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It’s a popular intellectual game among historians to debate who was the “worst” dictator of all time, with most of the disputants arguing the relative merits of Stalin or Hitler with a noisy minority piping up for Mao, Pol Pot and other notorious figures [ sidebar: on the Nazism vs. Stalinism issue, my favorite response is from the great man of letters and author of The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Robert Conquest, who was asked why he thought Hitler’s National Socialist tyranny outclassed Stalin’s in terms of Evil and he replied simply ” I feel it to be so.”]. The blood-soaked 20th century provides a long list of candidates for the title.

But what of the 21st century ?

Who today should be considered ” the great dictator”?

The Armed Forces Journal has an article by Col. Michael Wyly that relates Boyd’s ethic to professionalism:

 In praise of mavericks

Robert Gates felt called upon to prompt uniformed officers accordingly when he addressed Air War College students at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in April. His speech was more than a prompt; it was an inspiration. “The Armed Forces will need principled, creative, reform-minded leaders” who “want to do something, not be somebody,” Gates said.

The secretary continued by quoting Air Force Col. John Boyd: “If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself.”

For a defense secretary to quote a maverick colonel who left the Air Force as a pariah was a bold and risky step. But like the fighter pilot he quoted, he turned into the fight by describing Boyd as “brilliant” in his abilities “to overcome bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility.” The secretary referred to Boyd as “a historical exemplar,” tracing his impact on our military from 30-year-old captain through to his continued intellectual contributions after retiring in 1975. And he praised Boyd for more than his intellect. He championed his character, quoting the colonel, who said, “One day you will take a fork in the road. … If you go [one] way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go [the other] way and you can do something – something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself.”

….It was during the European Renaissance that the professional class emerged and defined itself. It was during the Renaissance that the birthright nobility began to give way to a society led by persons respected for their merits – for what they did instead of who they were. Each profession had standards for entry, they professed something, and their study of it was daily, continual and life-long. They served their society. Medicine, law, the clergy and military leadership became during the 15th and 16th centuries – and still stand as – the classically defined professions. When we speak of a professional ball player or a professional musician, we are corrupting the term, for it means far more than getting a paycheck for what you do. A profession must be applied for and joined after being accepted, and its moral standards are as important as its philosophy.

Read the rest here.

Blogfriend Smitten Eagle has also discussed military professionalism here.

This is hilarious. From David Axe writing for Danger Room:

Army Blogging = Horror Story Waiting to Happen?

….While some soldiers’ blogs may be questionable, they are the ones who understand the Internet and the power it has. … Turning loose senior Army officials who do not understand the impact of the Internet is a treasure trove for those who mean us harm!

I am a consultant to a major Army command that supplies soldiers with everything they need — and the command with one of the biggest IT footprints in the Army, if not the [entire] Department of Defense. I have seen first-hand what havoc those in positions of authority can wreak when they post on the Internet, or attempt to use technology without understanding it. Information on troop movements, supply levels, diagrams of weapons systems, chemical munitions, you name it, has been posted to the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and hosted on unprotected and unsecured .COMs. All in a misguided attempt to look “hip” or “cool” or “net savvy.” …

Give a senior service official a BlackBerry and I can guarantee he will transmit sensitive and sometimes classified information on it without thinking. He will use the Bluetooth headset and the built-in phone to talk about sensitive topics without a care in the world as to who is listening. I have lost count of how many times we have had to collect all of the BlackBerries we issue and purge them due to sensitive or classified information being sent on them. The BlackBerry is one of the greatest weapons system in the terrorists’ inventory, and we supply the bullets!

Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz

A partially wrongheaded book but an interesting one.

I say “partially” because Stiglitz intermixes sophisticated and nuanced understanding of market function and evolution with – at times, intellectually comical – bromide level asides for the anticapitalist yahoos who never took Econ 101 but want to lean on the intellectual authority of his Nobel Prize as they argue across the kitchen table. The second aspect that I find intriguing with Stiglitz so far, is that his (admittedly one-sided) description of the IMF is of an insular, stovepiped, hierarchical, rigidly dysfunctional institution that ignores empirical results of it’s policies and actions. That part I can well believe.

Stiglitz, who has an overriding leftish political agenda, blames IMF institutional culture on “market fundamentalism” of the Chicago school of economics, but he’s describing an organizational-informational behavioral pattern common to most second wave, industrial era bureaucracies. One shared by the US military, the IC, academia and (formerly) by IBM and most institutions of the decidely non-free market Soviet Union. The IMF simply isn’t the home for P2P networks and it acts like the lumbering dinosaur it is – large, brutish, powerful but slow on the uptake and oblivious to much of what goes on around it.

In a sense, though I’m sure Stiglitz never thought of it this way, he’s calling for economic COIN for developing nations rather than the 2GW version of market liberalization practiced in post-Soviet Russia. That’s a meritorious point but I inclined to think that the heavy left politicking Stiglitz sprinkes in his writing will prevent that message from reaching ears that might otherwise be receptive.

The choir he’s preaching to is in no hurry to open up markets anywhere.

Saw the The Dark Knight yesterday. Heath Ledger’s performance lived up to the hype, arguably the best movie villain since Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, but Ledger made an otherwise strong cast look weak by comparison, except for Gary Oldman’s understated, just an honest cop, rendition of Commissioner Gordon.

While having the Joker as the point of origin was a nice touch, I thought that the character of Twoface, one of Batman’s major villains, might have been handled better by compacting the story and leaving a full exploration of Dent’s mad descent for the next movie in the series.