14
May
Has Obama Administration geostrategy been based upon a cunning (and secret) plan? Richard Fernandez makes the case that a covert American attempt to subvert radical Islam crested with the September 11, 2012, Benghazi fiasco. Employing a mix of infiltration, drone assassination (to clear promotion paths), and calculated regime sacrifices (Egypt, Syria), the objective was to reforge an international Jihad under covert US control. When the take-over plan went south, nothing could be publicly admitted. Cascading failure has continued in the shadows ever since, jutting into media consciousness as a succession of disconnected — even inexplicable — foreign policy setbacks.
The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of the Obama presidency as clearly as a milepost. We are told by the papers that nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away country. A few people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but from that day the administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The secretary of State “resigned.” The CIA director was cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to withdraw his red line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose eulogy he had pronounced, appeared with disturbing force throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return to the world stage, first in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.
Fernandez digs much deeper than Carney, but this is still worth adding.
13
Mar
Nyan Sandwich has a cunning plan:
Sister Sarah (@sarahdoingthing) suggests the “hard part is to be somehow different from actual real leftist sites …”
Partly because there can simply never be enough of this, but also for other reasons, this idea is perfectly delicious. It would be like a Sokal tar-baby, spreading sticky black paranoid confusion throughout the redoubts of the enemy. To make this work, however, would require a very exceptional type of genius (of exactly the kind demonstrated in the Shea case). Judging the precise extent and flavors of absurdity that the left will endorse — or at least find credibly non-parodic — is a rare and delicate art, especially since they have to be taken to the very edge, teetering prominently into gulfs of roaring madness. In addition, since effectiveness would correspond closely with persistence, the work involved would be immense.
If anyone is embarking on this, I do not (of course) want to know — Omertà.
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15
Oct
When political polarization is modeled as a game the result is Chicken. The technical basics are not very complicated.
Reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) is socially integrative. An equilibrium, conforming to maximal aggregate utility, arises through reciprocal convergence upon an optimum strategy: defaulting to trust, punishing defections, and rapidly forgiving corrected behavior. Any society adopting these rule-of-thumb principles consolidates. When everyone norms on this strategy, individual and collective interests are harmonized. Things work.
Chicken is very different. Someone blinks first, so the trust-trust mutual optimum of RPD is subtracted in advance. Rather than the four possible outcomes of a single PD round (A and B do OK, A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose) there are just three possible outcomes (A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose extremely). In Chicken, it is the avoidance of outcome three, rather than the non-existent chance of PD outcome one, that moderates behavior, and then asymmetrically (someone always blinks first).
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03
Sep
There’s been a virtual post on the worse, the better* simmering in the kitchen here for a while, without reaching the stage of being ready for the table. ‘Max’ exuberantly pre-empts the topic in this comment thread. How deeply is this speculative position insinuated into the DNA of neoreaction? (The provisional Outside in response: very deeply.) There’s no longer any keeping it off the ‘to do’ list.
Also (on the same thread): don’t miss the trial application of the Lesser Bull / Gnon terminological creation Ruin Voting. It has a dazzling future, because it so exactly captures a devastating empirical reality. (If successfully slogan-synthesized with one or two additional words, it will be despatched immediately to the T-shirt factory. Perhaps antagonistic ghetto punks would be prepared to pay for a ‘Ruin Voter’ shirt already?)
*Wikipedia attributes the origin of the phrase to Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who seems to have been systematically lexo-pillaged by Lenin. (Chernyshevsky was also author of the novel What is to be done?)