November 21, 2005
China's Influence in Latin America
Bill Rice has done a great analysis of China's growing influence in Latin American and the economic and geopolitical underpinnings of those relationships. Check this out: By Dawn's Early Light: China's Moves in Panama. Here's one of his takeaways:
The Chinese, to grow their economy, require more natural resources than China has domestically. Securing metals and especially oil is vital to the long-term growth and modernization of the Chinese economy. China is seeking to obtain these supplies by increasing its good will with Latin American governments that have these resources, while minimizing Taiwan. Long-term Chinese goals will be to increase military contacts with these same nations to ultimately secure their economic interests.Bill's right on the money here and I have two follow-up thoughts:
Continue reading "China's Influence in Latin America"
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Congressman Murtha and Strategic Forecasting
On Rep. Murtha: I watched him on Meet the Press this weekend. I think he's a stand-up guy. He seemed cut from the same cloth as many other senior field-grade Marine leaders I've observed. Very blunt, calls things like he sees them, sees a problem, or what he percieves to be indecision or lack of commitment and wants to call attention to it. I don't think he has any ulterior political motives, and I doubt that he is a pawn of the Democratic leadership, though we've seen them try to use him to their own purposes. I don't think he wants to simply tarnish the President.
Having said all that, I disagree with his prescriptions.
Continue reading "Congressman Murtha and Strategic Forecasting"
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November 19, 2005
ThreatsWatch.Org Goes Live!
ThreatsWatch.Org, a new kind of information service and information company, founded by Bill Roggio of The Fourth Rail, Marvin Hutchens of Little Red Blog, and Steve Schippert of The Word Unheard, has gone live. Go check it out.
I know these three have worked very long and very hard to kick this new organization off -- I also know that Bill's imminent departure to Iraq has thrown some kinks in their plans. But I think the site looks great. I'm adding it to my blogroll and can't wait to see what they do with it.
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Any intellectual property attorneys out there?
I know many of you readers are attorneys. I have an idea that requires some advice from someone with a familiarity with intellectual property law. At this point, I just need quickie help -- a few minutes of consultation, nothing more -- though in the future I may need something more substantial.
Is there anyone out there with such expertise? If you'd be interested in lending a hand, please send me an email.
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November 18, 2005
Coming this weekend: Full Review of OSM
I've got my notes together for a full review of OSM, which launched this week, and used to be called PajamasMedia. I hope to post tomorrow.
At the moment, I'm off to see Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a Chinese film.
Mrs. Chester is out of town, so I get to indulge my love of independent film a little.
UPDATE: Wow. What an incredible film. Amazing. It's about love, the Cultural Revolution in China, and the power of books and ideas to change lives and attitudes. Fantastic. There's also a lot of undercurrents of urban-rural splits and confrontations or encounters with modernity.
Sadly, it was a French film. I don't say that because I don't like French films -- in fact, they are the only French product that I don't boycott. Some are pretty good.
Instead, I was hoping that it would be a Chinese film. Sure, it was in Chinese, and set there, but it was made by the French. I was hoping it would be Chinese because that would be a good sign of the country's willingness to examine its past in a more open way. The whole time I couldn't believe that the film would be shown there, given its content. I guess it probably hasn't been.
I also learned that it's based on a novel by a Chinese expatriate living in France, so that explains a lot. He was in a "re-education" camp in the 1970s, where the film is set. Here's the book if anyone is interested (from the reader reviews, looks like it's as good as the film):
UPDATE: Slight delay on the OSM review. Later today, it's coming.
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November 16, 2005
Back from Mexico
Well, I'm back after a short jaunt into Mexico. It was interesting to say the least. The reason was the wedding of a very close friend of mine and Mrs. Chester. The setting was Cabo San Lucas.
My experience in Mexico had been of only two kinds: the week before I got married in San Diego in 2003, I piled four Marine buddies into my Subaru and we drove south on a Saturday morning with no plan whatsoever. We ended up in Rosarita, where we got a cheap room, drank a lot of beer, and generally celebrated the end of my bachelorhood. My big takeaway from that experience was that Mexico was not as underdeveloped or as poor as I had thought.
The second trip wasn't really into Mexico but it pretty much dealt with the biggest issue out there in the realm of US-Mexican relations. I participated in planning a company-level construction project in support of JTF-6, which is a very strange military headquarters: based in Fort Bliss, Texas, it is responsible for construction projects that reinforce the US-Mexican border, and which support the US agencies that deal with border issues, whether the Border patrol, or the DEA, or others.
I thought JTF-6 was strange because even though it had a clear mission, and even though it had lots of money to execute the construction projects, it had no units permanently assigned to it, and even those that were assigned to it had chosen to be there themselves; that is to say, all engineer units in the US military are offered a go at any JTF-6 project that's out there, the units decide if any projects meet their training objectives, and then they ask to do certain projects.
Probably sounds ok, but the result is that JTF-6 has a lot of projects that are never executed because no engineer unit thinks they fit their mission profiles. The mission of engineering units is to prepare for war of course, and the tasks they will perform during a war, not to do some of the specific tasks required by JTF-6. At least, that seems to be the opinion of many units, commanders, and staffs that make such decisions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that any engineering mission is a good one for any engiineering unit because even if it doesn't match what that unit's projected wartime missions might be, the exercising of planning and thinking skills that the Marines (or solidiers, or Seabees, or airmen) will gain is invaluable.
Anyway in the spring of 04, I went down to the border around San Diego and tooled around for a day or two with some National Guard soldiers, and some field grade officers from the JTF-6 HQ who had flown out to meet us. We visited "the border" itself in several different places and it was fascinating. In many cases, it consists of nothing more than an eight foot high wall of corrugated steel -- with lots of gaping holes. We went to the beach and saw the fence that divides the US from Mexico. Unless it's been upgraded in the past 18 months, it consists of telephone-pole-sized timbers planted into the ground very tightly together, and then joined by some welded steel cross-pieces. It goes about 100 or so meters into the Pacific then peters out. Not to hard too bypass that obstacle!
Also interesting were the observation points of the Border Patrol. Along the border itself, the BP uses suburbans and Jeeps, if memory serves. They have observation points at various places that make good crossing points -- one for example, was overlooking a large drainage and culvert system that it would be very easy to crawl through. Others are in areas of very good visibility over long distances. They also have tightly woven nylon screens -- kind of like a combination of an overhang, and the kind of fence that is behind the catcher in a baseball park -- that serve to keep the rocks and bottles that the locals throw from damaging their vehicles. They seemed to work frequently in pairs of vehicles and seeing groups of Jeeps working together reminded me of Combined Anti-Armor Teams using bounding overwatch or traveling overwatch techniques.
Cabo San Lucas is certainly a phenomenon to behold. It's a boomtown: ten years ago, there were 10,000 residents; now, there are 140,000. I had never been to one of the Mexican resort cities (Cancun, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, etc etc). I really wonder a lot about the expatriate community there, and throughout Mexico. Not tourists, but those who have chosen to up and live down there for the majority of the year, or permanently. How many might there be? How does this impact the services and products available to the native population? What implications does this have for governance in Mexico to have a large number of relatively affluent US citizens living down there?
Anyone who does live in Mexico, or who knows more about JTF-6, please comment as these are very interesting issues.
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November 11, 2005
Incommunicado
I'll be gone for a couple of days. Back next week.
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November 10, 2005
Happy 230th to our beloved Corps!
Here's a nice birthday image via Leatherneck Magazine:
Semper Fi!
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Globalization and War
[This is my contribution to this week's online symposium on Globalization and War, sponsored by ZenPundit and it is cross-posted there. Enjoy!]
In the 1990s, the world awakened to a post-Communist order, one in which global capital was largely unfettered to come and go as it pleased. Soon it became apparent that not just capital, but people, ideas, goods, services, and every manner of human transaction, physical or otherwise, was enabled by technology and the fall of the USSR to spread as never before. This entire phenomenon came to be known through the shorthand term of "globalization."
Western academia had several assumptions in its analysis of the globalization phenomenon. Taken together these closely-held tenets, nearly sacred in ivory towers, might be called the "normal" theory of globalization. Many of these assumptions are now very clearly wrong and they are worth exploring:
1. Globalization will inevitably lead to Westernization. It's rather ironic that so many leftist academics espoused this theory, since it manages to embrace a sort of assumed Western superiority while at the same time turning the rest of the world's cultures into victims. Or maybe, Westernization would result because we in the West are so aggressive? No matter. The assumption is false. If there is any lesson to be learned these days from globalization's effects on people and cultures, it is that it transmits all of them, and transforms all of them. There is an process of give-and-take at play in nearly every place -- whether physically or in cyberspace, or other media -- where two or more cultures and peoples collide. In this way, we find radicalized Muslims as easily in Munich as we do in Mecca, and democrats as easily in Kabul as in Kansas. Moreover, the very cultures that were thought soon to be washed away by the onrush of global capitalism find themselves just as easily transmitted by it as those of the West. Witness the border region of the US and Mexico, which is a teeming hybrid of both Western and Latin cultures, or examine the growing influence of Chinese and Japanese pop culture upon the rest of Asia and even the United States. Western -- and American -- culture have influenced each of these others in turn, but by no means can be described as ascendant, and even less and less so, as dominant.
2. Globalization leads to homogenization. A famous and well-regarded 1996 work was entitled Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. Each of the visions it describes as competing for dominance in the world can only be considered homogenous: jihad and tribalism on the one hand, and global capitalism on the other. But the nearly 10 years since have revealed the actual fragmentation of both of these tendencies. All sorts of large-scale institutions, which Barber lumps into "global capitalism" are disintegrating, or decentralizing. And tribalism serves many people in many different ways. Polities are now to be found in diasporas all over the world, and are much less likely to fall upon traditional fault lines as they are to splinter into dozens of interest groups. From the consumer marketplace to geographic identity, political parties, racial identification, and even ideologies, heterogeneity is the order of the day.
3. Globalization will lead to a decline in state power. This is one of the most frequent assumptions in all of the lexicon of the political scientists who study globalization, and is taken for granted so regularly as to be a maxim of the field. But while there is certainly no dearth of failed states, successful states are just as plentiful. Moreover, state power, while sometimes bested by new challenges, does not seem to be withering away. Consider the many faces of state power that are not about to crumble: intelligence collection; military expenditure and operations; the setting of monetary policy and interest rates; the collection and disbursement of revenue; the creation and enforcement of regulations. States are surely challenged by globalization, and many may succumb to it, but its effects cannot be described as a frontal assault, and the demise of states is far from a foregone conclusion.
If the old touchstones of globalization analysis are looking pretty worn for the wearing, where does that leave us? I propose two new tenets of globalization that recent history seems to uphold:
1. Globalization subverts hierarchies. Indeed, it is not state power that is waning, it is state power expressed in the form of bureaucracy. Globalization speeds the pace of life, of events, of the spread of ideas, of the necessity for decisionmaking. Sclerotic state bureaucracies -- and any other bureaucracies for that matter, corporate or otherwise -- can only keep up for so long. Here is where the purported loss of state power may be visible; for while organizations that are flexible and adaptable have no problem adjusting to the speed of current decision cycles, those that require reams of forms filled out in triplicate, several layers of command between action and decision, and administration by committee are the ones most likely to be found mired in scandal, backlogs, and ultimately, irrelevancy.
The very medium through which I deliver this message is one of the more prominent examples. A pulsing, living, breathing conscious thing called the internet, but which is actually the online mind of a large proportion of humanity, is constantly seeking new information, devouring it, processing it, transmitting it, analyzing it, storing it, and so on in iterations ad infinitum. Compared to traditional means of performing those same functions, it is blisteringly fast. Moreover, it has little imposed order within its organization. What hierarchy may exist is highly decentralized and spontaneously generated ex machina. There is no top-down organization and drawing a wire-diagram of even the smallest portion of it would soon prove frustrating. The relationship to subversion of hierarchies is not hard to comprehend. One of the earliest texts on the implications of the internet, the cluetrain manifesto declared that "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy." In the intervening years, this has proved true. And so on to the next point:
2. Globalization leads to a decentralization of all aspects of human existence. Whereas cranks like the Unabomber once worried that the forces of history were turning human beings into "mere cogs in the social machine," now we know better. The "machine" is decentralizing, and is no longer singular, having made itself into a networked entity, not a singly hierarchy. And the results for human choice have been, and will continue to be, nearly unimaginable. Humans are not cogs in a machine -- they are more and more free radicals in a large interconnected organism. Certainly we are connected to others in many more ways, and in some cases new ways, than we once were, but at the same time our freedom of activity has not been circumscribed -- in most cases it has been enhanced dramatically. In the United States for example, a country that was recently declared to be a Free Agent Nation, is now developing a do-it-yourself economy, such that, for example, anyone with the time and inclination to do so can use services such as eMachineShop, and draw on a worldwide manufacturing and supply network. Such trends are expected to increase dramatically.
What does all this mean for the future of warfare? Several things: while violent conflict may be localized, if there are fundamental ideas underlying that conflict (as opposed to, say, local resource scarcity), the ideas will not be localized in the slightest. Walling off any one part of the world in the hopes that it will not impede upon the rest will prove useless.
Moreover, if decentralization is the order of the day, then the states that allow their functions to be decentralized will probably retain more power than those that continue to try to control their tasks via rigid hierarchies.
Finally, networked global actors, whether states, non-state groups, religious organizations, criminal enterprises, or basically any other formal or informal group of people, will continue to be dramatically more nimble than their hierarchical counterparts and competitors.
In many areas of warfare, theorists are attempting to understand and work within the ethic of decentralization. Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles, creates the concept of the market-state. Though he does not express it in the terms of hierarchy and decentralization used here, the goal of the market-state is to perform the functions of the state through decentralized and networked means -- markets, whether via privatization or other sorts of proto-markets. Some examples he offers are security warranties through which one state might offer a sort of guarantee to aid another that is more akin to an insurance policy than an alliance. Bobbitt also mentions programs such as "lease-hire security insurance, licensing some forms of defense technology and emphasizing the U.S. role in providing information, missile defense, and even intervention for hire."
Whereas Bobbitt is a strategist by training, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla study networks and networked forms of warfare at the tactical and operational levels. In works like Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy and Swarming and the Future of Conflict they discuss the advantages and disadvantages of networked forms of organizations and their preferred tactic, swarming. One development that seems to be influenced by the RAND researchers is the Marine Corps' experiments with a form of networked ground warfare called USMC Distributed Operations, which is about
enabling the ground elements to conduct successful NCW [network-centric warfare] against an adaptive, asymmetric enemy.
It is important to remember that no new programs develop from scratch. The US military's officer and NCO corps will have to undergo a variety of changes if distributed operations or other networked forms of battle organization and doctrine are to be adopted. Those systems, that of officers in particular, rest upon ancient ideas of aristocracy and noblesse oblige. Can the US military perform what might seem to be a subversion of this storied hierarchy?
It should be noted that whether it can or not, many private organizations may be able to do so with ease. The growing private military industry is as capable as any state of creating and provisioning the types of security markets that Bobbitt envisions and the types of decentralized tactical units that are foreseen by Arquilla and Ronfeldt. If the US military, or other state militaries prove too hierarchical to adapt to the decentralized, globalized world in which we live, other actors now waiting in the wings, many of them private, will rise to fill the void.
Such a vision of the future of warfare seems dark and mysterious, one in which the Leviathan of the state could easily break down. Perhaps. But a future in which anyone can publish anything might have once seemed frightening, just as a future in which anyone could worship as they pleased still does to many. There is just enough reason to believe that the future decentralized security market, both private and public, will serve its ultimate citizens – or consumers – just as efficiently as other new markets serve us today.
Written by Chester at 12:44 AM | Link | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article
November 8, 2005
Globalization and War Online Symposium
At the invitation of Mark Safranski, (aka Zenpundit), I am participating for the rest of the week in THE ZENPUNDIT ROUNDTABLE: ON GLOBALIZATION AND WAR! Now this is going to be some great stuff! Here's the line-up:
The Zenpundit Roundtable:
Bruce Kesler representing Democracy Project
Professor Doug Macdonald of Colgate University
Simon of Simon World
Professor Sam Crane of Williams College and The Useless Tree
Chester of The Adventures of Chester
Professor RJ Rummel of the University of Hawaii and Democratic Peace
Paul D. Kretkowski of Beacon
Stand by for lots of interesting thoughts! We've all already submitted our posts to Zenpundit and he promises to release three a day, along with a "moderator's post". I'll be cross-posting my own thoughts here at Adventures and hope to comment on the other posts as well.
I got quite a headful of globalization theory at Duke, both in my major and in a FOCUS Program that I did as a freshman, since discontinued, called, "Globalization and Cultural Change." Combine that with my military adventures and this is all right up my alley. I just love it.
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November 6, 2005
New additions to the Blogroll & Reading Links
New additions, which I've been reading periodically for months:
Kudlow's Money Politic$
TRENDWATCHING.COM
Grim's Hall
Also, here's some good stuff:
1. The Atlantic Monthly carries an interview with Robert Kaplan, Warriors for Good.
2. ZenPundit has loads of stuff about the Paris riots, or French Intifadah, whichever you prefer.
3. eMarketer.com carries a story on its recent survey of Blogs and Business. The whole thing is available here but costs an arm and a leg.
4. Baggage Claim: The Myth of Suitcase Nukes was in Opinionjournal.com last Monday and though I've printed all 9 pages of it, and haven't read it yet, I bet many of you would like to see it. So check it out.
5. On the bookshelf: I'm currently reading this:
and man is it good. Stasists, reactionaries, technocrats and dynamists. Which are you? I'll post a full review when done.
6. I just finished this:
and it was phenomenal. I've read three old Robert Littell spy novels this year and every one has been a treat. I'm scared to read too many more because I don't want to run out. Each one is like a little morsel meant to be savored. Full or intrigue, backstabbing, and of course interesting trysts and tete-a-tetes. Littell makes his characters all too real and all too human.
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November 3, 2005
"Hideous Schizophrenia": Western Nihilism and Angry Muslims
Cultural diplomacy abroad is all well and good, but what about those who are radicalized in the West?
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, 'Cultural diplomacy' is key to winning hearts and minds encourages a return to old methods of cultural diplomacy that were in vogue during the cold war:
Over the years, the United States government has targeted a string of foreign individuals destined for greatness and brought them to America to be steeped in the culture and ways of Americans, and be exposed to the strengths and weaknesses of the American political system. They came on an international visitor program and though they may not have necessarily agreed with the policies of any particular administration, they generally left with warm memories of individual Americans and respect for American institutions . . .One man in particular did not. Bernard Lewis explains in The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
: What we confront now is not just a complaint about one or another American policy but rather a rejection and condemnation, at once angry and contemptuous, of all that American is seen to represent in the modern world.Qutb, a major influence to Osama bin Laden, was radicalized in America, by just the sort of cultural diplomacy programs mentioned above. It seems that direct and pervasive exposure to Western culture has some sort of innate radicalizing influence when that exposure occurs in the West.A key figure in the development of these new attitudes was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who became a leading ideologue of Muslim fundamentalism and an active member of the fundamentalist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, he studied in Cairo and for some years worked as a teacher and then as an official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. In that capacity he was sent on a special study mission to the United States, where he stayed from November 1948 to August 1950. His fundamentalist activism and writing began very soon after his return from America to Egypt . . .
Even more revealing was his shocked response to the American way of life -- principally its sinfulness and degeneray and its addiction to what he saw as sexual promiscuity. Sayyid Qutb took as a given the contrast between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism, and described American as a particularly extremem form of the latter.
Why might this be? Is there some larger force at work? In Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld
According to Tocqueville, there are two dominant passions in democracy: the love of liberty and the love of equality, the more powerful of which is the latter. When allied to the longing for physical well-being, the passion for equality leads to a remarkable sameness of condition and to uniformity of opinion even as it dissipates the soul by immersing it in the pursuit of consumer goods and petty pleasures . . .This attitude is exactly what Theodore Dalrymple examines among UK Muslims in the latest issue of City Journal [ht: The Belmont Club]:There is, then, a hidden alliance between centralized government and individualism. They are mirror images of one another; each tends to give birth to its opposite. How are we to understand the relationship? According to Tocqueville, "When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality that renders him independent of each of his fellow citizens, taken severally, exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number . . ."
In jettisoning authority -- indeed, the past itself -- Enlightenment progress is supposed to liberate the individual. But progress puts the individual at the service of large, impersonal, historical forces. Tocqueville worried that the modern emphasis on historical progress would engenger in individuals a sense of helplessness and impotence born of the suspicion that the actions and thoughts of an individual are as nothing in comparison with the force of history.
The dissatisfactions of young Muslim men in Britain are manifold. Most will experience at some time slighting or downright insulting remarks about them or their group—the word “Paki” is a term of disdainful abuse—and these experiences tend to grow in severity and significance with constant rehearsal in the mind as it seeks an external explanation for its woes. Minor tribulations thus swell into major injustices, which in turn explain the evident failure of Muslims to rise in their adopted land. The French-Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar, who interviewed 15 French Muslim prisoners convicted of planning terrorist acts, relates in his book, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs, how some of his interviewees had been converted to the terrorist outlook by a single insulting remark—for example, when one of their sisters was called a “dirty Arab” when she explained how she couldn’t leave home on her own as other girls could. Such is the fragility of the modern ego—not of Muslims alone, but of countless people brought up in our modern culture of ineffable self-importance, in which an insult is understood not as an inevitable human annoyance, but as a wound that outweighs all the rest of one’s experience.Even now, we learn in an AP article about the Paris riots that the rioters live in "neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing."A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on “social justice,” the negation of which is, of course, “discrimination,” can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice. Islamism in Britain is thus not the product of Islam alone: it is the product of the meeting of Islam with a now deeply entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.
And it is here that the “potential space” of Islamism, with its ready-made diagnosis and prescriptions, opens up and fills with the pus of implacable hatred for many in search of a reason for and a solution to their discontents. According to Islamism, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is decadent, materialistic, individualistic, heathen, and democratic rather than theocratic. Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time. This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men. Both conceptions offer a formula that, rigidly followed, would resolve all human problems.
Meanwhile, the British have developed a new citizenship test:
It's not about your familiarity with Shakespeare, your knowledge of the Restoration or your command of the battles that forged the empire.[Here's the official study guide, and here's a BBC estimation of what kinds of questions might be on an actual test. I scored a 7, which gives me a "seat on the district council." Not bad for never having been to the UK.]As far as the British government is concerned, it's about knowing how old you must be to buy a lottery ticket (answer: 16). It's about UK voltage standards (240 volts). It's about what numbers to dial for police (999) and the fire department (112).
As of Tuesday, immigrants applying to become British citizens must pass a 24-question exam that is a mix of practical knowledge, civics and trivia about life in Her Majesty's realm. Unlike applicants for U.S. citizenship, aspiring Brits need not worry about having to bone up on history.
The 45-minute, multiple-choice test costs about $60 to take. Applicants must answer 18 questions correctly to pass; there are no limits on the number of times the test can be taken.
The Home Office says the test will help form a common bond among an increasingly diverse population.
Back to the piece on cultural diplomacy:
President Bush has installed Karen Hughes, his closest media strategist, as undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department. She and Secretary Rice have the president's ear. On their desks last month was deposited the intriguing report of an advisory committee on cultural diplomacy made up of distinguished American citizens. They argue that alongside radio and TV broadcasting to foreign countries, and all the other media programs designed to explain and further political policies, cultural diplomacy "reveals the soul of a nation." American art, dance, film, jazz, and literature continue to inspire people the world over despite our political differences. Cultural diplomacy, say the advisory committee members, "demonstrates our values, and our interest in values, and combats the popular notion that Americans are shallow, violent, and godless."Looking at the West as a whole, our soft-power strategy seems to be great books and priceless works of art abroad, and watered-down citizenship at home.
Written by Chester at 10:55 PM | Link | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0) | Print Article
November 2, 2005
Lawrence on Syria
After kicking off a Syria discussion yesterday, here's some follow-up from TE Lawrence, who describes the natural terrain of the country in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Continue reading "Lawrence on Syria"
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Qumana
Fellow bloggers out there should check out Qumana blog editor and blogging tools. I met one of the investors in this technology last week, and he recommended that I check it out. I took the tour and it looks very intriguing. I'll have to give it a test drive and report back.
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Conference Notes 4
A big issue that was raised to Roger Simon in his keynote address as the recent conference in New York was whether PajamasMedia would provide liability insurance to its bloggers, or indemnify its advertisers. I wasn't sure how to take these: on the one hand, I thought they played rather well into conceptions more about bloggers as journalists or reporters -- and therefore having a possibility of getting things wrong and getting sued -- than of what I perceive to be more the reality: bloggers are opinion-makers, who observe the stories of journalists and then comment upon them.
Continue reading "Conference Notes 4"
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A Presidential Decision-Making Game: Open Scenario Plan
Last year, I tried a bit of prognostication about the future of the US policy toward Iran. This year, I've learned my lesson: I'd rather use the aggregate wisdom of all you readers out there.
Here's what I propose: I'm going to set the table with a set of assumptions about Syria, then anyone who wants can respond with a scenario for how the administration will handle it. Over time -- a couple of days -- there'll be some discussions and then I'll summarize everything by attempting to narrow things down to three to five scenarios. Then we'll watch and see which scenario looks to be occurring. I'll create a special page on the blog to hold all the scenarios, for easy reference.
Continue reading "A Presidential Decision-Making Game: Open Scenario Plan"
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I Digg
digg is a pretty cool site that lets you submit links, and those that get the highest number of "diggs" from other users rise to the front page. I wish they had an open-source version of this software -- I'd love to use it for an idea I've had since March. If anyone out there with some programming skills might be interested in spitballing a little on this, please email me.
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