Friends, In 2013 I read Hugh Howey’s Wool after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal. Howey’s is a cinderella story; he wrote his novel in installments at his blog, and his story, Wool was picked up by a publisher. The response was so overwhelming, Howey wrote Shift, which is a very good prequel and Dust picks up the story to the conclusion.
I gave away my paper copy of Wool a couple years ago, but was pleased to see a graphic novel of the same title by Jimmy Palmiotti (Author), Justin Gray (Author), Hugh Howey (Author), Jimmy Broxton (Illustrator), Darwyn Cooke (Illustrator). The graphic novel filled in the gaps of my memory and helped visualize Howey’s imaginative and frightening new world below ground.
This trilogy is summer reading at its best. Story has duplicitous politicians, brave idealists and truly clever on-the-fly tactics—and a bit of not-too-syrupy true love. Howey is a gifted storyteller and weaves a credible yarn of a future where humanity is consigned to silos buried within the earth and surrounded by a poisonous atmosphere.
Trump and Putin are on their respective ways to a meet in Helsinki. This post offers a chess angle on the importance of symmetry as a technique Putin happily uses on Trump and others. Symmetry is already a keen interest of mine in the arts, where it is a prime key to beauty. In chess, too, and it would seem in diplomacy and strategy, symmetry matters.
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Here’s the game in which Bobby Fischer kills Robert Byrne in an astounding 21 moves:
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What’s of interest to us here is the symmetry at move 11, shown here in two diagrams:
where the blue lines annotate the symmetries in files a, b, c, d, g, and h —
and here:
where the red center-line serves as a mirror for those symmetrical files, their positions highlighted in green.
And here’s the site’s comment on symmetry:
It’s quite often the case that in very symmetrical positions such as this one, things go about very slowly, it’s often a bit of a maneuvering game, not a lot of, let’s say, great tactics, or fireworks, things of course can change, but there’s a great amount of symmetry here..
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Well, chess is the game of strategy par eminence, isn’t it? Here’s a quote I just used in my metaphors collection:
Brian Williams: Putin does the most rudimentary things, like mirroring, which communications experts will tell you is a way to kind of endearing yourself to your guest.
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Clint Watts: [agreeing] Ingratiate and mirror.
President Trump openly says If you say to me that you like me, then I like you. He’s just opening the door for this. Putin has done this with other world leaders. .. You want to build rapport with President Bush, talk about religion and the Christian Orthodox church. you do these things to build and ingratiate and build a mirror relationship with the target.
I’m not saying there’s a direct parallel between the chess comment and the Brian Williams / Clint Watts conversation, which just scratches the surface of the communications stragegy of mirroring and similar techniques, and their relevance to the immadiate situation with Trump on his way to Helsinki to meet Putin —
— just that the emphasis on symmetry in the celebrated Fischer chess match gives us a clue to the possible importance of symmetry in crucial strategic situations in general — and thus to the coming week’s Trump / Putin situation.
[ by Charles Cameron — a Croatian filibuster on the football field ]
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In extra time, Croatia’s Mario Mandžuki? had a nine-minute, operatic breakdown, a syncopated series of stops, starts, and seizures, which defined the match and took it away from England.
I jeep looking for sports metaphors in political reportage, and now, in a New Yorker article titled World Cup 2018: The Tragicomic Opera of Croatia’s Mario Mandzukic I find out all about players feigning cramps as a delaying tactic when games go into overtime —
— and it’s a clear analog of the Senate’s filibuster tactic. Either one could be a metaphor for the other, soccer for politics or vide versa.
One segment of the pre-game show was given over to a National Geographic Channel report on Russian Buddhism. If this was intended as outreach to soccer fans so ardent that they always burn in suffering, then perhaps it did some spiritual good. But, as an effort at a culture-enriching sideshow, it was unsuccessful, so out of sync with the analysis and hype surrounding it as to be charming. The correspondent said to the monk, “O.K., so, if everything is an illusion, what’s truth, then?”
I couldn’t exactly miss that, given my interests, could I?
[ by Charles Cameron — a third can destabilize two, but it can also ignore or deny them ]
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Here:
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I’ve written previously about ternary logic and games of three, which open up questions about alliances and trust, some of which President Trump might want to ponder next time he feels like wading into NATO or sidling up to Putin.
When the gameplay is equitable, there is no “third” — just a succession of “seconds” — or in strategic terms, repidly shifting alliances. When the “third” is a constant, at least for a while, he she or it is at times a peace-maker, at times the one to be bypassed by the other two players — andd as here, at times the one who doesn’t want to know!
[ By Charles Cameron — if the parallelism I see isn’t a mirage, it would seem highly relevant to both men and related issues ]
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Peter Strzok and Brett Kavanaugh:
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I’ll try to keep this brief, and won’t use my usual DoubleQuotes graphical formalism, which would be costly in both time and space.
Here we go:
It strikes me that there’s a parallelism between the issues swirling around the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, Judge of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to the Supreme Court, and those concerning FBI agent Peter Strzok, formerly Chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section in the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees joint hearing today..
The parallelism can best be expressed in ternms of a question: can a professional in the field of justice holding strong political opinions credibaly claim to remain unbiased when in professional pursuit of justice?
In the case of Agent Strzok, Democrats would very much prefer the answer to be Yes, while Republicans would like the answer to be an incredulous No — while presumably in the case of Judge Kavanaugh, Democrats would tend to the incredulous No side, while Republicans would prefer a resounding Yes. No doubt there are more subtleties here, but I’m no lawyer and this is the best I can manage.
That quibble aside, the two situations apparently fall into different silos, and I haven’t seen anyone bringing the two situations together in the hope that one would illuminate the other.
Have I simply missed the relevant materials, or does no one else wish to admit the parallelism? It seems to me that most of what I see is partisanship without much principle.
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Your comments, refinements and refutations are warmly encouraged.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
