Arising from this, it struck me that there is something very important about continuity in politics. In many ways, it’s a habit – the group of professional rightwing publicists who invented “teabaggers” in late 2008 were clearly very well aware that a movement survives by acting out its emotional rituals and internalised skills. Whether it’s…
Read More teaIf I hadn’t been fiddling with file permissions to get WordPress running last Sunday, I’d probably have been writing about the Haystack saga. I’m a bit gestört by some of the coverage of it – Evgeny Morozov, typically, has been doing good work in the general war on bullshit, but I’m less convinced of his…
Read More “Cyberwar” and Iran: the other side of the hillYou may have noticed that the blogspot version of TYR looks funny. The news is that we’re moving – with luck, our national nightmare of blog bifurcation and manually maintained archive links (there’s a reason the ones on TYR classic haven’t been updated in years) will be at an end. Before this happens, though, I’d…
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Read More Hello world!I was about to comment on this Jamie Kenny post about the blackly comic way that 10 years after the 11th September attack, the US or at least its media-political complex is in thrall to some book-burning nut in Florida who got thrown out of Germany for helping himself to the communion plate. Then I…
Read More googleA thought, while writing the last post. Thinking about international politics invariably involves a lot of rational-choice stuff, or rational-choice at one remove. Although this may not make sense in a platonic game-theory way, how do so-and-so’s interests, preferences, and meta-knowledge of their own situation have to differ from yours to make it work? They’ve…
Read More survival of the survivorsAdam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn’t defeat the Israelis…
Read More 2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrongExtremists. I can’t help but think this is a contribution to the ongoing debate about hero-of-the-blog Diego Gambetta’s work on engineers and terrorism. If stuff is upside down before you start the riot, fire, explosion, etc., your extremist cell could probably do with more engineers. Meanwhile, the SELF THOUGHT SPIRITUAL SCIENTIST guy next to him…
Read More mildly amusing roundupSo I was trying to parse the London Diplomatic List (this month’s edition yet to make an appearance). Cian suggested pulling out the fontspec tags on the grounds that they’re often redundant and it might be possible to identify groups among them. So I did just that and then a little bit of data reduction.…
Read More ambassador, with this pdf you are spoiling us