Letters from Guantánamo by Mansoor AdayfiMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Monday, July 29, 2024
Thursday, July 25, 2024
Sunday, July 21, 2024
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Sunday, July 14, 2024
Review: The Portable Steinbeck
The Portable Steinbeck by John SteinbeckMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The editor is actually the son: Pascal Covici Jr.
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Saturday, July 13, 2024
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
Review: The 33 Strategies of War
The 33 Strategies of War by Robert GreeneMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.
This from CARL SCHMITT, German jurist, political theorist, geopolitician and prominent member of the Nazi Party. First chapter also using as an exemplar of identifying the enemy,
Saul Alinsky, the American community activist and political theorist whose work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helped poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords.
Sun Tzu Clausewitz
Ancient Eurasian warfare
Napoleon zap Vietnam
20th century Eurasian
Ali liston
baseball Ted Williams, ali-frazier
alfred hitchcock director drowsing chair
https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Curre...
A fighting spirit needs a little edge, some anger and hatred to fuel it. So
do not sit back and wait for people to get aggressive; irritate and infuriate them
deliberately. Feeling cornered by a multitude of people who dislike you, you will
fight like hell. Hatred is a powerful emotion.
1] Declare war on your enemies: Polarity
You cannot fight effectively unless you can identify them. Learn to smoke them out, then inwardly declare war. Your enemies can fill you with purpose and direction.
2] Do not fight the last war: Guerilla-war-of-the-mind
Wage war on the past and ruthlessly force yourself to react to the present. Make everything fluid and mobile.
3] Amidst the turmoil of events, do not lose your presence of mind: Counterbalance
Keep your presence of mind whatever the circumstances. Make your mind tougher by exposing it to adversity. Learn to detach yourself from the chaos of the battlefield.
4] Create a sense of urgency and desperation: Death-ground
Place yourself where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.
5] Avoid the snares of groupthink: Command-and-control
Create a chain of command where people do not feel constrained by your influence yet follow your lead. Create a sense of participation, but do not fall into groupthink.
6] Segment your forces: Controlled-chaos
The critical elements in war are speed and adaptability--the ability to move and make decisions faster than the enemy. Break your forces into independent groups that can operate on their own. Give them the spirit of the campaign, a mission to accomplish, and room to run.
7] Transform your war into a crusade: Morale
Get them to think less about themselves and more about the group. Involve them in a cause, a crusade against a hated enemy. Make them see their survival is tied to the success of the army as a whole.
8] Pick your battles carefully: Perfect-economy
Consider the hidden costs of war: time, political goodwill, an embittered enemy bent on revenge. Sometimes it is better to undermine your enemies covertly.
9] Turn the tables: Counterattack
Let the other side move first. If aggressive, bait them into a rash attack that leaves them in a weak position.
10] Create a threatening presence: Deterrence
Build a reputation for being a little crazy. Fighting you is not worth it. Uncertainty can be better than an explicit threat. If your opponents aren't sure what attacking you will cost, they will not want to find out.
11] Trade space for time: Nonengagement
Retreat is a sign of strength. Resisting the temptation to respond buys valuable time. Sometimes you accomplish most by doing nothing.
12] Lose battles, but win the war: Grand strategy
Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.
13] Know your enemy: Intelligence
The target of your strategies is not the army you face, but the mind who runs it. Learn to read people.
14] Overwhelm resistance with speed and suddenness: Blitzkrieg
Speed is power. Striking first, before enemies have time to think or prepare will make them emotional, unbalanced, and prone to error.
15] Control the dynamic: Forcing
Instead of trying to dominate the other side's every move, work to define the nature of the relationship itself. Control your opponent's mind, pushing emotional buttons and compelling them to make mistakes.
16] Hit them where it hurts: Center-of-gravity
Find the source of your enemy's power. Find out what he cherishes and protects and strike.
17] Defeat them in detail: Divide and conquer
Separate the parts and sow dissension and division. Turn a large problem into small, eminently defeatable parts.
18] Expose and attack your opponent's soft flank: Turning
Frontal assaults stiffen resistance. Instead, distract your enemy's attention to the front, then attack from the side when they expose their weakness.
19] Envelop the enemy: Annihilation
Create relentless pressure from all sides and close off their access to the outside world. When you sense weakening resolve, tighten the noose and crush their willpower.
20] Maneuver them into weakness: Ripening for the sickle
Before the battle begins, put your opponent in a position of such weakness that victory is easy and quick. Create dilemmas where all potential choices are bad.
21] Negotiate while advancing: Diplomatic war
Before and during negotiations, keep advancing, creating relentless pressure and compelling the other side to settle on your terms. The more you take, the more you can give back in meaningless concessions. Create a reputation for being tough and uncompromising so that people are giving ground even before they meet you.
22] Know how to end things: Exit strategy
You are judged by how well things conclude. Know when to stop. Avoid all conflicts and entanglements from which there are no realistic exits.
23] Weave a seamless blend of fact and fiction: Misperception
Make it hard for your enemies to know what is going on around them. Feed their expectations, manufacture a reality to match their desires, and they will fool themselves. Control people's perceptions of reality and you control them.
24] Take the line of least expectation: Ordinary-Extraordinary
Upset expectations. First do something ordinary and conventional, then hit them with the extraordinary. Sometimes the ordinary is extraordinary because it is unexpected.
25] Occupy the moral high ground: Righteousness
The cause you are fighting for must seem more just than the enemy's. Questioning their motives and making enemies appear evil can narrow their base of support and room to maneuver. When you come under moral attack from a clever enemy, don't whine or get angry--fight fire with fire.
26] Deny them targets: The Void
The feeling of emptiness is intolerable for most people. Give enemies no target to attach. Be dangerous and elusive, and let them chase you into the void. Deliver irritating but damaging side attacks and pinpricks.
27] Seem to work for the interests of others while furthering your own: Alliance
Get others to compensate for your deficiencies, do your dirty work, fight your wars. Sow dissension in the alliances of others, weakening opponents by isolating them.
28] Give your rivals enough rope to hang themselves: One-upmanship
Instill doubts and insecurities in rivals, getting them to think too much and act defensive. Make them hang themselves through their own self-destructive tendencies, leaving you blameless and clean.
29] Take small bites: Fait Accompli
Take small bites to play on people's short attention span. Before they notice, you may acquire an empire.
30] Penetrate their minds: Communication
Infiltrate your ideas behind enemy lines, sending messages through little details. Lure people into coming to the conclusions you desire and into thinking they've gotten there by themselves.
31] Destroy from within: The Inner Front
To take something you want, don't fight those who have it, but join them. Then either slowly make it your own or wait for the right moment to stage a coup.
32] Dominate while seeming to submit: Passive-Aggression
Seem to go along, offering no resistance, but actually dominate the situation. Disguise your aggression so you can deny that it exists.
33] Sow uncertainty and panic through acts of terror: Chain Reaction
Terror can paralyze a people's will to resist and destroy their ability to plan a strategic response. The goal is to cause maximum chaos and provoke a desperate overreaction. To counter terror, stay balanced and rational.
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Review: Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World
Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony SattinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I took this in as the audiobook edition well-narrated by the author and published in 2022 by HighBridge Audio. I was drawn in to learn more of the mysterious nomad empires such as the Scythians, Hittites, Mongols, and more. This delivers on that and in doing so suggests much of what we assume about these roaming warriors is from an understandable smear campaign from their foes, largely European and Chinese. What really makes me glad I read this is the philosophical reflection on the nomadic way of life as an important and perhaps vital if not even redemptive dimension of the human experience. The lack of settlement (materialism) and acceptance of a cyclical reality suggests this way of life more resilient to climate change, less burdensome environmentally, and more about the community than the individual.
Much of these themes are very nicely tied together in a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, I believe it is the one dated 9 May 1753:
We had here some years since a Transylvanian Tartar, who had travelled much in the East, and came hither merely to see the West, intending to go home thro’ the spanish West Indies, China &c. He asked me one day what I thought might be the Reason that so many and such numerous nations, as the Tartars in Europe and Asia, the Indians in America, and the Negroes in Africa, continued a wandring careless Life, and refused to live in Cities, and to cultivate the arts they saw practiced by the civilized part of Mankind. While I was considering what answer to make him; I’ll tell you, says he in his broken English, God make man for Paradise, he make him for to live lazy; man make God angry, God turn him out of Paradise, and bid him work; man no love work; he want to go to Paradise again, he want to live lazy; so all mankind love lazy. Howe’er this may be it seems certain, that the hope of becoming at some time of Life free from the necessity of care and Labour, together with fear of penury, are the mainsprings of most peoples industry.
To those indeed who have been educated in elegant plenty, even the provision made for the poor may appear misery, but to those who have scarce ever been better provided for, such provision may seem quite good and sufficient, these latter have then nothing to fear worse than their present Conditions, and scarce hope for any thing better than a Parish maintainance; so that there is only the difficulty of getting that maintainance allowed while they are able to work, or a little shame they suppose attending it, that can induce them to work at all, and what they do will only be from hand to mouth.
The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appears strongly in the little success that has hitherto attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians, in their present way of living, almost all their Wants are supplied by the spontaneous Productions of Nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when Game is so plenty, they visit us frequently, and see the advantages that Arts, Sciences, and compact Society procure us, they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never shewn any Inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts; When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger Brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and a match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.
Though they have few but natural wants and those easily supplied. But with us are infinite Artificial wants, no less craving than those of Nature, and much more difficult to satisfy; so that I am apt to imagine that close Societies subsisting by Labour and Arts, arose first not from choice, but from necessity: When numbers being driven by war from their hunting grounds and prevented by seas or by other nations were crowded together into some narrow Territories, which without labour would not afford them Food. However as matters [now] stand with us, care and industry seem absolutely necessary to our well being; they should therefore have every Encouragement we can invent, and not one Motive to diligence be subtracted, and the support of the Poor should not be by maintaining them in Idleness, But by employing them in some kind of labour suited to their Abilities of body &c. as I am informed of late begins to be the practice in many parts of England, where work houses are erected for that purpose. If these were general I should think the Poor would be more careful and work voluntarily and lay up something for themselves against a rainy day, rather than run the risque of being obliged to work at the pleasure of others for a bare subsistence and that too under confinement. The little value Indians set on what we prize so highly under the name of Learning appears from a pleasant passage that happened some years since at a Treaty between one of our Colonies and the Six Nations; when every thing had been settled to the Satisfaction of both sides, and nothing remained but a mutual exchange of civilities, the English Commissioners told the Indians, they had in their Country a College for the instruction of Youth who were there taught various languages, Arts, and Sciences; that there was a particular foundation in favour of the Indians to defray the expense of the Education of any of their sons who should desire to take the Benefit of it. And now if the Indians would accept of the Offer, the English would take half a dozen of their brightest lads and bring them up in the Best manner; The Indians after consulting on the proposal replied that it was remembered some of their Youths had formerly been educated in that College, but it had been observed that for a long time after they returned to their Friends, they were absolutely good for nothing being neither acquainted with the true methods of killing deer, catching Beaver or surprizing an enemy. The Proposition however, they looked on as a mark of the kindness and good will of the English to the Indian Nations which merited a grateful return; and therefore if the English Gentlemen would send a dozen or two of their Children to Onondago the great Council would take care of their Education, bring them up in really what was the best manner and make men of them.
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Saturday, July 6, 2024
Wednesday, July 3, 2024
Review: The Human Tradition in the Vietnam Era
The Human Tradition in the Vietnam Era by David L. AndersonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The country was experiencing the breakdown of what scholars have termed the "Cold War consensus." This shared body of beliefs, which had existed in the country since the end of World War II, was not just a policy consensus; it also incorporated the widespread conviction that America and American principles were noble and worth defending. In terms of policy, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 had declared that the United States would assist people anywhere across the globe who were threatened by authoritarianism. Translated into action, this pledge became the containment policy designed to op- pose the creation and spread of communist regimes in any corner of the world. Despite the altruistic ring to this commitment, a defense of U.S. interests in global stability and in an open international economic and political order was inherent in the policy, as well. In the flush of America's success in World War II, the potential costs of these ambitious goals were largely ignored.
The Cold War policy consensus also merged with the belief that America was a model of democracy, prosperity, and domestic harmony. In the 1950s and early 1960s the new medium of television popularized and reinforced this image in such programs as Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show. The depiction of domestic bliss in these shows was idyllic and mythical, and it ignored the economic, racial, gender, and other inequities that existed in the country. Still, the powerful myth led many Americans to accept the notion of a unique "American way of life" which they would defend even by ruthless force, if necessary. The tougher aspect of this self-image was also reflected in popular television dramas including Westerns such as Gunsmoke or Have Gun Will Travel that portrayed a violent conflict between good and evil in which the good hero used his fists or gun to prevail over the heartless villain.
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Review: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays by Henry David ThoreauMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.
Thoreau
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