[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Ryan Lanham]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> PS:  America is NOT able to win militarily in contexts such as Somalia,
> Afghanistan, and even Iraq, because the pool of new insurgents is constant,
> and the insurgents don't have to win - they simply have to persist.  To
> "win", America needs to pacify the country.  And it does not achieve this
> goal by killing large numbers of insurgents, because the insurgency is
> self-reproducing.  What's more, the more the war goes on, the more the
> morale of insurgents increases, and the more the morale of America's
> support-base decreases.  The only way America can "win" is by stepping back
> from the reconstruction of society to the making-safe of enemies through
> patronage and bribery.  America has reduced violence in Iraq (still not to a
> low enough level for refugees to return!) mainly by in a sense, *accepting
> defeat* - ceding local power to militias with goals vastly different from
> America's, in effect buying them off with patronage and recognition in
> return for the *appearance* of stability.  They take "al-Qaeda in Iraq"
> and "Islamic State in Iraq", give them official posts, bribe them, and
> rename them as the "Awakening Councils" - thus suddenly, defeat becomes
> victory.  They are trying the same thing in Afghanistan.  I doubt it will
> work.  If it does, it will just be the Taleban brought inside the fictive
> Afghan 'state', not at all their defeat.
>
> ___________________________________________
>

People don't understand victory post WW2.  Winning isn't about military
matters at all.  Militaries exist to hold on until the social fabric of a
place can be re-woven into something totally new.  It's a meme machine.
That is and always has been US strategy from Japan to Europe to
Korea/Vietnam and now Central Asia.

America won the Southeast Asia wars just as they are winning the Central
Asian wars now regardless of military outcomes.  Victory is about social
DNA.  America succeeds at spreading that like no one else. Even for the
post-industrial world, American ideals, approaches, technologies, memes are
totally and absolutely dominant.  The new China is really just the old
America in Asia.  There's nothing American's don't recognize who visit
there.  It feels like the US in 1950.

The American model is simple and, so far, unstoppable.  The objective is to
turn people into Americans...baseball, sports interests, beer brand focused,
and business friendly... and smothe desire for cheap and systematically
similar meals of relatively high quality/low cost...particularly those
favored by children, cigarettes, cheap chocolate...cheap beer, ease on the
weekends, style set by movies and television...the desire for individual
hopes and dreams, religions beholden to businesses...or even businesses
themselves...all the American way.   I guarantee you that right now
Americans are working on televangelized Islam with silver haired Imams
asking for donations every 4 minutes even while they say whatever it is
muslims want to hear.

Indians talk about the autonomy of Bollywood...its memes are totally
American...circa 1935.  Europeans claim to hate American consumerism but
nearly all their meaningful firms are modeled on US lines and deliver
products aimed at US contexts.   The whole niche of European production is
to avoid US low end products.  America opens markets, Europe responds to the
elitists that education and savoir faire create.  It was Japan 25 years ago,
now it is the Gulf.  In 25 more years it will be Vietnam and India.

Unfortunately, the system is breaking down.  So all the critics will have to
deal with a world where the very productive and liberating model of the last
50 years is now dying.   We'll still see iPods and Marlboros for a while,
but the new system is going to be local...and that will lead to a lot of
misery for those who never gained the worldview to be liberated.
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