its absence in early hominids, see http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/full/410324b... -- which admittedly only establishes the possibility, not the certainty, that the human-chimpanzee MRCA did not knuckle-walk -- as well as http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.700-humans-ma... and the work of Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute. (Annoyingly, both these sites are behind paywalls.)

The obscure field of forensic anthropology has a fair amount of information about the dichotomy between Iberians and Upper Paleolithic survivors (Cro-Magnons, plus Neandertal genes if the two subspecies of H. sapiens were inter-fertile).

However, the whole question of human races and human differentiation in general is anathema in this day and age because of Hitler -- although for some reason social engineering is (mostly) not anathema because of Stalin. The result of this is that somewhere in the back of everyone's mind is the tripartate division into "Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid" of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is not correct. I know much more about Europe than about the rest of the world; but Europe was first peopled by Cro-Magnons, who evolved

"Race" and "species" are not the same thing in this context. I don't want to get into semantic games, but the difference between an Iberian (dark-white, small, long-headed, fine-boned) and a Germanic or UP Survivor (pinkish-white skin, tall, broad-faced, 'uncouth', large-boned, broad-headed) is plainly visible, and the differences between either of these and, say, the mainstream Chinese type (broad, stocky, somewhere between these two in height) or the small "Bushmen" type (related to the Iberians, but with a different type of hair) or the large, "archaic" "Bantu" type of Africa.

While there seem to be some correlations of race with temperament, intelligence, social fluency, and so on, these are generally not very strong, and individuals can generally overcome them -- and as a Catholic, I'm not about to start advocating apartheid or genocide or anything _regardless_ of what the genetic studies say.

For a little more on Iberian spread in Europe, see Stephen Oppenheimer's _The Origins of the British_; Iberian or pre-Iberian descent tends to correlate with mtDNA haplogroup H and Y-DNA haplogroup R1a and its relatives; but I'm afraid that most of what I've figured out here has been my own piecings together, and I have more urgent things to do than to write a book on the subject.

And it's not Godwin's Law if Hitler was actually a factor. (http://xkcd.com/261/)

I don't have a dog in the fight of evolutionism versus creationism, but if I had to pick an "ism" I'd pick the former. I'm a Catholic, but I'm certainly not a Creationist -- and I find evolution to be thoroughly consistent with the style of a God Who, as Dawkins lamented, couldn't even be bothered to tell his followers to wash their hands before eating. (However, I find it troubling that "posting something that may be an oblique challenge to my beliefs" is an adequate criterion for a down-vote.)

Regardless, I'll say one thing: this comment has taught me a lot about the contents of "what you can't say" (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) on Hacker News. (Yes, that was a sneer, but I hope a sneer can be forgiven me after getting as badly flamed as I just did. And perhaps it'll inspire some of my interlocutors and down-modders to reconsider their beliefs...?)

Edit: I have another comment in response on my position on global warming, so look for that as well as this one.

I'll try to answer objections here in two sets of comments, one on climate, the other on human evolution.

On climate change: from what I understand of the subject, there is only one body of research -- three sets of "cross-pollinated" research of which the CRU was one. Again from what I understand, all three of these sets do not have the raw data available.

I can also say more confidently that none of these people have theories with operant mechanisms that explain the Medieval Warm Period or the cooling cycles towards the end of the Roman Empire and during the Little Ice Age -- nor do they seem to be in a hurry to discover the operant mechanisms behind these changes to world climate.

This does not mean that toxic effluvia like DDT, or the sulfides contributing to acid rain, or whatnot are harmless; but it does mean that it's not clear that "the science is settled" on global warming -- which seems to have stopped and started going the other way in the past 20 years, regardless. I'm not a climate scientist even as an amateur, but recent research seems to point to sunspots as an, or the, operant mechanism.

This writer missed or is ignoring both the deliberate fraud known as Climategate, and the new discovery about the importance of sunspots; does he know or care about climate change in the past, the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period, the freeze towards the end of the Roman Empire, and the like? He seems to be too committed to American liberalism, and to have spent too much time arguing with creationists (which, from my personal experience arguing with them, is not good for anyone's sanity), to be able to discuss these issues scientifically.

Also, does anyone else get tired of the canard about apes evolving into humans? Recent science indicates that apes and humans are different evolutionary paths; no human or human-precursor species ever evolved knuckle-walking or the simian proportions of arms to legs (and both Neandertals and Cro-Magnons looked mostly like Germans, Scandinavians, or Finns). Pop-cultural understanding of human evolution -- including the pop-cultural understanding held by the evolutionary apologist culture -- is frozen in time at 1945 or earlier; the Holocaust has frightened us away from discussing human evolution (and its natural corollary, human race).

This is all the more ironic because, if we _were_ willing to discuss human evolution and race, we would discover pretty quickly that the Nazis were wrong. There is an Aryan race, but it's local to Persia and the Indian Subcontinent (hint: languages and cultures can spread without genetically significant numbers of people spreading with them); there is no Nordic race, but two mostly-unrelated races coexisting in northern Europe; the whole narrative of the development of Western man is the evolution of the Iberian race and its descendants...

I'll get off my hobby-horse now.

How different are the experiencing and remembering selves from the Freudian id and ego respectively, though?

I'm coming late to commenting on this, but I have to ask whether the cultivation of a sense of place is really a good idea. An "idea economy" functions best as an urban economy, preferably one composed along the lines proposed by Jane Jacobs; but the author of this work, as far as I can tell at least, has a "neo-agrarian" outlook that thinks in terms of villages, not cities -- if the defining characteristic of a village, including a "cluster of villages city" like Somerville in Boston, or Tokyo in the Edo period, is that one is fundamentally rooted to the village and unwilling to leave it even to pursue greater opportunities. Geographic immobility is not the friend of intellectual enterprise; just ask Paul Graham, who requires all Y Combinator startups to move to Silicon Valley (IIRC) for their initial stage.

So I think this proposal would make things worse, not better; it would be better to cultivate the "moral roots" of the final stage of the Freudian model of psychology (or of Zen, if it comes to that), which permit the individual to function well whatever his environment and whatever his social group or acquaintances.

Let me also point out that highly rooted village life encourages clannishness and asabiyya (the nasty variety, the type condemned by Muhammad, which includes nationalism, racism, and xenophobia), while rootless, urban life discourages it -- in favor of either purely personal selfishness, or objective moral standards. Obviously, the second, not the first, are what's to be pursued; but objective standards are much harder to attain in the village model of life.