Tag: war

Taleb corrects Pinker

He observes that Pinker has been fooled by randomness and The “Long Peace” is a Statistical Illusion:

When I finished writing The Black Swan, in 2006, I was confronted with ideas of “great moderation”, by people who did not realize that the process was getting fatter and fatter tails (from operational and financial, leverage, complexity, interdependence, etc.), meaning fewer but deeper departures from the mean. The fact that nuclear bombs explode less often that regular shells does not make them safer. Needless to say that with the arrival of the events of 2008, I did not have to explain myself too much. Nevertheless people in economics are still using the methods that led to the “great moderation” narrative, and Bernanke, the protagonist of the theory, had his mandate renewed.

Now to my horror I saw an identical theory of great moderation produced by Steven Pinker with the same naive statistically derived discussions (>700 pages of them!).

  1. I agree that diabetes is a bigger risk than murder –we are victims of sensationalism. But our suckerdom for overblown narratives of violence does not imply that the risks of large scale violent shocks have declined. (The same as in economics, people’s mapping of risks are out of sync and they underestimate large deviations). We are just bad at evaluating risks. 
  2. Pinker conflates nonscalable Mediocristan (death from encounters with simple weapons) with scalable Extremistan (death from heavy shells and nuclear weapons). The two have markedly distinct statistical properties. Yet he uses statistics of one to make inferences about the other. And the book does not realize the core difference between scalable/nonscalable (although he tried to define powerlaws). He claims that crime has dropped, which does not mean anything concerning casualties from violent conflict.
  3. Another way to see the conflation, Pinker works with a times series process without dealing with the notion of temporal homogeneity. Ancestral man had no nuclear weapons, so it is downright foolish to assume the statistics of conflicts in the 14th century can apply to the 21st. A mean person with a stick is categorically different from a mean person with a nuclear weapon, so the emphasis should be on the weapon and not exclusively on the psychological makup of the person.
  4. The statistical discussions are disturbingly amateurish, which would not be a problem except that the point of his book is statistical. Pinker misdefines fat tails by talking about probability not contribution of rare events to the higher moments; he somehow himself accepts powerlaws, with low exponents, but he does not connect the dots that, if true, statistics can allow no claim about the mean of the process. Further, he assumes that data reveals its properties without inferential errors. He talks about the process switching from 80/20 to 80/02, when the first has a tail exponent of 1.16, and the other 1.06, meaning they are statistically indistinguishable. (Errors in computation of tail exponents are at least .6, so this discussion is noise, and as shown in [1], [2], it is lower than 1. (It is an error to talk 80/20 and derive the statistics of cumulative contributions from samples rather than fit exponents; an 80/20 style statement is interpolative from the existing sample, hence biased to clip the tail, while exponents extrapolate.)
  5. He completely misses the survivorship biases (which I called the Casanova effect) that make an observation by an observer whose survival depends on the observation invalid probabilistically, or to the least, biased favorably. Had a nuclear event taken place Signor Pinker would not have been able to write the book.
  6. He calls John Gray’s critique “anecdotal”, yet it is more powerful statistically (argument of via negativa) than his >700 pages of pseudostats.
  7. Psychologically, he complains about the lurid leading people to make inferences about the state of the system, yet he uses lurid arguments to make his point.
  8. You can look at the data he presents and actually see a rise in war effects, comparing pre-1914 to post 1914.
  9. Recursing a Bit (Point added Nov 8): Had a book proclaiming The Long Peace been published in 1913-1934 it would carry similar arguments to those in Pinker’s book.

Taleb is using a different means to reach much the same conclusions I have. Again. Pinker is essentially applying the same “This Time It’s Different” argument to violence that the mainstream economists applied to the dot com bubble, the housing boom, and the post-2008 “recovery”.

Simplistic thinkers inevitably think in linear terms. They assume tomorrow will be like today because today was pretty much like yesterday. Both those who know history and those who understand probability understand that at some point in time, this will no longer be the case.

History is rife with long periods of peace and tranquility. Those are quite often the sections missing from the history books, because there was nothing much that was noteworthy to record. But human nature being what it is, sooner or later events always becoming more exciting, which usually means more bloody.

It’s not hard to understand why there are fewer wars these days. Nuclear weapons have put an end to the post-French Revolutionary progress towards Ludendorffian total war. But that doesn’t mean they will never be used or that Man will not find other means to fight cataclysmic wars. It’s rather remarkable that anyone would make such abysmally stupid claims about the prospects for the continuation of the “Long Peace” when the USA is moving rapidly towards ethnic civil war, Europe is preparing for extreme ethnic cleansing, and the Dar al-Islam is in the process of uniting under a new and aggressive Caliphate even as the USA attempts to instigate war with Russia.

Don’t fight them over there

Fight them over here:

The accumulating evidence from high-quality public-opinion research is hard to ignore. A Quinnipiac University survey released March 4 found that terrorism now trails only the economy as a top public priority: 67% of the American people regard Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as a “major threat” to U.S. security. The public is not satisfied with the Obama administration’s response to this threat. Only 39% approve of the president’s handling of terrorism (down from 52% a year ago), while 54% disapprove. When it comes to ISIS, the public’s view is even more negative, with only 35% approving.

These sentiments translate into support for much more assertive policies. The Quinnipiac survey found that by a stunning 62% to 30%, the American people now support sending U.S. ground forces to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Those in favor include majorities of Democrats and independents as well as Republicans, women as well as men, and young adults as well as seniors. This result underscores a late-February CBS poll, which found 57% of Americans favoring the use of ground forces, up 18 percentage points since last September.

It is astonishing that the American public want to send ground forces to Iraq and Syria when there are millions of Muslims laying the groundwork for the Caliphate in the West. This is why the West is presently losing the Third Great War of Islamic Expansion.

Any time your grand strategy is based on an idea as intrinsically idiotic as the notion that the magic of geographical translocation will somehow transform invading enemies into clones of yourself, you deserve to lose.

Diversity = military occupation

France occupies itself:

As the threat of attacks by Islamist extremists remains high in France, President Francois Hollande has decided to continue the deployment of 10,000 troops on the streets across the country.

“The threat of terrorist attack against our country remains high. The head of state has decided to maintain the level of the army on the national territory at 10,000 troops in support of security forces from the Interior Ministry,” Hollande’s office said in a statement after a meeting of senior ministers, AFP reported.

A total of 7,000 troops will be monitoring and protecting religious buildings that are “particularly threatened,” the statement added. Among other sites that are being patrolled by the troops are stations, media buildings and various other possible targets for terrorists. The move comes almost two months after deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s headquarters and a kosher shop in Paris left 17 people dead.

At some point, someone in France is going to realize that if you’re going to pay for 10,000 troops to militarily occupy your own nation, it would be considerably more effective to use all those troops to repatriate the group of people responsible for making the occupation necessary.

And that’s assuming they lean towards the more civilized option, which has historically not always been the case in France.

Immigration as weapon

Still convinced that immigration is not invasion? Greece is rather convincingly threatening the use of immigrants as a weapon to hold Europe financial hostage. Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said:

“If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State, too.”

European Union finance chiefs are currently debating whether to continue a bailout plan, with Germany a deciding vote.

“If they strike us, we will strike them,” the official said. “We will give to migrants from everywhere the documents they need to travel in the Schengen area, so that the human wave could go straight to Berlin.”

It’s a brilliant move, hanging the European Union on the gallows of its own rhetoric about the sanctity of the free movement of peoples. In one fell swoop, Greece can rid itself of all its invaders and hit the EU much harder than if it had an actual army. In fact, it’s a great strategic move whether the EU comes through with the cash or not.

Either way, it is putting the lie to the EU’s suicidal policy on immigrants and Islam.

In it for the long term

A comment about ISIS at Jerry Pournelle’s site:

ISIS has more to offer its soldiers than the Western militaries do:
Arab men in traditional culture have NO contact with women at all, not even dating, until they’re married. That can often not be until one reaches the thirties. This has the results you would expect.

ISIS, by contrast, offers a quick marriage both to male and female recruits. For the men  the attractions of marriage are obvious. Women are offered  “wonderful husband and a free house with top-of-the-line appliances, such as a fridge, microwave and even a milkshake machine”.  Moreover, ISIS will pay a stipend for every  child the couple bears.

Framed that way, it’s obvious why they exert such a powerful draw.  People who aren’t ever going to amount to much , people who have been let down by their traditional culture, are flocking to a place that offers them a fresh start. And sex , of course. 

I’m going to guess that their soldiers are not subject to divorce-rape the way Western soldiers are either. The fact that they are willing to pay for children born to ISIS couples is an ominous sign that they are planning for the future.

War propaganda doesn’t fly in Berlin

The Germans are getting increasingly dubious about the way the US is reporting Russian activities in Ukraine:

Breedlove’s Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine

US President Obama supports Chancellor Merkel’s efforts at finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis. But hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin’s approach. And NATO’s top commander in Europe hasn’t been helping either.

It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.

On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”

German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America’s NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.

The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove’s comments as “dangerous propaganda.” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove’s comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

Read the whole thing. There is considerably more there about the way that Gen. Breedlove and Victoria Nuland are incessantly banging the drum for direct military conflict with Russia. Apparently Putin isn’t Hitler yet, but give it another six months and he’ll be sporting hair and a mustache.

The banality of killing

The higher up the chain of command you are, the easier it is:

I spent every day of my seven-month deployment in Afghanistan trying to figure out how to kill the Taliban commander in my area. He lived and operated to our north and every day would send his soldiers down to plant bombs, terrorize the villages and wrestle with us for control of the area. Our mission was to secure the villages and provide economic and political development, but that was slow work with intangible results. Killing the Taliban commander would be an objective measure of success.

I never killed him. Instead, each day we would kill his soldiers or his soldiers would kill our Marines. The longer I lived among the Afghans, the more I realized that neither the Taliban nor we were fighting for the reasons I expected. Despite the rhetoric I internalized from the newspapers back home about why we were in Afghanistan, I ended up fighting for different reasons once I got on the ground — a mix of loyalty to my Marines, habit and the urge to survive.

The enemy fighters were often young men raised alongside poppy fields in small farms set up like latticework along the river. They must have been too young and too isolated to understand anything outside of their section of the valley, never mind something global like the 9/11 attacks. These villagers fought us because that’s what they always did when foreigners came to their village. Perhaps they just wanted to be left alone.

The more I thought about the enemy, the harder it was to view them as evil or subhuman. But killing requires a motivation, so the concept of self-defense becomes the defining principle of target attractiveness. If someone is shooting at me, I have a right to fire back. But this is a legal justification, not a moral one. The comic Louis C.K. brilliantly pointed out this absurdity: “Maybe if you pick up a gun and go to another country and you get shot, it’s not that weird. Maybe if you get shot by the dude you were just shooting at, it’s a tiny bit your fault.”

My worst fear before deploying was what, in training, we called “good shoot, bad result.” But there is no way in the chaos and uncertainty of war to make the right decision all the time. On one occasion, the Taliban had been shooting at us and we thought two men approaching in the distance were armed and intended to kill us. We warned them off, but it did no good. They continued to approach, and so my Marines fired. What possible reason could two men have to approach a squad of armed Marines in a firefight? When it was over and the two men lay dead we saw that they were unarmed, just two men trying to go home, who never made it.

On most occasions, when ordnance would destroy the enemy or a sniper would kill a Taliban fighter, we would engage in the professional congratulations of a job well done like businessmen after a successful client meeting. Nothing of the sort happened after killing a civilian. And in this absence of group absolution, I saw for the first time how critical it actually was for my soul and my sanity.

Nobody ever talked about the accidental killing. There was paperwork, a brief investigation and silence. You can’t tell someone who has killed an innocent person that he did the right thing even if he followed all the proper procedures before shooting.

It is somewhat amusing that Americans are still insisting that the United States are “the good guys” in all of this long and sordid history of invading and occupying other countries. How many more countries do they have to occupy, how many more innocent civilians have to be killed by American soldiers, before Americans wake up to the fact that, just maybe, the country which has invaded and is currently occupying literally dozens of sovereign countries is not, in fact, “the good guys”.

The fact that there are bad guys out there does not automatically make those who oppose them good. When Hitler and Stalin went to war, who was the good guy?

Donald Rumsfeld once said that the USA could only win if it killed terrorists faster than it created new ones. Considering that we’re now 14 years into “the war on terror”, I think it should be obvious that the USA did not win on the basis of his metric. Forget peace, give isolation a chance.

I’m not a big fan of Louis CK, but in this case, he has a point. “Maybe if you pick up a gun and go to another country and you get shot,
it’s not that weird. Maybe if you get shot by the dude you were just
shooting at, it’s a tiny bit your fault.”

Afghanistan is not our business. Ukraine is not our business. Iraq is not our business. Syria is not our business. Iran is not our business. And while the neocons are off playing Risk in foreign lands, the homeland has been invaded by 50 million invaders. The only war genuinely worth fighting is the one being completely overlooked and ignored.

The author concludes:

Ensuring our own safety and the defense of a peaceful world may require
training boys and girls to kill, creating technology that allows us to
destroy anyone on the planet instantly, dehumanizing large segments of
the global population and then claiming there is a moral sanctity in
killing. To fathom this system and accept its use for the greater good
is to understand that we still live in a state of nature.

Monsters so often tell themselves they are heroes.

Asking for trouble

This epically lunatic deployment looks likely to put more than a few American soldiers in danger this summer:

US 173rd Airborne Brigade Commander Michael Foster said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC said the US would deploy personnel by the end of this week to train the Ukrainian national guard.

“Before this week is up, we’ll be deploying a battalion minus… to the Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces for the fight that’s taking place,” Foster stated. “What we’ve got laid out is six United States companies that will be training six Ukrainian companies throughout the summer.”

The training will take place at the level of US and Ukrainian national guard companies, Foster explained, adding that “we have nothing above battalion staff level” engaged in the military training. The current plan is for US forces to stay six months, he said, and noted there have been discussions about how to increase the duration and the scope of the training mission.

The current channels for military training set up between Ukraine and the United States would not be used for transferring defensive lethal aid if the United States decided to provide arms to Ukraine, Foster told Sputnik on Monday.

I imagine Putin is already conferring with his generals about the best way to encircle and capture this battalion, which would be a bigger military humiliation for the United States than the Vietnam War combined with the failure of Operation Eagle Claw.

Obama vs Israel

No wonder America’s Jews are suddenly so conflicted and flirting with some of the Republican presidential contenders:

President Obama is alleged to have stopped an Israeli military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2014 by threatening to shoot down Israeli jets before they could reach their targets, according to reports to emerge from the Middle East at the weekend

The threat from the U.S. forced Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to abort a planned attack on Iraq, reported Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida…. The report claimed that an unnamed Israeli minister who has good ties with the US administration revealed the attack plan to Secretary of State John Kerry, and that Obama then threatened to shoot down the Israeli jets before they could reach their targets in Iran.

According to the report, ‘Netanyahu and his commanders agreed after four nights of deliberations to task the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Benny Gantz, to prepare a qualitative operation against Iran’s nuclear program.

‘In addition, Netanyahu and his ministers decided to do whatever they could do to thwart a possible agreement between Iran and the White House because such an agreement is, allegedly, a threat to Israel’s security.’

The sources added that Gantz and his commanders prepared the requested plan and that Israeli fighter jets trained for several weeks in order to make sure the plans would work successfully. Israeli fighter jets reportedly even carried out experimental flights in Iran’s airspace after they managed to break through radars.

At some point, even the dimmest American Jews are going to wake up to the fact that the gelding of Christian civilization in the West and the racial diversification of the white nations is very unlikely to turn out “good for the Jews”, regardless of how it ends. Some Jews have clearly begun to realize that, as 69 percent of Jews voted for Obama in 2012, nine percent less than the 78 percent who did in 2008. But too many Jews outside Israel still appear to be caught up in the 1970’s notion that they can easily defeat an aggressive Islamic Caliphate that outnumbers them about 70 to 1.

The problem is that while speed, cleverness, and finesse are a force multiplier, they do have limits. And I suspect that far too many American Jews, unlike Israelis, don’t know how close they were to being defeated at times in the Arab-Israeli wars. A mistake here or there, a failure of nerve on the part of a political leader or a general at the wrong time, and it could have been all over. The American Jews only know that the IDF repeatedly won those wars and assume they can easily do so again.

But history is littered with the examples of defeated nations who attacked other nations in the assumption that their victory was certain. Regardless of what happens in the Middle East, it is certain that American politics is going to become less predictable as the Coalition of Diversity that was created, in part, by elite politically active Jews begins to turn against both Jews and Israel. This would imply that they will increasingly seek influence in the Republican Party, thus increasing the growing gulf there between the moderate Republican elite-for-hire and the various conservative and libertarian grass roots.

Christianity’s killers

I was not surprised there has been an amount of pushback against the idea that a Christian should do anything except sit on his ass and prayerfully expect that God will take care of everything in due time. Now, this is not to denigrate the power of prayer, which is vital and can absolutely be efficacious, but rather the idea that it is God’s will for us to always refrain from any action of any kind that might bruise the feelings of anyone, especially an enemy.

There is an intrinsic conflict between the moderates and the extremists of any movement or organization. The moderates are inward-focused, conservative, defensive, and believe that public relations is the ultimate determinant of victory or defeat. The extremists are outward-focused, creative, offensive, and believe that material conditions are the ultimate determinant of victory or defeat. These two rival perspectives tend to hold true regardless of whatever the issue might be, from politics and cultural war to sports and business affairs.

Christianity merely compounds this intrinsic conflict, it does not create it. And it is not, as some might have it, a mere intellectual difference of opinion, which is why discussing the different perspectives and attempting to come to some compromise seldom works. Consider what Maj. Dick Winters, of Band of Brothers fame, wrote about Easy Company in Beyond Band of Brothers:

On reflection, we were highly charged; we knew what to do; and we conducted ourselves as part of a well-oiled machine. Because we were so intimate with each other, I knew the strengths of each of my troopers. It was not accidental that I had selected my best men, Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey in one group, Lipton and Ranney in the other. These men comprised Easy Company’s “killers,” soldiers who instinctively understood the intricacies of battle. In both training and combat, a leader senses who his killers are. I merely put them in a position where I could utilize their talents most effectively. Many other soldiers thought they were killers and wanted to prove it.

In reality, however, your killers are few and far between. Nor is it always possible to determine who your killers are by the results of a single engagement. In combat, a commander hopes that nonkillers will learn by their association with those soldiers who instinctively wage war without restraint and without regard to their personal safety. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that casualties are highest among your killers, hence the need to return them to the front as soon as possible in the hope that other “killers” emerge.

In other words, the dynamic between actors and non-actors is entirely normal and the latter always outnumber the former. Keep in mind that the men of Easy Company were aggressive, competitive, highly-trained young men who belonged to the absolute elite of the US military. And even there, the “killers are few and far between”. In war, physical or metaphorical, there are very few who are capable of instinctively waging it “without restraint and without regard to their personal safety”. And one important difference between actual war and cultural war is that in the case of the latter, many of the nonkillers spend a fair amount of their time sniping at the killers on their own side rather than at the other side.

Imagine how effective Easy Company would have been if instead of being expected to follow the killers’ example, its nonkillers dedicated themselves to explaining at length that instead of flanking the German gun position on D-Day and killing the German gunners, they should all prove themselves to be better than the Germans by being nice to them. And then, when the killers ignored them and began the flank attack, instead of laying down covering fire, the nonkillers started shooting at the killers. Does anyone seriously think this would be a successful way to wage war?

Why, then, does anyone imagine that the same tactical approach will succeed in cultural war? If the moderates will not at the very least provide covering fire for the extremists, they are useless. And to the extent that they open their cowardly mouths to criticize, correct, and concern-troll the only people on their side who are taking action, they are worse than useless.

As for the Christians, let us reflect upon the Biblical example that many “nonkillers” like to cite, Matthew 26:51

With
that, one of Jesus’ companions reached for his sword, drew it out and
struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.
Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

There is a great deal of significant information here, particularly the situation-specific aspects of the command, but with regards to the present subject, the most important point is this: Jesus knowingly chose a hot-tempered “killer” as one of his closest companions and the rock upon which he would build the Church. Like David, beloved of God, and Paul, the great evangelist, it is the “killers” whom God has historically preferred and chosen to utilize. I do not think the moderates and nonkillers who sit back and snipe in the comfortable confidence that they are doing God’s will by sitting on their plump posteriors and doing nothing that will offend anyone should be so confident that God’s Will is in line with their own.

Keep in mind that the incident is also recounted in John 18:10

Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant, cutting off his right ear. (The servant’s name was Malchus.) Jesus commanded Peter, “Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?”

Clearly the relevant point is not the non-use of swords, but the non-use of a particular sword in a particular situation. As to “dying by the sword”, what of it? That doesn’t mean that one’s actions that put one at risk of it are necessarily wrong. It’s merely a factual warning. Recall what Winters pointed out: “The problem, of course, lies in the fact that casualties are highest among your killers.” Winters also wrote about the guilt he sometimes felt at reunions, as he was reminded that there were about half as many survivors of 1st platoon as there were from Easy Company’s 2nd and 3rd platoons due to the heavier casualties they took. But consider why he leaned upon them so heavily:

With thirty-five men, a platoon of Easy Company had routed two German companies of about 300 men. American casualties (including those from Fox Company) were one dead, twenty-two wounded. German casualties were fifty killed, eleven captured, about 100 wounded.

It should not be a surprise that looking into it reveals that the platoon responsible was Easy Company’s 1st platoon. Dying by the sword is not a sin. It is, in many cases, a sacrifice.

Most damning of all, I think, is the observable hypocrisy of many moderates, who flagrantly violate their own advice. They are very often more than happy to insult their nominal allies and attack their own side’s extremists with the very names they refuse to call the enemy.