Strategy at the speed of stupid

March 1st, 2015 by Lynn C. Rees

Since the most limited resource in today’s West of material plenty is attention, the blinking of ISIL diverts real power away from weightier matters. What Russia does carries more weight that what ISIL does. And ISIL can’t do much outside its territory except inflict bad theater on its viewers. Russia has nukes. ISIL has has YouTube. YouTube is huge to voting machine watchers. It’s marginal to weighing machine monitors except as just one input building towards a cumulative weight that tilts the weighing machine one way or the other. Nukes unleash weight with a speed that makes even the most shallow of flash voting look tardy.

Weighing Russia by investing sustained attention is strategy at the speed of smart. Voting for ISIL with any attention at all is strategy at the speed of stupid.

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Posted in advertising, antifragile, art history, attention, Augmented Reality | 4 comments

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  1. T. Greer:

    March 1st, 2015 at 12:54 am

    And then there is Beijing…

  2. carl:

    March 1st, 2015 at 4:18 am

    Oh I don’t know. About 100 years ago the Bolsheviks weren’t much compared to the Ottomans or the Austro-Hungarians or the Tsar’s empire for that matter. They rose quickly on the strength of an appealing idea and some very bright and brutal men.
    .
    Putin and company need to be dealt with much more realistically than they are being dealt with now. But I don’t think the magnitude of their menace reduces the magnitude of the menace of the takfiri killers.

  3. T. Greer:

    March 1st, 2015 at 7:19 am

    I have been reflecting on this for several hours now.

    .

    I think the point I made in my recent post holds true here too. If the problem we are talking about is ISIS then Lynn is 100% correct. All hype and no weight. But ISIS is really just an expression of a bigger phenomena. The broader rise of Salafi-Jihadist thought has a great deal of weight to it. It potentially has more weight than Russian and Chinese geopolitics put together.

    .

    A Capetan monarch looking at the state of the world in the early 16th century, could be forgiven for thinking that the machinations of the house of Hapsburg were the most important developments of his day. In hindsight it is clear that this was incorrect. Few people recognize the Grand Duke of Alba today. Everyone recognizes the name Martin Luther.

  4. larrydunbar:

    March 2nd, 2015 at 11:32 pm

    Voting is relatively easy when you are not under any existential threat. If and when ISIL is replaced it will be by pretty much the same guys, just perhaps dressed differently. When you are under an existential threat, then you need to put more weight into the effort at hand, because it is not so much which way or how (by voting or weight) the scale is going to tip, at least in the position ISIL holds, but, for Russia, it is as if they will move at all, i.e. existence or no existence.
    I mean, I think it was someone here that once said that Russia knows Jihad. The Mongols came down and made believers out of all of them.