I love this sentence in a new explainer for how hard it has been for social platforms to kick the Taliban out.
We’ve seen revolutions in the age of social media; we’ve seen coups. But we haven’t seen a case where an internal insurgency successfully co-opts a state and seeks to take over that state’s functions.
It begs the question of whether the 2016 Presidential election was a coup or an insurgency that co-opted the state.
My argument has been that 2016 qualifies as a coup (which fizzled and fumbled for years until flaming out in 2021), yet here I’m seeing evidence that I may have to update that assessment.
You may remember a long time ago how the CEO of Tesla was accused by the company founder of some pretty serious knowledge and ethics gaps (calling him an “exaggerator and a liar“):
…claimed on a number of occasions to have degrees in both business and physics and to have briefly attended Stanford University, the suit alleges that Musk only has a degree in economics…
Lately those accusations have seemed like important foreshadowing to the CEO’s well documented lies and exaggerations.
According to a new book it’s also an insight into Tesla’s growing struggle to handle the truth — allegedly their manufacturing “approach” all along has been sacrificing safety and delaying fixes in order to push harmful exaggerations onto the road.
Musk’s approach to many manufacturing issues was, and still appears to be, keeping the assembly line moving while line problems are being fixed. He’s not a fan of the Toyota method, where a worker can stop the line until the problem is solved. He’s all about the volume.
That may be one reason why the quality of Teslas is so variable — why buying one can feel like a crapshoot. Some owners report their car is perfect; some say they were sold a piece of junk. (Including Kristen Wiig and Avi Rothman.)
In fact, Toyota ended a partnership with Tesla over such issues. “Musk was willing to let some quality issues slide if addressing them meant slowing down their schedule…,” Higgins reports. “Tesla was building the airplane as Musk was heading down the runway for takeoff.”
Of course Toyota ended that partnership. Tesla puts safety last. It’s a repeat story for many companies who realize far too late that they’re being pulled into a scam.
Getting more product out in a variable state of quality is a certain recipe for disaster, which is exactly what the data has been showing (Tesla’s safety record rapidly declines with the more cars they release).
Tesla ‘Autopilot’ leads to *more* crashes than regular driving
Tesla Model S has higher insurance losses than other large luxury cars” (higher frequency and severity)
Tesla has fire deaths at 4x the rate of other vehicles
Teslas have 2-4x more non-crash fires than the average car, and incur damages up to 7x higher
Teslas have triple the driver deaths of comparably priced luxury vehicles
Teslas crash twice as often as regular cars
Tesla Deaths as of 7/7/2021: 201
A “crapshoot” is not how safety regulation is supposed to work, but it’s a good description of what owners should be thinking about as their brand new Tesla battery rushed to market spontaneously combusts and their door locks fail to release — a predictable death trap.
Back when I started giving regular Big Data security talks, all the rage was using Gartner’s framing of Velocity, Volume and Variety (Three Vs).
For example in a 2012 talk I called for a fourth V to be included: vulnerability (to disinformation — integrity attacks).
Now I see an attempt to reformulate Big Data platform features using Four As instead:
…aggregation, algorithms, anonymity and automation — are some of the ways contemporary technologies can contribute to the spread of harmful content online…
Source: NYT 2017 article “Without a Motorcycle in Kandahar, ‘You Are Like a Prisoner'”. A foreshadowing of how the Afghan war would be won and lost by distributed/localization networks, hit & run tactics, and terrain advantages.
First of all I just want to say I think a new article in The Hill is excellent.
It makes a lot of great points using sound analysis explaining how the Pentagon lost Afghanistan, such as this paragraph.
The U.S. military still lacks a comprehensive field manual and “doctrine” on how to achieve wholesale security force assistance, even though it has been core to our exit strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. Why? Because our military’s identity is about assault and not occupation, and training foreign troops smells of occupation. We would rather blow up the enemy.
Second I want to say the American “occupation” of itself after Civil War could become the canonical example of why American forces have had difficulty identifying with the critical phase that comes after blowing up the enemy.
Look at the 1865 Mississippi concentration camp controversy for a fascinating and detailed case of post-war refugee crisis handling.
Consider that the American military track-record includes confronting the long history of Confederate South attempts to shame or obscure America’s most successful military leaders at nation-building as well as occupation.
Anyone who wants to speak about the American military identity being forged and focused on assault, rather than suited to an occupation, should thus consider how the 1870s and rise of lynchings and Jim Crow might be proper framing.
We could benefit from more history analysis like the following paragraph in another expert op-ed on the war in Afghanistan (which highlights just how an “occupation” phase goes missing from the American narrative):
Though the Federal Army fought the Confederate Army, both armies were composed of locally raised forces like Joshua Chamberlain’s famed 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment that was made famous for defeating the 15th Alabama Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg. Such forces fought bloody battles across America that eventually led to the standing army we have today with no such regional affiliations. But that took decades.
That’s a good telling of the assault phase, yet not exactly accurate overall. We obviously know that the standing army 150 years later still had to explicitly ban soldiers from flying the “regional affiliation” battle flag of the Confederate South. Ouch.
Third, I feel I have to point this history out because The Hill article makes an unbelievably bad error in analysis — an unforced error, a cardinal and common error in American thinking that helps highlight exactly why “our military” is so bad at occupation doctrine.
The following paragraph in The Hill is like nails on the chalkboard to me.
…conduct human-rights vetting of all candidates for the security forces, which is not just a good idea but also U.S. law (22 U.S. Code § 2378d). We would never dream of putting cops on our streets or soldiers in our military without a background check, but it’s what we did every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No no no no.
The history of America tell us the exact opposite. After losing the Civil War the Confederate South soldiers who had sworn to destroy America were appointed to run police… and predictably started to massacre Americans.
…summer of 1865, just after the Civil War, Union commanders in the battered port city of Wilmington, N.C., appointed a former Confederate general as police chief and former Confederate soldiers as policemen. The all-white force immediately set upon newly freed Black people. Men, women and children were beaten, clubbed and whipped indiscriminately… One of the most terrifying examples erupted more than a century ago, when white supremacist soldiers and police helped hunt down and kill at least 60 Black men in Wilmington in 1898.
…Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California was a hotbed of KKK activity–an open secret that was tolerated or aided by Marine Corps brass… white marine Klansmen openly distributed racist literature on the base, pasted KKK stickers on barracks doors and hid illicit weapons in their quarters…
Such “background check” failures in human-rights vetting continue to this day. Here is some 2020 news!
FBI agent has documented links between serving officers and racist militant activities in more than a dozen states.
I’ve also pointed this kind of error out before with regard to Delta Force Commander memoirs — how basic ignorance about culture and history (e.g. thinking there’s no American equivalent to Afghan “night letters“) creeps into even the most elite American military narratives despite best attempts at being widely studied and not ignorant.
Source: West Point. A 2009 “night letter” advises the public to avoid roads and highways built by Coalition forces or Afghan government, avoid schools, avoid government buildings and refuse all assistance to foreign companies in Paktika Province. Perhaps comparable to how the Confederate South in America reacted to reconstruction after loss of its Civil War.
Missing these obvious parallels to American history and ongoing practices can be a form of cognitive blindness and its explanations are not pretty.
The Hill gets so much of the analysis right, yet it throws a giant wrench right in the middle of itself begging a question of how did they make such a giant error.
Basically American security experts regularly overlook domestic terrorism and corruption, or pretend it doesn’t exist, when it involves white insecurity groups that target people other than themselves.
I’m sure it’s a sobering thought to some, while for others in America it’s very well known.
Anyone who experiences or studies the very harsh side of cops on American streets and soldiers in American military, those studying the consequences of weak background checks, knows the “every day” failures in Iraq and Afghanistan could easily be argued to have roots… in sordid American history of human rights abuses.
Fourth, and probably superfluous to this post, is that my degrees are in this exact topic of occupation, or more formally the ethics of military intervention.
My master’s thesis focused on the Allied occupation of Ethiopia 1940-1943, which was meant to give some kind of insight into how armies best invade, hold and then release a country to self-rule.
And from that perspective, what I’m reading today reminds me a lot of the papers I used to pull out of the British archives. Unlike the frozen folders of antique yellowed and brittle documents, however, in this case I wish I had been given a chance to review or edit this article before it went to press to help eliminate such a glaring error.
