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I’m suspending Project 366 for now because of omgwtf.
I was pretty surprised to learn last week about a U.S. Army training that advocated “total war” against Islam itself, including the bombing of Mecca and Medina. As it’s sunk in more and more, the surprise has turned into horror. I remember watching the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad on satellite TV and crying. In the nearly 10 years since, though, I’ve grown increasingly numb, and it takes something awful like this to reawaken my conscience. And I have a lot of shame about that.
The news wasn’t new, actually, at all. On Tuesday, April 24th, 2012, the Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered that all training and educational materials provided by all four branches of the U.S. military be reviewed to get rid of anti-Islam references or content. What prompted this was the “discovery” that a course taught at the Joint Forces Staff College called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” advocated a “total war” against Islam in order to maintain security for America. The course has been taught five times a year since 2004, with about 20 students each time. So something like eight hundred captains, commanders, lieutenant colonels and colonels from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have sat through a class where they were told that “the United States is at war with Islam and we ought to ought to just recognize that we are war with Islam.”
“By conservative estimates,” according to course materials written by Lieutenant Commander Matthew A. Dooley, 10 percent of the world’s Muslims, “a staggering 140 million people … hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit [to Islam].” The decorated soldier notes that ”some actions offered for consideration here will be seen as not ‘politically correct’ in the eyes of many,” (using the hateful formulation that is now de rigueur on the political right) before making the suggestion of “taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable).’’ Other tactics included “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation … Islam reduced to cult status’’ and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia “destroyed.’’ And that was just the main instructor’s contribution. Guest lecturers had even more to offer.
John Guandolo is a former FBI agent who was ousted for sleeping with a witness. As a freelance Islamophobe, he has traveled the country in support of people who want to block the construction of mosques, asserting that Muslims “do not have a First Amendment right to do anything.” In Guandolo’s presentation “Usual Responses from the Enemy When Presented With the Truth,” he explains his distorted view of Islam to students, and in other materials claims to show how “it is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians.” Stephen Coughlin, a lecturer at the Naval War College and at the FBI’s Washington Field Office, blamed al-Qaeda for the overthrow of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak and Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi as part of a scheme by Islamists to conquer the world. And Serge Trifkovic featured some YouTubes that supposedly prove that President Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The fact is that this is no longer fringe behavior in American society. Along with the usual assortment of racists and jingoists, many Americans on the political right have no problem with Dooley’s ideology. Casual references to nuclear bombing cities in the Middle East have been common since before September 11, and American Muslims have seen their civil rights steadily stripped away. So it seems entirely unsurprising that these attitudes have deeply penetrated the military. This year we have been treated to reports of bodies being pissed on by Marines, photos of troops under Nazi Waffen-SS banner and others posing with Afghan corpses and body parts, as well as the notorious Qur’an burnings at Bagram Air Base.
LTC Dooley no longer teaches his course at JFSC, but he is still a part of the school’s faculty. And while the colonel who complained about the course in April deserves credit – as does GEN Dempsey for insisting that presentations at any military facility “are consistent with our values” – let’s not forget that for eight years rising U.S. military officers rated the course “mostly positive, usually around the 90% range.”
This is who we are. This is what we believe.
Ugh. Had a great weekend in the country, but I’m already falling way behind with Project 366… and it’s only been four days! And next week is another out-of-towner. Sigh. Anyway: on with it.
I wanted to look at chivalry for today. I just finished Dark Tower for the second time, and I’m really captivated by the heroic ideal, especially with regard to my men’s work. Etymologically, ”shivalry” was defined as the ”status or fee associated with military follower owning a war horse,” and as usage changed over the centuries it became synonymous with the code of the warrior caste. Excellence in the use of arms, courage, gallantry and loyalty were held as ideal traits. Cowardice and “baseness” – lack of integrity and mean-spiritedness – were detested. The medieval knight glorified ” the valor, tactics and ideals of ancient Romans.” Johan Huizinga wrote what is apparently considered the definitive text of medieval society called The Waning of the Middle Ages. In it, he notes that “the source of the chivalrous idea, is pride aspiring to beauty, and formalized pride gives rise to a conception of honour, which is the pole of noble life.” Huizinga also asserts that “the more primitive a society is, the more the need of conforming real life to an ideal standard overflows beyond literature into the sphere of the actual.” So the pursuit of the “life beautiful,” or “true culture,” became the aristocratic ideal. In Huizinga’s formulation, “to be representative of true culture means to produce by conduct, by customs, by manners, by costume, by deportment, the illusion of a heroic being, full of dignity and honour, of wisdom, and, at all events, of courtesy.”
A chivalrous knight works in three spheres: what is due to his countrymen and fellow Christians; what is due to God; and what is due to women. The romantic tales that sprung up around the knighthood emphasized the ideal of courtly love, but the knight was supposed to be gracious towards, and protective of, all women and others who cannot protect themselves: widows, children, the elderly. Knights were disciplined, required to tell the truth at all times, always kept their faith and never turned their back on a fight. Knights persevered to the end in any thing they started. The main vow from the knights was that they shall fight for the welfare of all.
King Arthur’s knight Gawain is in many ways the avatar of chivalry in British literature. When the Green Knight rode boldly into Arthur’s great hall on New Year’s Day, it was Gawain who claimed the right to be the king’s champion, and in a classic style:
I pray you, my lord, in plain words, let this combat be mine. Bid me rise from my seat and stand by you, so that without discourtesy to my liege lady the Queen I can leave her side; and I will give you my counsel before all this noble company. In truth it is not seemly, when such a challenge is thrown out in your hall, that you yourself should be so eager to take it up, when there are sitting around you so many of your knights…. I may be the weakest of all of them, and the feeblest of wit…. But since this business is so foolish, and beneath your dignity as King, and since I have made my request first, grant it to me. Whether I have spoken fittingly or not, I leave to this company to decide.
Bertrand Russell once said that “one of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” And this seems particularly true in our time (by which I mean the 21st-century United States) where those who demonstrably know the least – devotees of supply-side economics, for example, or crank pseudo-skeptics – are the most vocal and assertive.
David Dunning, a psych professor at Cornell, along with grad student Justin Kruger, decided to look into this dynamic for a 1999 paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” They had some undergrads self-assess their logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor, then tested them (for the “humor” test, they were asked to rate a series of jokes, and their results were compared with those of a group of professional comedians). The participants were then shown their test scores, and again asked to rate themselves. The less-competent students still thought of themselves as more competent than the tests showed them to be, while, interestingly, the more competent people tended to underestimate their competence. The competent people who found some problems easy assumed that they were easy for everybodt, whether or not that was actually the case.
Dunning and Kruger’s finding was not merely that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence, but also that incompetent people:
Dunning calls this dynamic “the anosognosia of everyday life,” by analogy to the neuroological disorder in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of, or denies the existence of, that disability. “An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed,” explained Kruger, “simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.”’
It also appears to be the case that this is not a universal trait. Studies of East Asian students appear to show that competent and less-competent people alike are more likely to underestimate their competence.
I’m still in the process of exploring what it means to me to be a “cultural Catholic” in the way that some of my friends are “cultural Jews:” I like the art, dig (some of) the traditions, but don’t have any love for the outright insanity and bigotry of Mother Church. Rational materialism is too sterile and bland for me, and while I have a lot of appreciation for neo-Paganism, it feels contrived and precious sometimes.
So I’ve been messing around with reclaiming my Catholicism; or, rather, those parts of it which seem relevant and inspiring. The art, as I’ve said,and the architecture: a lot of cathedrals are AWESOME. The spooky mystery of the Tridentine Mass appeals to my love of ritual, the rosary and crucifix are powerful symbols to me, and the Calendar of Saints conveniently includes a lot of the pagan deities I venerated as a young hippie.
And let me just put it out there: the scary, eschatological Christianity of The Book of Revelation speaks to something within me… especially when given voice by someone like Johnny Cash.
Fortunately, a lot of work has been done by the exponents of teología de la liberación (liberation theology), the radical, outlaw movement started in Latin America in the 50s and 60s.They stress the “social gospel” in Jesus’ teachings, and were informed by Marxist thought in those bad old days of strongmen and United Fruit. Liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff and others developed an exegesis (interpretation) of Revelation as a liberatory text.
Think of the context in which “John the Revelator” wrote. Jerusalem had been destroyed and Judea was a Roman province. Jews (and Judeo-Christians like the Revelator) were dispersed, living as refugees in a Greco-Roman empire which held values that were alien to their way of life. Rather than a description of the end of the world, then, the fantastic imagery of the Apocalypse can be seen as God’s promise that the empire will fall. The liberation theology exegesis shows how the world of mid 20th-Century Latin America parallels Judea of the 1st: their way of life destroyed, a greedy empire (the Beast) ruling over all. In the words of the Chilean priest Pablo Richard Guzmán, ”Revelation is not an isolated book, one belonging to a sectarian or desperate tiny group, but rather a universal book that pushes for radical reform in the church and a new way of being Christian in the world.”
The Beast of today? Rapacious, predatory capitalism, in all its guises: a profit-before-everything ethos which puts money ahead of people; the destruction of the living environment and the denial of the evidence of global climate change; the commoditization of food and of water. “And they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?” (Rev. 13:4) “There is no alternative.” (Margaret Thatcher)
Lutheran pastor Barbara Rossing sees the great struggle not as the end of times, but as the beginning. “Instead of people going up,” she says of the Rapture, “it is God who descends.” This utopian dream is at the heart of the apocalyptic vision (from apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil”) of Revelation as liberation.
To help myself study for CCNA recertification in July, I’ll kick off Project 366 with a little disquisition on Open Shortest Path First, which is a protocol used by network routers to determine the best way for traffic to flow through a network. I’ll keep it sort of middlebrow as a way of trying to get the basic ideas clear without lapsing into indistry jargon. The difficulty here for me is that talking about a routing protocol touches on so many other areas – the concept of routing itself, as well as juicy mathematical subjects like graph theory – that it’s difficult to stay focused on the core of OSPF itself. ADD Challenge: Accepted!
OSPF is an interior routing protocol. This means that it’s used inside groups of connected networks – or Autonomous Systems – that have common policies, rather than across the open Internet. Routers running OSPF exchange link-state advertisements (LSAs) describing the state of every link on the network. Some links may be temporarily down, while some links may have higher “cost” (they may actually cost more money to use, or they may offer worse throughput or require more hops). The routers use these LSAs to build a link state database (LSDB) – a map, if you will, of all the networks in the area. These maps are periodically shared or “flooded” to all routers.
Networks managed by OSPF can be large and complex. So it’s useful sometimes to sub-divide these networks into “areas” to simplify administration. The so-called “Backbone Area” is the core of any OSPF network, and contains an Autonomous System Border router (ASBR) which connects that AS to the rest of the internet. Any other areas directly connect to it via Area Border Routers (ABRs), and so the backbone area must be able to connect to the rest of the internet even if one or more of the routers in the Backbone are unavailable. Backbone routers receive information from outside the AS via the ASBR as well as updates about internal routing from other areas inside the system via the ABRs. ”Stub” areas, on the other hand, don’t get routing information from outside the AS. They use a default route to the ABR to deal with any traffic destined outside the system, and only exchange routing information with other routers in the AS, known as Internal Routers or IRs.
In practice, the rigid partitioning of ASes into Backbone and Stub areas turned out to be limiting, and a virtual bestiary of areas has evolved over the years. The Not-So-Stubby-Area includes elements of both Backbone and Stub, in that there is an ASBR that can import routes directly from routers it is connected to outside the AS and advertise them to routers in other areas inside the AS. But because it’s a Stub, routers in this area still can’t get external routes from the Backbone or from other areas inside the AS, but only from its own ASBR. The Totally Stubby Area, on the other hand, does not even receive information about routes in other areas, let alone outside the AS. There is even a Totally-Stubby Not-So-Stubby-Area for times when it’s advisable to have an ASBR inside a Totally Stubby Area. In this case, all traffic destined outside the area still goes to the default route, but routers in the area still get information from outside the AS and can communicate them to routers in other areas inside the AS.
Well, that was awful.
The main idea behind of all this Totally and Not-So stubbing is to minimize the amount of updates that are sent around inside the system. After all, the whole point is to improve performance, so creating another chatty source of traffic becomes counter-productive beyond a certain point. The benefit here is that the “map” of the AS can be built relatively quickly and any changes are rapidly disseminated through the area.
OSPF requires more router horsepower than many other protocols, but is considered more efficient than the other major link-state protocol IS-IS, which is more commonly used on extremely large (>1000 router) systems.
I came across a blog post yesterday about this kid who wrote three books in the last year on topics he knew nothing about. Which sounds awesome, and exactly the kind of thing I would try to do. The way he managed to do it was that he decided to learn one new thing a day, and blog about it.
I’ve set myself up to have to learn a lot over the next year, and it felt right that I should commit to something like this. Since the two big challenges are re-certifying as a CCNA and going for my CCNP, my first though was that I’d revive my moribund old technical writing blog. But I’m probably not going to want to do one Cisco topic a day, and a lot of the learning over the next year is going to be in decidedly non-techy areas (getting married, doing men’s movement stuff, martial arts, and traveling… to name a few). So the clue-by-four it is.
I don’t remember if this links to Facebook, and anyone who actually ever saved me in RSS (do people other than me still even use RSS?) might be surprised to see me pop up. So I hope this ends up being reasonably interesting to anyone other than me. The public accountability piece is actually really important, in my judgment. It’s one thing to say you’re going to do something, and entirely another to actually step up day after day and do it.
So: Day Zero! I already have an idea of what today’s Thing will be, so hopefully I can do it justice before the Celtics game starts…
The shocking revelation in April 2012 that Mitt Romney had been diagnosed with advanced-stage pancreatic cancer threw the Republican race into turmoil. Romney’s string of primary victories had already clinched the nomination, but it soon became clear he would not be well enough to serve. Romney privately groused from his hospital bed in San Diego that he would “rather give [his] delegates to Obama than to Newt Gingrich.”
Ron Paul stood a distant, but solid, second to Romney as the August convention approached. Gingrich had imploded in the March primary bonanza, and Paul’s libertarian, populist message seemed to resonate more with primary voters than Santorum’s. In an intricate deal crafted over weeks of shuttle diplomacy between the Romney and Gingrich camps, Romney came out for Paul, who had agreed to name Gingrich as his running mate.
The Republican convention in Tampa was a raucous affair, with mainstream Republicans still in mourning over Romney seemingly dazed by shouting, clapping Paul and Gingrich supporters. Paul’s acceptance speech in Tampa – characterized as “surprisingly reasonable” by one commentator – did much to ease the tension, but Gingrich was visibly stiff as he waved from the stage.
The Greek default in March had caused anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic, but Italy’s sudden spiral into bankruptcy in mid-July sent stocks sharply down worldwide. While riots convulsed Rome, Milan and Naples for weeks, Obama hunkered down in Washington. Years of stimulus and quantitative easing had left the White House and Fed with very few tools to prevent a second Great Recession. The President watched the stock market – and his approval rating – plummet.
Obama’s victory over a candidate widely regarded as a laughingstock still seemed assured. However, YouTube video of a US drone attack on a preschool in Pakistan generated outrage on the political left, and with Obama’s perceived closeness to Wall Street interests, college campuses and urban Occupations began to sprout “Ron Paul Revolution” signs. The race was officially too close to call as November approached.
In a rerun of the disastrous 2000 election, the electoral college was tied with the votes of a single state – this time: Nebraska – in dispute. As the recounts dragged on, an appeal to the Supreme Court by the Obama campaign was rejected. The Electoral College met early, on December 20, 2012, and without a clear mandate, Nebraska’s electors unanimously voted for Paul, handing him the election. A second appeal to the Supreme Court, on the constitutionality of this action, was rejected.
Ron Paul gave his acceptance speech by national television on December 21, 2012.
Once in office, Paul moved swiftly to implement his campaign promises. The Federal departments of Energy, Commerce, Interior, Education, and Housing and Urban Development were eliminated, drastically cutting the Federal budget… and wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process. As Great Recession II ground on and official unemployment figures stood at 15%, Paul began a second, even more radical reform: he signed an Executive Order to abolish the Federal Reserve and return the US to the gold standard.
The Paul administration decided on an arbitrary peg: $2500 to the ounce, a number somewhat higher than the spot rate on the day he made that announcement. Within hours, however, the price of gold – now denominated in euro – shot up 10%. By the end of that week, its price had increased by 50%… and the dollar had lost a third of its value.
Panic set in. The interest rate on US Treasury bonds rapidly increased as investors chose gold itself – or other currencies – over dollars. Americans were shocked to find that their life savings were suddenly worth a small pile of yellow coins: coins that were increasingly difficult to get. The UK made a demand on billions of dollars of gold, as it had done in 1971. Fort Knox went on a 24-hour lockdown, tanks patrolling its perimeter.
Meanwhile, a group of Paul supporters in the Mountain West gained power, and began taking steps to set up their own government along Christian Dominionist lines. President Paul announced tacit support for these actions in keeping with his ‘states rights’ philosophy, but stated that Federal government property rights would have to be respected. An altercation at Minot Air Force Base soon escalated into a full-scale battle, with the loss or destruction of dozens of aircraft on the ground. The “American Redoubt,” as the secessionist states were calling themselves, now had Stealth bombers.
Tensions were increased with release by Anonymous of the so-called “Spic Video:” a recording of President Paul using the racial epithet in a teleconference about border policy with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Riots broke out in cities across the US, and Hispanic communities began arming themselves in anticipation of a crackdown. The appearance of assault-style weapons in the nation’s inner cities alarmed mayors and police departments, and the National Guard was called out in Los Angeles and Houston. Street battles killed nearly 2,000 people in September alone.
The months-long cold snap called “The Long Dark Winter” took over ten thousand lives by spring 2014, as fuel prices skyrocketed and support systems began buckling under the strain of a weak dollar and the loss of Federal programs. President Paul called on Americans to work harder in order to keep their core temperatures higher, without mentioning the caloric debt that would put on an already hungry populace. Federal restrictions on reproductive services led increasing numbers of women to seek clandestine abortions, resulting in untold additional deaths.
As the weather warmed, anger was expressed more openly by both the left and right. Federal buildings were attacked in every state, forcing the closure of more government offices and a retreat back inside the Beltway. The Occupy movement experienced a resurgence as it actually occupied these vacated buildings, sometimes against violent resistance. A splinter group calling itself the “99% Army” began carrying weapons and defending the occupied buildings from Federal troops and right-wing militias.
Finally, former President Obama set up a “shadow government” in Sacramento, CA, claiming that he was the rightful President because the 2012 election had been illegitimate. Most states on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts supported the Sacramento government, with much of the middle of the country staying with Washington. Texas in particular remained neutral, amid growing calls for secession there. Hawai’i asked for Japanese protection.
The “Cold Civil War” continued for months. Then, in July 2015, a container ship filled with liquified natural gas (LNG) was detonated “by a person or persons unknown” in Baltimore harbor, leveling two-thirds of the historic city and partially cutting off access to Washington from the North.
The UN Security Council met in an urgent session in Shanghai to discuss the worsening situation in what was increasingly referred to as “the former United States.” President Paul having pulled the US out of the world body in 2013, there was only an observing delegation as China advocated a peacekeeping mission be sent to North America “to protect ethnic minorities and restore the rule of law.” Germany and France, desperate for Chinese financial support to prop up the euro, readily agreed. Russia insisted on a separate mission to capture the US nuclear arsenal, but gave its support anyway.
The invasion began on September 25. The Obama government initially welcomed the Chinese-led occupation forces, and allowed the use of bases in California as staging areas. Texas declared independence that week, and the UN sent Chinese J-20s in to fight the Texas Air National Guard. Within ten days, the battle of Texas was over and the UN had complete air dominance. Refugees streamed out of Houston, clogging the interstates, as UN troops poured out of hulking Antonov cargo planes at Bush Intercontinental. Florida and Georgia fell by the end of October.
The attack on Washington began on Hallowe’en, with Chinese assault boats steaming up the Potomac to link up with tanks arriving from the south. The mostly-emptied city was silent but for the missiles arcing over the Tidal Basin launched by dead-enders on the National Mall. The city was encircled, and a “Green Zone” set up in Arlington around the Pentagon and National Airport. The siege continued through the winter of 2015-2016, with UN troops finally entering the city on February 9 to find most of its defenders dead or dying.
A “Government of National Unity” was set up under President Obama and Vice President Santorum, with its first priority being the reconstruction of the “liberated” areas on the East and West Coasts. No attempt was to be made to subdue the rebellious “Redoubt,” the Republic of Texas, or the Deseret Free State in Utah, the President said. The United States, he promised, would be rebuilt through negotiation, not force. The 2016 elections were “postponed…” indefinitely.
Nearly a million Americans had died as a direct or indirect consequence of Civil War II. The dollar was no longer legal tender in most of North America, with Chinese yuan, euros or silver used as a medium of exchange. Life outside the cities was hard, with electric service a rarity. In the cities, some utilities were available, but Chinese tanks and troops controlled most major intersections, and public places. Food shortages continued to be acute, and deaths from preventable causes remained high for years.
Ron Paul’s brother, Pastor David Paul, was spotted by a US drone outside of Grand Rapids on August 30, 2016. Troops landed nearby and pursued him to a compound in Middleville, where they found President Paul, incapacitated from a stroke he had suffered in 2015. He was captured in a brief firefight which killed three defenders, including the President’s son Rand Paul, the former Secretary of Homeland Security. Ron Paul was unhurt, and was extradited to the Hague to face a war crimes tribunal. He was found not guilty, having been the duly elected leader of a democratic nation fulfilling policies he had promised to enact. However, Ron Paul died in custody on April 12, 2018 at the age of 82.
I guess I’ve been waiting for apocalypse since before Y2K. This is why being a history buff is dangerous: you look down through the ages and all you see are societies rising and falling again. Sheep grazing in the Roman Forum. The sun setting all over the British Empire. The steady decline of hip-hop. And so on.
What I’m starting to realize is that things are both better and worse than I used to think in my Mad Max nightmare fantasies. I’m not expecting a collapse in my own lifetime, really. But the game is changing, slowly, in such a way that we probably wouldn’t recognize the world we’re leaving to babies now being born. And it’s not going to be al-Qa’ida or the Chinese or even global climate change that will do us in, but simple mathematics:
Economies can’t grow forever. Cancers eventually kill their hosts.
This is as close to heresy as it gets in our modern age. The idea of constant growth is at the heart of mainstream economic theory: the worst thing imaginable to an economist is a halt – a “recession” – in growth. But it stands to reason (or it should, at least) that you just can’t keep growing on a finite planet with finite reserves.
Richard Heinberg, in his excellent upcoming book The End of Growth (which is already available on Kindle, so I’m not using a crystal ball here) points out three dynamics that mainstream economists completely ignore:
These things are both a consequence of our heedless growth and a major roadblock to the ongoing metastasis of industrial civilization. Now, a wise and enlightened society would see the inherent contradiction between what we believe and what is actually happening and begin the process of transition to a more sustainable way of living. But obviously, we’re not wise or enlightened, so what seems more and more likely is that simple mathematics will hit us upside the head with a cluestick. Unfortunately, though, the harshest consequences will fall on those people least able to cope: the poor, the sick, and the very young and old.
There has been a lot written down through the years – especially since the 1970s, when people like Donella Meadows began pointing out the limits to growth – about the nature of the problem and how to go about solving it. I haven’t found a better framework for thinking about the subject than the “Buddhist economics” proposed by E.F Schumacher. In a collection of essays called Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, Schumacher talked about the aim of Buddhist economics being “to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”
There are examples large and small of alternative economic structures that work, provide quality of life, and are sustainable. We may not be able to avoid the crash, but we can find a way to pick up the pieces afterward.
These are dark days for privacy.
Facebook is selling your personal information – and that of your friends – to the highest bidder. The Obama administration adopted the Bush policy of warrantless wiretapping, and demands even greater freedom for oversight. And a new policy of the TSA requires select passengers to be either body-scanned or submitted to humiliating pat downs. Even though the media hyped stories of outrage, with women and small children being subjected to what was clearly abusive behavior, the overwhelming majority of air travelers rejected calls for resistance. Over the holiday, most people I talked to had already lapsed into acquiescence: “it’s invasive, sure, but whatever keeps us safe…” Evidence that the scanners are both ineffective and hazardous is ignored. Dual fears of terror attacks and missed flights won out over civil rights. And so it goes.
Meanwhile, the latest WikiLeaks document dump is revealing the secrets of the global elite, including a US plan to spy on the leaders of the United Nations, Arab leaders begging the US to bomb Iran and a top Chinese official hilariously ordering a Google hack after finding disrespectful comments about himself online. What’s interesting about this is how it parallels the hack of climate scientists’ emails almost exactly a year ago. I for one criticized the people who hyped the so-called “Climategate” thing using a lot of the same terms that government apologists are using today: you can’t take private comments out of context, hacking an email server is theft, etc. And let’s leave aside whether the two events are reasonably comparable or the motives of the different hacker/leakers. Exposure is now a tool of asymmetrical warfare, rather than a power that only governments possess. And this leads to some interesting possibilities.
Back in the PGP days, smart kids like me advocated strong encryption for the masses as a sort of my-home-is-my-castle defense from government surveillance. And while that had – and still has – some merit for dealing with individual communications, key exchange never really caught on, and we’re exposed in so many areas of our online lives that encrypting your emails or even proxy browsing and avoiding social networking is little protection. I’m increasingly won over to the ideas on write David Brin, who’s been proposing something called “the Transparent Society” since the 1998 Wired magazine article (and, later, a book) by that name.
Basically, the idea is this: the increasing sophistication of surveillance methods makes the pursuit of privacy a cat-and-mouse game that average citizens can’t win (or, as Brin quotes Heinlein as saying, “‘privacy laws’ only make the bugs smaller”). However, rather than giving up on civil liberties, Brin advocates that this cut both ways: advocating ‘sousveillance’ of government by people as well as the other way around. Additionally, he uses the analogy of a restaurant to show the benefits of a more ‘transparent’ approach to privacy. When you are in a restaurant, Brin notes, other patrons are dissuaded from eavesdropping because you can see them leaning over, cupping their hands to their ears to listen in on you. If you were surrounded by screens, contrariwise, it would be easy for others to listen in on you without you knowing about it.
If you can watch them watching you, in other words, you at least have the power to know what information might be used against you. Moreover, you can have your own record of where you went and what you did to combat against government intentionally or (as is more often the case, accidentally) accusing you of something you didn’t do. There could be reasonable exceptions carved into the law for intimate privacy, for example, or to protect victims of abuse. But the idea that privacy is a wall that protects you has been revealed as a tragic fiction.
There’s gaps in the idea, obviously. But giving up the illusion of privacy in favor of real, genuine, verifiable accountability is something that free people should not be afraid to take a serious look at, in this age of porno-scanners and secret emails on the Internet. We need to open our eyes.
