The Compulsive Explainer

U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Drug Lords Tied to Taliban

From the NY Times

WASHINGTON — Fifty Afghans believed to be drug traffickers with ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed, reflecting a major shift in American counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan, according to a Congressional study to be released this week.

United States military commanders have told Congress that they are convinced that the policy is legal under the military’s rules of engagement and international law. They also said the move is an essential part of their new plan to disrupt the flow of drug money that is helping finance the Taliban insurgency.

In interviews with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is releasing the report, two American generals serving in Afghanistan said that major traffickers with proven links to the insurgency have been put on the “joint integrated prioritized target list.” That means they have been given the same target status as insurgent leaders, and can be captured or killed at any time.

The generals told Senate staff members that two credible sources and substantial additional evidence were required before a trafficker was placed on the list, and only those providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.

Currently, they said, there are about 50 major traffickers who contribute money to the Taliban on the list.

“We have a list of 367 ‘kill or capture’ targets, including 50 nexus targets who link drugs and the insurgency,” one of the generals told the committee staff. The generals were not identified in the Senate report, which was obtained by The New York Times.
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How this can be done under international law is a mystery to me. The American military can decide who they want to kill - and then kill them without a legal review of any kind. This is exactly what I said in We Have the Right to Kill Whomever We Please. 

The article ends on this note:
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A major unresolved problem in the counternarcotics strategy is the fact that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remains wide open, and the Pakistanis are doing little to close down drug smuggling routes.

A senior American law enforcement official in the region is quoted in the report as saying that cooperation with Pakistan on counternarcotics is so poor that traffickers cross the border with impunity.

“We give them leads on targets,” the official said in describing the Pakistani government’s counternarcotics tactics, adding, “We get smiles, a decent cup of tea, occasional reheated sandwiches and assertions of progress, and we all leave with smiles on our faces.”
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He could have said the same thing of Afghanistan's other borders. Drugs flow through them with impunity - as they always have done.

As they have done with America's own borders. Money talks, and drug raids only make drugs more profitable.

A new Technology Changes the Structure of Discourse

I am now reading Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: how the past can improve the future, by my favorite thinker: Neil Postman.

His objective here is to reacquaint us (or more likely, acquaint us) of what the Enlightenment did: it created the modern world - and made us modern people, for better or worse. Right now he is discussing the impact of technology.

The technology of the Enlightenment was the Printing Press. It made the Reformation possible and mass literacy possible. It is hard for us now to appreciate this, since we are now post-literate and post-modern. But at the time, it was literally an world-changing event. The Founding Fathers, for example, were all voracious readers, writers and thinkers.

As an aside, I am the only one who reads anything in my hamlet of La Alegria de Orosi. The locals are literate, but never read. This is not something they do for recreation. They are people-focused, not print-focused. But let me get back to myself.

I was always an enthusiastic adopter of the latest technology; I figured it gave me a jump ahead of everybody else. But I think I outsmarted myself.

As a young man, the outdoors was my passion, and I was in it as much as possible. I should have gone to work for the Park Service, which was still possible back in the Fifties. But instead I did the sensible thing and became an engineer - even though I was not an engineer at heart. As a result, I wasted much of my life. But let me return to the real subject - which is not me, but technology. I sometimes confuse the two. 

Let me quote from Postman:
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What is at issue are the changes that might occur in our psychic habits, our social relations, and, most certainly, our political institutions, especially electoral politics. Nothing is more obvious than that a new technology changes the structure of discourse. It does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence, and by demanding a certain kind of content.

Ronald Reagan, for example, could not have been president were it not for the bias of television. This is a man who rarely spoke precisely and never eloquently (except perhaps when reading a speech written by someone else). And yet he was called The Great Communicator. Why? Because he was magic on television. His televised image projected a sense of authenticity, intimacy, and caring. It did not much matter if citizens agreed with what he said or understood what he said. This does not in itself suggest that he shouldn't have been president or that he did his job poorly. It is to say that television gives power to some while it deprives others. It is not human nature we worry about here but rather what part of our humanness will be nurtured by technology.

I have often wondered how Abraham Lincoln would have fared on television. Because of the invention of photography in the 1840s, he was the first president to be the subject of continuous comment about his looks (ugly and ungainly, many said). Would it be too much to say that Americans must be eternally grateful for the absence of television when Lincoln made his run for the presidency? Or perhaps we might say that had television existed, no such person as Lincoln could have become a serious candidate for president.

The point is that we must consider whether or not (or to what degree) the bias of a new medium is relevant to the qualities we require of a politician. The twenty-seventh president of the United States - William Howard Taft - was fat, very fat, well in excess of 300 pounds. We may assume that this physical condition would make him an unsuitable candidate in our own time, when the imagery of television dominates our perceptions.
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What will the impact of smart phones be? Here everything depends on the ability to dazzle: the instant impression. Here Reagan would be hopelessly old-fashioned because his style needed a little time to soak in (he was a movie actor). Now things move too fast for that. 

I suspect other forces, forces that can move faster than people can, will control our future political decisions  - without our being aware of it at all.

Why Latin America will never Catch Up

Basic cultural changes are extremely difficult, and for Latin America to catch up it would have to change its culture - which it sees no reason to do. It is content with a superficial layer of American popular culture on top of the late medieval culture it inherited from Spain or Portugal.

A short historical review is in order here. Northern Europe went through profound changes that changed its countries into Protestants (who rejected religious authority, and by implication authority of all kinds) - and who recognized that reality is objective (scientific), not subjective. 

Southern Europe made none of these changes, and to this day is unaware of them - except for some of its intellectuals. Its culture is subjective and personal, which certainly has its advantages - but also severe disadvantages.

France, after a brilliant start, did not get its political act together until well after WWII. The same could be said for Italy. Once the Italian Renaissance was over, it was over.

A Tico friend was complaining to me about Costa Rica's low-quality infrastructure - meaning, for him, physical infrastructure - bad highways, for example. He is certainly right, you risk breaking you legs walking on Tico sidewalks. There are practically no sewerage treatment plants. Raw sewerage just runs down the gutters directly into the streams.

Unsavory as these are, their cultural deficiencies are more severe. They suffer from a lack of organization at all levels. And this comes, as I have said before, from deficient concepts of space and time and ethics - all things that the North is better at, relatively speaking. 

Some of my friends will object that the poor condition of the South is due to colonialism - and that is partly true. The South (and the undeveloped world in general) has been exploited, and is still being exploited. The effects of colonialism have been profound and long-lasting. Latin America, for example, has never recovered from the effects of the Spanish and Portuguese. 

But the most serious defect was the cultures they inherited, which they kept in their isolation from the rest of the world, which keeps them from joining the modern world.

I want to add that there are many individual Latinos, and Latino organizations, that are as advanced as any anywhere. Like advanced Americans, they realize that can have little effect on their culture.

We Have the Right to Kill Whomever We Please

The Geneva Convention makes a clear distinction between civilians and combatants, and states that civilians should not be the targets of any military action. But our military, and those of our allies, have targeted entire populations, making only perfunctory efforts to differentiate between the two groups.

And the American public has supported this policy wholeheartedly. As far as it is concerned, the Geneva Convention should never have happened, and they have, in effect, rescinded it, without going to the trouble of any legal formalities. They are at war with enemy civilizations, and these include civilians, because they support their militants. They are not interested in the rule of law, only the rule of power - and they intend to stay in power.

I watched Bill Moyer's Journal, where he interviews Judge Richard J. Goldstone, the man responsible for a UN report critical of Israel in its war in Gaza. Judge Goldstone is a Jew, and a Zionist, and many of his fellow Jews now consider him a traitor - even though he is only trying to help Israel regain its reputation for fairness, honesty, and respect for human rights.

Most Israelis, however are not interested in human rights - and neither are its allies, including, most prominently, America, which has dedicated itself to the suppression of the report - with our Secretary of State in the lead.

Israel is simply retaliating against the Gaza Palestinians for electing Hamas, and many of their actions were aimed at destroying the Gaza economy, in addition to the Gaza military. They plowed under crops with military bulldozers, for example, and destroyed chicken farms, as well as many factories. They didn't go out of their way to kill civilians, but if any were around during one of these operations, on one of the farms slated for destruction, for example, they were destroyed too. 

Any atrocities committed were dealt with by secret Israeli military tribunals, with no public involvement permitted, with no acknowledgment of any wrongs, and with no compensation for the victims.

Meanwhile, in America, similar crimes, of a much larger extent, committed by the Bush/Cheney administration are also being ignored. And civilian populations in Afghanistan and Pakistan are suffering tremendously. Americans do not care, they are at war, and in war bad things happen. Too bad for them.

A Smart Phone Makes you Smarter

Not only that, it also makes you more socially desirable, more attractive to other people. People's hand-held electronic possessions have now become part of themselves, just like their clothing, home and car.

A cell phone is nice, but it is not something you can show off to anyone. When they first came out, everybody wanted to have one of the new tiny ones, but this fad has passed. Now they have so many new things they are boring - except for thieves, of course (a real problem in Central America, where people will kill to get the latest pair of sneakers). 

A smart phone has a decent-sized display and a speaker, and can perform all kinds of tricks to impress your friends.

However, if you are not into impressing people what good are they?

You Gotta Subscribe to Ribbon Farm

You gotta do this for no other reason than to learn how to do a subscription on the Internet. If you already know how to do this, you can ignore the rest of this posting - but I still think you will enjoy his site. It's something else. Even the comments are worth reading, he has some interesting friends. If you are really high-tech, you can look at his code to get some ideas for yourself.

To subscribe to an Internet site, such as a blog, you use the RSS feed published by that site. You don't have to know anything about how this works, which is rather complicated, just consider it a piece of Internet magic. Doing this used to complicated, but now it is super easy - especially with Firefox. I now have seven subscriptions lined up along the top of Firefox. For example, I just now looked at Robert Reich's blog Too Big to Fail: Why The Big Banks Should Be Broken Up, But Why The White House and Congress Don't Want To .

When you are on a site you want to subscribe to, to get more of their good stuff automatically, just go to the bookmarks menu at the top of Firefox, or whatever browser you are using. If this site has an RSS feed, the selection subscribe to this page will be active. 

In Internet Explorer, click the RSS logo, select the feed, and subscribe to it. It's help facility can also help you with this. Windows does have excellent help, the best in the business. 

Venkatesh Rao, the guru of Ribbon Farm makes this ever easier: just click on Subscribe on the upper-right corner of one of his blog postings, for example, here is his latest.

Enjoy!

When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins

A previous posting We know more and more, and therefore we know less and less was from the book The Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen. This posting is also taken from that book. The sub-title of the book is Fast and slow time in the information age. He has a lot to say about this, including the following:

This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent tasks first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for things like thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships.

Here is another main point:

The main scarce resource for suppliers of any commodity in the information society is the attention of others. Whether it is advertisements, talks, scientific articles, knowledge or simply physical commodities that we offer the outside world, there is an intensified competition for the vacant slots in the time budgets of the target groups. These vacant moments become fewer and shorter, since the people in question are subjected to powerful expectations that they should squeeze ever more impressions, commodities, experiences and pieces of information into their lives. The next impression kills the previous one at an accelerating speed. 

He is not the first one to notice this. Providers of every kind on the Internet are well aware of it. They are fighting like hell to get their brief moment in the awareness of the viewer.

A friend of mine down here in Costa Rica was complaining to me that he had spent 1000 dollars on his Web site, which hadn't done a bit of good. I was shocked, 1000 dollars down here is a lot of money. I told him he had been cheated, but I was thinking something else: that he was helpless and stupid - which he is.

The Conservative Right will Destroy America

History is clear about this: mass radical hysteria destroys any nation it overcomes - and this is exactly the aim of American conservatives - no matter what they say. 

In the last century this kind of movement was called Fascist, and it resulted in the destruction of Germany, Italy, and Japan. It succeeded because it claimed to save these countries from evil forces, which varied from country to country, but could be summarized as decadence and weakness. 

This was even the case with Islam. From Wikipedia:

The Islamic Golden Age or the Islamic Renaissance,^[1] is traditionally dated from the 9th to 13th centuries for 400 years C.E.,^[2][3] but has been extended to the 15th^[4] century by recent scholarship. During this period, artists, engineers, scholars, poets, philosophers, geographers and traders in the Islamic world contributed to the arts, agriculture, economics, industry, law, literature, navigation, philosophy, sciences, sociology, and technology, both by preserving and building upon earlier traditions and by adding inventions and innovations of their own.^[5] Howard R. Turner writes: "Muslim artists and scientists, princes and laborers together made a unique culture that has directly and indirectly influenced societies on every continent."^[5]

Islam is now a reactionary, backward culture, because it was overcome by mass radical hysteria - in its case a religious hysteria. In the US, the conservatives have religious connections also, with the Evangelicals and the Mormons. But, like Fascism, it is mainly secular, a religion of its own - like Communism was.

Perhaps you think I am being hysterical myself, and blowing this problem out of proportion. Americans are determined to be optimistic, there was even a official Optimist social organization, similar to the Lions, at one time - but I haven't heard of it for awhile.

Recent events, concerning a posting on my blog The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans, has startled me. I considered this to be an expose of the conservative movement, showing how crazy it had become. But my brother, a true conservative himself, commented:

One of the rare times that you have captured the conservative philosophy accurately. Good work

Once again, I quote from the original article from the Democracy Corp:

First and foremost, these conservative Republican voters believe Obama is deliberately and ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt our country and dramatically expand government control over all aspects of our daily lives. They view this effort in sweeping terms, and cast a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of the United States as it was conceived by our founders and developed over the past 200 years. This concern combines with a profound sense of collective identity. They readily identify themselves as a minority in this country - a minority whose values are mocked and attacked by a liberal media and class of elites. They also believe they possess a level of knowledge and understanding when it comes to politics and current events, one gained from a rejection of the mainstream media and an embrace of conservative media and pundits such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, which sets them apart even more.

Looking at the current political debate, it was evident in our focus group discussions that the divide between conservative Republicans and even the most conservative-leaning independents remains very, very wide. Independents harbor doubts about Obama’s health care reform but are desperate to see some version of health care reform pass this year; the conservative Republicans view any health care reform as a victory for Obama and are militantly opposed. The language they use further reflects this divide. Conservative Republicans fully embrace the ‘socialism’ attacks on Obama and believe it is the best, most accurate way to describe him and his agenda. Independents largely dismiss these attacks as partisan rhetoric detracting from a legitimate debate about what many of them do see as excessive government control and spending.

To me, this sounds like mass radical hysteria: mass insanity. Insanity always destroys those it overcomes.

We know more and more, and therefore we know less and less

Much of the following is taken from the book The Tyranny of the Moment by Thomas Hylland Eriksen, first published in Norwegian. He is saying much the same as Maggie Jackson in Distraction, which I have mentioned in my posting Cultural Attention Deficit Disorder.

At first glance, what he says makes no sense, surely we should try to know as much as possible. But I, for one, have reached the limit of what I can absorb, and I am sure others have too. What I write is falling on deaf ears - not because the owners are stupid or lazy, but because they are into terminal overload - and they have to shut down to protect themselves.

But they are completely unaware of this; cannot see the danger in their situation; and cannot slow down.

I quote:

When there is a surplus, and no scarcity, of information, the degree of comprehension falls in proportion with the growth in amount of information.

One has to limit one's information out of consideration for one's knowledge. Often, students write their best papers about the topics they are least familiar with; this forces them to structure, justify and argue better than they usually do, and the main argument does not drown in details. Put differently: after spending six months in a foreign country, you can write a book. After ten years, you can I write an article. The more you know, the more you do not know. This general principle is part of the human condition in the information society. 

I must repeat the premise of this argument: this happens when too much information is available - something we are normally proud of. Is there a solution? Yes, and he goes into it later:

The main scarce resource for inhabitants of the information society is well-functioning filters.

Often this means giving yourself some time out - something our hectic life-style makes difficult. 

I will be coming back to him in future postings.

The Latest from John le Carré

From Wikipedia:

John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, born 19 October 1931) is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.

Le Carré states he did not know his mother, who abandoned him at the age of five, until he was reacquainted with her at the age of 21. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who had been jailed for insurance fraud and was constantly in debt.

I knew none of this; I only knew he wrote excellent spy-thrillers, which I have enjoyed. He has not hesitated to expose the high-level incompetence that seems to pervade the profession - and this is part of his appeal.

His latest is A Most Wanted Man, and it is up to his usual standards. The enemy now are Islamic radicals, but the operators portrayed here are probably innocent. The man in the middle is trying to develop them as leads into a terrorist network - resources that are badly needed. But he is opposed by those who not interested in anything so subtle - they want to arrest them, using dubious means, and torture them: mainly American operatives.