History, Security

Let’s Be Honest, Nice Means Ignorant

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Saying “be nice” is nothing like saying “be kind”. The two phrases are worlds apart.

First, consider how a British man living in Holland says the Dutch seem “rude” (to him the opposite of nice) because of what he deems an egalitarian approach (data sharing) to risk management.

The constant need to defend against flooding also had a profound impact: with one person’s land at risk if another failed to maintain their dikes, it was essential that decisions be made collectively.

That’s not really accurate. Armies have constant need to defend, yet decisions do not need to be made collectively. It wasn’t a need to defend against water that led to a Dutch “directness” against lying and cheating, also known as holding people accountable.

Others have tried to put a humorous spin on the real reasoning, related to a sense of justice and equality:

Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.

A freedom to speak the truth or even just detect and document what is happening was a method to resist attempts at denial (non-repudiation), which were early integrity controls related to Dutch distaste for Spanish religion-based rule 1556 to 1581.

Calvinist religion had a large impact on national identity because the Dutch associated Catholicism with Spanish oppression. From that moment on, “Calvinism dictated the individual responsibility for moral salvage from the sinful world through introspection, total honesty, soberness, rejection of ‘pleasure’ as well as the ‘enjoyment’ of wealth,” writes Breukel in an article on Dutch business culture published on her website.

Everyone speaking their mind (a methodology of truth-seeking as offensive measures) enabled popular resistance to a form of top-down management where an autocrat could never be wrong (never be brought to justice by lawyers) because even the laws were autocratically controlled.

This is the philosophical split between a set of inherited rights versus controlled rights, an ancient ethics distinction which I often refer to in my talks about why artificial intelligence can be so unsafe.

The real product today of the Beeldenstorm of 1566 (Iconoclasm) is that the Dutch aren’t very religious.

Depiction of the Beeldenstorm. Source: RP-P-OB-77.720 at www.rijksmuseum.nl

The British by comparison tend to lean on the concept of being “rude” as a social enforcement mechanism.

Everyone in England is supposed to be trying to pull together on a collective goal (e.g. winning against adversaries, staying in a queue during WWI or WWII) as a different form of resistance to imposed authority. There’s actually less divergence between the two cultures than implied just because Holland dealt with Spanish inquisition while England… dealt with its own set of threats.

Second, while being “nice” is an act of self-erasure supposedly in the interest of others — whether society or a single authority — it’s the opposite of what’s being discussed above in terms of risk and information sharing. It’s literally a form of ignorance.

Nice didn’t always mean what it means today. “Nice” comes from the Latin nescius, which literally means, “not-knowing” (from ne, “not,” and scire, “to know.”) Even centuries later, when the word found its way into Middle English, that meaning more-or-less remained the same: “nice” still connoted ignorance. If you were “nice,” that meant you were simple, foolish, daft—an idiot.

This all begs the question whether people think of others in terms of an actual greater good (e.g. lowland flooding) or simply erasing themselves at the behest of random request to not have independent thoughts. Holland is the former and Texas is a great example of the latter (e.g. it’s not “nice” to talk about real history such as a racist state founded to perpetuate and expand slavery alone). Did you know in 1836 that America used an official “Gag rule” to deny Americans the right to speak the truth about slavery?

In fact, Texas and Florida history clearly shows they are states with a total lack of accountability and an idealized model of business profit and ascent to power. They are doing statewide what has been celebrated in popular American spectator events that reward niceness (lying) like NASCAR and Football. Being nice in America may mean peddling catchy “know nothing” ignorance as a means of privileged profit by doing harm to others, which also explains why the unkindness of “tipping” is still a thing.

In other words, if you desire to prevent power shifting to liars and cheats try to practice integrity (honesty) and be kind, even when it’s not nice (rude).

Security

Feb 2018: U.S. General Ordered Russian Forces “Annihilated”

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File the 4 hour Battle of Khasham under the ancient topic of intelligence as critical to ground truth in a fog of war.

“Not their people” was the official information received by the U.S. Army from a Russian government “deconfliction line“, even as Russian tanks advanced towards American troops.

The Russian high command in Syria assured us it was not their people, and my direction to the chairman was for the force, then, to be annihilateds. And it was.

American combined forces in just a few hours killed as many as 200 incoming Russian troops and destroyed their archaic systems, ostensibly another foreshadowing of Ukrainian defense preparedness in 2022.

Poetry, Security

The Other Alamo

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A poem by Martin Espada, recipient of the 2021 National Book Award for poetry, and as published in American War Poetry: An Anthology

In the Crockett Hotel dining room,
a chalk-face man in the medaled uniform
growls at a prayer
at the head of the veteran’s table.
Throughout the map of this saint-hungry city,
hands strain for the touch of shrines,
genuflection before cannon and memorial plaque,
grasping the talisman of Bowie knife replica
at the souvenir shop, visitors
in white biblical quote T-shirts.

The stones in the walls are smaller
than the fists of Texas martyrs;
their cavernous mouths cold drink the canal to mud.
The Daughters of the Republic
print brochures with Mexican demons,
Santa Anna’s leg still hopping
to conjunto accordions.
The lawyers who conquered farmland
by scratching on parchment in an oil lamp haze,
the cotton growers who kept the time
of Mexican peasant lives dangling from their watch chains,
the vigilantes hooded like blind angels
hunting with torches for men the color of night,
gathering at church, the capitol, or the porch
for a century all said this: Alamo.

In 1949, thee boys
in Air Force dress khaki
ignored the whites-only sign
at the diner by the bus station:
A soldier from Baltimore, who heard nigger sung here
more often than his name, but would not glance away;
another blonde and solemn as his Tennessee
of whitewashed spires;
another from distant Puerto Rico, cap tipped at an angle
in a country where brown skin
could be boiled for the leather of a vigilante’s wallet.

The waitress squinted a glare and refused their contamination,
the manager lost his crewcut politeness
and blustered about local customs,
the police, with surrounding faces,
jeered about tacos and senoritas
on the Mexican side of town.
“We’re not leaving,” they said,
and hunched at their stools
till the manager ordered the cook,
sweat-burnished black man, unable to hide his grin,
to slide cheeseburgers on plates
across the counter.
“We’re not hungry,” they said
and left a week’s pay for the cook.
One was my father; his word for fury
is Texas.

This afternoon, the heat clouds the air like bothered gnats.
The lunch counter was wrecked for the dump years ago.
In the newspapers, a report of vandals
scarring the wooden doors
of the Alamo
on the black streaks of fire.

Security

Ukraine Credits Drone Swarms With Defeating Entire Columns of Russian Armor

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The basics of battle being reported from the Ukraine war are like chapters right out of history. Small groups of Ukrainian volunteers on fast and light cycles (specifically “quads”, as in four-wheeled and motorized) are using forested flanking moves to attack the large slow-moving or stopped columns on paved roads.

Honchar describes these technological battles, and Aerorozvidka’s way of fighting, as the future of warfare, in which swarms of small teams networked together by mutual trust and advanced communications can overwhelm a bigger and more heavily armed adversary.

That sounds very much like warfare from the past to me (the sort of thing I was giving talks about at least 10 years ago, not least of all because I was working on swarm drones then).

Think about behavior of American soldiers marching as columns into guerrilla warfare lessons in 1898 Cuba.

Marching in column of fours we measured about a quarter of a mile in length: there being two hundred and fifty two rows with four or five feet between each. In passing a wagon or mud-puddle the column was forced to hault until the first four singled out and passed it; then forward four feet and stop while the next row of fours passed…

Perhaps worth noting here an important footnote in history about what helped the American military avoid defeat.

“If it hadn’t been for the black cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated.” Five black soldiers of the 10th Cavalry received the Medal of Honor and 25 other black soldiers were awarded the Certificate of Merit.

What’s novel and new in Ukraine is a a different footnote about airborne conflict.

…Aerorozvidka typically waits for the Russians turn off their jamming equipment to launch their own drones, and then it sends up its machines at the same time. The unit then concentrates its firepower on the electronic warfare vehicles.

The Russian defense system doesn’t allow Russia to attack, forcing it to be disabled.

Big oops for an offensive operation.

So when Russian defenses have to be lowered Ukrainians attack any systems that provide defense, much like if the Ukrainians were taking out anti-aircraft guns that stop firing when Russia tries to launch its own planes.

With Russian jamming and anti-aircraft systems destroyed, Russsian drone lessons from Syria are in question again as they leave their columns defenseless. Ukrainians can escalate their attacks, as I warned back in October 2019.

The following section on “gaps in electronic warfare shield” was particularly interesting as it emphasizes Russia’s current dependence (pun not intended) on primitive jamming systems and kinetic counter-measures.

The key point here being Russia doesn’t seem to have any air-to-air defenses in terms of drones (the sort of thing I’ve been talking about and working on for over a decade now) let alone an ability to learn and adapt from obvious mistakes. While Russians can slowly and manually locate drone launches the Ukrainian wheeled launchers (cycles) make forested evasion maneuvers a simple and effective form of obfuscation.

Or perhaps more to the point, Russia’s defense might even be destroying its own offense.

…sabotaging their own equipment and have even accidentally shot down one of their own aircraft, according to the head of Britain’s spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). […] Russia has lost 71 aircraft since February 24 (59 of which were destroyed)…

It all goes back to “lessons” I’ve pointed towards since before the start of the Ukraine war: military capabilities from corrupt puppets of a dictatorship (paper bears) are overestimated although still very dangerous to vulnerable populations.