Good riddance 2007, boo sucks to 2008

"Literature", Meta
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The news that Ellis Sharp has given up blogging was the perfect end to 2007, another year in which the world in general seemed to get shittier, even if my personal circumstances have remained alright. What remains of 2007 to me is an overwhelming feeling of ennui, where literally each day brought a fresh outrage, but where unlike in 2006, when there was Israel’s war on Lebanon, there was no all overwhelming issue to which people mobilised. Not even global warming. There was more a feeling of despairing acceptance that the world was going to shit and you individually could do little about it, especially in the last months of the year. Blogging had been an escape valve, but has now conclusively been proven not to be able to change the world. No wonder Ellis, one of the best and intelligent bloggers I read this year has stopped. When you’ve said everything you can say, what’s the point in hanging on much longer?

Erm…

Well, for me personally there’s still the reason why I started Wis[s]e Words in the first place, because otherwise I’d still be screaming at the telly. I don’t need to win fame or influence people with this little thing, just as long as I can get rid of my thoughts here.

Meanwhile 2008 is four days old and has already managed to piss me off by offing George MacDonald Fraser, faithful chronicler of the adventures of Sir Harry Flashman, adventurer-gentlemen, cad and rogerer of other men’s women. I worried that this would happen back in September, when I reviewed what has now turned out to be his last Flashman novel. I had discovered him back in 1991 when John Ostrander namechecked Flashman in the last issue of Suicide Squad as the spiritual ancestor of Captain Boomerang. (If this means nothing to you, do check out back issues of this series; perhaps the most cynical (but excellent) mainstream superhero comic ever published.) Ten minutes into reading the first Flashman novel I could find (Flashman and the Mountain of Light iirc) I was hooked. George MacDonald Fraser was somewhat of a reactionary, but he was brutally honest in chronicling Flashie’s adventures in empire building. Such a pity that the still blank spots in Flashie’s past will now never be filled in.

So what can we expect from 2008? More of the same, I think. Yes, there are the presidential elections in the US to look forward to, but how much these will matter is something that can only be determined later. Like 2004 the outcome might break your heart if you still belief in the Democrats to save America from itself.

Intelligence in War – John Keegan

books and books review
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Cover of Intelligence in War


Intelligence in War
John Keegan
443 pages including index
published in 2003

John Keegan is one of the better known British military historians, having been a lecturer at Sandhurst before becoming defence editor at the Daily Telegraph, as well as writing a slew of books about military history. Keegan seems to write two kinds of books: the first kind follows a war or campaign in some detail, while the second takes a specific aspect of war (or even war as whole) and follows its development through the ages. Intelligence in War is an example of the second kind. As you may guess, he’s somewhat of an establishment historian, accepting and understanding that war is an essential part of human nature, even if an unfortunate part. He’s therefore more interested in writing how wars are fought than how they come to be. Within those limitations he’s an excellent history writer, one of my favourites when it comes to military history.

Intelligence in War, as said, is typical of Keegan’s work. Through the careful selection of several case histories Keegan examines the role intelligence plays in warfare and its limitations and capabilities to influence battles. Keegan distinguishes five separate stages intelligence has to go through to be able to influence a battle: acquisition, delivery, acceptance, interpretation and implementation. Due to difficulties that can arise at each stage, Keegan is skeptical about how influential intelligence is for a given battle. His main thesis is that intelligence can be useful in battle, but is rarely decisive, even in those cases which are supposed to be the examples of intelligence determining the outcome of battles. For Keegan, intelligence is only ever a secondary factor in winning or losing battles, with things like the relative balance of forces and the determination and will of the opposing troops and commanders being much more important.

Read more…

Scratch another dearly loved sf myth

science fiction
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New research seems to show mordern human evolution is supercharged:

In a study published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone — around the period of the Stone Age — has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.

“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, Hawks says, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival. Adds Hawks: “We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”

Science fiction’s dirty little secret is that it tends to believe in pseudoscience more often than it does in real science; even supposedly “hard” science fiction is littered with impossible or just wrong science. The idea that evolution has “stopped” is one of them, usually used in a setting which contrasts the brave manly colonists of Proycon B with the teeming soulles dependent masses ruled by an incompetent, corrupt bureaucracy of Earth. So much for that idea.

What’s the deal with Mugabe?

Imperialism
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Yeah, alright, Robert Mugabe is a Bad Man ™, the kind of authoritarian asshole who doesn’t hesitate to sent the riot police against his ooposition, or rig the elections. He’s also been accused of stealing white people’s land, which is just wrong; doesn’t he know it can only be done the other way around? Cheap sarcasm aside, it’s clear Mugabe is a thug, but he’s hardly unique.

So why is it that during the EU-Africa summit this weekend, all attention was on Mugabe being present and how awful it was that such a tyrant should’ve been invited, when much worse people were present as well? People like Hosni Mubarak? He’s surely as authoritarian as Mugabe, but there has been nothing like the hysteria that surrounded Mugabe’s participation, none of the official denounciations, no carefully staged mediafriendly protests against him. Why is that?

Surely not because Mubarak, unlike Mugabe, is careful to stay on the right side of “the west”, e.g. helping us out by providing handy extralegal torture facilities for those pesky suspects we cannot torture ourselves?

Manufacturing consent and the NIE

Manufacturing Consent, War on Iran
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I came across two great remarks today on how that National Intelligence Estimate helps shape the received wisdom on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions. First quote is from Left I on the News, second quote from Aaronovitch Watch:

One of the successes of the new NIE is that virtually everyone in the “mainstream” (pundits, candidates, corporate media) now accepts as simple fact that Iran had a nuclear weapons program which it abandoned in 2003.

[…]

“News” in the same sense that it was “news” that Iraq didn’t have WMD – ie, it’s not news, it has been available for years, the international inspectors who know what they’re doing and publish their results have been giving exactly this message, but now some sekrit American intelligences have said the same thing, it is no longer possible to pretend otherwise[.]

The news cycle on this issue was from start to finish driven by the American government. The US says Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and the debate is on whether the US should impose sanctions or use military force to stop this, not on whether or not its claims are actually true. When the issue of truth did arise, it was presented as “he said, she said”, with the truth of the matter, that international inspectors had not found any evidence of Iranian wrongdoing, largely not being reported or only glossed over. Only when the NIE confirmed this was it converted to the official truth, though as Left Eye remarks, with the caveat that Iran had a nuclear programme before 2003, again something I haven’t seen any evidence for.

In other words, there have White House originated limits in the reporting on this issue, beyond which the newsmedia, whether approving or disapproving of the US stance on Iran, whether British, American or Dutch, have largely not strayed. And this is not done through some sort of Stalinist censorship, but purely through the news media’s internalised ideas about what is and isn’t acceptable reporting. As Chomsky and Herman discussed so many years ago, the media operate under a set of self imposed filters, filters that hinder its ability to determine the real truth and instead lead it to present a severely skewed image of the world.