A simple good/bad binary is like an empty premise, not food for thought; doesn’t come anywhere close to reflecting the messy and hard decisions of the real world.
On that note, here’s an interesting essay that says Robin Hood was transfigured into a moral tale to excite political resistance:
As part of this new nationalist consciousness, other authors started changing the old stories to make a moral distinction between, for example, Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Before Joseph Ritson’s 1795 retelling of these legends, earlier written stories about the outlaw mostly showed him carousing in the forest with his merry men. He didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor until Ritson’s version – written to inspire a British populist uprising after the French Revolution. Ritson’s rendering was so popular that modern retellings of Robin Hood, such as Disney’s 1973 cartoon or the film Prince of Thieves (1991) are more centrally about outlaw moral obligations than outlaw hijinks. The Sheriff of Nottingham was transformed from a simple antagonist to someone who symbolised the abuses of power against the powerless. Even within a single nation (Robin Hood), or a single household (Cinderella), every scale of conflict was restaged as a conflict of values.
My immediate thought is that this presents a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Were old stories changed only after nationalist consciousness, or did they create it?
I mean these narratives may have changed as a reflection of nationalist consciousness, but that doesn’t preclude narratives from having moral spin. Nor does it preclude moral stories from being messy and complex to stimulate thought instead of obedience.
Overall the essay lacks a lot of oral traditions and mostly centers around Greek literature. It makes no mention of Native American or African stories at all, for example, so I am unconvinced it has a fully researched view.
One clear danger is how a good/bad narrative is a terrible way to practice intelligence, let alone threat detection and mitigation. Some people broadly apply a very precise term like “terrorism”, for example, to be a generic classifier of “bad”:
The terrorism label, for them, is a way of distinguishing who is in the wrong. Brian Jenkins, a leading scholar of terrorism, observed in 1981: ‘Terrorism is what the bad guys do.’
This story gets reported again and again every few years, but never with any real depth.
Nobody knows why a “Harvard-taught evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp” invented ransomware.
Somehow he could afford to send 20,000 floppy discs “in the mail to people including targeted attendees of the World Health Organization’s AIDS conference in Stockholm”.
Not a small bill in 1989.
And reportedly 20,000 was just the first shipment as he had plans for sending even more.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s a big (Harvard-taught) clue:
…he advocated that the marriage age be lowered and young women focus their lives on birthing children…
That suggests he was power hungry, a predator with intent to victimize and control others. Was there a state involved? Was he leveraged by some political group, especially in terms of AIDS research?
Here’s what news looked like in 1990, which is what I mean by a lack of any real depth to the reporting (such as where Popp’s funding came from).
You have to appreciate the rich irony of people trying to sway opinion in PsyOps (information operations) failing to do so at home and instead installing a crude political shortcut to push operations faster without convincing anyone…
It is easier to get permission to put a Hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears.
And the obvious reason why there was a difference was because permission to kill someone is a far clearer request than dropping, and I quote an actual information operation here, “an image highly offensive to both Muslims and the religion of Islam”.
Why authorize something with unknown or unpredictable outcomes? Asking whether should someone be killed is a much simpler calculus than asking for authorization to persuade others, I mean if outcomes are meant to be measured and held up for scrutiny. You know when someone is dead. Do you know when someone is persuaded as intended?
Pompeo in this story sounds very much like an impatient tyrant (“executive privilege” addiction syndrome), unable to work with others or convince them of anything, with a clear lack of moral decency or responsibility.
He seems so bad at basic science, so unable to do the hard work of socially engineering things to have lasting value (required in the nuanced word of psychology and influence), that his big answer to difficult questions in life was to yell louder and ignore feedback.
Ironic, right?
Thus, if someone were to point out in advance of the operation that a target would be highly offended and an operation would fail on its first run, Pompeo’s likely would have removed the messenger to push a go button anyway and ignore the disasters.
“When we make a mistake with a kinetic strike, it can be catastrophic — wedding parties, things like that where mistakes are made in targeting,” [David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and retired Special Forces colonel] said. “Whereas if we make a mistake in the information realm, the news cycle is going to move on. We can recover from an information mistake. A kinetic mistake, the victims of it can’t recover.”
“We can recover”? Says who?
Sorry Colonel Maxwell that’s just flat wrong. While it’s true you can’t come back from being dead, there’s also no proof you can magically recover from blown PsyOps.
Think of it this way. If a news cycle moves on, the PsyOps failed in one particular way (like a gun jammed instead of firing). If the news cycle never moves on, a PsyOps operation actually worked, however you might have failed to have it work in the way intended (like a gun shooting the wrong person).
And then there’s the blended issue, where a kinetic mistake is a symptom of a PsyOps mistake — George Floyd’s death (despite systemic racism and so many other black men in America regularly being killed in the same way) isn’t just a news cycle that moves on.
Did white policemen think it was easier to get permission to put a knee on the neck of a black man than it was to get permission to put an idea between his ears? Apparently.
Yet the death of Floyd was called out eventually as an information operation (e.g. it’s harmful to allow a narrative that Americans are killing themselves when clearly they are being suffocated by white nationalist domestic terrorists) and the question isn’t just whether Floyd can’t recover, but whether policing in America now faces an information realm failure that will take a long time to overcome.
Sunn M’Cheaux of Harvard explains — in a brief history lesson on accents within a longer video — that American slaveholders tried to force learning English to surveil and thereby prevent rebellion of their slaves.
As he lays out in the video, there were many native languages among the Blacks kidnapped and forced into American concentration camps. Slaveholders worked hard to mismatch and divide people to prevent any two slaves from speaking with each other except using English (so they could be surveilled and freedom quashed).
Such a plan for racist dominance and control over Blacks (surveillance capitalism as a symptom) ultimately backfired, however. Diverse languages among the slaves evolved into a whole new “creole” that their oppressors struggled to understand.
This common example shows how a Gullah phrase would look versus an English equivalent:
De buckruh dey duh ‘ood duh hunt tuckrey.
The white man is in the woods hunting turkeys.
Kumbaya, as I’ve written about before in terms of American surveillance history, is alleged to be a Gullah phrase for “come by here” — an encoded expression of Black liberation theology.
The Gullah Geechie people are descendants of people from the rice-growing region of West Africa, who were forced into the rice plantations (concentration camps) of South Carolina and Georgia. Those who could escape tyrannical American abuses headed across the border at that time, towards the freedoms given to them under Spanish or French monarchy (even British monarchy by 1800s was abolishing slavery, so life in America was unquestionably the worst).
While Florida was still part of the Spanish empire the Gullah who arrived there built their own settlements and began to prosper, away from the white nationalist extremists running America. A series of wars were even fought to preserve these Black freedoms, which had the effect of further scattering the Gullah across North America.
More precisely General Andrew Jackson in 1818, a long-time white insecurity leader with the life-long objective to steal and destroy Black prosperity in America (e.g. note his abuse of Black American veterans in 1815), illegally invaded Florida to murder the non-white population there.
The video above lays out some of the important Gullah achievements against American tyranny, and the outsized role of John Horse:
They created the largest haven in the U.S. South for runaway slaves
They led the largest slave revolt in U.S. history
They secured the only emancipation of rebellious slaves prior to the U.S. Civil War
The formed the largest mass exodus of slaves across the United States and, ultimately, to Mexico
Since Mexico figures prominently here, crucial to understanding the “Remember the Alamo” phrase popular in America is that it had always been a racist white insecurity response to Black liberation and freedom… in Mexico.
The slave rebellions of the early 1830s thus were when white immigrants (like the assault by Andrew Jackson into Florida two decades prior) pushed white militancy upon Mexico (state of Tejas). White settlers were trying to replace existing freedom with a tyranny, ultimately with the aim to expand slavery.
So when a white militia occupied the Mission San Antonio de Valero (a ruin called “the Alamo” because Spanish for cottonwood) it was precisely to violently force a white nationalist state into being against the rising Gullah freedom movement (the foundation story for white police state of Texas).
American slave rebellions map from http://www.johnhorse.com
It’s shocking that today most Americans are more familiar with the gross disinformation spread about the Alamo and Texas as a whole, while few if any are taught about the Gullah Wars of the exact same period that show what was actually at stake.
That probably has something to do with the fact that American children are spoon-fed very North-Korean sounding “underdog” missives about the bogus heroism of white slaveholders fighting to expand slavery. The Civil War, like the Gullah Wars that preceded it, was to stop tyranny spreading.
Saying “remember the Alamo” or throwing around associated racist salutes are like stupidly trying to teach that expansion of slavery should be promoted as if it was a good thing. Here’s what it really means:
…no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens…
And, just like any tyrant would be expected to do, a Texas state representative has introduced legislation to censor the mention of slavery being one of the causes of the Texas Revolution (it was the primary cause).
Thus, Gullah history is interesting to consider when people talk about surveillance technology and oppression even today. It almost seems that soon the only safe way to teach real facts about places like Texas, Florida or Georgia (states where Blacks were free until they joined America) might be to return to roots and practice Gullah.
Update May 20, 2021:
Whit Diffie says in a preview for the RSA Conference Cryptographer’s Panel that increasing communication decreases freedoms, and we’re only a decade away from total freedom loss.
I would argue this is a false choice fallacy, and the Gullah history above hopefully shows why. Could the Gullah communicate securely while also being free? Indeed, by increasing their communication they realized greater freedoms than before.
Physically, [the human] is a sad case. His teeth are baby-size and can barely penetrate the skin of a too-green apple. His claws can’t do anything but scratch him where he itches. His stringy-ligament body makes him a weakling compared to all the animals his size. Animals his size? In hand-to-paw, hand-to-claw, or hand-to-incisor combat, any animal his size would have him for lunch. Yet [the human] owns or controls them all, every animal that exists, thanks to his superpower: speech.
Gullah Atlantic Creole is a superpower? Now that’s an American history story I would love to see kids learn.
