Brian Frank » global

History, Perspective & Speed: 2001 – 2011

Brian — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:16 +0000

September 11, 2001. I remember staying up past midnight, flipping through my hundred or so cable channels. Everything covered the attack. I went for a walk. TV light flickered from windows of every house. Everyone was up but nobody was out. Except one guy, on a payphone, highlighted by a street light glowing over him, speaking into the silence: “they flew into the World Trade Center.” I thought about staying up until 4:00am to see what the newspapers would say.

Our world got a lot bigger after that, and a lot faster. Papers and cable news covered every conceivable detail while the weekly and monthly magazines worked on the longer narratives. Heros and villains were made — mostly by their own deeds but also by how the stories were told.

From the other side of the world, the Arab Emirates-based network Al Jazeera gained notoriety by airing footage that came directly from the terrorist themselves. They became almost synonymous. Whenever American networks uttered “Al Jazeera” you just knew it would be something terrible — another beheading, more threats, another diss against Western civilization — as if the network was the PR arm of al Qaeda.

May 1, 2011. Future generations will say it was 10 years: 2001 – 2011. Days and months aren’t much of a difference in the long run.

Here we are, staying up past midnight. This time scrolling through hundreds of tweets every few minutes. Every one is in reference to Osama bin Laden. I’m not going for another walk, but if I did it’s unlikely I’d see anyone on a payphone. And I already know what the papers will say. I watched the process become the product. I watched the story go from word of a mysterious presidential announcement to the first report of Bin Laden’s death through phases of speculation and gradual confirmation and finally — as of now — images of people celebrating at Ground Zero and in front of the White House.

It didn’t take long for people to find the compound Bin Laden was at and even *tweets about the raid from nearby.*

And then it occurred to me: I watched the official announcement through Al Jazeera.

My perspective isn’t just at a different scale now but a different angle too. I was watching a US spokesman play down the celebrations to a foreign network — ‘just a few dozen young people…not something the American people will gloat about’ — but a foreign network that feels very familiar to me. Al Jazeera has become my go-to source for live video of breaking global events. That’s where I watched the Egyptian people oust a regime that ruled for decades. That’s where I watched the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Japan.

I wouldn’t have imagined in 2001 that Al Jazeera would be where I’d choose to watch *this* announcement — and I certainly wouldn’t have imagined watching it with over a hundred other people on the internet.

It’s amazing what a massive wave can do: so much force and momentum, so fast, and so ephemeral, but the effects linger long after the wave recedes. Days and months aren’t much of a difference in the long run, but somehow all the instantaneous events add up to something huge.

It’s big to us now, seeing it through a tiny scope, and it will have symbolic importance when people look back at our time from the distant future, but in coming days and months its importance will gradually recede (or get washed away) and we’ll realize Bin Laden had become a small part of much larger stories — events with plenty of momentum to go without him.

It’s pretty incredible to think about it all happening so fast, this close up. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be though: watching history emerge at this speed and range of perspective.

Ugly War, Pretty Package

Brian — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:58:53 +0000

Here’s a fascinating article about the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue at Firdos Square in 2003 – a great case to examine how our desire for compelling stories and images makes us deceive ourselves. Some argue it may have made things worse — enabling the infamous “Mission Accomplished” announcement and causing people to overlook real problems.

(More insights about self-deception in general in a interesting post by Tim Carmody.)

A lot of spontaneous little decisions in specific moments add up to something altogether different and beyond anyone’s control.

A few separate media feedback loops converged for this story to happen. The first is the symbiotic relationship between journalists and the Marines. Journalists get valuable first-hand accounts. Marines get bragging rights and leverage through media exposure to survive as a proud and distinct branch of the military. Going out of the way for a photo-op and selectively cropping the results has benefits for both.

The second feedback loop was between Iraqi citizens and journalists at the scene — both of whom had been cooped up and anxious hoping for a positive outcome of the invasion. So when Iraq’s military cleared out, civilians showed up in the public square to see what might happen and possibly be a part of something (basically why public squares exist in the first place). Photographers followed — which pretty much assured that something would happen…

[Update: accidentally edited out the most obvious part! the Marines showed up with tools and the massive vehicle that was used to eventually topple the statue. They might have moved on if the civilians and photographers weren't in the square. Either way, the event wouldn't have had the symbolism it did without all the presence of all three groups, reinforcing each other.]

The third feedback loop was (or still is) between media outlets and the audience. Editors and producers know what will keep people’s attention and people are mostly happy to have their attention kept by compelling images. Nobody forced people to watch the footage replayed on CNN every 7.5 minutes (4.4 minutes on Fox), as cited by the New Yorker article:

Primed for triumph, [news editors and anchors] were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war. It was an unfortunate fusion: a preconception of what would happen, of what victory would look like, connected at Firdos Square with an aesthetically perfect representation of that preconception.

At the same time, it’s tempting to look at these media-made messes and exercise the same sensationalist tendencies to deceive ourselves into believing there’s some kind of orchestrated collusion or deliberate conspiracy afoot. Because it’s kind of fun to tell that story, and easy. It’s comforting to infer conscious designs behind big, complex things in life.

Even saying “media-made,” as if “the media” is a coherent entity, is kind of lazy. It’s helpful in a blog post, but only as a provisional place to start.

When we dig deeper we’ll usually find that all of the alleged conspirators are just regular people trying to live as best they can from one day to the next. It’s important to keep coming back to this likelihood.

Because one day some of us might find ourselves caught up in events being distorted to symbolize something they’re not. If we care about truth and meaning we should think about how to recognize these things from the inside, before they reach their tipping point. One voice to dispel an encroaching myth at the right moment might make all the difference.

Thanks @DougSaunders for the link.

“Ugly War, Pretty Package” is the title of a book mentioned in the article.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

WikiLeaks Reveals! What Happens When Anyone Can Be As Annoying As Michael Moore

Brian — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:29:00 +0000

The WikiLeaks story is really becoming a saga. It’s like a new chapter is added every week, with new characters and new ethical questions raised. The latest one helped me work out at least one big answer to move forward with.

The answer hinges on trust.

It used to be that knowledge was power: it was difficult to acquire, so relatively few people were able to control it. Which meant that people who had it were more likely to be trusted. Because if you’ve invested a lot (in infrastructure, political capital, etc.) gaining access to information, you’re damn well going to make sure what (and how) you eventually communicate is trustworthy.

And there was little risk in being more careful before sharing something, because so few people had access to information, and there was already a considerable process involved in getting it out. If the first print run or broadcast didn’t start for another few hours, you might as well check all the facts again and craft it to make sure you told the same story better than your two or three competitors.

Trust used to be more or less given (but could be lost through mistakes) — owing to the fact that people with information already distinguished themselves and appeared trustworthy simply by having it.

But now knowledge is everywhere (or at least information is everywhere): it’s easier to get and harder to control. It’s also easier to share once you have it. So simply having information isn’t an effective way to distinguish oneself. There isn’t much advantage to having it.

But we’re still working according to old assumptions. We’re still competing as if the best advantages go to whoever simply has information (I’m including blogs and a lot of us who essentially “compete” for attention and reputation through social media). That’s largely why there’s such a race to know something FIRST — for that brief moment of advantage, albeit fleeting — and why fairly minor developments are sensationalized on cable TV news into stories in themselves.

The latter amounts to thinking and saying you know something when there’s really nothing to know. When you can’t compete on access or speed, you can still compete by seeing stories that others don’t see — and embellishing the shit out of them.

Which brings me to Michael Moore.

I’ve just been catching up on the #MooreandMe chapter of WikiLeaks. To simplify a complex and ambiguous story, Moore put up $20,000 of the surety (like bail) on behalf of Julian Assange, who’s facing extradition to Sweden on suspicion of sex offences.* As one might expect, Moore’s using the opportunity to generate attention. The complaint against Moore, led by Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown, is that his rhetoric insinuates that accusations of rape are relatively unimportant, and that he’s enabling (or at the very least turning a blind eye to) some pretty vicious personal attacks against Assange’s accusers — who, as suspected sexual assault victims, i.e. people who’ve gone through a very personally invasive experience, could probably do without the added scrutiny and abuse.

(Best background on the details of the suspected crime is here, and there’s more here.)

One of the accusers has been called “the most hated woman online.” There are allegations that she has CIA ties. Bianca Jagger (who also put up part of Assange’s surety) tweeted a link to a post that identified the accuser and outlined the rationale for suspicions about her motives. The link was retweeted by former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and at least 100 other people.

I looked it up and did a bit of extra Googling and everything I found eventually referred back to the same post by Israel Shamir (not an uncontroversial figure) and Paul Bennett at CounterPunch. The basis of the claims is that the most high profile of Assange’s accusers wrote a couple of “anti-Castro diatribes” that were published in a periodical that’s financed by a group that “is connected” to a Cuban anti-Castro group that’s led by a guy who was alleged to have CIA ties.

Got that?

To put that into perspective, as a writer, apparently I need to be careful not just of the kind of periodicals I might submit to, and not just who’s financing those periodicals, and not just the “connections” of who’s financing them, and not just the individuals running those groups that are connected to the groups that finance the periodicals I might publish in, but also the alleged ties of those individuals running those groups connected to the groups that finance the periodicals I might publish in… lest I be accused of having those same ties myself.

The post also claims she was deported from Cuba for “subversive activities,” and while she was there she allegedly “interacted” with a group called Las damos de blanco (Ladies in White) that apparently receives funding from the US. They’re allegedly “supported by” a group that’s run by a guy who “has ties” to another guy who allegedly has CIA ties.

Or maybe, just maybe, her “interactions” with a Cuban group espousing principles of justice and freedom of speech are somehow “connected” to her “interactions” with WikiLeaks — which espouses the same sort of principles.

Why’s it implausible for someone to believe that while we’re demanding transparency from the US we should also demand it from dictatorships?

A stronger case for conspiracy is made by pointing to an apparently disproportionate amount of zeal with which Assange’s offenses are being treated. Naomi Wolf has been especially persuasive:

for all the tens of thousands of women who have been kidnapped and raped, raped at gunpoint, gang-raped, raped with sharp objects, beaten and raped, raped as children, raped by acquaintances — who are still awaiting the least whisper of justice — the highly unusual reaction of Sweden and Britain to this situation is a slap in the face. It seems to send the message to women in the UK and Sweden that if you ever want anyone to take sex crime against you seriously, you had better be sure the man you accuse of wrongdoing has also happened to embarrass the most powerful government on earth.

There’s a compelling argument that Assange’s case is an anomaly even within the Swedish justice system. Wolf made that argument too, pointing to a somewhat damning report by Amnesty International, and Moore added more. There are some scary stats — though I must say, much less scary when I went directly to Amnesty International’s report.

On one hand I find it hard to believe that such a progressive society as Sweden’s would “love” rapists, as Moore put it. There’s an equally compelling argument here that Sweden is very serious about rape, pointing out that positive government measures could be responsible for the statistics:

Sweden has had an active and vocal discussion (can’t really call it a debate) in the last 10-15 years, on getting rape charges higher priority from the police and prosecutors, to getting women to report the crimes more often, and so forth. This includes active campaigning by the government.

So, is it any wonder then that the number of reported rapes has increased?

I’m reminded of scenes in The Wire, in which statistics perversely disincent the police from taking new complaints — especially if they were unlikely to lead to an arrest (say, a crime like rape that often comes down to one person’s word against another’s). The optimist in me hopes that Sweden is fighting against that attitude and working to make it socially acceptable for women to complain about sexual abuse — despite the challenges that creates for authorities and despite how bad those statistics for non-convicted crimes may look.

I can’t really say. There are stats and statements in the Amnesty report and quoted in the above arguments that make me too skeptical to guess either way. And I’ll never say that any country is doing a “good enough” job fighting sexual abuse and rape.

Regardless, I’m not sure why Moore is complaining that Sweden needs to get tougher on sex offenses by way of affiliating himself with a suspected sex offender. If he really wants Sweden to get tough on sex crimes he’s doing it the wrong way. And if Sweden is as bad as he says it is (and even if it’s not), I’m inclined to think the disproportionate attention given to Assange would be the best thing a critic could ask for: that’s a very high profile precedent to use as leverage. Future accusers and activists can say, “but you went after Assange, now you have to do it for the rest.”

As for the likelihood of Sweden cooperating with the US, consider that Sweden may have hidden motives here that are entirely self-serving — nothing to do with pressure they’re imagined to have received from the US.

Sometimes countries make a show of strength just because that’s just what countries do. It helps maximize their bargaining power and autonomy. (Remember Saddam Hussein’s refusal to fully cooperate with weapons inspectors — making it look like he was hiding something even though he wasn’t?) Maybe Sweden is fighting for Assange for the same reason Canada is fighting for a deserted and completely symbolic island: because it’s within a country’s rights to make that claim; rolling over tends to weaken a country’s bargaining power in future negotiations. And they know the world’s watching this one.

(And for all we know it could simply come down to one prosecutor’s careerism: hoping to build a reputation and get promoted by reeling-in a big fish.)

I know “it’s a coincidence” and I know it’s easy to wonder if there’s “American politicial manipulation of a foreign legal system” involved, but the simple fact is that Swedish authorities are following the letter of their law in seeing this through.

Besides, to not see this through would also look like they were bending to foreign pressure — not by American authorities but by celebrity opportunists. There are pros and cons to both sets of optics. Ultimately I’d say they cancel each other out.

The fact that (as far as I know) Swedish prosecutors are doing exactly what their job description dictates they should do seems sufficient to explain why they’re doing it.

And until we see something more substantial to support suspicions that Assange is the victim of a “honeytrap” (his lawyer’s word), a coincidence is nothing more than a coincidence.

Of course it would be nice if we had more access to information that could help us establish the truth one way or the other, and it’s ironic that that’s what Assange and WikiLeaks promote.

So do we need Assange to keep working towards more transparency? I doubt it. If Assange can’t build an organization able to persist without him then I’d rather see it taken apart and rebuilt sooner than later. And the broader movement towards open government is more than robust enough to move forward without either Assange or WikiLeaks. It can and will continue to move forward in the same distributed, incremental, somewhat accidental way that the internet has always developed.

To put it bluntly, open government — which may or may not be Assange’s genuine motive — is precisely the wrong movement for iconoclasts.

Don’t let sensationalizers and ‘isn’t it all a funny coincidence’ status-seeking opportunists like Michael Moore distract us from more important aim: seeing through all artifice and theatricality to find verifiable and useful truth.

The paranoid left and paranoid right enable each other; government institutions and corporations are enablers too. They’re still mainly still competing with knowledge as if it’s scarce, attention as if it’s precious, and control as if it’s still as easy as it once was — while taking trust for granted.

The change won’t happen overnight, but this trend of Tea Parties and DDoS attacks and anti-institutional sentiment keeps going, eventually trust will become so depleted that institutions and people will recognize that trust is more precious than mere information or attention. At some point trust — through the judicious use of knowledge — will be the main source of influence and power, not just knowledge.

That’s what we need to be building. Governments and organizations need to think of how to continually re-earn people’s trust. Playing whack-a-mole with WikiLeaks is counterproductive: it feeds the narrative that governments and organizations are untrustworthy. Likewise for the likes of Michael Moore (who is behaving a lot like his own targets: evasively) and Keith Olbermann (who evaded for a while and came back clumsily). They’ve been focused on criticizing (or merely raising doubts) and getting people riled up against others, but now it’s easy for anyone to do that — which means anyone can do it to them, which is what’s happening with #MooreandMe.

The diminishing returns on attention produced by that cycle can’t go on forever. At some point people will look a little deeper for more sustainable value.

The tougher and ultimately more rewarding thing to do is not to attack but to build — to motivate people for something — and to continually re-earn trust not by smearing other people’s faults but by demonstrating one’s own integrity.

Why Truth Matters (Not Just About WikiLeaks)

Brian — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:22:20 +0000

We have to make a choice: divert more & more energy to avoid & repair leak after leak or come to terms with an open world. #

This is the big ethical and practical choice we need to confront.

Every time we choose to keep even the smallest secrets we sow seeds that’ll grow into deeper obligations and tighter constraints — we’re choosing to have to keep more secrets in the future — because some seemingly innocuous piece of information could raise questions or reveal something we assume people shouldn’t know.

It’s like the principle that one lie inevitable leads to more. Lies and secrecy are both forms of deception: additional, superficial layers of information we’re forced to keep feeding. As if the world isn’t complicated enough already.

Secrets aren’t just passively kept, they’re actively maintained, and maintenance incurs a cost — a cost that’s not getting any cheaper, as Will Wilkinson explained:

Consider what young Bradley Manning is alleged to have accomplished with a USB key on a military network. It was impossible 30 years ago to just waltz out of an office building with hundreds of thousands of sensitive files. The mountain of boxes would have weighed tons. Today, there are millions upon millions of government and corporate employees capable of downloading massive amounts of data onto tiny devices.

One major factor is digitization.

It isn’t just easy to get information out; once it’s out it can go everywhere — within minutes — and keep circulating, virtually forever. Sure, Joe Lieberman successfully got Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its servers (which is yet another whole issue), but it was up on someone else’s servers in just a few hours (well, only to be taken down yet again, but cables have already been reported and copied and pasted all over the place anyway). [Update: and mirrored... Second Update: Dave Winer suggests BitTorrent is where it could eventually end up, which will be virtually impossible to police.]

The second major factor is the size and complexity of today’s organizations.

Does anyone remember the major report on U.S. intelligence services the Washington Post ran in July?

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

When we talk about “the government” or “the state” (in this case the U.S.) trying to keep these secrets we’re actually talking about 46 different organizations. And the computer hardware and software they use has to come from somewhere, so like almost every other organization in the world they deal with outside venders and contractors — about 1931 of them altogether — many of whom require the same security clearance.

Altogether, over 850,000 people have “top secret” security clearance (according to the Post‘s report back in July). As for the clearance required to have had access to these leaked cables — not “top” secret, I suppose – around 3 million people have that.

I’d expect that number to keep going up — especially if they’re trying to keep more secrets more reliably.

The alternative is to lower the threshold: decrease what needs to be secret or increase our tolerance of what can be public (Jeff Jarvis’s latest project).

I imagine there’s some sort of optimum.

If we keep hiring more people to maintain secrets, at some point so many people will have access to those secrets that it won’t even be worth it: might as well then give everyone the same clearance — along with the same corresponding degree of responsibility, ideally.

Maybe that’s an option. But it would mean expanding the state and channelling energy and resources to enforce rules (and endlessly interpret, debate, game and rewrite them) instead of letting citizens choose where to invest their energy and resources in endeavours that solve problems, create value, drive prosperity and improve quality of life.

America would essentially be trading in its famed aspirational attitude for the sake of mere preservation — which seems to me like an even more radical (and far less promising) shift in American values than the push towards transparency.

The third major factor is human nature: we’re endlessly inquisitive.

We have a deep, innate need for information (as well as for being a source of information). We want to know what other people know. We notice patterns and narratives in our world — and we feel uncomfortable when something seems to be missing or distorted.

The internet supercharges these human needs. What might have been a passing curiosity for someone twenty years ago is more feasibly an ongoing obsession for the same person today. These tendencies aren’t going away.

Authorities can channel this energy constructively, working with citizens, or they can continue to unintentionally entice people into games of cat-and-mouse and hide-and-seek. In some ways, efforts to maintain secrecy are counterproductive: if these cables weren’t secret we probably wouldn’t even be talking about them right now.

So the answer, I think, is to lighten up a little. I’m not saying open the floodgates, but the existence and success of WikiLeaks indicates the U.S (and probably the world) is becoming bloated by excesses of secrecy.

Glenn Greenwald put it excellently, building on Matthew Yglesias’s point that “it’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.” As Richard Posner explained:

Our process of classification is undisciplined, because the incentives of public employees in sensitive positions are distorted from an overall social standpoint. Information in government is power, and public employees, like other employees, like to cover up their mistakes. They are in a better position to do so, they think, because they can classify documents—which are then rarely declassified until long after they have ceased to hold any interest for anyone—so they overclassify.

Posner sensibly suggests that maybe much of the answer is just for diplomats to be more, you know, diplomatic.

Because we should also consider that if Julian Assange can get this information, how much of it can be (or is being) milked by real enemies with a sophisticated expertise, way better resources and far more nefarious aims?

Regardless of how this particular episode is dealt with, it’s happening and it’ll happen again.

Any system that can’t survive the truth is a system that can’t survive. #

Above all, this is about respect for truth. It feels like we’re losing it — or maybe society never really had it.

Either way, I know which side I’m on.

I don’t mean truth as something absolute. I’m not saying, “Lets figure out the Truth and then our system will survive forever.” What I mean is that every idea and piece of info we have now will be subject to falsification eventually and need to be verified regularly. The world changes, our ideas change accordingly.

If an idea or practice or institution can’t survive a little scuffing up by facts and experience then it isn’t something I’d put much faith in.

Of course there are things that don’t change, but somehow our ideas about those things keep changing and turning out wrong and improving over decades and centuries anyway.

Read the engaging list at Edge.org of the wrong ideas that people believed to be true. Consider what happened when people still believed the Sun revolves around the Earth. As their observations got better they found other planets doing all kinds of seemingly strange things. In order to maintain the idea that everything goes around Earth they had to contrive increasingly complicated explanations (there’s a good demonstration of pre-Copernican inquiry into the problem in Agora). By then it would have been simpler to give up the main idea and accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

This doesn’t just happen in scientific and religious thinking but in politics and just about anything else we do.

Something we did yesterday might not be the best practice tomorrow. In any given situation we might get a choice between contriving increasingly complicated explanations or simplifying things (this is close to the point Clay Shirky made a little while back): letting our mistakes and emerging opportunities be revealed through abrasion by hard facts so we can cut through the layers of outdated assumptions — habits of mind that were helpful when information was limited but aren’t robust enough to handle very microscopic observations or conciliation with other ideas.

Of course there are risks involved no matter what we decide.

When you distort the truth there’s a risk that one day someone will call you a liar or a fraud and you’ll have to deal with those consequences. When you admit the truth there’s a risk that it won’t matter: let’s face it, people can still call you a liar and a fraud whether you are one or not.

But that points to the pivotal problem here: we live in a world not just of wildly proliferating information but wildly proliferating bullshit.

How do we cope?

Just look at the astonishing range of opinions about WikiLeaks itself: How do we place arguments that WikiLeaks should be listed as a terrorist organization beside arguments that Cablegate actually helps build a case for war? How do we accept that this is a net gain for human rights when human rights groups are against it? How do we reconcile the presumption that WikiLeaks promotes transparency (because it exposes secrets, duh) when smart people argue WikiLeaks will increase secrecy and even Assange himself has said so?

A rational case could be made to argue almost anything. It’s not inconceivable that within a few years there’ll be a Demand Media or Mechanical Turk for editorial analysis — some desperate, anonymous grad student might one day make 1¢/word to quickly churn out an argument that Assange is a hero and then another arguing he’s a villain…

Ultimately all we know for sure is that WikiLeaks is bad for old habits of thought and good for people who like disrupting those habits, regardless of the cost. I’m not quite supporting the latter but I’m sure as hell not going to stick myself with the former.

Because in this atmosphere there’s little we can really trust. Verifiable facts are the best we’ve got.

People are losing trust in government — both prior-to and because of WikiLeaks. People are losing trust in media — which increasingly seems fused with power interests. It’s disorienting. It feels like there’s nothing solid or stable to grab onto. So we need to be skeptical and incisive — and regardless of the havoc caused by WikiLeaks in the short term, we urgently need to improve how we access, filter and verify information.

Maybe “truth” is the wrong word; perhaps “veracity” is better: it’s something we actively pursue and maintain, it’s elusive and unstable, not something permanently given.

WikiLeaks isn’t the answer but it’s at least a clue to where things are going. Respect it for that, at least.

Let us trace information back to the source for ourselves: let citizens participate in legitimate processes of inquiry so individuals and groups don’t feel the need to go rogue like Assange has done — not just to satisfy that human need but to add valuable resources to the challenge of developing better ideas, strategies and institutions in a world awash with information.

Even Sarah Palin ludicrously demanded more transparency from the White House and U.S. intelligence to explain how such an egregious act of transparency could have been allowed. (I’m paraphrasing Daniel Drezner).

So lets all just give our foreheads a good slap and get on with adapting to an open, 21st century world.

Make sure you follow me on Twitter and subscribe to more posts like this by RSS (if you’re into that) or directly to your email (about one per week).

Here are links to some of my favourites on the topic so far:

Dan Gillmor: A few questions about the wikileaks release.
Will Wilkinson: In defense of WikiLeaks and especially Missing the point of WikiLeaks.
Glenn Greenwald: The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics.
Richard Posner: WikiLeaks and the Art of Shutting Up.
Evgeny Morozov’s assiduous real-time curation.

And note: I hate overuse of the suffix “-gate” but that’s what WikiLeaks named this particular release.

More Aspects of Google’s New Approach to China

Brian — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:03:03 +0000

Other people will have a lot more insight into this than I do, but since everyone is talking about Google’s announcement [excerpted]…

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

I don’t buy the cynical suggestions that this move is merely matter of bailing out of a market they’ve already “lost.” Scoble’s post on the push and pull of China makes good points.

From the academic side, Jonathan Zittrain proposed that Google might create its own opportunities to circumvent China’s constraints, with or without government approval:

My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user. There are lots of unexplored options here. They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters. So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages. Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches.

[Update: via Jay Rosen here's a blog post by Rebecca MacKinnon covering reactions in China. One person on Twitter suggested in the same spirit that Google "can enter the anti-censorship market."]

(The filters in China are more of an inconvenience than a total block, but Zittrain knows that as well as anyone, through his academic work as well user-submitted data via HerdictWeb.)

Nothing to lose and much to gain in terms of publicity here, as Zittrain went on:

It helps realign Google’s business with its ethos, and masterfully recasts the firm in a place it will feel more comfortable: supporting the free and open dissemination of information…

It seems like almost too-perfect timing in a push that includes starting dataliberation.org, hiring Joseph Smarr, writing “The Meaning of Open” in December, hiring Chris Messina last week…

Either way, getting back to China, has there ever been a more appropriate time for a more appropriate company (or anybody, for that matter) to put more pressure on that government?

[Update: another post via Jay Rosen, explaining colourfully that "Google has taken the China corporate communications playbook, wrapped it in oily rags, doused it in gasoline and dropped a lit match on it."]

It isn’t just corporations. China doesn’t seem to give the UN or many other governments too much respect, as they demonstrated in Copenhagen (by sending a second-tier official to negotiate — if “negotiate” is even an accurate description — with Obama and a room full of heads-of-state).

It’s like they’re turning into the US.

James Fallows suggested (provisionally) that we might be seeing the start of a “Bush-Cheney” phase for China, i.e. “the government is on a path that courts resistance around the world.”

I shouldn’t have to say this: it’s going to be fascinating to watch as it goes on.

There are other aspects (e.g. continuing this thread and this one and this one too — trying to weave them together) that I’m turning over in my head but can’t quite get a solid feel for.

Can’t wait to see what people who actually know something about this stuff have to say.

Copenhagen Wasn’t About Climate

Brian — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:25:05 +0000

On the surface the Copenhagen summit was about cutting carbon emissions, but the situation reminds me of Robin Hanson’s well known countrarian notion that politics is not about policy:

Civics teachers talk as if politics is about policy, that politics is our system for choosing policies to deal with common problems. But as Tyler Cowen suggests, real politics seems to be more about who will be our leaders, and what coalitions will rise or fall in status as a result.

By all accounts I’ve seen, Copenhagen marked the arrival of consensus regarding the general need to rein in carbon emissions, yet they couldn’t agree to endorse a formal statement or any substantially concrete targets.

Hugo Chavez made it quite explicit: climate change was merely a premise; he was there to negotiate against the capitalist system as a whole. Any successful agreement would be a de facto endorsement of US hegemony (or something like that — whatever rhetoric works):

“I would exhort the government and the people of the earth … to say that if the destructive nature of capitalism exists, let’s fight against it and make it obey us,” he said. “If capitalism resists, then we have to give battle against capitalism and open our way to save mankind.”

[Source: Toronto Star]

Even that’s merely a premise. What he is really trying to do (like any other leader), if we get right down to it, is acquire more personal attention and leverage by whatever means he possibly can. He makes the same case when he’s talking about economic trade, or anything at all; he even used the climate summit as a platform to accuse the US of military aggression.

Bottom line, the real negotiation is for political capital — for one’s country, but on some level it’s always personal too.

The US was there trying to demonstrate they’re still the dominant power in the world, and Obama was there to personally demonstrate he can get things done — an intention telegraphed by the language of his speech, e.g. “it is better for us to act than to talk; it’s better for us to choose action over inaction…”

Likewise, China was there trying demonstrate that they reserve the right to make their own decisions.

Common sense dictates they would be interested in limiting carbon emissions; their cities are literally choking on them. Based on a few references I’ve seen, China is aggressively working on innovations to address the issue. But they would be much less willing to look complacent and let the US, the EU, and the UN get credit for compelling them to change.

For the Guardian, Mark Lynas described his first-hand account in an article that will continue to make the rounds, “How do I know China wrecked the climate deal? I was in the room“:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.

It’s a very interesting article, sure to get a lot more attention, and indicative of how the prominent the US vs China narrative will probably be in the near future.

James Fallows responded to Lynas’s story by outlining a few points of reservation, but suggesting it seems important, if true:

even in a provisional sense, this seems worth noting as one strand in the emerging interpretation of China’s new role in international affairs, and the prospects for the much-bruited China-US cooperation on climate issues.

I could write in my sleep the response that will come from Chinese officials and from Chinese netizens about the unfairness of this view and the possibility that it will “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

The idea that progress on the climate front will have to come from bilateral agreement between the US and China also came up in a discussion on Charlie Rose (can’t find the permalink but the transcript is here).

Meanwhile, also in the mix we can observe optimistic statements by Ban Ki-moon being a way to sell the U.N. (and by extension, himself) as an important facilitator.

In all of these cases people are “negotiating” by posing as more capable than they are, and asking for more than they know they can possibly get, and generally trying to control the balance of information by artfully embellishing and obscuring their true intentions (perhaps even from themselves).

I’m using “negotiation” as a metaphor, but not entirely. I suspect that formal discipline of negotiation evolved from these tendencies.

As a final wrinkle (for now), consider how rallies on the streets can be interpreted as “negotiations” on yet another axis… another topic, perhaps, carrying on with the suggestion that what passes for theory is usually about theatre…

Climate change is not my area so I don’t presume to add anything to the discussion, per se. I’m doing this as part of a broader attempt to understand the 21st century, and even more generally, the meta factors and human fundamentals that affect these kinds of things, e.g. what we really talk about when we talk about power.

[Note: post was renamed the same day of publishing from "What exactly was being negotiated in Copenhagen?"]

Death of an Immortal

Brian — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:42:50 +0000

The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event.

Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu exceed 5%. Mashable later reported over 30% (“likely an underestimate”) at one time referred to Michael Jackson or “MJ.”

I have a hard time believing there’s anyone in the world who hasn’t already reacted to this. Even supposed ambivalence about Michael Jackson’s death is expressive. My own initial urge was to announce I didn’t care and wasn’t going to add to the din — until I realized I was adding to the din, and I must have cared somehow to say anything at all.

Then Phronk quickly and rightly argued against nonchalance – calling this a globally significant, history-changing event.

To understand the significance of the event we need to distinguish between “history” as actual events and “history” as the account, or story we compose around them… Don’t underestimate the power of the latter.

Granted, Michael Jackson’s death doesn’t change much of the structure or substance of our world. It doesn’t have any potency — the way a war does, or an election, or a scientific discovery, or economic booms and busts — like the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, which has affected the dynamic of a real, ongoing crisis with countless lives in limbo.

To that list of “potents” we can also add art, literature, and music. Music can be as potent and powerful as anything. Michael Jackson, more than anyone, proved that himself, acting as a beacon for oppressed and impoverished peoples around the globe. Even in Iran, I imagine, this is a significant event.

But as an artist, Michael Jackson washed up long ago. While many still loved the man and his music, he ceased to move the world forward.

What he did continue to do was act as the paradigm, or paragon of Pop. His example was projected onto the careers of every performer who followed (even alternative and indie performers could never escape the paradigm, to oppose something is still to be influenced by it).

He’s still at the centre of our popular culture — and our Pop Culture, Michael Jackson’s Pop Culture, is the only Pop Culture there ever was.

There was popular music and popular culture before him — there was even “pop” — but not with all of the interwoven connotations and assumptions and expectations we now have that make it a distinct and vital concept.

Think of mega-bestselling albums, choreographed music spectacles, videos, tabloid controversies, the cult of eternal youth – things Michael Jackson elevated into the mainstream but which we now take for granted – things that have even become so formulaic that we have a game show, American Idol, producing new pop stars on a four-month schedule.

It hardly impresses anyone anymore. Not the way it used to when an absurdly talented man in read leather morphed into a zombie and moonwalked onto the highest pedestal in the Pantheon of Pop.

While his passing in itself won’t make an immediate impact on music, it does provocatively symbolize an end.

We won’t see it that way — not yet anyways: not as long as there are people who, like me, have childhood memories of putting on little talent shows to the irresistible tune of Billie Jean, Beat It, or Thriller, or Bad, wearing a single white glove, abortively attempting to pull off his superhuman dance moves.

Michael Jackson — and more generally, the popular culture he represented — is ingrained in our identities.

But subsequent generations will come along that never shared the same vital symbols that have defined our time. It follows that they won’t be of the same culture, in a sense. They’ll have their own heroes and paradigms, their own concepts with different connotations, their own galvanizing events.

Compared to the political, social, and economic changes we’ve witnessed in the past year, the death of a pop star is insubstantial — but it is not meaningless, it is not insignificant.

Such an event affects us on a human, emotional level that technical, structual matters do not.

It’s also more symbolic. It doesn’t matter that the symbolism of an event is mostly made up and assigned by our imaginations after the fact. That’s precisely what makes them so important.

In a complex world that often makes little sense, rapidly unfolding towards an uncertain future, we need to imagine idealized and immortal figures. They can be our only means of orientation, navigation, and control through the dusky realm of the big picture, or simply, “What comes next?”

Like a real star, he’s something we never touch but is always there to remind us where we are and why we’re here.

Iran, An Intro to the Age of Openness?

Brian — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:20:49 +0000

I’m absolutely enthralled by this, both emotionally and intellectually. My passion is driving me to reason that we’re in the midst of one of history’s great moments. Historians a century from now will yearn to imagine what it was like to actually experience these changes (I mean the large-scale shifts). Let’s not squander this.

We’ll see — maybe within hours — whether I’m just being melodramatic again.

The election in Iran — not to mention its aftermath — feels even more compelling than the US election because it is part of a distinct narrative that has gradually built up, specifically to this climax, over the course of years, if not decades.

Going back to the “axis of evil” days, before the Iraq War, there has been discussion in our newspapers and magazines about how Iranian demographic and cultural shifts would eventually bring about more progressive democracy — without intervention — and beyond that, strategists have argued that US-led intervention could actually backfire and destroy that momentum.

No doubt, the “hands-off” approach would not have been easy for many Americans to accept — especially with the nuclear threat involved.

Just as intuitions about the relationship between attempts to control and the effects those have are changing in business (going from the industrial-age drive for more-and-more control to the counterintuitive notion that you get more of what you want by relinquishing control), politics is getting turned inside-out.

(Aside: Could Iran leapfrog Canada in this? Don’t dismiss it without consideration. Last time I checked the Globe & Mail’s website, just after 11:15 pm, the history-making upheaval in Iran was not in their 10 most popular stories. Three of the top 10 are about hockey — two of those are about the fight over the Phoenix Coyotes — and two more are about Harper and Ignatieff’s game of parliamentary chicken. Those five stories essentially boil down to grown boys playing 20th century control games. That’s what Canadians are interested in right now, that’s what we’re learning, that’s the attitude being enabled and reinforced: playground shit. Meanwhile things are surging elsewhere…)

There’s a lot being written and said (and tweeted and ff’d) about this being a Twitter revolution (whether or not social mobile media has much to do with the actual events, it is certainly affecting how we watch).

We’re getting deeper into the Age of Openness — deep enough that it seems like a cliché to a lot of us, but not so deep to have gained ubiquity or lost its novelty. We’re still explaining it to ourselves, leaders are just now learning how to practice it — speaking directly to people rather than to abstract policies.

It’s reassuring to read this, about Obama, from George Packer for the New Yorker (via Wells):

The new President understood that the U.S. could no longer take a high-handed approach: the world had long since stopped listening, and the language of freedom and democracy had been so deeply tainted that the cleansing will take years. That’s why the passages in the Cairo speech on human rights and women’s rights came after extremism, after Israel and Palestine, after nuclear weapons, and had a careful tone. There’s too much wreckage to sort through before an American President can tell other countries to live up to a standard set by us.

The key phrase in Obama’s remarks on the world stage is “mutual respect and mutual interests.”

I’m sure everyone will have their eyes open by tomorrow, regardless of what they know or care about the historical significance of all this.

Only 24 hours ago, this was what was being written about the uncertain situation:

Unless the street protests achieve unexpected momentum, the election could cast the pro-reform classes — especially the better off and better educated — back into a state of passive disillusionment, some opposition figures said.

“I don’t think the middle class is ever going to go out and vote again,” one Moussavi supporter lamented.

Well the street protests certainly achieved that unexpected momentum. This, this, this and this are anything but passive disillusionment — and keep in mind the people at those rallies have supposedly been conditioned all their lives to expect a swift beating (or worse) for public displays of disrespect. Also keep in mind, as The Lede pointed out at NYTimes (where I saw those videos, and probably the best place to follow the ongoing developments),

Considering that today’s protest was supposedly called off, and resulted in a crowd in Tehran five miles long, you have to wonder what tomorrow will bring, when a general strike is in the cards. Persiankiwi passes the message: “Moussavi – calling national strike tomorrow – all Iran.”

Again, I’m elated to be experiencing this moment of history — even if not first-hand.

Stay tuned, there’s still a hell of a cliffhanger (though it took me so long to get around to writing this that by the time anyone reads it will already know some of the next day’s outcome), as Ramin Ahmadi wrote at Forbes.com (via The Lede):

There are at least two possible outcomes for the current crisis…

In either case, the Islamic Republic we have known for the last three decades is gone.

Shifting, even if only slightly, the “axis” of our global, historical narrative: adding more weight to the momentum towards post-industrial openness — whatever that turns out to mean, exactly.

Regarding Leadership

Brian — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:00:34 +0000

I can’t see the merit in complaints that Obama’s Cairo speech “didn’t set out any concrete new policies.”

The last thing the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example, needs, is more policy-for-the-sake-of-policy… “Look: concrete action: a new treaty!… a new accord!… a new roadmap for peace!”

What Obama has done is established a background, or foundation on which to frame a process of working-out more sustainable policies over the long-term.

Just as he did with his campaign, he was specific and forceful enough that people have something to identify with, yet it’s open and dynamic enough that anyone who’s interested can buy into it and add their own initiative to push it forward. That voluntary buy-in builds solid momentum, broadens the acceptance and deepens people’s genuine commitment.

Obama’s position matches my own, and as far as I know these are the shared opinions of most reasonable and informed moderates — for example (again), concerning Palestine-Isreal: there has to be two states, both self-governing, Palestine must give up the violence and Israel must give up their expansionism via settlements.

(Aside: via Matt Yglesias, Obama seems to have all the right enemies: “extreme elements on both sides are in a symbiotic relationship.”)

Delivered with both eloquence and force, the speech said, “Here are the boundaries. Violate them and I assure you there will be consequences. Work with me — with us, together — and I assure you there will be mutual benefits.”

Great leaders don’t just speak to policies and policy-makers. They speak to the people whose daily lives are directly affected — people who will be constantly presented, often in subtle and barely-perceptible ways, with decisions whether to uphold and perpetuate the spirit of the policies or whether to violate and take advantage of them.

And whatever they choose, whether virtuous or vicious, tends to become habitual and infectious.

There’s always elbow room when it comes to actually executing and upholding policies. When leaders come straight out with yet another corporate initiative or political treaty without generating buy-in at all levels, then very soon the foot soldiers and middle managers and colonels get restless and start taking liberties, testing how elastic the rules are… and that continues to spread like a virus because most people prefer to be amenable to the people around them rather than stick to abstract policies they presume nobody really took seriously.

The irony of that is that people often allow violations to occur and then point to those violations as justification to disregard the policies even more. It turns into a vicious self-perpetuating cycle. It’s like breaking the first window and then complaining that the whole building is condemnable because of it.

“Well just look at that damned broken window: it’s a disgrace! We might as well break all the rest…”

It happens all the time in large corporations and institutions. I think most people would recognize this from their own experience.

“Nobody else cares… hell if I’m going to.”

Then five more people pick up on that attitude and say the same thing, then twenty-five more people see those five, and on and on and on until the whole culture is caught in a vicious feedback loop.

The virus doesn’t have to be not-caring, it could be over-aggressiveness, short-term thinking, anti-intellectualism (or over-intellectualism), vindictiveness, greed, rudeness, general stupidity, overspending, blindness to reality and change, not washing hands after using the washroom, etc.

The most timely example of institutional culture gone-wrong is General Motors, as everybody knows.

Speaking of that there was a good conversation on Charlie Rose about it the other night. They discussed how only a few months ago bankruptcy was unthinkable but Obama gradually “conditioned” people to embrace it.

That’s what sets great leaders apart: not just their decisions and what they do but how they communicate — and how they say it is often more important than what they say.

Imagine how the Iraq War might have proceeded if there was more effective communication and conditioning, more buy-in — and subsequently, better input into how it should (and/or should not) have been executed.

I’m not saying Obama is perfect and I’m not predicting all of this is going to turn out great. We’ll have to watch to find out.

What I’m saying is that if great things are to happen, or great catastrophes to be avoided, then it has to start here.

It isn’t exactly “selfless” leadership. It isn’t about putting oneself ahead of, nor behind, everyone else’s wants and needs. It’s about granting everyone the respect and responsibility they deserve as people who are capable of making their own decisions — whether good or bad — and using those connections to cultivate mutual benefit, gradually proliferating the good and diminishing the bad, by speaking to people, not to abstract political conceptions.

[I wonder if Obama's high self-regard is simply a result of the higher-than-normal regard in which he seems to hold everyone.]

China: Mother of All Enrons?

Brian — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:24:52 +0000

Directly following up on my last post about the problems of goals gone wild, here’s a look at China’s attempts to keep up their 8% rate of annual GDP growth. (Thanks to Francois in the previous post’s comments for bringing up the abuse of information during China’s Cultural Revolution.)

Earlier today, FP Passport reported the World Bank’s quarterly update on China predicts 6.5% growth – which just about every other country in the world would be envious of (seems like any growth is like a fantasy most places) but for a tremendously growth-driven economy like China’s (or Dubai’s — or any advancing economy’s), where new construction etc is such a substantial element of the economy, slower growth is like taking a step back in some ways. Btw, year-over-year GDP growth in China was 12.6% in Q2 2007.

The post has disappeared, and I can’t find the World Bank update where the 6.5% figure apparently came from — so I’m not going to put any weight on that — but there was a link to an interesting article in Foreign Policy on that goal of 8% growth.

At the 12th Party Congress in September 1982, Deng determined that the national economic goal would be to quadruple the annual industrial and agricultural output of the entire country by the end of the century. Prior to the big meeting, Deng asked then General Secretary Hu Yaobang how the country could quadruple its economy from 710 billion yuan in 1980 to 2,800 billion yuan in 2000, and Hu responded that 8 percent annual growth would do the trick. That’s it. There’s no complicated secret formula, no hallowed equation precisely linking growth to employment, no connection to the revered words of Confucius, Mencius, or Lao-tzu. Back in 1982, it was determined that it would take 8 percent annual growth to quadruple the economy by 2000.

The end of the century has come and gone, but the target has remained the same. Subsequent five-year plans have all set an annual growth target between 7.5 and 8.5 percent. This national objective has since become the obsession of officials at each level of the government’s vast bureaucracy.

But goals and consistency are good, right?

The truth is, it’s hard to tell exactly what China’s annual growth rate actually is. Because officials receive promotions based on how well they tend their economic gardens, there’s a strong incentive for mandarins at all levels to fudge the numbers they report up the bureaucratic food chain. Each year, county officials are instructed to tally their economic growth figures and report them to the next level, which then reports to the provincial government, which reports to Beijing. Invariably, almost every province reports economic growth exceeding the national average — which, of course, is impossible. As Jim Mann, the noted author and former China correspondent, once pointed out: “It is like Lake Wobegon. All the children are beautiful and above average.”

Reminds me of CNBC.

Pakistan and Complex Conflicts

Brian — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:43:23 +0000

We tend to reduce faraway conflicts by figuring out who’s the good guy and who’s the villain, then working out the rest of the narrative around those simple distinctions.

And more often than not we decide who the good and bad guys are based on how we associate them with particular good and bad guys we already know and love/hate. E.g. if President So-and-So has pro-American ties, folks might be quick to heroize or vilify that president based on existing attitudes towards the US: extremists on the left start screaming about hegemony and extremists on the right start sneering about socialism.

A pretty good example was the Georgia-Russia conflict last year. People on the far right immediately diagnosed it as a case of Russian imperialism, therefore the Georgian military needs an express shipment of surface-to-air missiles to stand up against Putin. People on the far left immediately pointed out that the Georgian president has deep US ties, therefore Russia was benevolently protecting those poor South Ossetians from US-backed, oil-mongering bullies.

The turmoil in Pakistan is harder to classify; it doesn’t accommodate such simple categories. I get a sense that even the main players there are having a hard time figuring out the angles themselves — never mind angles: what few ambiguously defined “sides” there are only seem like temporary expedients for an incomprehensible clusterfuck of personal motives.

Jason Burke from the Guardian included a brief synopsis in a recent column on how “our skewed world view won’t let us see the real Pakistan“:

Pakistan has very grave problems. In the last two years, I have reported on bloody ethnic and political riots, on violent demonstrations, from the front line of a vicious war against radical Islamic insurgents. I spent a day with Benazir Bhutto a week before she was assassinated and covered the series of murderous attacks committed at home and abroad by militant groups based in Pakistan with shadowy connections to its security services. There is an economic crisis and social problems – illiteracy, domestic violence, drug addiction – of grotesque proportions. Osama bin Laden is probably on Pakistani soil.

And how about all the other foreign coverage? Well, there’s nothing western audiences like more than to be challenged by complex political dynamics playing out among groups and individuals with names we have trouble pronouncing. Eh? And it’s a good thing our media outlets are up to it… Er, no. As Reuters Global put it:

Maybe this always happens at times of national upheaval. But there is a surprising disconnect between the immediacy of the crisis facing Pakistan as expressed by Pakistani bloggers and the more slow-moving debate taking place in the outside world over the right strategy to adopt towards both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Reading Pakistani blogs since confrontation between the country’s two main political parties exploded and comparing them to international commentaries is a bit like watching men shout that their house is on fire, and then panning over to the fire station where the folks in charge are debating which type of water hose works best.

Maybe I read that wrong the first time. It seems to be more about the exuberance of Pakistani bloggers than everyone else’s ambivalence. Ok so I’ll go with that then because it’s an even more important factor to consider: what we saw in the past few days is not an uprising of poor oppressed masses, the Long March has been a middle-class movement composed of some of the most educated and technologically empowered people in the country — specifically lawyers and judges (here’s Aitzaz Ahsan describing the “lawyer’s movement” on Charlie Rose — while two New York Times reporters narrowly talk about the Taliban and the tribal areas — back when Musharraf was still president) which isn’t to say some of the participants aren’t also poor, especially given the condition of the economy (Pakistan’s Karachi Stock Exchange actually ceased trading for months after a violent meltdown in the summer).

Intuitively, it doesn’t seem like a good sign that so many professionals — led by presidents of legal bar associations — feel the need (and, more worryingly, have enough free time and energy) to participate in such a large-scale passionate movement. While I have a hunch that some degree of this amounts to a kind of boredom (which has been shown to correspond with preludes to war) there are specific auspices involved. Here’s the most current one outlined by Juan Cole, going back a few years:

A conflict developed between Nawaz Sharif [leader of the Long March protesters] and PPP leader [now president] Asaf Ali Zardari over the deposed chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhury. Dictator Musharraf had dismissed Chaudhury in spring of 2007 for opposing some of his policies. Pakistan’s massive legal establishment began holding rallies and demanding that the chief justice be reinstated, which he was in summer 2007. Musharraf was under pressure from Washington to become a civilian president. But he found out that fall that the supreme court would not allow this transition because the constitution requires that a military man have been out of the service for 2 years before becoming president. So Musharraf just dismissed the whole supreme court, including the recently reinstated Chaudhury, and appointed a new court, which sycophantically recognized him as president.

When he was allowed to come back to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, who had been overthrown as prime minister in 1999 by Musharraf, began demanding that Iftikhar Chaudhury and the old, dismissed, supreme court be reinstated.

After the PPP won the parliamentary elections, its leader, Zardari, declined to reinstate Chaudhury. Zardari was afraid that the chief justice might reinstate the corruption charges against him, which had been amnestied by Musharraf.

Another reason Zardari might not be in a hurry to have Chaudhry reinstated as chief justice (and why Sharif does) is that the current supreme court helpfully barred Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from running for president. See? There are more varying agendas than can be arranged on one or two simple axes. Complicating things even more, as Cole pointed out more recently,

On the other side of the ledger, Chaudhry did sign off on Musharraf’s 1999 coup against then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and was appointed chief justice by the military dictator in 2005, so I’m confused as to how he is a symbol of the rule of law. He was complicit in a lawless, praetorian regime.

The supporters don’t seem very picky about who represents their ideals — as long as there is at least something and someone to get behind. I found these blogged remarks via the #LongMarch thread on a few of hours ago:

Well, it’s okay. We don’t have to like the guy much. At some point, for reasons that were part personal gain and part opportunity to finally act in favour of the nation, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry exercised his powers as an independent arm of the triumverate democractic system. Masses of people supported him. That’s the reality. He’s no saint. But by God he’ll be independent. And that’s a step in the right direction.

And for a little more cultural background I also found a link to a music video (chorus: “listen to the hope of a new dawn“) posted by a young Pakistani who tweeted about the “patriotic feeling” it gives (the video depicts a young man charging through a police barrier towards a presidential-looking motorcade, which is subsequently stopped by a crowd holding their hands up in a gesture of defiance).

One could certainly find worse ideals to rally behind than judicial independence. The last thing I want to do is discourage Pakistanis (or anyone for that matter) from promoting transparency and justice.

The danger is that passionate idealism tends to turn into opportunities for manipulation by shadier characters. To start with, how genuine is Sharif’s adoption of the judicial cause?

Even more dangerous is the possibility of movements turning into mobs, with a life and direction that nobody especially intended or approved. Further, intellectually affected movements have the added drawback of providing a foil — something to rally against and be inspired by — for anti-intellectual movements (by which I don’t mean stupid, but simply less about debate and more about getting something done, i.e. straight-up ass-whooping), which Pakistan already has the makings of, waiting just off to the side in the form of radical theocrats (or militias posing as such).

Then there’s the military… and the intelligence services…

The Foundation for Middle East Peace…

Brian — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:27:25 +0000

… has to be laid on a robust background of sensible, generative dialogue. I don’t just mean “peace talks,” but rather a wider, deeper understanding of societies and how they interact.

That’s an ambitious title up there, and this post will surely disappoint people who assumed there’d be a concrete twenty-seven-point plan for peace, or whatever. Well I don’t have to make much of a case to argue that that kind of thing goes nowhere: history makes that case for me — and so does the present, to be sure. We can keep wading into the same millennia-old battlefields again and again or we can… well, that’s what I want to explore.

I’ve been thinking in earnest about the Palestine-Israel/Israel-Palestine question for a decade and I’ve never figured out anything sensible to say that might go towards resolving it. I had to do a presentation on it in 1999 for a university course on the causes of war. Our prof made a list of a couple dozen wars since WWII and we were all supposed to get together in groups and pick one. I forgot. I missed the deadline, and all the wars got taken. So my professor had to come up with something else for me (and another classmate in the same situation):

“Well, I didn’t really want to include this one, for a few reasons — partly because it’s not really a “war,” like the other ones assigned, with a clear beginning and end, and partly because this one’s especially sensitive…”

Anyhow, we were assigned to give a presentation on the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which included (because this was a class on the causes of war) the creation of the state of Israel and the partition of Palestine. I had no idea what I was getting into. It was to be the most vexing problem I ever looked at.

The general account of the Israel-Palestine problem, it seems to my eyes, is roughly this: both sides have profound grievances and a genuine right to complain — reaching back thousands of years, more or less as far as all written accounts go — and both sides are guilty of despicable acts of provocation and vengeance that at the very least only make things worse.

In my more sentimental moods I’m slightly inclined to lean towards the Palestinians’ case (“Israel has all the power…”). In my more rational moods I’m slightly inclined to lean towards the Israelis’ case (“But Hamas’s mission is to destroy Israel. They’ll never be satisfied with compromise…”). Right now I’m trying to work through what might be called a “post-rational” temper: leading with reason then trying to accommodate emotional realities, rather than conceiving an iron-law notion of what’s right and true. (The prevailing temper on both partisan sides seems to be the inverse of that: startwith emotional reactions and attachments, then hardening them with rational arguments.)

I followed the past few-to-half-dozen episodes (I’m including Lebanon… I’m losing count) fairly closely as they were happening, but now I don’t have anywhere near enough information to assess the present escalation in violence – I’m not even inclined to follow it closely because much of the information — and certainly most of the commentary — is so limited in perspective and saturated in biased assumptions that I feel more distracted and blinded by it than actually “informed.”

So I think we need a new way of talking about this stuff.

I actually just took a break from writing this post to comment on Mathew Ingram’s blog, about changes in the news industry. I suddenly see how relevant that could end up being. The Atlantic article everyone’s talking about today mentioned how great the first-response coverage in Mumbai was by bloggers etc. I’m not talking about pajamas-wearing bloggers, for the most part it may amount to journalists with mobile tools — like this great accountof the opening of the Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza by Nidal al-Mughrabi on the Reuters Global blog: “Saturday is my day off from being Reuters correspondent in Gaza and I usually sleep until noon. This Saturday things didn’t go to plan.”

I said I haven’t been following it. What I mean is I haven’t pored over every newspaper article and editorial I can find. I have kept my eye on the content coming into my Google Reader from different foreign policy blogs (and 3 Quarks Daily has done interesting curating).

I have a sense that in a way this conflict represents Old vs. New as much as Israel vs. Palestine (in no particular order), and the old present in the attitudes and practices of both sides — much as all combatants in the First World War all began with the same 19th century strategies and weapons, only to find themselves at war against the future as much as they were at war against enemies in opposing (newfangled) trenches. The analogy may be confusing due to the differences in specifics, and especially the difference in overall scope, but there is a deep underlying principle I’m trying to convey.

Try to grasp that I’m using this specific conflict for concrete reference points, so we can generate insight into more general historical patterns, which in turn we must appreciate before we can understand the specific conflict. It’s a recursive essay: we’re trying to bootstrap our way towards making sense of this damn mess.

Obviously it is a very massive and very sensitive topic to think and write and talk about. This is just the preamble. I suspect any final solution would take generations to build towards (or, to put it more bluntly, it’ll take that long for enough of the irreconcileably biased troublemakers to pass away). Maybe we can see it happen in our lifetime (if you’re around 30), but I don’t see anything resembling peace in the Middle East for at least the next twenty years: that’s how long it’ll take to establish the background we need before we can even build the foundation, which is maybe another twenty years…

At best, the conflict may simmer down but it certainly is not going away in the next couple of years. Those of us who are neither obligated or able to intervene have time to work over and under the issues with a lot of care, looking for radical (yet pragmatic) new concepts to make the dialogue more generative — eventually a few people in our generation will be in the thick of these challenges. Now’s the time to invest in the intellectual equipment to address them.

Here’s a look at what I’m doing: start here, here, and here.

Dubai

Brian — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:36:57 +0000

I can’t be the only person seriously doubting that this flagrant show of prosperity is sustainable:

I have this gut feeling that the completion of the Burj Dubai skyscraper (amazing pictures here) will mark a moment of incredible economic collapse, and it will stand for decades as a 707 metre monument to boom psychology run ridiculously amok.

Just speculating… I wish Dubai nothing but the best, but what’s happening there seems to be an absurd contrast with everything else that’s happening in the world… And the price of oil isn’t giving me much faith right now either.

Updated 22.nov.08: Oh hey, what d’ya know –

Reality however, has finally come to town: the Dubai Financial Market – the general stock index – has fallen from a high of 6,315 earlier this year to just 2,012 yesterday. Emaar’s share price has plummeted 79% in less than a year; according to some estimates, property prices have fallen by as much as 49% in parts of the Dubai market. The overall figure is much lower, in the region of 4%, but this is a place that’s become accustomed to its figures only going in one direction and a lot of people are being caught out by the turnaround. [Guardian, via Archinect]

I’m really trying to restrain myself from making extraordinary ‘doomsday’ predictions. I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve just witnessed something that will be used, if not to explain, then at least to symbolize (for a very, very long time) the decadence of our era — the pulsing-headed stupidity that has tried to build wealth on a foundation of mere expectations. ”Build it and they will come,” and then they came… but to do what, exactly?

Somebody please tell me that the economy in Dubai isn’t mostly composed of the kind of Monopoly money enterprises that are collapsing in the US.

I know that oil isn’t (directly) a major factor of Dubai’s economy. I’ve been doing a little Googling around to get more information (and hopefully some evidence that my suspicions are wrong). Here’s an excerpt from recent article that supposedly argues against the kind of scenario I’m afraid of:

“For several analysts, the Dubai Inc. story is tied in to its real estate sector. They miss the mountain for the hill. True, the real estate and construction sectors are key growth drivers. But let us not forget the big picture. The economy is driven by traditional sectors such as re-exports and trading; tourism and retail; transportation and logistics; manufacturing; the free zones and the business hubs for IT, media, financial services, education and healthcare. These are the sectors that drive real demand.” [Khaleej Times]

Was I wrong? Here I was worried that Dubai’s economy didn’t have a firm footing, and meanwhile it’s built on such rock-solid industries as “re-exports and trading; tourism and retail; transportation and logistics… media, financial services…”

Which is to say, no foundation at all — just a list of the world’s sickest industries, most of which are of an intermediating type, dependent on the prosperity of others to keep the traffic and transactions flowing, with no capacity to self-generate or self-sustain value.

Even if I’m completely off-base, the fact that I have these concerns makes me pretty sure that many other people have them too, and soon enough these fears will run through the media and people will get their money out of Dubai with as much exuberant haste as they’ve been pouring it in.

We’ll have to wait and see.

No Related Post

Thinking About War

Brian — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:23:11 +0000

I wasn’t sure if I’d write anything on Remembrance Day, but then I saw this National Post editorial:

Still, we risk dishonouring those Canadians who have gone to war to defend our nation and its values when we seek to revise our history and downplay our contributions to wars fought in the name of freedom. This is especially true at a time when more than 2,500 of our soldiers are battling the Taliban and al Qaeda on the plains and in the mountains of Afghanistan. Nearly 100 have lost their lives there in the past six years trying to bring stability to the people of that nation and deny terrorists a staging base from which to plot their attacks on the West.

Amen. But…

As far as I can tell, most people believe war is both bad and sometimes necessary. There are few pure pacifists and pure soldiers at either extreme. The extent of our discussion about war dissipates into ultra-ambiguous opinions like, “I think war should always be avoided, but sometimes it’s necessary, like WWII,” and “Mankind has always fought wars and always will, but, I agree, there are cases when war can and should be avoided.”

It’s pointless to get into hypothetical because, if you consider the major wars from the past century, they tend to occur in unprecedented circumstances that people aren’t intellectually prepared for (but which people nevertheless take for granted as largely the same as past precedents — think of how quickly Iraq was compared to Vietnam, Saddam Hussein was compared to Hitler, anti-war politicians were called compared to Neville Chamberlain as “appeasers,” and the recent Georgian conflict was compared to Sudetenland). As conflicts play out (or not, if a peaceful agreement is reached) and become part of history people begin to appreciate how defective the earlier assumptions were (the First World War is the great example of this).

And talk is cheap. Peaceniks can say “sure I’d support a war against XYZ” but when actually faced with the reality they renege. War mongers can say “sure there are cases when war isn’t the answer” but as soon as any minor conflict breaks out they declare the solution is to choose a side and run in with surface-to-air missiles.

One way in which talk can actually be useful (and is really essential) is in defining our concepts of things like “freedom” and “justice.” The more I hear politicians talking about “dying for freedom” the less I’m inclined to take them seriously — unless they follow that up by giving us an impression of what freedom is and what it’s good for.

Anybody can say they’re fighting for freedom. Arguably, that’s what everybody says they’re fighting for.

In fact I’m tempted to suggest that “freedom” is what people say they’re fighting for when they don’t actually know (and don’t care to know) what their actual reasons are. I wrote about this last year when I claimed war is a retreat from complexity.

If we can’t articulate exactly what it is our predecessors fought and died for, and what we stand for now, then we aren’t justified in claiming to be morally any better than our enemies, because they’re almost certainly fighting for the same reasons but merely facing a different direction.

If our politicians can’t explain and exemplify the values and ideals we’re at war for, then “it’s all just part of the game” — just like any other fight among boys, a show of physical strength when minds and morals have failed.

This isn’t to discredit the sacrifices that have been made — far from it. This is about fulfilling the purposes of those sacrifices, sustaining their vitality in our mind (not just in habits, gestures, and rhetoric), building from them towards even greater purposes; above all, ensuring that a century from now we aren’t seen as the evil side, ensuring we aren’t ultimately defeated by sacrifices of others made in the name of “freedom” facing another direction.

Terrorist Jujitsu

Brian — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:50:18 +0000

Remember after 9/11 when George W. Bush said everyone should go shopping — “or the terrorists will win”?

But wasn’t the economy supposed to have receded anyways, without the terrorist attack? There was the super-hyped dotcom bubble and then Enron and the accounting blowup. Things needed to cool down.

Then the attack happened, the reactions of Bush and Greenspan et al impelled people to spend at precisely the moment people should have started to save, or cultivate real growth, or both and now…

According to the official numbers, economic growth in the U.S. has averaged 2.7% over the past 10 years. But by BusinessWeek‘s calculation, U.S. consumers have run up about $3 trillion in excess borrowing and spending over the same period—consumption that was not justified by income growth. Without that boost, which translated into new homes, cars, furniture, clothing, and the like, U.S. economic growth would have come in considerably lower.

And the world followed the U.S. lead.

Consumers got spun around and started mistaking the atmosphere of irrational exuberance of the late nineties as the benchmark of economic normality.

This is an old theory of mine — which I kind of hoped would be proven wrong.

Increasingly, it looks like the terrorists might have won after all, not by bringing down the economy directly, but by using the full weight of the U.S. consumer-driven economy against itself.

History of Perpetual Peace

Brian — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 06:46:12 +0000

Just as there are benefits of appreciating our economic situation in terms of a long-run historical perspective, it’s also wise to appreciate our economic situation as just one aspect of our whole political situation. I’ve been thinking about this in light of recent events and reading parts of Tony Judt’s latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century:

The paradox, of course, is that the very success of the mixed-economy welfare states, in providing the social stability and ideological demobilization which made possible the prosperity of the past half century, has led a younger political generation to take that same stability and ideological quiescence for granted and demand the elimination of the “impediment” of the taxing, regulating, and generally interfering state. Whether the economic case for this is as secure as it now appears — whether regulation and social provision were truly an impediment to “growth” and “efficiency” and not perhaps their facilitating condition — is debatable. But what is striking is how far we have lost the capacity even to conceive of public policy beyond a narrowly construed economism. We have forgotten how to think politically. [p. 11]

I’m going to make a darkly ironic suggestion: A good reason not to get irrational and panicky about the financial mess is there is much, much more to worry about. There are signs that everything could go to shit – and I don’t just mean the “real economy,” consumer confidence, employment (not that those aren’t going to shit too), I mean geopolitical stability, the war on terror, and what-have-you.

In other words, instead of freaking out about “the next Great Depression,” try to wrap your brain around “the next Great Depression and the nest World War wrapped up into one.” And we could still do much worse.

Let me be clear. The last thing I want to do is stir up fears. I genuinely don’t believe there’ll be another World War, nor another Great Depression — at least not if we act and think appropriately. I’m not saying bad things will certainly befall our civilization, but that’s no reason to assume that some bad things won’t happen for sure.

We are, let’s not forget, engaged in one or two fairly long wars, and as I noted a couple of days ago, Pakistan is going through some turmoil that threatens to make things even more complicated and deadly.

And here’s something else to add to the list of pan-century parallels: Norman Angell’s Great Illusion, first published in 1909:

According to John Keegan “Europe in the summer of 1914 enjoyed a peaceful productivity so dependent on international exchange and co-operation that a belief in the impossibility of a general war seemed the most conventional of wisdoms. In 1910 an analysis of prevailing economic interdependence, The Great Illusion, had become a best-seller; its author Norman Angell had demonstrated, to the satisfaction of almost all informed opinion, that the disruption of international credit inevitably to be caused by war would either deter its outbreak or bring it speedily to an end.” [Wikipedia]

I hadn’t realized until revisiting it that Angell’s thesis was specifically that it was the avoidance of credit disruption that would prevent war. I had muddled it with Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which was clearly debunked about nine or ten weeks ago (how quickly we’ve moved on!) by the conflictin South Ossetia.

It’s more than a little disconcerting to reflect on Angell and then consider the implications of credit already being deeply disrupted…

Before you say, “No, that can’t happen,” stop and think about how you would have bet 3 months ago on the possibility of the investment banking industry being decimated and government capital being used in the U.K., the U.S. — and now the Netherlands – among other countries, to sustain the viability of their banks, markets, and their economic systems as a whole.

At times I worry that my worries get out of hand. It doesn’t do much good to stir up unfounded fears. But then again, it may be even worse not to be prepared for legitimate threats. It’s only by talking about these things that we can figure out what’s legitimate and what isn’t.

It isn’t totally valid to suggest that the war in Iraq is merely going through a quiet period and it’ll get worse again. It isn’t totally valid to suggest that the war in Afghanistan could go on forever and the war on terror is unwinnable. It isn’t totally valid to suggest there might be a major war within a few years involving some combination of the U.S., China, and Russia.

But on the other hand, it isn’t valid at all to suggest those things are impossible and the relative peace we enjoy right now will go on forever. History shows that prosperity and peace require both hard work and luck. Even if things continued to degenerate to the point that “the next Great Depression and the next World War wrapped into one” seem inevitable, I’d still work my ass off to make things better.

History tells us something else we can’t forget: prosperity and peace are worth the effort.

Lessons from History

Brian — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:43:49 +0000

Yesterday I dealt briefly with the long- vs. short-run looking forward. Today I want to deal with the long- vs. short-run looking back.

We are always in a zone of imperfect visability so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned. It is as if we were in the hollow of the historical wave; not until we reach the crest of the next one can we look back and estimate properly what went before.

That’s from the forward to Arthur Schlesinger’s Crisis of the Old Order – part of his multi-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt — covering most of the Great Depression and the decade leading up to it. One of the reasons I look at history is that we can actually make sense of it, whereas our own time will take decades for historians to understand and explain.

History isn’t an escape from the present, it’s an attempt to find concrete reference points with which to understand the apparent chaos we’re living in — either or by finding events that caused/conditioned our current situation by finding times in which people dealt with circumstances like our own.

Read, for example, The Education of Henry Adams (one of my very favourite books). The late 19th Century makes a lot of sense to us now (for those of us who bother to look) but in that book we can appreciate what those circumstances looked like from the inside.

The book reaches back virtually to the eighteenth century:

The flint-and-steel with which his grandfather [John Quincy] Adams used to light his own fires in the early morning was still on the mantel-piece of his study. The idea of a livery or even a dress for servants, or of an evening toilette, was next to blasphemy. Bath-rooms, water-supplies, lighting, heating, and the whole array of domestic comforts, were unknown at Quincy.

… and stretches virtually to where we are today:

Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid….

That was 1904. Though very different in terms of specifics, the period from roughly 1890 – 1914 is a lot like our age in terms of the speed and depth of change, the role of commercial enterprise, technological advancements, and peace (and the belief that all that would go on forever).

Much of the art and music from that time is still astonishingly ‘new’ to people today. Even futurism is almost a century old:

It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists! [Futurist Manifesto, 1909]

We like to think of our age as one of “unprecedented growth” in technology, knowledge, and wealth, but consider that someone my age (30) a century ago would have witnessed the emergence of the automobile, the airplane, the movies, wireless communications, the phonograph, the skyscraper, the subway, the use of telephones– not to mention electricity in the home, office and factory, along with all the many appliances that suddenly made possible.

Until fairly recently (in terms of decades) most research and development has been a matter of “multiplying and refining” what was invented around the turn of the century (paraphrasing Jacques Barzun). It’s worth pointing out that ‘research and development’ is itself an 1890′s invention. Other things taken for granted in our business-driven society – the assembly line, scientific management, training, advertising as a discipline, chain retail – emerged around the same time.

And consider the 1907 financial crisis in which J.P. Morgan took the initiative in rescuing the U.S financial system — much like the Treasury and Federal Reserve have done now. In fact, the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, largely in response to that crisis as a measure to avoid or address possible crises in the future.

With finance it’s especially difficult to think in terms of years and decades — it’s hard enough thinking in terms of months — even more so in this crisis. It seems like a very long time ago that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the U.S. government — and that was just in September!

But it takes a long time for things to play out. Authorities are just beginning to work out the regulatory tangles in the way of actually implementing the rescue programs. That’ll take months, and work will continue in various (and yet-unknown) forms in the years ahead.

I used to be someone who believed that “things move faster now.” Now I think that’s false. If everything happens so lightening-quick, why has it taken over a year to get to this point from the initial scare of August 2007 (which itself was a slow response to the decline of housing prices that began at least in February)? And we’re talking about taking over a year just to recognize the problems.

Things seem to move fast because we’re so close to the action. We see all the details — we see the Paulson plan turn into the Paulson/Dodd/Frank plan, and then it continues to evolve with Gordon Brown’s plan and on-and-on into who-knows-what in the week ahead. (And just wait until the next president finally takes office.)

We see all the specifics that make 2008 so different from 1908 but we don’t see the general shapes and tones that make it similar – and in some ways, part of the same historic period. A hundred years from now all of the talking and writing about these events will covered in a single lecture.

Eventually all this will be remembered by students as a single, simplified phrase – just as we tend to simplify ’the Gilded Age’ and ‘the Great Depression’ into singular themes. Simplification isn’t always bad. It helps us organize and manage large amounts of information. If we had to go into the details of the Great Depression or the Gilded Age every time you talked about them, we’d never get anywhere.

I’m not just talking about taking lessons from the past, I’m talking about taking lessons from the discipline of history.

Good historians select particular facts and highlight specific themes, bringing them into the foreground of the narrative to make it more meaningful and effective. That skips over a lot of details — many of them important in some ways — but it makes things easier to understand and act on. Having a sense of the general themes makes the details more manageable.

It’ll be a long time before 2008 will be so easy to understand. It’s more practical to have a sense of the history we can understand. That’s the only way we can begin to develop a vague sense of the major themes in our current narrative, which is the only way to make the details of this mess manageable at all.

… Meanwhile, Pakistan Crumbles

Brian — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:35:16 +0000

Quite a contrast from Where Canada Stands:

Pakistan moved closer to a balance of payments crisis on Friday, as the rupee slumped to a record low after the central bank reported it had barely enough foreign currency to cover six weeks of imports. [Reuters]

How barely?

Imports totaled $3.8 billion in September. Exports were $1.78 billion, creating a trade deficit if $2.207 billion.

Or if you prefer a little more scene-setting and rhetorical flourish in your news:

The Zardari government is sailing into a perfect storm of political instability and economic turmoil. The economy is in a virtual freefall. International agencies have slashed its credit ratings. The rupee has hit an all-time low against the dollar. Capital flight is believed to be continuing despite efforts to stop it. Suicide attacks and kidnappings have led to the repatriation of foreign skilled labor. The bourses are a blood bath as foreign investors continue to pull out. Unable to pay its bills, the government has taken to issuing I.O.U.s to private- and public-sector companies. Overall inflation is at a punishing 30-year high. Power shortages, the worst in at least 15 years, are disrupting businesses already hurt by higher input costs. To top it off, much-needed funding and easier terms promised by Pakistan’s allies and multilateral donor agencies have yet to materialize. Foreign-exchange reserves, worth about two months of imports, are fast running out—and with the worsening economic situation, so is public patience. [Newsweek, via Yglesias]

And check out this graphic from Paul Kedrosky. The Pakistani authorities decided to outlaw any stock price drop that would take the index below a set limit, so “it looks more than a little reminiscent of a dying patient hooked up to an EKG.”

And Pakistan’s problems (as everyone ought to know by now) aren’t just economic:

Even as the strain on Pakistan’s economy from suicide bombings and political wrangling becomes manifest, the opposition seems intent on sitting out the war against terrorism and not making Zardari’s or his government’s jobs any easier. On Thursday, after the second day of a rare in-camera intelligence briefing on the militancy to Parliament concluded, opposition members, particularly those from former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s party, expressed dissatisfaction with the proceedings and criticized the government for “continuing” with Musharraf’s policies. Other right-wing politicians, including Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the Jamaat-e-Islami and former cricket star Imran Khan, who are not members of Parliament but were invited by Zardari to attend the sessions, refused to participate. The same day, a suicide bomber breached Islamabad’s high-security zone and blew up a police station. Hours later, the government said it had foiled another attack, this time at the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, and arrested a would-be suicide bomber. Many are hopeful that a political consensus will emerge with the stakes rising for all politicians. Asfandyar Wali Khan, who leads the secular Pashtun party allied with Zardari, was attacked at his home. Days later, a member of Parliament from Sharif’s party was attacked at his home. Both survived the attacks, which together left at least 24 dead. [still Newsweek]

And…

A growing al Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

A U.S. official who participated in drafting the top secret National Intelligence Estimate said it portrays the situation in Pakistan as “very bad.” Another official called the draft “very bleak,” and said it describes Pakistan as being “on the edge.” [McLatchy, via FP Passport]

Doesn’t seem like a good situation. But I’m sure someone will come to the rescue…

China has assured Pakistan of help to get out of its economic crisis, the Pakistani ambassador to Beijing said on Friday, but he gave no details and did not say if China had agreed to urgently needed new loans. [Reuters]

Well, at the very least, geopolitical dynamics are becoming a lot more interesting – both in general terms and specifically concerning the increasingly problematic war in Afghanistan.

Terrorists, Great Friends

Brian — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:27:23 +0000

The conditions that create Islamic terrorists aren’t as straightforward as one might assume. None of the easy answers accord with the facts. According to research presented in a new book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman, here’s a rough summary of what doesn’t cause people to become terrorists:

mental illness
poverty
lack of education
sociopathy
psychopathy
suffering trauma
brainwashing
deep religiousness

Cass Sunstein (who I seem to be quoting daily now) explains in a review of Sageman’s book for the New Republic:

Sageman finds that terrorists are neither sociopaths nor psychopaths. Very few people in his data set display any kind of mental disorder. Indeed, Sageman notes that the low incidence of disorders suggests that “as a group, global Islamist terrorists may be in better mental health than the rest of the population.” Some people have speculated that terrorists suffer from sexual frustration, but the vast majority of global Islamic terrorists are married, and two-thirds of them have children. Most Islamic terrorists lack any kind of criminal history. Many people think that terrorists are poorly educated, but here, too, the evidence goes the other way. Sageman finds that nearly two- thirds attended university, a rate that sharply contrasts with that in their home countries, in which fewer than 10 percent go beyond high school. Indeed, the percentage of terrorists who attended university actually exceeds the average rate in the United States (slightly over 50 percent)! And while trauma is often thought to help explain terrorism, Sageman finds little in the background of Islamic terrorists.

The most important factor is group dynamics — “they are ordinary individuals who move to radical positions as a result of discussions with like-minded others.”

This fits into Sunstein’s current work on ideological extremism and social polarization. A couple of years ago he was involved with an experiment (sponsored by ABC News) to observe the effects of in-group deliberation:

Two cities were chosen: Boulder (a predominantly liberal area) and Colorado Springs (generally Bush country). About 60 citizens were brought together to explore three of the most controversial issues of the day: affirmative action, an international treaty to control global warming, and civil unions for same-sex couples.

People in Boulder deliberated with others from Boulder, and people from Colorado Springs deliberated with people from Colorado Springs. Thus people were generally sorted into groups of like-minded people.

Citizens expressed their views in three ways: anonymously, before deliberation began; in small groups, which deliberated and tried to reach verdicts; and anonymously, after deliberation concluded. Our key question was this: What would be the effect of deliberation on people’s views?

Here are our three major findings. (1) Liberals, in Boulder, became distinctly more liberal on all three issues. Conservatives, in Colorado Springs, become distinctly more conservative on all three issues. The result of deliberation was to produce extremism — even though deliberation consisted of a brief (15 minute) exchange of facts and opinions! (I am speaking here of shifts in anonymous statements, not of shifts between individual views and group views — though groups were also more extreme than their individual members, predeliberation.)

(2) The division between liberals and conservatives became much more pronounced. Before deliberation, the median view, among Boulder groups, was not always so far apart from the median view among Colorado City groups. After deliberation, the division increased significantly.

(3) Deliberation much decreased diversity among liberals; it also much decreased diversity among conservatives. After deliberation, members of nearly all groups showed, in their post-deliberation statements, far more uniformity than they did before deliberation.

The kind of extreme-extremism that leads to terrorism tends to occur either within enclaves of expatriates, or online, where people can find “like-minded others” with whom to engage in polarazing dialogues.

Fascinating and scary, especially since there are more potential dangers here than just Islamic terrorism.

No Related Post

Brian Frank » global

History, Perspective & Speed: 2001 – 2011

Related Posts:

Ugly War, Pretty Package

Related Posts:

WikiLeaks Reveals! What Happens When Anyone Can Be As Annoying As Michael Moore

Related Posts:

Why Truth Matters (Not Just About WikiLeaks)

Any system that can’t survive the truth is a system that can’t survive. #

Related Posts:

More Aspects of Google’s New Approach to China

Related Posts:

Copenhagen Wasn’t About Climate

Related Posts:

Death of an Immortal

Related Posts:

Iran, An Intro to the Age of Openness?

Related Posts:

Regarding Leadership

Related Posts:

China: Mother of All Enrons?

Related Posts:

Pakistan and Complex Conflicts

Related Posts:

The Foundation for Middle East Peace…

Related Posts:

Dubai

Related Posts:

Thinking About War

Related Posts:

Terrorist Jujitsu

Related Posts:

History of Perpetual Peace

Related Posts:

Lessons from History

Related Posts:

… Meanwhile, Pakistan Crumbles

Related Posts:

Terrorists, Great Friends

Related Posts: