Lexington Green offers his World War I book recommendations, starting with Storm of Steel, which I’ve been meaning to read for years now. He also recommends Rommel’s Infantry Attacks, which I really enjoyed.
So many books to read…
World War I Book Recommendations
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014But he was unarmed!
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014Chris Hernandez offers a dose of reality for Ferguson, starting with a hard look at the cry, “But he was unarmed!”:
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard the term “unarmed teenager”. Yes, Brown was an unarmed 18 year old. He was also 6’4″ and 292 pounds. Anyone who thinks an unarmed, 6’4″, 292 pound man can’t be a threat has never been punched in the face. Unarmed people can be extremely dangerous.
In 2012 an unarmed 17 year old beat an El Paso police officer to death. The officer was 29 years old, a former Marine and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.
An off-duty police officer in New York City was beaten almost to death by an unarmed man last November.
In July, an unarmed 21 year old “felt like killing someone” and beat a 56 year old random victim to death at a train station in San Antonio.
In 2012, an unarmed 24 year old man beat a man to death for raping his daughter.
Those chanting “but he was unarmed” are pathetically ignorant of the reality of violence. Unarmed people hurt or kill others on a regular basis. No, that doesn’t mean every unarmed person needs to be shot; it does, however, mean an aggressive, unarmed person can be a threat to your life. The bigger and stronger that person is, the bigger the threat.
Read the whole thing for the point of view of a cop who doesn’t claim to know what happened.
TwistRate
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have decided that they simply cannot allow firearm projects to sully their mission, so now TwistRate aims to fill the gap:
TwistRate is Americans coming together online to build the innovations, dreams and causes of America’s veterans, service members, law enforcement, outdoor enthusiasts, fishing and hunting communities. We bring your ideas to life, giving you the tools to take your great ideas to others in your community so they can benefit from your ingenuity. TwistRate brings communities together to fund their own, build their own and make their own – all on their own.
TwistRate and you make the American Dream a reality by connecting the dreamers with the dollars.
My first thought is, TwistRate? You couldn’t think of a better firearms metaphor for getting something going?
Warring States
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014In War in Human Civilization, Azar Gat describes the early modern military revolution:
Armies greatly expanded and became more permanent; they were increasingly paid for, administered, and commanded by central state authorities that grew progressively more powerful; similar processes affected navies, with which the Europeans gained mastery over the Seas.
A world held together by feudal ties transitioned to one dominated by institutionalized, absolutist monarchies whose powers expanded with the scope of war — and, as T. Greer explains, this wasn’t just an early modern European phenomenon:
Small armies organized around noblemen on horseback are replaced by gigantic armies of massed infantry led by professional generals. Reasons of state supplant chivalry in determining the course of battle; court ministers work closely with kings to establish the bureaucratic machinery needed to wage such wars and determine the national interest. Complex strategies and protracted siege warfare become the new norm. All of this describes what was happening in Early Modern Europe — but also what happened in pre-modern China!
The parallels between the Chinese Warring States Era and its pre-modern European equivalent do not end here. The Chinese Warring States Era gave birth to the Chinese strategic corpus. Many historians of Western strategic thought begin with the strategic theorists — such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Cardinal Richelieu — of the “European Warring States” Era. Unlike the strategic thinkers of Western antiquity, these men did not plant their theories in broader historical narratives, but devoted entire treatise to strategic themes. They drew on the histories of the classical era, but their approach was more similar to that of the ancient Chinese thinkers than the Greek philosophers and historians which they esteemed so highly.
What accounts for these similarities? What follows is not a comprehensive review, but a few tentative explanations that I personally find convincing:
A Scattered System of Warring States: War has been a constant in Chinese history; in many ways China has always been a warring state. Less common is its division into warring states. Both premodern Europe and ancient China were host to vicious polities divided in a desperate bid for survival. There was no world spanning empire; all roads did not lead to Rome. (Or Luoyang, for that matter). There was no universal center of learning or prestige that all intellectuals passed through before their voices could be heard, nor was there a single governing authority with power to clamp down on thinking it disapproved of. The decentralized political system of both eras allowed intellectual movements to flower without serious interruption. The competitive nature of this system piled fuel on the fire, for dueling states that refused innovation — be it scientific or strategic — faced annihilation.
The Rise of the State: Modern political scientists often date the creation of the modern-nation state to premodern Europe. However, almost all of these developments (the exception being institutionalized banking and finance) are closely paralleled in the Warring States transition. These institutions did more than increase the number of men that could be thrown into battle; they changed why wars were fought and what wars were fought for. The strategic logic of war between states was fundamentally different than that between feudal lords. Ideas like “national interest” or “reasons of state” made no sense in a society where there was no real distinction between international relations and interpersonal relationships. Treatises explaining how to use military power to attain national goals have no purpose when there is no nation.
Absolute Monarchy: The rise of absolute monarchs had various effects on European and Chinese societies, many germane to the creation of strategic theory. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that “French kings have shown themselves to be the most energetic and consistent of levelers. When they have been ambitious and strong they have striven to raise the people to the same level as the nobles.” A similar statement could be made about the kings of the Chinese warring states. As kings in both eras extended their control over their realms, they systematically replaced warrior nobles with professional soldiers and ministers. In both eras these men produced treatises on statecraft and soldiery and in both eras men of their rank were the primary consumers of such. The rise of the monarch affected strategic discourse in another subtle way. In the classical city-states of Greece and Italy, matters of state were discussed in the forum or the agora before public audience; feudal systems and tribal confederacies, in contrast, placed emphasis on formal oaths and war-meetings. In both of these cases decisions were made publicly. Those who wished to influence policy (or as was often the case, justify it) did so by way of oratory. Not so in the world of the absolute monarch. Decisions made by kings and emperors were usually made in private. There was little need to justify these decisions in a grand public setting. Those who wished to influence policy did so through personal conversation, correspondence, or official petition. The strategists of both systems were not orators or debaters. They were writers. This partly explains why we have their writings today.
A Marvellous Filing System
Tuesday, August 26th, 2014When Gregory Cochran mentioned The Wizard War, he cited a classically thick problem that R.V. Jones solved with his personal filing system. From page 323 of my copy:
At the same time, as my memorandum to Inglis had stressed, there was much to be said for using as few individuals as possible, and stretching them to their utmost.
It has been part of our policy to keep the staff to its smallest possible limits consistent with safety, because the larger the field any one man can cover, the more chance there is of those fortunate correlations which only occur when one brain and one memory can connect two or more remotely gathered facts. Moreover, a large staff generally requires so much administration that its head has little chance of real work himself, and he cannot therefore speak with that certainty which arises only from intimate contact with the facts.
It was an encouraging experience to find just how much a few individuals can do, and how even a single individual can sometimes be more effective than a large organization. During the Battle of the Beams in 1940 and 1941, I myself read every Enigma message. A full record of such messages came to me daily from Bletchley, and in the early days they were typed on different typewriters, or sometimes the same typewriter with different ribbons or different carbons. I could usually remember the date on which a message had been received, the colour of the carbon copy, and its degree of blurring along with the part of the page on which the message had been typed. It was therefore usually a matter of seconds for me to flip through the file and pick out a particular message, even two months later. After I had done this a number of times over the telephone in discussion with Norman he had said enthusiastically, ‘You must have a marvellous filing system! We have an enormous one here, and yet we can never find a message as fast as you can. Can we come up and see your system some time?’ I told him that I should be delighted to show him and his colleagues, but it was hardly worth their making a special trip.
Norman’s honest surprise when he found that the index was in my head was one thing; but the suspicions of others were less easy to deal with. The information must have been churning continuously around in my head, only returning to the conscious when some hitherto unseen correlation presented itself. The effect of producing theses correlations out of the head, if not out of the hat, was to lead some of our associates to think that I had a great source of information that I never revealed to anybody outside.
There were at least three attempts made to infiltrate liaison officers into my Section to locate this great undisclosed source. In one, an officer from Bletchley was offered to me on a part-time basis to help but, as he told Norman and me afterwards, his main task was to uncover my mysterious source. After a month or so, he was called back and asked what he had found. He assured his seniors at Bletchley that there was no trace of anything other than what they already knew. When someone asked, ‘Then how does Jones do it?’ Bob Pryor, the officer concerned replied, ‘Well, I suppose, Sir, he thinks!’ Another officer who had been infiltrated became so enthusiastic as to have defended me to an Air Commodore who told him that I was a funny chap, and that he, the Air Commodore, had not been able to get on with me. ‘Well Sir,’ was the reply — and it came from a Flight Lieutenant — ‘You must remember, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly!’
Police Brutality
Monday, August 25th, 2014Criminologist Darrell Ross has studied “out of control” police:
First of all, it’s important to understand that between 1978 and 2003, the U.S. population age 13 and older grew by about 47,000,000 people. The police population in that period increased by about 235,000 officers. Yet despite a civilian population growth that is about 200 times that of law enforcement growth, police shootings have not increased. Indeed only a tiny percentage of police-citizen contacts — holding steady at about 1% — involve police using force of any kind. Even in arrests, use of force occurs only in about 3%.
From 1968 to 1975, an average of 483 persons per year were shot dead by police rounds. That average has dropped significantly since then. Overall, the annual average of lethal shootings is down 33% since 1968. Shootings by police that inflict injury but not death have decreased by 20-22%, Ross says. He credits a drop in violent crime, more restrictive court rulings (notably Tennessee v. Garner), better training and decision-making by officers and the availability of more less-lethal force options, including OC, Taser and beanbag ammunition.
Police shootings are related to UCR violent crime trends. Both tend to be highest in crime- and violence-ridden “hot spots” within a city. These areas are “catalysts” for officers being called and using force to deal with the situations they encounter there, Ross says. Like it or not, the areas with the highest concentration of violent crimes predominately are black. “Shootings are related to community safety and crime in the community,” Ross explains. In fairness, “you can’t ignore that and look at police shootings in a vacuum. If you don’t consider factors like this you aren’t looking at the true nature of the statistics.”
Given their representation in the general population (about 15%), blacks are disproportionately shot by police. But that figure is changing. In 1978, 49% of suspects shot by officers were black. By 2003 that had fallen to 34%. It’s relevant to note that there also is a racial disparity where the commission of violent crime is concerned. For example, “African-American males are eight times more likely to commit homicide than whites,” Ross points out. This involvement in violence and other behavioral choices make them more likely use-of-force targets. “The lifestyle of people who get shot is generally different from those who don’t. You can’t overlook that. Disparity in shootings does not equate with ‘discrimination’ in shootings.”
The race of the players in use-of-force scenarios is changing. The incidence of white officers killing black suspects has dropped since 1978, while the incidence of white officers killing white suspects is increasing. Most often black suspects are killed by black officers. All of this “dispels the myth of cops picking only on a certain race” when force is used, Ross says. “Research over the last 30 years repeatedly shows that lethal force used by police is NOT racially motivated.”
As to the charge that misguided police tactics provoke force encounters, Ross found no evidence of a pattern in which “the officer ‘created’ the danger and/or situation in which lethal force was required, nor did the officer take a ‘poor position’ that placed the officer in a situation necessitating the use of lethal force.”
Where both lethal force and nonlethal force are concerned, Ross’ research confirms that the measure of force officers decide to employ is “highly associated” with the degree of suspect resistance. In other words, force is not just arbitrarily and unjustly delivered. Indeed, he found that officers “routinely use lower forms of force than what could have been justified” (deploying OC, for example, when a baton or a neck restraint could have been employed). A significant indication of the move toward lower levels of force is a decline in the use of impact weapons and a corresponding rise in the use of pepper spray, Ross says.
As to the claim of widespread “brutality,” Ross cites the federal DOJ’s Use of Force Survey (1996 and 2000), the largest study of its kind ever made. Of all the hundreds of thousands of police-citizen contacts in which force of some kind was used, fewer than 1% of uses were considered excessive. In 68% of arrests, the subject did not sustain any injury, and in another 25% only a cut or bruise occurred. In fact, officers in force encounters are more likely than suspects to suffer an injury that requires hospital treatment!
Talked At By Famous People
Monday, August 25th, 2014After a few months at Harvard, Michael Strong was bored by being talked at by famous people:
I arranged for a “year abroad” at St. John’s College, which is known for its Great Books curriculum, in which one reads the classic works of western civilization, including original works in math and science including those by Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger, etc. More importantly, all classes are taught by means of Socratic discussion, where the tutor (there are no “professors”) is simply the best student in the class. After my second day at St. John’s I knew I would never return to Harvard.
Knickebein
Monday, August 25th, 2014A couple years ago Gregory Cochran mentioned The Wizard War, R. V. Jones’ account of his time leading scientific intelligence for Britain during the war, because it had some interesting examples of thick and thin problems — but mostly because it’s so damn much fun.
I bought a copy, under the original British title, Most Secret War — “most secret” is the British equivalent of “top secret” — and recently read and enjoyed it.
The classically thin problem that Cochran cites involves the German two-beam navigation system (Knickebein). From page 97 of my copy:
It may help here if I explain what a Lorenz beam is, for this is what we expected to find. If one arranges a number of aerial units (‘dipoles’, which look like the simplest type of television aerial) side by side, as in a fence and about the same distance apart as they are long, and feeds the radio energy to them in a suitable manner they will generate the beam which emerges broadside to the fence; and, paradoxically perhaps, the longer the ‘fence’ the sharper the beam. But without a fence of prohibitive length, the beam would not be nearly sharp enough to define a target one mile wide at two hundred miles range. The clever trick in the Lorenz system was to transmit two fairly blunt beams, pointing in slightly different directions but overlapping one another in a relatively narrow region which now in effect becomes the ‘beam’ along which the aircraft are intended to fly.
The two overlapping beams are most simply generated by two aerial systems pointing in slightly different directions and mounted together on a single turntable. The actual radio transmitter is switched from one of these aerials to the other and back again in a repetitive sequence, so that one aerial transmits for a short time followed by a longer interval, giving a ‘dot’ to anyone who listens to it on a suitable radio receiver, while the other transmits for a long time followed by a short interval, giving a ‘dash’. Anyone so placed as to receive the two aerials at the same strength would hear the one transmit a dot immediately followed by the other transmitting a dash, so that he would think that he was listening to a single aerial transmitting continuously. As he moved sideways into the zone in which one beam, say the ‘dot’ beam, was stronger than the other, he would being to hear the dots coming up above the continuous note, and vice versa with the dashes. By listening for the predominance of dots or dashes he would know the direction in which he would have to steer to bring himself back into the narrow ‘equi-signal’ zone. This zone can be as narrow as one hundredth or even one thousandth of the width of the ‘dot’ or ‘dash’ beam alone. The aerials are therefore set on the turntable in such a direction that the equi-signal zone passes over the target. To warn the pilot that he is approaching the target, a similar beam system would be set up from one site well to the side of the director beam, and this second system would transmit a marker beam to cross the director a few kilometres before the target.
Virtue Cultures
Sunday, August 24th, 2014All cultures prior to modern European culture were virtue cultures, Michael Strong suggests:
Humans were raised understanding that they had a role and standing in society and that their entire life was a reflection of how well they fulfilled that role. Indeed, in many cultures, this reputational effect was multigenerational: if one violated a cultural norm, it damaged one’s children, and children’s children, and so forth.
Each culture had a vision of excellence in that society. This vision of excellence was transmitted by means of myth and heroic tales, it was transmitted by a multitude of comments, jokes, attitudes, manners, behavioral corrections, and so forth: the very texture of day-to-day life provided a consistent, coherent template that taught young people how they were to behave. From time to time, a member of the society was sanctioned or expelled in a manner that made it perfectly clear what types of behavior were not condoned by the community. And young people were brought up in a set of cultural practices that allowed them to practice the requisite virtues of that society so that they would naturally become respectable adult participants in such a society.
Of course, western civilization has been seeking liberation from these sorts of “intolerant” virtue cultures for some 500 years. The social rebellions known as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment in their resistances to traditional authorities unwittingly provided the foundation for the more radical liberations of the 20th century. In the 1920s and the 1960s it appeared as if radical individual freedom was the final goal.
What none of the liberators seems to have realized is the truth of Goethe’s insight, that “Whatever liberates our spirit without a corresponding increase in self-control is pernicious.” I continue to be committed to the liberation of the spirit; and I have gradually come to realize that as I liberate spirits, I have an absolute obligation to simultaneously provide training in self-control. Else I am responsible for disasters.
Traditional cultures did not seek to liberate the spirit: by and large, they sought to constrain the spirit within very well-defined cultural boundaries. As a consequence, they were often highly bigoted, shaming, and sometimes cruel: Zorba the Greek contrasts Zorba’s own liberated spirit with the cruel stoning of a young widow. Films continue to celebrate the liberation of the young from the constraints of traditional narrow-mindedness: See My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend it Like Beckham for recent sweet comedies based on the same theme. Few people who are truly knowledgeable about traditional cultures would want to return to their brutal stasis, conformity, constraints, and judgementalism.
And yet many people long for community, tradition, ritual, structure, and meaning in their lives. We (including most emphatically Socratic intellectuals such as myself) have ripped traditional societies and norms to shreds. We had to do it. There were gross injustices and bigotries. We must now re-build more humane, tolerant, decent replacements for those earlier meaning systems.
He notes that we only see honor in fantasy and sci-fi characters:
In reading about the concept of honor in Japanese society at Bronze Doors last week I noticed, as is typically the case, that the students are fascinated. Adolescents, I find, crave a sense of honor. I asked them if characters in science fiction and fantasy had a sense of honor, and they all acknowledged that usually such characters did have honor, and that that was partly why they loved those genres.
And then I asked if the people in reality tv shows had honor, and those who were familiar with such shows agreed that those people did not.
How strange it is that young people in our society must look to fantasy novels to enter a world in which honor is a living reality, and yet “reality” television typically shows us a society made up of human beings motivated entirely by short-term vanities and pleasures.
It seems abundantly evident to me that we evolved in tribes in which a sense of honor was a key element of society.
Contemporary Wisdom Reflected Back
Sunday, August 24th, 2014In Dune, Tim O’Reilly notes, Frank Herbert puts contemporary wisdom in the mouths of his characters, so that the reader hears the insights of his own age reflected back at him out of the imagined future:
Kierkegaard’s “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced” becomes a Bene Gesserit aphorism. Ecologist Paul B. Sears’s statement, “the highest function of science is to give us an understanding of consequences” is expressed by Kynes as a fundamental ecological principle; and his “respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality” is recalled as a lesson Paul had received from his father. Such statements are used without acknowledgment, reflecting the supposition that truly profound thoughts may, over time, lose their authors and become a part of the wisdom of the race. Such borrowings give the distant flights of science fiction a foundation on the solidity of contemporary fact. A feeling of familiarity is thus attached to situations that are overtly strange.
Creativity Hack
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014A popular creativity hack, Scott Adams (Dilbert) notes, is to use distractions that don’t distract — by working in a coffee shop, or taking a walk, a drive, or a shower:
My armchair guess about what is going on with the brain distractions is that we evolved to keep some important part of the brain on high alert for danger, food, and mating opportunities. If you distract that part of the brain with driving, walking, showering, and background noise it loosens its hold on the creative processing part of your brain.
This supports my hypothesis that creativity is something that happens naturally so long as your brain is not actively suppressing it for some sort of survival advantage. That makes sense because creative thinking usually isn’t helpful in immediately dangerous situations. If we were cave dwellers I would be the one that didn’t see the mastodon stampede heading my way because I was daydreaming and inventing new stone tools in my head. Sometimes you don’t need creative ideas so much as you just need to run.
Putting it in simpler terms, creativity is a mental luxury that your brain will not allow until it feels safe or until the watchdog part of your brain gets busy handling some routine task such as driving the car.
From Rags to Riches to Rags
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014It is clear that the image of a static 1 and 99 percent is largely incorrect, Mark S. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl have found:
It turns out that 12 percent of the population will find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year. What’s more, 39 percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and a whopping 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.
Yet while many Americans will experience some level of affluence during their lives, a much smaller percentage of them will do so for an extended period of time. Although 12 percent of the population will experience a year in which they find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, a mere 0.6 percent will do so in 10 consecutive years.
World Of PeaceCraft
Friday, August 22nd, 2014“You’ve fought terrorists in Call of Duty and alien hordes in Gears of War. Well, now get ready for the opposite of that“:
(From Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.)
Usagi Yojimbo Short
Friday, August 22nd, 2014This is the proof of concept short film that Lintika Films created and presented to Stan Sakai to secure the feature-film rights to Usagi Yojimbo:
Usagi, by the way, is Japanese for rabbit, and yojimbo means bodyguard. Yojimbo is also, of course, the famous a 1961 jidaigeki (period drama) film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It was based, indirectly, on Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest” and inspired Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Traditional Cultural Traits
Friday, August 22nd, 2014It has become very difficult to pass on traditional cultural traits to children in contemporary circumstances, Michael Strong laments:
In the West there are plausible claims that characteristics such as character and integrity, courage and honor are not what they used to be. In Japan, which experienced a very rapid transition to modernity in the late 19th century, older Japanese observed the rapid decline in the Samurai Bushido ethos in a matter of decades. Alaska natives saw an even more rapid introduction to modernity in the mid-20th century, in which thousand-year old survival skills ranging from hunting knowledge to extraordinary physical toughness and prowess, vanished almost overnight.
A skeptic may suggest: Fine and good, but we don’t really need seal-hunting skills, arctic survival skills, Samurai self-discipline and shame, or perhaps even old-style honor and integrity. Regardless of what one thinks of these claims, my point is that if there were any human characteristics whatsoever that required long tutelage by trained masters in a supportive culture they would be invisible to us at present. There may be amazing capabilities that might allow human beings to adapt to the 21st century but which do not exist, which cannot exist, because our society has prevented the development of those institutions that would bring forth such human capabilities.
Traditional cultures, having evolved through centuries of interaction with a relatively stable environment, are models of such integrated, coherent cultures. “Education” in such cultures was a natural, unconscious experience in which young people gradually learned the practices of their culture. With the exception of the rapidly disappearing vestigial remains of such cultures, human beings today are raised in a more or less incoherent cultural universe. In the absence of a coherent culture, humans are more likely to find themselves prey to impulsive and compulsive behaviors, variously directed towards material goods, status, sex, food, vanity, emotional attachments, gambling, electronic stimulation (television, video games, etc.), or drugs. We are very complex organisms; in order to live as healthy adults, we need to be raised well.