Recommended Reading
Adam Elkus –There Is No Substitute For Victory & There Is No Substitute, Part 2.
Mixed results in Iraq and Afghanistan are not proof that victory itself should not be a goal of American military efforts. They are only proof that the policies and strategies that animated American forces were faulty. If Slaughter and Bacevich are arguing that we should adopt more realistic and limited policies and strategies in war, I wholeheartedly agree. Nearly a decade of state-building later, we have ultimately little to show for our efforts. But that is not what is what is being said. Rather, there is a straightforward argument that we cannot “win” wars anymore….
Adam wages battle against unclear and poorly reasoned thinking in national security affairs.
Fabius Maximus – About the escalating conflict with Iran (not *yet* open war), Have Iran’s leaders vowed to destroy Israel? , What do we know about Iran’s nuclear ambitions? and What does the IAEA know about Iran’s nuclear program?
FM is running a series on the political lobbying for war with Iran, or at least US sanction for an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities and research sites.
Summary: What do we know about Iran’s program to build atomic weapons? For decades Americans have been subjected to saturation bombing by misinformation and outright lies about Iran. The information from our intelligence agencies has painted a more accurate picture, if we choose to see it. Sixth in a series; at the end are links to the other chapters.
Steven Pressfield-Work Over Your Head
Writers of fiction learn early that they can write characters who are smarter than they are…..
KC Johnson – Groupthink & Political Analysis
A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and less pedagogical diversity. Outside the academy, the prevalence of groupthink has had the unintended consequence of making the views of “mainstream” academics of little use even for their seeming political allies.
Take, as an example, the recent book analyzing the ideological roots of modern conservatism, penned by political science professor Corey Robin. Published by Oxford University Press, The Reactionary Mind would seem to be what passes for quality in contemporary political science–exactly the sort of analysis that liberals might like to receive as they embark on what promises to be a highly contentious campaign season. The book’s general thesis–that conservatives defend the interests of the elite at the expense of the weak–likewise would seem to be attractive for partisans in the post-Occupy Wall Street era.
Instead, the Robin book has been panned, in caustic terms, by publications that would seem to be sympathetic to an academic critique of the contemporary right….
Hat tip to Bruce Kesler.
Slouching Toward Columbia –Drone panic: New weapon, old anxieties
Poor drones and drone-operators: as the latest generation of weaponry on the battlefield, it’s now their turn to be subject to that great generational scrutiny of moral and ethical suspicion. Poor thinking public: we get treated to these arguments as if they were all original or unique to drones.
This piece from the Atlantic, addresses (among many other things) many of these themes. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a number of very tired tropes about military technology and tactics.
The first overused and under-scrutinized argument is the fear that drones make war “easier to wage” because “we can safely strike from longer distances.” Well, we’ve had that ability since the birth of air power and missile power, it just makes it a lot easier to hit certain kinds of targets at acertain tempo. After all, it’s only the pilots who are “far away,” the drones themselves still operate from bases with real, flesh-and-blood people who are potentially exposed to retaliation, and those bases are not necessarily any further away than bases for manned aircraft (in most cases they service both)…..
The subtext to some of the anti-drone angst is that it is an effective use of American power against some of the worst bastards on Earth, hence the hurry to tangle up in investigations, regulations and lawfare, something that is morally indistinguishable from an artillery shell or infantryman’s bullet.
Ribbonfarm –Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies
The reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the E/I spectrum is that a lot of my recent ruminations have been about how the rapid changes in social psychology going on around us might be caused by the drastic changes in how E/I dispositions manifest themselves in the new (online+offline) sociological environment. Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:
- As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
- Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
- The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
- Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
- The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology
An old post by Venkat I stumbled across.
Gary Rubinstein–The ‘three great teacher’ study — finally laid to rest
Rubinstein deconstructs a study that undergirds a central tenet of corporate Ed Reform:
….When you look at this graph, the first thing that might seem unusual is that the high group is not the 555 group, but the 455 group. Why is that? Well, because the 555 group had a different starting point than the 111 group, so it would not be a valid comparison. None of the twenty graphs have both the 111 and the 555 groups since those groups never had a close enough starting point. They explain in the paper that this is because:
So they admit that the assignment to these teachers was done with bias which, it seems to me, invalidates the entire study. But I learned that even with this bias, the authors of the report had to further distort their results. When you see those three bars it seems that those were the only three groups that began with a starting score of around 56%.
Metamodern – Moscow Report (II): Russians embrace a radical vision of nanotechnology
Shlok Vaidya-FICTION: PLACEIQ
Kings of War-Persian Risk: Analyzing “The Problem of Iran”
