If your political philosophy can be adequately explained by a 13 year old…then its entirely possible your political philosophy is kinda stupid.
Edit: and as if by magic, I just remembered this 2005 post on Crooked Timber. However, since 99.9% of self described Libertarians are conservatives anyway, it still works.
Over at Chaos Marxism, a cunning plan has been hatched.
I’m down with this. God knows, all I do every day is read political theory texts and blogs anyway, it would be nice to engage myself somewhat more critically with the whole process. I have also been taking notes from TV Tropes, for my own attempts of fiction, once I start writing fiction again (in between searching for jobs, reading, blogging and contributing to several internet fora – sooner or later, something will give, most probably me). Should those come to fruition, I’ll probably spend days getting people to read them, so no doubt you will all know when it happens.
Anyway, I know a couple of peeps from PD, such as Cramulus, have also expressed potential interest in this project, and board members always have tons of hosting space lying around, doing nothing (for some bizarre reason). Hopefully, enough people will register interest to get a viable site going once I get to pitch the idea to the members. Worst comes to worst, I’ll dump the ideas on a free blog until someone less in debt and more technically competent than me gets a Wiki on the project started.
Edit: NlhasdAJHLgkgli. Seriously, that’s what the inside of my head feel’s like. I tried, but my mind is so fried right now I can’t express myself the way I want. I need a proper night’s sleep.
I was reading Fifty Key Thinkers on International Relations earlier this week and ran across this interesting quote:
Essentially, Gilpin believes that all hegemonies are transient because the costs of maintaining them rise more quickly than the resources available to do so. On the one hand, the hegemon is unable to prevent the diffusion of its economic skills and technique to other states. On the other hand, the hegemon must confront the rising expectations of its own citizens. Over time, they will privilege consumption over production and resist further sacriï¬ces in order to maintain the supremacy of the hegemon on the international stage. The combination of internal and external factors leads to what Gilpin calls ‘a severe ï¬scal crisis’ for the hegemon.
It then has a limited choice of options. If it wishes to maintain its power, it can either confront its internal obstacles and reverse the tendency towards complacency, or it can attack rising powers before they mount a challenge of their own. Alternatively, it can seek to reduce its overseas commitments and promote strategic alliances with other states. Gilpin illustrates the former with reference to imperial China, while in the 1930s, Britain attempted the latter course of action. Gilpin is sceptical about the lessons of history, however. While each of these options has been pursued with varying degrees of success in the past, neither has been able to prevent the onset of war to resolve the disequilibrium of global power. In the late twentieth century, such a conclusion raises urgent questions about contemporary stability in the international system and the need to discover means other than war for managing the process of change, as the next ‘systemic’ war is likely to be the last in the context of nuclear weapons.
Now, while this is unsettling reading, I don’t actually think it applies in this case, for one particular reason. Namely, under current conditions, the economic crisis is globalized. While the USA is indeed suffering, other nations who could become peer competitors to the US have been hit just as hard, if not harder. And as we know, a broad economic base is essential to build the military muscle necessary to leap to hegemon status.
However, should one of those potential peer competitor nations recover while the US is still mired in trouble…when then there could be a real recipe for trouble. It doesn’t seem likely, but it should not be discounted.
Some might suggest this analysis may be too state centric, however I very much doubt any of the current 4GW using organizations either have the capacity to create nuclear weapons in sufficient quantity, or the manpower and economic muscle to fight anything more than a guerrilla war. In a systemic conflict, such groups would be wiped out with extreme prejudice.
In my last post, I talked about two games which use a very large, dynamic board: the internet. By using the internet as a gamespace, players invent new uses for websites. The playspace is dynamic, always changing. Adaptive, creative strategies win out. Participation leads to exploration.
I have to confess I’ve been pretty plugged into PMOG in the last few days. I’ve enjoyed seeing which websites have been trapped or treasure’d by other players. And I’ve gone on some missions which have taken me to some pretty interesting and unusual spots on the web. But something’s still missing. I’m still anchored here to my computer, wishing these adventures were a bit more tangible. Such is the plight of any gamer whose characters lead more exciting lives than their player. But that’s the clue – PMOG and Wiki Paths blur the lines between game activity and non-game activity by creating a game that overlaps traditional web usage. Why not explore this border in the real world? Let’s imagine some game events which could happen if these passively-multiplayer games took place in 3D.
Several technologies already exist which allow digital interactivity in meatspace. It’s just that nobody’s set up a game (that I ‘ve heard of) which brings all of these elements together. GPS, voice-over-ip, and digital cameras could easily be blended together to transform urban areas into playspaces.
Imagine a game that you play as you make your way through the real world. As you pass an intersection, you receive a text message that there is a chest nearby. You click the link for more info, and see a picture of a nearby mailbox. You walk over to the mailbox and press a button on your phone to collect the loot.
Or maybe I leave a mine along a busy street. A few hours later, another player walking down the same street is informed that he’s triggered a mine and has lost 10 points. If I respond when it happens, I have the opportunity to send a 15-second taunt via voip.
Maybe I’m hanging out at the library, looking for a specific book whose cover has a scavenger-hunt sticker. If I snap a picture of the sticker, I get to hear the next clue. While I’m searching for the book, I bump into another player who is on the same scavenger hunt mission. We agree to cooperate to find the next clues, and spend the rest of the afternoon navigating the city together. Suddenly the game experience has created a real-world experience. Relationships form. Networks grow. The line between the digital and real worlds has been blurred.
Of course, this presents some new problems. There’s an alchemy involved in meeting strangers, and not all formulas work. I imagine the ten year old player who ends up in a party with drunken teenagers, or the sociopath who lures players into isolated situations to meet them. The stakes of befriending a dangerous person are much higher in the real world than they are on, say, facebook. Controls could be set up to filter out certain players – like maybe you only want to play with other 20 somethings, or only people who go to your college. Maybe there’d be a way to tag problem users so your friends can avoid them.
I imagine puzzles that can only be solved by getting together a party of people. Maybe there’s a spot on a college campus which has treasure buried under it. To find the spot, you’ll need to get together someone who specializes in geocaching (to find the spot), logic problems (to pick the lock on the chest). Maybe you need to bring together certain character classes, sort of like how in fantasy games, a well rounded party needs at least a healer and a tank. When the chest is finally dug up, you snap a pic of your group for a few bonus points and they split the treasure. The person who planted the chest is sent the picture of the groundbreaking discovery.
Faster paced games would be possible too. Maybe I could put treasure in one room on the top floor, and then put killer landmines all over the rest of the building. When you hit a landmine, you’d have to go back outside and push a button to be resurrected. You’d have to use trial and error, teamwork, or creative problem solving to bypass the mines and grab the chest. Teams of players could compete to race to the chest. Or maybe two teams would race each other to the chest, or fight each other in capture-the-flag style matches. Every building, every park, every urban center lends itself to different strategies and tactics. The game is wrapped around real-world geography and therefore real-world problem solving is needed to accomplish game tasks.
One day we’ll be able to play this exciting game, or maybe one like it. The technology already exists and it’s just a matter of time before someone develops the game. And then we’ll be on our way to really having the fabulous, action packed adventures our characters so frequently do.
As a kid, I used to draw board games on the sidewalk. I’d write “go back two spaces”, “lose a turn” and the like on the sidewalk squares in chalk. The neighborhood kids would grab dice and race each other around the block.I had psychedelically transformed my neighborhood into a board, and people into pieces on it.
Years later, in college, I created a campuswide 24/7 game, called “Tales of the Dreaming”, where the players played the roles of creatures living in a dream world. The people on campus who weren’t playing — or rather, people who didn’t think they were playing — were figured to be people just going about their dreams, oblivious to the battles and stories and scavenger hunts going on right below their noses. At any time you wanted to go to the Dreaming, you could slip on an arm band and be your character in this parallel community.
I’m intrigued by blurring this boundary between games and reality. That’s why I was delighted to discover two games which use the internet as their “board”. Both are firefox plugins, and very easy to learn.
The first is WikiPaths, a “Wikipedia-based scavenger hunt game“. After you install the plugin, when you go to the wikipedia entry for Path, you’ll see a start button. Click it, and you’ll be taken to a random page. Another random page will be displayed in the bottom right corner of your screen. Your goal is to navigate from one page to the other in the shortest number of clicks possible.
Since the pages are random, there’s no way to really know if you did “well”. It takes a bit of strategy to figure out how you’ll navigate from, say, an obscure hair metal band, to a public school in india. The name is a bit misleading though because it’s not really a “race” – there’s no way to record your score or compete with other racers. Regardless, Wiki Paths’ reappropriates wikipedia as a game board.
The second game is called PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This game takes your normal web browsing behavior and plugs it into a few game feedback loops. Every time you view a unique URL, you get a few points. You can then spend those points on tools, which allow you to interact with other players. You can set a mine on a page, and the next player to view it will trip it, causing their browser to shake and a few points to be lost. You can also leave crates, which give players goodies for finding them. As you go through the web, messages will pop up when you encounter something that another player has left. It’ll also notify you when another player trips your mine, and give you the opportunity to taunt them.
Since you accumulate points just for using forums, social networking sites, reading blogs, porning around, whatever, you’ll be racking up points all the time. It feels a bit like Progress Quest in that you’re effortlessly and passively accumulating resources all the time. This raises a few privacy issues of course, namely that when the plugin is turned on, pmog.com is recording what sites you view. But they swear on a stack of bibles they won’t hose you (intentionally) for participating.
There’s also missions, guided tours of a section of the internet. The mission creator will string together 4 or more websites around a theme, and write about a paragraph about each site. If you’re not interested, you can just click through to the end of the mission, but if something along the track piques your interest, you can jump off and explore to your heart’s content before you continue. Missions often take you to some pretty interesting places which you may not have encountered in your regular web travels. It’s in this way that PMOG rewards you for exploring the web, and checking out stuff outside your normal circles.
Creative gamers are reappropriating the web, transforming it into a playground. New behaviors are emerging out of this digital morass. Wikipaths has forged a new usage for wikipedia, while PMOG blurs the line between game play and non play. That’s the Golden Secret, some say, transforming Life into the Art of Playing Games.
Increasing complex systems have a tendency to collapse in more catastrophic ways. Hence, when George Soros and Nassim Nicholas Taleb say that this economic crisis will be worse than the Great Depression, I am not surprised at their appraisal.
However, what does a Depression actually mean, in our current socio-political economic condition? No doubt, circumstances across those three areas of analysis do differ from the 1930s and so we have to ask ourselves, what does that mean for us? The only viable mass movements of the moment seem to be, at least in the American contexts, religious ones. In the UK, I don’t think even that is possible. While I think the worries about fascism, at least in parts of the Third World, are valid, platforms explicit about such a program are rejected, and not just because of the negative connotations of such labels.
And how will the internet affect such a Depression, as well? Will we see spontaneous protests, or even peaceful urban takedowns, orchestrated via Facebook and Twitter? Or will the net become a talking shop, the modern day equivalent of a soapbox, where gripes and despair about our current conditon are aired but little else is actually done?
Obviously, my thoughts turn to recent graduates and attempts to get jobs, for personal reasons. Will unemployment and the lack of prospects lead to, as it did in Italy in the 60s, a militant intellectual movement who felt they had more in common with the proletariat than their (usually) middle class backgrounds? Or could it breed a new class of cosmopolitan guerrilla entrepreneur, an anti-Davos man if you will.
I could really do with a team of sociologists and cultural theorists right now.
Guantanamo and Camp X-Ray do not equal all American operated black sites
The Justice Department ruled that some 600 so-called enemy combatants at Bagram have no constitutional rights.
As I have suggested before, the Bush administration’s great crime was not its rampant criminality and disregard for others, it was that all this was obvious, and they broke the fourth wall of politics with great regularity. Obama’s is much superior at playing the game while keeping the pretence up. I still suspect the new crew is not as criminal as Bush, but, well…
Why the FUCK are you in a sword fight?
As antiquated weapons, replaced mostly by handguns in our current age, we see very little of swords, or any blade longer than a meter in any widespread use, offensive or otherwise. The closest analogue that most people of this age will use and keep around as a common tool is a kitchen knife or a machete. More traditionally styled swords are still found in ceremonial roles, as decorations, or for practicing martial arts / historical recreation (which may be the most functional of the three examples.) There have been cases of people fending off robbers or assaulting others with such pieces, but these are isolated cases. For simplicity and basic concept, we’ll consider a machete length blade the most likely you are to come across or use. This information applies the same across most single handed swords designed to chop effectively. These could include falchion, grossmesser, katzbalger, cleavers, long kitchen knives, wood / plant cutting tools, a stick, pipe, or even a piece of rebar. Rapiers, two handed swords, or katana are different animals, and special cases, so won’t be discussed yet.
To examine the basic idea, a sword fight would imply some form of duel. Both opponents, for whatever reason, have agreed to fight each other with similar weaponry. Outside of such “controlled†circumstance, two people rarely meet in a mugging or home invasion, pull long blades and square off. This is about as anomalous and odd a circumstance as the mythical “knife fightâ€. More likely two people will meet under such circumstance, and one of them has such a tool as their intended weapon, or one is close by and is grabbed as an available weapon. When a fight with matched weapons and supposedly even terms does occur, it’s often a very touch, squirrelly occasion. If for some bizarre reason you’re forced into a ritualized duel, look for ways out of it other than winning by the sword. Likely your opponent will have people there who will kill you if you win, so a way out other than fighting may be best.
No advice or pointers will make you a master swordsman; it takes practice, study and improvisation, like with any art, but a few basic ideas help make it less daunting.
1. SWING. Can you swing a stick? Answer yes if you can move your arm; trust your author on this. Good, in THEORY, this means you can use a sword. A sword is a metal bar with an edge, but don’t let the edge distract you. It will cause pain or damage no mater WHAT side you hit with.
2. MOVE. Do not try to stand in one place and act like a chef chopping meat. You need to move, circle fade in and out on your opponent. Even a stick is only good at a certain distance from your arm to your target, so while you play kung – fu with the hands, you need to play chess with your feet to get your opponent into your optimal striking range, an keeping yourself clear of your opponent’s.
3. You can hit with more than one part of that thing. Though frowned upon by more rigid “honorable†forms of fighting, smashing with the base of the handle, punching, grabbing the blade and using the sword like a short staff, or abandoning the sword to grapple are ALL valid techniques. These can shorten your effective striking range almost instantly, and can catch many opponents off guard.
4. Don’t block when you can avoid. This will help you learn to MOVE in a hurry.
5. Keep your defense / offense ratio balanced. Assuming matched weapons you don’t need to attack with suicidal abandon. Keep offensive, but don’t commit heavily, and hit targets of opportunity. If you can thrust with the blade you have, use it for quick jabs as distraction.
6. Go for more than the kill shots. Strikes at arms, legs, hands, or face are great for distracting and keeping your opponent back. They won’t rush at you so quick if you can spank or gash the first appendage to come into range.
For more specific development, look around for local Renaissance sword “Guildsâ€, a new fad in martial arts, historical recreation groups, or martial arts studios that train in stick fighting (Filipino martial arts specifically, have a VERY good curriculum on the subject)
Good luck otherwise. While training specifically for the possibility of a sword fight on the street is fairly useless in this time period, the training and general fitness of martial arts is ALWAYS a good thing, and you can meet some truly interesting folks through it.
Is really good. No, really good. Might even be better than To Record Only Water for Ten Days, which I always thought was his best solo work. It takes a bit to get into it, but when I did, I found myself really enjoying it. That’s all, no review or anything else, just a recommendation as to what I’m digging currently. Via Youtube, here is the track Central.