“Stay the course / bring ‘em on / mission accomplished.”

Adios Baghdad!

Islam will never heal until the hole in their hearts caused by the ending of the Caliphate is filled.

Turkey may or may not get this, in any case it’s pursuing a course of both Turkish Interests and a dream of the re-established Turkish Empire and populist and elitist Islam. Turkish core interest is Anatolia. They are unlikely to forget it. It’s how they took the Romans.

However Turkey may also be under the delusion they can ride the Tiger and harness it for their own purposes, this is already exploding in their faces. I don’t blame them for hanging up the phone on DC, but they’re fools to play with this self-guiding and quite intelligent fire.

Now here’s a fascinating link to how ISIS organizes and fights: it seems to be Ausfragstik mission orders and small groups are concentrated and swarmed through social media.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/10/turkey-syria-how-to-defat-isis.html

https://news.vice.com/article/britains-student-union-votes-against-condemning-the-islamic-state-because-that-would-be-islamophobic?utm_source=vicefbuk

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/10/islamophobia-strikes-again-british-union-of-students-refuses-to-condemn-isis/

Utterly absurd.

If Nick can be lured into economic identification with Ebola-Chan, I would be happy to cover his side of the bet. The bet would be between the two of you and it would be up to you to agree the exact terms. I won’t interfere, I will just cough up $100 if Nick loses. Nick, I am happy to transfer the money to you well in advance of whatever deadline you agree, just in case anything happens to me – like I die of Ebola, or something.

Asabiya is an old concept that gets interpreted in the modern world in different ways by different people. The way I interpret it, it doesn’t seem to me that it dissolves into dust, unless perhaps you mean it is part of the soil in which the Industrial Revolution grew.

It seems to me that asabiya serves as a decent term for what is maybe the first principal component of generalized social capital, and the extent to which a society can maintain asabiya at any given scale (citystate, continental empire, whatever) bears very strongly both on military effectiveness and on economic effectiveness. Justified confidence that the people you do business with won’t let you down or steal from you seems likely to be strongly related to justified confidence that your comrade in arms won’t let you down or betray you, and justified confidence that your political rulership won’t let you down or steal from you seems likely to be strongly related to justified confidence that your military leadership won’t let you down or betray you. When Xenophon is needled by his Spartan fellow merc about the Athenians being skilled at stealing public money, and when the Old Testament tells the story of David sending Uriah to his death, it seems to me in both cases the main intended significance of the story is asabiya, and in both cases it is hard to separate it either from wartime significance or from peacetime significance.