“It appears that previous civilizations evolved laws and customs to ensure the continuity and thus the sustainability of their way of life. By law or by custom each local culture would evolve a system whereby economic, political and ecological balances were continually renegotiated as a precondition for the continuity of the local way of life. [...] In today’s political economy these preconditions and that collective genius are absent.”
terrorism
"I was one of the Americans blown away by the catastrophe, but living. One who left a hip Manhattan life because of the historical shifts, because of George Bush's frightening policies, because I wanted a better future for my two young sons than the one I
Fiction from James G. Poulos speculating on how to truly terrorize Americans.
Many agree that a democrat (Kerry or Gore) would be President today and Thomas L. Friedman argues (convincingly) that America would "be in a tense standoff with China".
Terror abroad or soccer stadium approved. Which would you lead with?
Some of them, particularly those from the links at the bottom, may be disturbing.
The whole point of terrorism, though, is to make surviving scary and in that respect it's often successful.
Richard Posner: “There is an old but still useful distinction between "risk" and "uncertainty," the former referring to contingencies to which a probability can be attached, the latter to contingencies to which no probability can be attached. The former is the domain of insurance and cost-benefit analysis. The latter? No one can assign a probability to any given time, place, or manner of a terrorist attack within a very broad range (obviously some possibilities can be excluded); and yet we have to take counterrorist measures; we have, in short, to manage uncertainty as well as risk.”
Gilles Kepel, professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, quoted by Lawrence Wright: “The Internet is the key issue. It erases the frontiers between the dar al-Islam and the dar al-Kufr. It allows the propagation of a universal norm, with an Internet Sharia and fatwa system Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca. In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the one with the best Web site”
The article is half about the terrorist bombings in Madrid on March 11th of this year as well as the political fallout and half about the use of the Internet by terrorist groups to communicate both plans and reactions to attacks around the world. The first half is a little more compelling, since it is more interested in telling the story of the attack, while the second half is a cautionary tale of the costs of using an open and accessible medium.
Walter Laquer has written an article on the future of terrorism and argues, among many things, that the connection between poverty and terrorism is a weak one if it exist at all. This is a blow to the left's assertion that poverty is the root cause, or is a root cause, but Laquer is more nuanced in his arguments, and has little patience for right-wing assertions that fighting terrorism can be fought with traditional war methods. Other points Laquer argues: he suggests that proportional responses to terrorism—especially in what he chillingly believes is the inevitable use of weapons of mass destruction by a very small, tightly knit and very much invisible (so below-the-radar that they may be impossible to defend against) group of fanatics—because war is usually unpopular outside the borders of the country going to war; Pakistan is a potential powderkeg that President Musharraf has little hopes of controlling; resentment in European Islamic population, especially the young, both despite and because of “alcohol, loose morals, general decadence, and all the other wickedness of the society facing them”, governments abiding by the Geneva convention and other aspects of international law do so foolishly because terrorists almost by definition do not play by the established rules; and democracies may have to engage in propaganda campaigns—even if it means outright lying—to convince societies that believe that Sept. 11th was the work of the Israeli intelligence agency.
