Category Archives: War

comment o’ the day: complacency as complicity

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Slightly edited and stolen from Guido‘s blog, but I can do that because I’m the one that put it there. Besides, information wants to be free, right?

War

Someone asked if I thought Blair and Bush declared war on Iraq just for fun.

I don’t think they have wars for fun; I think they have wars to “secure their place in history” to outdo their fathers, and to gain or retain political power. Far more Americans and Brits have died as a result of their wars than died as a result of the terrorist attacks, and the effect of the tightening noose of fascism on the formerly free peoples of the US and the UK is a horrible thing to see.

It’s a kind of autoerotic asphyxiation. It is obscene.

They could never have done it without us. I never thought I’d witness it, but the easy acquiescence of the people to these controls is an offense to the eyes and the soul of every free-born human being. Britain is where representative democracy in its modern form originated, and America was forged in the belief that only the people who lived in a country had the right to decide how that country should be ruled.

What happened to that?

The government and popular actions of the past several years are nothing more than the grotesque spectacle of a citizenry falling on their knees to their rulers. Isn’t this the battle against tyranny we thought we’d won centuries ago?

If we give up our freedoms to preserve our pathetic skins, what exactly gives us our moral authority? When they say they’re bringing “Western-style democracy and freedoms” what can they possibly mean by that? The kind we’ve just forfeited?

As Benjamin Franklin said, those who would trade personal liberty for bodily safety deserve neither.

Secrets of Hezbollah’s Success

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Stolen from Ben Heine:

Hezbollah's winning the peace

1) Organizational Improvements

The central secret to Hezbollah‘s success is that it trained its guerrillas to make decisions autonomously at the small group level. (…) The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah‘s aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.

2) Hybrid Methods

Ancillary to the improvements in organizational design, Hezbollah also demonstrated its ability to supercharge antiquated conventional tactics with off-the-shelf technology to create weapons systems and hybrid tactics attuned to defeating Israeli military systems. We can expect to see this behaviour accelerate among non-state groups as readily available commercial technology continues its pace of radical improvement.

3)Extracting an Economic Toll

Hezbollah‘s success against Israel codifies two strategic methods that global guerrillas emulate. The first is the value of strategic coercion through economic attrition. Ongoing disruption of the Israeli economy through rocket attacks attaches a quantifiable strategic cost to the conflict. (…) Israel has been forced into an aggressive air campaign to accelerate progress on the ground against missile launch sites and interdict resupply of new missiles from Syria. This air campaign has backfired due to the asymmetry of targets, in that Israeli air strikes have alienated the Lebanese government and increased the moral cohesion of its foes.

4)Leveraging force protection and an aversion to casualties

A second strategic method is to trade territory for the blood of professional soldiers and delay. The intent is demonstrated by Hezbollah‘s dispersal of small units across a wide geographic area. This clearly shows Hezbollah‘s willingness to trade ground for the lives of Israeli soldiers and time. It succeeds by leveraging the aversion to casualties and dedication to force protection found in modern Western militaries (these men are professionally educated and therefore considered too valuable for use as cannon fodder).

Source : http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com
John Robb is the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism.

Operation Global Media Domination: the rear view

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TIAWell and here I was, thinking OGMD wasn’t going too well today. Then I checked the stats.

Not only have I gotten the linkie luv from Liberty Forum, but I’ve also been linked to by nastyfuckingporn.com. May I note as well that this has resulted in a $5 increase in my Pingoat Blog Worth.

My mother would be so proud!

No: you don’t know my mother. She would be!

Operation Global Media Domination: the temptation situation

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Have I ever explained just how difficult it is to maintain the care and feeding of a decent blog while actually working?

Hell to the No! How would I know, right?

But it is. Found out today. Wish me luck feeding the beast, as they say in the White House, now that I actually have, like, “work” and stuff to do.

Meantime, just because it was good for 37 comments last time, let’s have a piccie from my new favoritest movie!

11/5

the single best V for Vendetta music video ever

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Period.

Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up” and V for Vendetta.

There are a lot of good videos out there, but I like this because of its perfect timing, its perfect philosophical match with the film, and because it doesn’t give away the whole fucking plot like most of them.

Come on!
Uggh!

Come on, although ya try to discredit
Ya still never read it
The needle, I’ll thread it
Radically poetic
Standin’ with the fury that they had in ’66
And like E-Double I’m mad
Still knee-deep in the system’s shit
Hoover, he was a body remover
I’ll give ya a dose
But it can never come close
To the rage built up inside of me
Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy

Movements come and movements go
Leaders speak, movements cease
When their heads are flown
‘Cause all these punks
Got bullets in their heads
Departments of police, the judges, the feds
Networks at work, keepin’ people calm
You know they went after King
When he spoke out on Vietnam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot

Yeah!
Yeah, back in this…
Wit’ poetry, my mind I flex
Flip like Wilson, vocals never lackin’ dat finesse
Whadda I got to, whadda I got to do to wake ya up
To shake ya up, to break the structure up
‘Cause blood still flows in the gutter
I’m like takin’ photos
Mad boy kicks open the shutter
Set the groove
Then stick and move like I was Cassius
Rep the stutter step
Then bomb a left upon the fascists
Yea, the several federal men
Who pulled schemes on the dream
And put it to an end
Ya better beware
Of retribution with mind war
20/20 visions and murals with metaphors
Networks at work, keepin’ people calm
Ya know they murdered X
And tried to blame it on Islam
He turned the power to the have-nots
And then came the shot

Uggh!
What was the price on his head?
What was the price on his head!

I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard a shot
I think I heard, I think I heard a shot

‘He may be a real contender for this position should he
abandon his supposed obediance to white liberal doctrine
of non-violence…and embrace black nationalism’
‘Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to
pinpoint potential trouble-makers… and neutralize them.
Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to
pinpoint potential trouble-makers… and neutralize them
and neutralize them, and neutralize them, and neutralize them’

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!

How long? Not long, cause what you reap is what you sow