Update, Terrorism vs Insurgency, and Other Topics

California, Washington, and Oregon have apparently announced a pact, and the eastern states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are creating a regional working group to help coordinate their efforts against COVID-19.

Which is not unreasonable. (This, btw, is why I'm skeptical about efforts to get rid of government. You might get rid of whatever you currently call government, but the need for coordination/administration etc generally doesn't go away, and will take on the same form, albeit under a different name. Maybe you have a private 'mutual aid organization', which you all pay some membership fee to. Whether you call it 'mutual aid' or 'government', a 'membership fee' or 'taxes' it all tends to act the same in the end. But that's for a later discussion.)

But it sets the stage for quite an intense and uncertain future, because Trump (who apparently is now claiming he has 'absolute authority', after declaring "I don't take responsibility at all", and at other times claiming that the federal goverment was just a stopgap to states) is probably not going to take that too well.

Weird, that you can't have it both ways, isn't it? You can't neglect to do your job and then get upset when other people step in to fill the gaps.

But this is Trump, and every time he's been faced with a challenge he doubles down. He's petty and vindictive, and I have no idea what sort of crazy response he'll come up with, but I'm sure it'll be a doozy.

Right now... this has the potential to be a nothingburger, or to be a Very. Big. Deal. Indeed.

I'm not sure which way it'll go, though.

So anyways, here's the thing. The conversation I want to have has more to do with which sorts of things we would want, at what level. Like... public goods vs privatization, county vs. state. vs. federal. That sort of thing. My overall principle is to 'support the lowest level possible' and enable them to come up with their own solutions, but there's a heckuva lot of room to play around in that... and there are reasonable arguments to be made for placing certain things at a national level. (For example - as mobile as Americans can be, it makes sense to have some consistent education standards so that a kid transferring from Arizona to Connecticut - or vice versa - won't be on a completely different academic level.)

But I've got plenty of time to dig into that. Before doing so, I wanted to talk a little bit more about something else.

It's a mishmash of things I've come across over the years, and I'm not going to try and look up every little reference, so please excuse any mistakes.

Almost a decade ago, we were asked "what is the difference between terrorism and an insurgency."

It's a complicated question, hinging on how you define terrorists and insurgents, and I will leave aside that terrorism is a strategy or a tactic that may or may not be used by an insurgency, so it's not exactly a fair comparison. Here goes.

When you have a society, there are many decisions made... about who gets what. How resources are allocated, what laws are passed, and so on and so forth.

And there are always people who don't get what they want.

In a free marketplace of ideas, and a democracy, they can try to work within the system to make the changes they want. They can create a platform, run candidates, try to drum up support (and funding)...

But some ideas don't really catch on. (And - in systems that have ossified too much, or are too autocratic, the system may not be capable of changing, either.)

If this represents a genuine grievance, more and more people may join in... and an insurgency can grow. (In a democracy, it would show in candidates running on certain platforms, winning primaries and political positions at the expense of the establishment candidates. In the absence of a legitimate way of doing this within the system, if the issue is severe enough you may see an insurgency... a competing force for the resources of a government. They won't just be trying to fund military forces, they'll also be taking taxes from areas they control, and trying to take care of the people under their jurisdiction. Just like a government would.)

Terrorism... terrorism starts because their ideas weren't popular enough to catch on. They don't have the numbers. Don't have the support.

So they are trying to build support beyond what they otherwise would have. By doing attention-grabbing attacks, to draw in supporters who may otherwise not know they exist.

And by doing horrific attacks, so that when the government overreacts (and rounds up innocent people in a dragnet operation to capture the guilty), people who were perfectly content to go about their business realize that they can't afford to... and get radicalized, and (they hope) turn to the terrorists.

If they do build that level of support, they can become an insurgency... so there's a lot of crossover. The line between the two isn't always clear (and, well... you can have an insurgency without terrorist tactics, so it's not like this is 'the one and only path' a movement can take. Heck, there are also options for non-violent tactics, or insurgency targeting 'legimate' targets like government offices and military personnel, rather than civilians.)

What I wanted to talk about, though, was about the mindset leading towards terrorism. Because that is also a choice, and it's almost always tied to arrogance.

That is, in a free marketplace some ideas are just not going to catch on. Certain Christians believe that dancing is bad - had a whole movie on that - and yet dancing is still pretty popular, and it's unlikely that there would ever be enough popular support to ban it. Not on a large scale, at least.

But the people who believe this are not going to say "the vast majority of people don't agree with us, so maybe we're wrong."

Nope. They truly believe, in their heart of hearts, that they're in the right. And so they are faced with a choice - privately live their beliefs, and accept that the rest of society will never share them...

Or try to change society. Mayhap even try to force society to do 'the right thing', where 'the right thing' is 'that which I'm absolutely certain I know is best for you.'

Arrogance.

Compulsion. I do think that the Koran had that right, btw - that "there is no compulsion in religion."

If there is a God, I'm fairly sure He (or She) is more offended by attempts to compel people into doing what you think is best, then He is by people doing whatever it is in the first place.

But I digress.

The point is, there's a choice. A point where people either accept that they'll always be some weird minority (of which we have plenty. Amish that drive horses and buggies. Hasidic Jews with their particular styles of dress. Christians who decide to ban dance in their local city or county. Each able to live how they think is best, in their private life... but not trying to impose those choices on the rest of society), or decide that they're right and everyone else is wrong.

And when they - arrogantly - decide the latter, they have to explain away why they're not succeeding like they 'should'. And they'll argue that it's because their opponents are cheating, or lying, or whatever it takes to show that they're right and would win in any reasonably fair contest.

And so it's easy to start justifying doing whatever it takes to put their beliefs in practice.

Deliberately, knowingly, lying? Justified, if it helps defeat those nasty fill-in-the-blank, who have blocked you and opposed you and prevented you from building that perfect world you dream of.

There was a book, some while back, talking about the Wisdom of Crowds. About how, collectively, we can be wiser than we are individually. I think it's somewhat true, with caveats. Further studies showed how people could mess with that 'wisdom of crowds'. Could deliberately try to feed it false information, or skew things in one way or another.

Some do it just because it's fun to mess with people, ofc. Others do it... well, because they have a pre-determined answer that they're trying to force the crowd to choice.

Again, arrogance.

I went into all that because most of what I want to get into... well, it presupposes that fair and open marketplace of ideas, which I think tends to be allow the best ideas to come forth.

But we do need to be aware of the types of things that undermine it.

Of attempts, whether it's terrorism, disinformation, lying, bribing, blackmailing - anything other than a open and honest debate, that is used to arrogantly push a certain answer on the rest of us.

To use my previous pizza analogy, it's that one person who his absolutely certain their favorite pizza choice is the only possible pizza choice, and is willing to do whatever it takes to force that decision on everyone. 

Marketplace of Ideas, Strategies, Etc.

I posted a link earlier to an article discussing how black feminists on twitter campaigned against twitter trolls who were pretending to be women of color, and said I was saving it 'for later'.

That later is now.

See, I believe there is something to the whole wisdom of crowds thing. I also believe there are ways of disrupting it, preventing the whole from acting in a 'wise' manner. A lot of it has to do with the free marketplace of ideas, and what sort of behavior is acceptable (and not) in advancing your arguments. This also ties in a bit with my previous post, regarding strategies of attack and counterattack.

What I want to start with, though, is with the common reasons people dismiss the 'wisdom of crowds'.

The most common one, I think, is that survey after survey shows that quite a few of us aren't really all that knowledgeable... so it's hard to believe that the whole can be wiser than the sum of it's parts. I think Malcolm Gladwell explains the mechanism behind that rather well in his book The Tipping Point. Sure, if you conducted a survey on something like, I don't know... car mechanics...

The majority of us would probably sound dumb, we'd have no idea what a carburetor is or what it does, or why the car sputters, etc. And that's okay, because if we ever actually need to know that information, we'd go find ourselves an expert (a maven) to fill us in. We'd go to our buddy the car mechanic, or google the symptoms and find a youtube video, or take it to an actual mechanic - though we'd probably want to have some reason to trust their expertise, as there are too many horror stories of mechanics ripping people off.

The point, though, is that even if we collectively don't seem to know much about cars, we generally known how to go the experts when we've got a car problem, and the whole is wiser than the sum of it's parts.

By the same token, during an election people may not pay attention to the blow-by-blow accounts, may not recognize the names of obscure candidates at the beginning, but we have political experts who do pay attention... and they advise the people around them who don't often have time to dig into the facts, and the ultimate winner of an election can be a better choice than you'd expect.

I say 'can', because of what I'm about to get into next:

The wisdom of crowds is not perfect, and there are ways of subverting it. On a small scale, a lot of it acts like my earlier discussion on decision-making, conformity, and groupthink.

If someone quickly gives the impression of support for an idea and squelches dissent (so that people think they're the only oddball who thinks differently, or has no way of identifying who else feels the way they do, so they can't work together to present an alternative) one forceful person can make it seem as though 'the crowd' agrees with an action that doesn't actually draw on the wisdom of crowds.

It's the magic trick by which dictators and tyrants hold power despite having real support from only a fraction of the population. So long as it's the right portion, in the right places, they can control the decision-making process. (And, much like my earlier example where the military is trying to defend against an enemy coming across a mountain, said dictator will sometimes be right, but there's always a risk that they'll be disastrously wrong given their horrible decision-making process. One singular person with ultimate power can definitely make decisions faster than committees, and sometimes committees don't have good dynamics and don't make wise decisions, but unless that singular person with power makes a sincere effort to get diverse opinions and makes a sound plan that takes into consideration all the various concerns - i.e. consider the likelihood that the enemy will come through the large pass or the small pass, and then create a plan that takes both possibilities into account, though focusing on the most likely - they generally don't have the time or knowledge to be expert in everything they need to know, and will probably miss something critical. At some point or another.)

The other thing I wanted to point out is that support doesn't generally come from a vacuum. That doesn't mean that there's actual support for the proposed solution... to go back to computer software, it's more like there's a vulnerability, and malware can exploit that vulnerability in a variety of ways... whether by installing spyware to monitor you, or running a bitcoin mining program, or looking through your files and copying anything interesting. The underlying vulnerability is the same in each case, but the way that vulnerability is exploited is vastly different.

In the same way, the underlying vulnerability may be frustration at the inability to better yourself through hard work. It may show itself (I don't want to say 'exploited' in this case, because many of the people gaining support because of that vulnerability are idealists who sincerely want to improve the system, it's just that their ideas gain traction because of this underlying vulnerability) in support for a particular political candidate...  or support for something like socialism. That's part of why FDR claimed he was saving capitalism from itself (and also why the intense distaste for his policies, and efforts to roll them back seem so short-sighted. If you're not addressing the underlying reasons why FDR and his policies came into being, then all you're doing is resetting the situation to a place where capitalism will fail.)

It may also show itself in support for libertarianism, or whatever. A vulnerability can also be exploited to take us in darker directions, like white supremacists, xenophobia, and the like. The point is that there's some underlying reason people are drawn to support certain ideas, and we have to address that if we want to get anywhere. Much though I dislike those ideas, I understand that there's an underlying fear... perhaps even the same fear driving support for socialism. The fear that you won't be able to succeed through hard work, but in this case you blame it on illegal immigrants and affirmative action efforts rather than the wealthy bilking you out of fair compensation. (This is speculation, and I'm sure there are people studying the topic who can give a better explanation.)

I'm not saying any of these things are the right answer, btw. Simply trying to point out that, well, there's a reason every single idea out there has support, and we shouldn't just dismiss those ideas without at least considering why some people honestly support it.

But this is all describing a fairly honest marketplace for ideas. One where most people genuinely support their favored ideas, and for the reasons given during the exchange.

There are people who deliberately subvert the system. Who, for example, are dishonest about their reasons for supporting an idea. (When I was deployed with the New York guard, I was caught off guard once because apparently we had 'internal reasons' and 'external reasons', and we were only supposed to tell 'outsiders' the external reasons for something. That whole thing rather disturbed me, since we should be able to honestly tell why we wanted to take an action, and having an entirely different set of reasons that was known only to those of us in the unit seemed dishonest. This was for a fairly mild issue, though. Like, it seemed silly that we were even trying to hide our reasons in the first place since there was nothing bad or wrong about our reasoning, which is part of why I apparently crossed an unwritten rule I hadn't been aware of when I mentioned the real reason in a meeting. Seriously, if you have an 'internal' reason and a 'public' reason, you might want to take a long, hard look at yourself in a mirror because you are clearly exploiting a vulnerability of some sort for your own purposes... and if you're afraid to publicly admit what that purpose is, you are misleading all the people supporting you.)

The article about the black feminists on twitter is another example of this, for a variety of reasons. First, though it's not quite the case in this example, we've got the problem of twitter bots... given the tendency to self-censor if you feel you're the only one who disagrees, various people try to manipulate the marketplace of ideas by making it seem like they have more support than they really do. They hope to draw on the bandwagon effect, and get more people to agree with them than they otherwise would have. So they flood social media with accounts saying they support some idea, or disagree with another, and hope to gain traction.

Second, and more specific to this case, they will try to sabotage opposing ideas. In this case by running a false flag operation that tried to make the other side look more extreme than they really were. (This, btw, reminds me of some more historical efforts to disrupt unwanted ideas. Like the Pinkerton agency and it's efforts to infiltration unions and disrupt strikes. Or the FBI, and it's attempts to disrupt the Civil Rights Movement.)

If this was more like a game of Dominion, these would clearly be attack cards... with all the risks and issues that go with that. It refuses to address the underlying reasons why people are drawn to these movements (in the case of strikes, the mistreatment of workers. In the case of civil rights, the frustration with a system that puts up roadblocks and obstacles to every effort you make towards building a successful life, solely because of the color of your skin).

It's like they see the signs of an unexpected program on their system, they assume it's malicious (which... I know I keep saying this is where the analogy breaks down, because it's not. Or not necessarily. Maybe I should say that the hacks can be benevolent or malicious depending on user intent, and the same vulnerability can be exploited to patch the system or break it. The analogy only goes so far, at this point.)

Anyways. They see unexpected activity, assume it's malicious, and instead of digging down to the root vulnerability and patching it themselves, they scramble to create another program that can disrupt or reverse whatever unexpected behavior they see.

This is why I talked about fear and arrogance, earlier. There's an arrogance in believing you know better than everyone else, an arrogance in believing you are justified in doing whatever you have to in order to make sure what you consider the 'right' decisions are made, an arrogance in believing that those actions are justified in your case (and not, when taken by your evil opponents)....

And there's arrogance in assuming that the only reason your ideas aren't more popular is because people are too stupid to understand, and/or that your opponents are too good at manipulating the system.

That there's no underlying vulnerability to patch, no reason to worry about 'saving capitalism from itself' like FDR did, because the only reason there's support for things like socialism is because of... I dunno. People's stupidity, or evil villains, whatever. Take your pick. (You can also make a similar argument about support for white supremacy, tbh. What's the underlying vulnerability drawing people to such a horrible idea?)

But the arrogance is only part of the story, and the other part is fear. See, if you truly believed in capitalism. If you truly believed it was the best system...

Than you wouldn't feel threatened by socialism. You would know that people may try it, but that it would fail, and they'd eventually come back to capitalism.

But fear, fear that maybe capitalism wouldn't triumph, fear that people won't be 'smart enough' to do what you arrogantly believe is the right thing, fear that 'the enemy' can manipulate the marketplace of ideas in its favor, all that fear means you feel justified in doing 'whatever it takes' to fight socialism.

Whether that means supporting the Contras in Nicaragua, or a military-led government in El Salvador, or backing a coup in Guatemala. All were done primarily out of fear, and fear-based policies often have negative consequences. (And, as just one consequence, the instability the US contributed to has created an incentive to migrate. In some cases, by seeking asylum in the US. We have at least some responsibility in creating the mess on our own borders, not that our government would ever admit it.)

Fear is used to justify tactics that undermine the whole wisdom of crowds thing, and makes people focus on the symptoms instead of the root causes of a problem.

Fear and arrogance are used to justify doing whatever it takes to win, and to dismiss any dissent as either stupidity, naivety, or enemy action.

If your ideas are not gaining traction, you're probably missing something important about your messaging. It may be that you just need to make better arguments, or it could also be that you're not addressing something that people think is more important at the moment, or any number of things.

Forcefully attempting to coerce and manipulate people into supporting you is ultimately destructive to the entire system.