At 9:40 AM on Feb 17, 2016, using Twitter for iPad, the @brian_bilston account tweeted:
Here’s a poem entitled “America is a Gun”.
Strangely, however, you will not find this poem anywhere on Brian Bilston’s official “Poetry Laboetry“.
Since I was a teenager I’ve preferred watching non-American movies because they aren’t saddled with the boring good/bad split.
Drama becomes exceptionally lame when you are told who is good, who is bad, and then you take an obvious side and wait out the inevitable results.
Nothing is at stake.
This was always one of the first points I made when I was teaching ethics to computer science graduate students.
A simple good/bad binary is like an empty premise, not food for thought; doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the messy and hard decisions of the real world.
On that note, here’s an interesting essay that says Robin Hood was transfigured into a moral tale to excite political resistance:
As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s 1795 retelling of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist uprising after the French Revolution. Ritson’s rendering was so popular that modern retellings of Robin Hood, such as Disney’s 1973 cartoon or the film Prince of Thieves (1991) are more centrally about outlaw moral obligations than outlaw hijinks. The Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a simple antagonist to someone who symbolised the abuses of power against the powerless. Even within a single nation (Robin Hood), or a single household (Cinderella), every scale of conflict was restaged as a conflict of values.
My immediate thought is that this presents a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Were old stories changed only after nationalist consciousness, or did they create it?
I mean these narratives may have changed as a reflection of nationalist consciousness, but that doesn’t preclude narratives from having moral spin. Nor does it preclude moral stories from being messy and complex to stimulate thought instead of obedience.
Overall the essay lacks a lot of oral traditions and mostly centers around Greek literature. It makes no mention of Native American or African stories at all, for example, so I am unconvinced it has a fully researched view.
One clear danger is how a good/bad narrative is a terrible way to practice intelligence, let alone threat detection and mitigation. Some people broadly apply a very precise term like “terrorism”, for example, to be a generic classifier of “bad”:
The terrorism label, for them, is a way of distinguishing who is in the wrong. Brian Jenkins, a leading scholar of terrorism, observed in 1981: ‘Terrorism is what the bad guys do.’
This story gets reported again and again every few years, but never with any real depth.
Nobody knows why a “Harvard-taught evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp” invented ransomware.
Somehow he could afford to send 20,000 floppy discs “in the mail to people including targeted attendees of the World Health Organization’s AIDS conference in Stockholm”.
Not a small bill in 1989.
And reportedly 20,000 was just the first shipment as he had plans for sending even more.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s a big (Harvard-taught) clue:
…he advocated that the marriage age be lowered and young women focus their lives on birthing children…
That suggests he was power hungry, a predator with intent to victimize and control others. Was there a state involved? Was he leveraged by some political group, especially in terms of AIDS research?
Here’s what news looked like in 1990, which is what I mean by a lack of any real depth to the reporting (such as where Popp’s funding came from).
You have to appreciate the rich irony of people trying to sway opinion in PsyOps (information operations) failing to do so at home and instead installing a crude political shortcut to push operations faster without convincing anyone…
It is easier to get permission to put a Hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears.
And the obvious reason why there was a difference was because permission to kill someone is a far clearer request than dropping, and I quote an actual information operation here, “an image highly offensive to both Muslims and the religion of Islam”.
Why authorize something with unknown or unpredictable outcomes? Asking whether should someone be killed is a much simpler calculus than asking for authorization to persuade others, I mean if outcomes are meant to be measured and held up for scrutiny. You know when someone is dead. Do you know when someone is persuaded as intended?
Pompeo in this story sounds very much like an impatient tyrant (“executive privilege” addiction syndrome), unable to work with others or convince them of anything, with a clear lack of moral decency or responsibility.
He seems so bad at basic science, so unable to do the hard work of socially engineering things to have lasting value (required in the nuanced word of psychology and influence), that his big answer to difficult questions in life was to yell louder and ignore feedback.
Ironic, right?
Thus, if someone were to point out in advance of the operation that a target would be highly offended and an operation would fail on its first run, Pompeo’s likely would have removed the messenger to push a go button anyway and ignore the disasters.
“When we make a mistake with a kinetic strike, it can be catastrophic — wedding parties, things like that where mistakes are made in targeting,” [David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and retired Special Forces colonel] said. “Whereas if we make a mistake in the information realm, the news cycle is going to move on. We can recover from an information mistake. A kinetic mistake, the victims of it can’t recover.”
“We can recover”? Says who?
Sorry Colonel Maxwell that’s just flat wrong. While it’s true you can’t come back from being dead, there’s also no proof you can magically recover from blown PsyOps.
Think of it this way. If a news cycle moves on, the PsyOps failed in one particular way (like a gun jammed instead of firing). If the news cycle never moves on, a PsyOps operation actually worked, however you might have failed to have it work in the way intended (like a gun shooting the wrong person).
And then there’s the blended issue, where a kinetic mistake is a symptom of a PsyOps mistake — George Floyd’s death (despite systemic racism and so many other black men in America regularly being killed in the same way) isn’t just a news cycle that moves on.
Did white policemen think it was easier to get permission to put a knee on the neck of a black man than it was to get permission to put an idea between his ears? Apparently.
Yet the death of Floyd was called out eventually as an information operation (e.g. it’s harmful to allow a narrative that Americans are killing themselves when clearly they are being suffocated by white nationalist domestic terrorists) and the question isn’t just whether Floyd can’t recover, but whether policing in America now faces an information realm failure that will take a long time to overcome.