Cyreenik Says
It is spooky how much the ISIS/Syria/Iraq situation is looking like the Spanish Civil War of the mid-1930's. Both started as social revolutions and then became bloody proxy wars substantially supported by outside interests. Now the ISIS War is picking up the equivalent of the Spanish War's International Brigades. In both cases these are idealistic foreigners who come to get involved in fighting for the cause. This 21 Aug 14 WSJ article, A New Kind of Terrorist Threat by Peggy Noonan, talks about how vicious, organized and professional ISIS is. More interesting to me is this insight she has, "They have a talent for war and draw fighters from throughout the world, particularly young men from the culturally fractured and materialist West. Those young men, desperate to belong to something, to be among men on a mission, to believe in something bigger and higher than their sad selves, are ripe for jihadist recruitment. Many hundreds of ISIS fighters are said to hold U.S., British or German passports," ISIS may be ugly and scary as Noonan describes in the article, but the cause is apparently as attractive to internationally-oriented, idealistic warriors as the International Communist cause was in the 1930's.
This war will end some day. And those idealists are going to be disappointed with the outcome. It is going to be interesting to see how this bitterness shows up in the cultural thinking of the 2020's. Who are going to be the Hemingways and Orwells of the 2020's and what will they lament?
Update: Here is a 29 Aug 14 WSJ article, Inside the Mind of the Western Jihadist: Shiraz Maher, a British citizen who lived the experience, describes the allure of the Islamic State for young Westerners and the deadly peril it poses. by Sohrab Ahmari, which describes who's taking the journey to fight in Syria.
From the article, "These include Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a wannabe rapper from a posh west-London neighborhood who recently posted a Twitter selfie of himself holding a severed head. "Chillin' with my homie," read the caption, "or what's left of him." Abdel Bary is also suspected to be the terrorist who addresses the camera before beheading American journalist James Foley in a widely circulated online video, though Mr. Maher thinks the masked figure is a different British jihadist.
Abdel Bary is one of 500 to 600 British citizens who have joined the Islamic State, and Mr. Maher's center estimates about 2,200 foreign fighters from Europe are operating in the region. "Globally we believe the number to be somewhere in excess of 12,000. We've counted 74 different nationalities that are represented on the ground.""
Update: This 30 Aug 14 Economist article, It ain’t half hot here, mum Why and how Westerners go to fight in Syria and Iraq is another one about Europeans heading to become jihadists. It describes some of their day-to-day living condtions.
The unrest in Ferguson has been going on a full week now. It hasn't spread, but it hasn't stopped, either. This 17 Aug 14 WSJ article, Governor Says Ferguson Curfew to Stay as Feds Plan New Autopsy: Anger Over Death of Unarmed Teenager by Police Officer Sparks Another Night of Protest, Violence by Ben Kesling and Matthew Dolan, describes the unrest. Reading between the lines it shows that the disenfranchisement that is the root cause of this unrest is still not being addressed. Keeping the peace and justice are the hot topics, not getting these people back into the American mainstream.
From the article, ""If we are going to have justice, we must first have and maintain peace," said the governor, who was repeatedly interrupted by protesters demanding a quick indictment of the officer involved in the shooting.
Capt. Johnson, who took over responsibility for security in Ferguson on Thursday, said he would enforce the curfew without resorting to tear gas or heavy-handed tactics. But in the end, he defended his change." (he used them)
I also find it spooky just how much military hardware and tactics the police forces are using these days. The National Guard has not been called in but armored cars are cruising the streets. Spooky! And I don't see how this helps on the enfranchisement front.
People panic when they are faced with a new, strange and scary threat that they feel they have to deal with fast, as in, right now. The new part of this means that the people involved have no idea, no training, in how to deal with this. There has been no "fire drill" equivalent.
When this situation happens those feeling it turn off much of their higher level thinking so that they can act faster on the solution they have chosen on-the-spot to avoid or end the threat. This choice, because it is made in the heat of the moment, seems very right at the time. But when looked at from a detached, cool-headed thinking perspective it is often both wrong and seriously expensive. In my writing in this section I call that hot-headed choice of action a Blunder.
It seems that West Africa is in full panic and blunder mode concerning Ebola virus. This 17 Aug 14 BBC News article, Ebola crisis: Protesters attack Liberia quarantine centre, is describing a serious blunder: protesters attacking and looting a quarantine center for suspected Ebola patients in a Monrovia, Liberia slum.
From the article, "The protesters were unhappy that patients were being brought in from other parts of the capital, the assistant health minister said.
Other reports suggested the protesters believed Ebola was a hoax and wanted to force the quarantine centre to close.
A senior police officer said blood-stained mattresses, beddings and medical equipment were taken from the centre.
"This is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my life", he said."
If some of those patients did have Ebola, the looters spreading contagious mattresses, beddings and medical equipment have made the problem a hundred-fold worse. This is a serious Blunder, and a sad and scary example of Panic and Blunder in action.
This 2 Aug 14 Economist article, Whose hand on the tiller? Both government and opposition are in a state of paralysis, relates how Venezuela still can't get its social or economic act together.
From the article, "An uneasy calm has returned to the streets of Caracas and Venezuela’s other main cities after months of clashes between opposition youths, riot squads and pro-government gunmen. But the discontent that sparked the demonstrations—over inflation, shortages of basic goods, collapsing public services and violent crime, among other things—remains profound. So are the tensions within both government and opposition ranks."
Venezuela is feeling the "resource curse" big time. Much of the nation's wealth comes from drilling and exporting oil. Sadly, this is such a socially distant source of wealth that it looks to much of Venezuelan society like a free lunch. The result: they abuse it, they argue over it, and most important, they don't use it to improve their ability to contribute meaningfully to a modern society. The people of Venezuela aren't learning socially useful trade skills or how to organize businesses and communities that are business friendly in our globalized world. Instead the people of community of Venezuela, poor as many of them are, are acting like rich-kid brats. Further sadly, this is a common curse to fall upon a group of people who have been living in Agricultural Age conditions, and who then strike it rich with resources in the ground that other people come and extract. They have a real hard time transitioning from Agriculture Age thinking and acting into Industrial Age thinking and acting.
Figuring out how to have people with a resource blessing make this transition effectively is a challenge that still hasn't been solved. This remains a mystery still to be solved in 21st century practical sociology.
Update: This 22 Oct 14 WSJ article, Despite Riches, Venezuela Starts Food Rationing Government Rolls Out Fingerprint Scanners to Limit Purchases of Basic Goods; ‘How Is it Possible We’ve Gotten to This Extreme’ by Sara Schaefer Muñoz, describes how the twisting due to the free-lunch delusion has now reached the point that the country is into food rationing.
Venezuela's devolution under fourteen years of Hugo Chavez and a year of Maduro now reminds me of the collectivist apocalypse Ayn Rand describes in her 1957 book Atlas Shrugged. The moral in this is that you don't need a John Galt to get the entrepreneurial types to disappear, a delusional populist government can do that all by itself.
This is a scenario that has been repeated often here in the US. During the summer a black teenage boy gets shot and killed on a city street by the cops, and the neighbors start protesting, rioting and looting in outrage. This 11 Aug 14 WSJ article, Vigil for Missouri Teen Turns Violent Shopkeepers Cleaning Up While Police Presence in Ferguson Amped Up by Ben Kesling, describes this year's version.
What does this pattern indicate?
It indicates that the residents of the area doing the rioting feel disenfranchised. They feel like: a) the powers-that-be are not paying attention to their wants and needs, and b) that what they do makes little difference to the well-being of the community. Those that demonstrate are displaying the "You're not paying attention to me." side, and those that loot are demonstrating the "What I do makes no difference to the community." side.
And for some reason weather is involved as well. This is a late summer season ritual much more than any other time of year.
How big and widespread the protesting, rioting and looting will get varies enormously and is unpredictable. It usually stays local, but in 1966, for example, it spread nationwide as the outrage became part of the civil rights crisis of that era.
Update: This 14 Aug 14 WSJ article, Ferguson Has Long Been Challenged by Racial Tensions: Protests Turn Violent Again in City With a Growing Divide by Mark Peters and Ben Kesling, provides some more details on the background for the unrest. It supports my thesis of enfranchisement problems, in this case caused by a recent racial transformation of the suburb and the economic and social changes that accompanied that transformation.
From the article, "The city's population has shifted from almost exclusively white to one that is predominately African-American, while the city leadership and police force has remained mostly white.
Federal data show integration in Ferguson has been difficult to achieve. The black population started to grow from a few hundred residents in 1970, to 52% in 2000. Over the next decade, the balance tipped, with the city reaching about 67% African-American and 29% white in 2010."
The article goes on to describe things such as school issues that have indicated a lot of tension and frustration before this summer's crisis erupted.
This 8 Aug 14 Xinhua news article, Russia bans western food imports, threatens with overflight ban, describes the Russian government reacting to US and EU sanctions.
From the article, "Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that Russia is imposing a ban on food imports from the European Union (EU) and the United States, and considers an overflight ban for European and U.S. airlines to the Asia-Pacific region."
This part is straightforward tit-for-tat, the interesting part is the silver lining Medvedev tries to put on this further into the article, "[Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fyodorov] added that the import ban is supposed to trigger agricultural production growth in Russia, as the production volume will "reach 281 billion roubles (nearly 7.7 billion dollars) in the next 1.5 years."" This part is pure autarky sunshine thinking. It is Russia sounding like it wants to follow in North Korea's footsteps.
Now we will get to see who first suffers enough from this Blunder Chain to blink and back down. Or, will the tit-for-tat keep on going? Putin has his redneck Russians backing him, and the US and EU have the horror of the airline crash backing them. This means there's a lot of hot blood flowing on all sides. And that means this is going to be a tough one for cool-heads to get involved in.
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