Academia Ghetto Thread

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yeah, I think the grad student who is facilitating our team is only taking one class and has no job, and doesn't realize that for people who are taking a full load, writing three case studies over the weekend is fucking ridiculous. Fuck, writing ONE decent case study over a weekend is ridiculous. 

I'm basically just writing brief summaries, and then I'm going to inform him that this class gets eight hours a week of homework time from me, and no more.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Despite sacrificing all other homework to focus on my molecular biology homework for the last two weeks, I got a C. Barely.

Travis, who is probably the smartest of our group, got a low B. Sam, who is wicked goddamn smart and I'm pretty sure a fair shake smarted than I am, got a high D.

We studied really hard and have a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of molecular biology. What none of us are good at is memorizing a shit ton of acronyms, and it turns out that's all he's really going for. So, for the final: fuck learning, just memorize a shit ton of acronyms.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The meeting with the grad student turned into "The Grad Student Show" wherein he was basically lecturing and filling up chalk boards, and the three of us undergrads just sat there and finally were like "OK, but what do we do next?"

[Cain]

Every time you write a paper on "cyberterrorism", someone with actual knowledge of computers commits seppuku out residual shame from reading your article.

It's also interesting to note just how many academic articles on cyberterrorism come from the early 2000s, ie; when you could publish any old bullshit about the internet because it runs on Space Magic and no-one had Facebook to teach them any better.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Delayed post due to clusterfuck week that is End-of-Thanksemestergiving, but:

A mutual friend of mine and Villagers who used to be her roommate and moved to Arizona and then Colorado for work came back home for the holiday, and randomly dropped in. Fun was had and we went down to the shittiest Irish bar in Dorchester (Sonny's on Adams St.)  because we love it despite its shittiness. Well it was karaoke night, and Jim is an excellent singer. Among other things he did Unchained Melody, but apparently I was in a biological mood and the sheer desperation of the notes and lyrics amused the hell out of me, and Jim suddenly, in the middle of his quite honestly gorgeous performance, became the loneliest cricket in the field, just looking to pass on his genes to the next generation.

Made even funnier by the fact that Jim is mostly gay.

But also not helped by the fact that he also did Piano Man.

It was Fundeprenlightening? I enjoyed myself and told George about the chuckle I had about the hypothetical genetic failure cricket.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Dead week starts on Monday.

Ffffuuuuuu

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

In the last week, for some reason, I've had several WTF conversations around organic chemistry.

1. My ex (I have a good ex and one who is a trainwreck of phenomenal proportions) suggested that our son could help me with my organic chemistry homework. The boy is in 9th grade.

2. Friend asks how I'm doing with organic chemistry and I reply that I'm loving it. He guffaws and says "Nobody loves organic chemistry!".

3. I was complaining about how very very long chapter 7 is and some guy I don't really know offers to help me with my homework. The problems only  take a minute or two, but I humored him by showing him a couple, and he says "Oh, I failed chemistry, I don't know this language". 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

OK. I am just all over the place, but I am determined to finish ONE of the two remaining chapters. JUST ONE.

I have fortified myself with ritalin and marijuana. I'm going to nail elimination reactions, or bust.

[Cain]

Every time you write a paper on "cyberterrorism", someone with actual knowledge of computers commits seppuku out residual shame from reading your article.

It's also interesting to note just how many academic articles on cyberterrorism come from the early 2000s, ie; when you could publish any old bullshit about the internet because it runs on Space Magic and no-one had Facebook to teach them any better.

So apparently defacing a website = destruction to property = terrorism.

Well...there's not much I can say about that.

These notes by a PhD student at Oregon University aren't all bad, though.

[Demolition Squid]

I got in an argument about the definition of terrorism recently. Its been a long time since I studied  it, but I remember 'intending to have a political outcome' was one of the few traits shared between the different definitions.

IIRC, the person I was arguing with was an american who said that sending death threats = terrorism, because it is meant to intimidate people with the threat of violence. He then produced state law which backed that up legally. So you don't need to actually follow through with an act to be a terrorist, nor does there need to be any political dimension, and now damaging property is terrorism too.

So terrorism is 'doing or threatening to do anything we don't like'. Seems legit.

[Cain]

I personally like Schmid's "academic consensus" definition of terrorism, which he formulated after analysing over 100 different academic and legal definitions of the terrorism:

Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby - in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought"

I can understand the inclusion of property into a definition of terrorism, because certain anarchist and environmentalist groups are very keen on bombing empty buildings.  But there has to be a "political" and "violence" element to it, and as far as I can see, defacing websites =/= violence.  Indeed, as the author of the above linked piece points out, such acts rarely rise above the average noise level of the spammer infested, clickbait orientated internet.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Every time you write a paper on "cyberterrorism", someone with actual knowledge of computers commits seppuku out residual shame from reading your article.

It's also interesting to note just how many academic articles on cyberterrorism come from the early 2000s, ie; when you could publish any old bullshit about the internet because it runs on Space Magic and no-one had Facebook to teach them any better.

So apparently defacing a website = destruction to property = terrorism.

Well...there's not much I can say about that.

These notes by a PhD student at Oregon University aren't all bad, though.

That looks worth a read, I'm saving it for after finals.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Not as interesting as what you guys are talking about, but I had my real actual LAST MIDTERM OF THE TERM this morning.

I think I did OK, and it only sort of matters because he's throwing out the lowest exam score and so far I have something ridiculous like 98% plus 20 points of extra credit. So I only have to do better than 80% or so on the final to hang on to my A.

Now, FINALS TIME!!!

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

I'm sitting at a Chinese restaurant out in bumblebefuck Hillsboro on lunch break after watching people do criminal justice all morning. First trial got plead out in part and held over in part. It involved counts of sexual assault, felony assault, sodomy (a separate thing in Oregon), and Driving While Suspended. I really wanted to see a closing argument on that joinder. "Yeah, so in addition to all these horrible things the defendant is accused of, he didn't even have a license when he drove to and from the scene."

Next was a pretty desparate and thin motion to suppress on a fraud case. I was pretty stoked that I was able to figure out the defense theory without reading the motion, and that point for point I was with the judge on denying it. Bummer for the defendant, though. Looked like he's hosed.

[Cain]

80% should be easy for you Nigel, but good luck anyway.

And here's some quotes from a couple of old papers of mine.  I don't normally look at my papers again after sending them, because I hate reading my own writing after proof-reading and editing, but I needed some citations I had in them for my current paper.

Discussing the distinctions and similarities between state and anti-state terrorism requires us to have a working, definitional model of both phenomena in order to compare and contrast.  Unfortunately, in terrorism studies the role of the state as a terrorist actor is a frequently overlooked phenomena .  Furthermore, more generally there has been considerable debate regarding how to define and understand terrorism, which has further hampered discussion on this topic .

In particular, some discussion has focused on whether the state itself is capable of being a terrorist actor or whether it is definitionally precluded from being labelled as such.  In particular, Hoffman and Wilkinson argue that while historically states did carry out terrorism that state terror and terrorism refer to two distinct and different types of political violence.

For Hoffman, there is a "fundamental qualitative difference"  between acts of terrorism and state violence.  For Hoffman, the crux of this difference lays in that anti-state terrorists refuse to be bound by rules and conduct governing war and conflict. While admitting states sometimes violate these laws as well, he nevertheless attempts to draw a clear distinction between the acts of states and non-states.

This clear distinction is in broad agreement, and partially influenced by, the US State Department's own definition of terrorism, which is political violence "against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents".   While it is not immediately clear what the legal definition of a "clandestine agent" is, the definition avoids specifically mentioning state terrorism – which can be seen as part of the "silence of discourse" on state terror which Jackson refers to.  For Jackson, this lack of reference means that such definitions and the scholars who employ them intend for states to be "a priori and by definition excluded as actors who can practice terrorism" .

While Hoffman concedes that historically terrorism was practiced by the state –most notably during the French Revolution – he considers such usage to be "uselessly anachronistic"  because such a description is insufficient for the study of modern terrorism and how that term is used.

By contrast, Wilkinson admits that both states and non-state actors are capable of committing terrorism, that it is a "weapon or method"  used by both state and non-state groups.  The examples he gives, of Stalin and Serb ethnic cleansing, back up this assertion.  However, Wilkinson also cautions that while terrorism can be sub-divided into state and non-state domains, it is difficult to analyse the two in a comparative manner due to the "complex processes of and implications of both regimes of terror and factional terrorism".

Therefore we have two basic critiques of the concept of state terrorism, the definitional critique that excludes states from charges of terrorism a priori, and the complexity critique, that while states do also engage in terrorism, this is of a different kind due to the processes involved, and so such terrorism, while still terrorism is of a qualitatively different kind.

Hoffman's critique fails on the issue of state actors engaging in the same activities as terrorist groups and employing the same methods.  For Hoffman, the difference between terrorists and a military is that a military force engaging in such activities can be prosecuted for war crimes and violations of international law.  However, if we accept Hoffman's premises as correct, this opens the door to reverse his argument, and claim that terrorism is a form of war crime, often taking place in times of nominal peace.  This has been argued before, most notably by Scharf.   While there are reasons why this formulation may be unenforceable from a legal perspective, it nevertheless strongly suggests that there is a strong equivalence between terrorism, war crimes and that the political violence the two phenomena deal with form part of a larger, single type of violence.

This criticism can also be considered from the angle of the distinction between guerrilla war and terrorism, as discussed by Schmid and Jongman.  Quoting Kossoy, they point out the conflation of terrorism and guerrilla warfare is grossly inaccurate, while nevertheless pointing out most guerrilla campaigns make use of terrorism.  As they put it, terrorist methods are "exceptional in conventional and guerrilla warfare", but that in state and anti-state terrorism, these exceptional methods are "elevated to the level of strategy" .  Thus the war crimes of guerrillas become terrorism, while the terrorism of states is considered war crimes.

Hoffman's historical critique is also inaccurate, as he claims that the definition of terrorism has changed since the French Revolution, and that it no longer indicates a state-inclusive process.  However, Stampnitzsky points out that the formulation of terrorism as state violence continued past the second World War, where the opening address of the Nuremburg statement charged Germany with using terrorism against its own people, and into the 1960s where "writers...classified "terror/terrorism" as largely an attribute of states and political systems" , with the second most common usage being that of insurgent groups.  Only since the 1970s has this changed.

Wilkinson's critique is more difficult to dismiss, and doing so would require the rest of this paper.  However, it is worth pointing out at this stage that despite the supposed differences in state terrorism, the activities they engage in are very much the same, utilising techniques such as kidnappings, bombings, assassinations and torture against a civilian population, then "there is no doubt that in analytical terms, this constitutes terrorism."   This broadly correlates with Schmid and Jongman's own definition of terrorism , however they include a caveat that, unlike assassination, terrorism does not directly target an individual but uses opportunistic, symbolic or representative targets to convey a message to a wider audience.  Jackson would also seem to be in agreement with this, noting that "it is important to note that state terrorism may have both instrumental (terroristic) and strategic intentions".

More broadly, it would seem a description of terrorism based on behaviour and actions would allow for state terrorism to be considered a form of terrorism.  Therefore, an analysis of state terrorism based on the methods employed by the state would be the most productive method for investigating how and whether this violence is fundamentally different from anti-state terrorism

While the term "genocide" was only coined in modern times , most scholars agree that the concept pre-dates the term itself, and could be considered a constant through history, in both pre-state and modern state societies.   And while the term is contested by scholars, a broad overview shows the common themes to be that of mass-killings, intent to destroy a whole group or a substantial number of that group .  Genocide is closely associated and largely overlaps with the related phenomena of ethnic cleansing, as "modern episodes of ethnic cleansing have caused large numbers of deaths and often conform to the United Nations' definition of genocide".

Ethnic cleansing also appears to be where terrorism and genocide also intersect.  As the aim of ethnic cleansing is to remove a given population from a geographic area by means of violence and intimidation, terrorism is often considered inherent in the description.   In particular, the Bosnian experience strongly influenced the understanding of ethnic cleansing when the term was first formulated, and this experience was of "artillery barrages that laid waste to people and buildings; sieges that went on sometimes for months, even years, reducing the populations to a starved, diseased, and fearful existence" , alongside beatings, disappearances, rape and murder by paramilitary forces.

This parallels with other incidents of ethnic cleansing, such as that in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Darfur.

Nor is this kind of violence unique to state violence, as the example of the LTTE ethnically cleansing Tamil Muslims from the Jaffna Peninsula  and the Kashmiri Pandits being ethnically cleaned by Islamic militants from Pakistan  show.

Nevertheless, this violence has several strong overlaps with what we would normally consider terroristic violence.  The violence itself is normally of an illegal kind, unsanctioned under international law and in violation of human rights, targeting civilians and using violence designed to terrorise and intimidate.  Those who carry out the violence are frequently not official arms of the state, but paramilitary forces aligned with the state and perhaps covertly backed by them.  In the case of Bosnia, many of these paramilitary groups were populated by organised crime syndicates, organised by the police and trained by the military , while in the case of Kashmir these were Islamist militants recruited and supported by the Pakistani military .  Instead of seeking to outright murder their political enemies, these groups instead relied on mass intimidation to coerce them into leaving – which is often considered a hallmark on terrorism, the psychological impact and anticipated reaction to violence.

Nevertheless, while terrorism is strongly linked with ethnic cleansing, and ethnic cleansing with genocide, it does not necessarily follow that terrorism and genocide are similarly linked.

One problem is that while genocide is preoccupied with the elimination, in part or total of a given group, using terrorism, with its emphasis on psychological intimidation and coercion, suggests that genocidal levels of killing are not desired or believed to be required for the aim of the terrorists to be met.  As Alexander Laban Hinton points out, "terrorism and torture are typically used to subjugate and intimidate, not obliterate, certain groups of people. Even ethnic conflicts, which may lead to and be a crucial part of genocide, often erupt over forms of domination and subordination and do not by definition involve a sustained and purposeful attempt to annihilate another ethnic group."

The second is that almost all examples of ethnic-cleansing related terrorism are either state-sponsored or directly carried out state terrorism.  The only counter-example to this that could be found was that of the LTTE, which in terms of terrorist groups was unusual due to its strong territorial influence and power.  What this strongly suggests is that ethnic cleansing is either only of interests to states (and para-states or virtual states) or that only those kind of institutions have the sufficient military power and resources to undertake any such campaign.

While individual coups have often been studied in great detail, systemic study of the coup as a form of political violence is sadly lacking.  Perhaps the most persuasive attempt is Edward Luttwak's Coup d'état: A Practical Handbook  and, much as the name suggests, this deals more with the practical issue of how to undertake a coup than under what circumstances is a coup more likely and what factors can influence the decision to use this particular form of political violence.

However, because the coup involves the seizure of power in order to effect a change in government it is undeniably an act of political violence.  And because of this it merits comparison with terrorism, which often has the revolutionary aim of overthrowing government or, when the state itself engages in terrorism it is either a revolutionary government itself or seeking to protect itself from revolutionary forces.  Ariel Merari, in his classification of insurgent violence, lists the coup as a possible form and strategy alongside terrorism .

A coup would, therefore, be a potentially attractive strategy to undertake in order to achieve the aims of a terrorist group.  However, how does that occur in practice?

Collier and Hoeffler claim that coups and civil wars have similar underlying causes and economic conditions which make their outbreak more likely.  In particular, they note that "there is, in effect, a common core of factors inducing violent, illegitimate challenges to a regime. "   These factors include the existence of resource rents, what specific grievances the security services may have and the legitimacy of the existing government.  Collier and Hoeffler's research shows that rebellion and civil war is far more likely when specific segments of society are excluded from power-sharing arrangements, whereas a coup is more likely where grievances are specific to the security services.

As a result, many coups have been the result of actions on behalf of said security services.  As these mostly attempt to seize power in order to redistribute resources towards themselves, their aim is to seize control of the state quickly and effectively, and because of their access to military power, this is affected in such a way that "involves little violence and, sometimes, it is achieved without bloodshed."   Luttwak concurs, noting that "[t]he coup, in short, looks a pushover."

Notably, some terrorist groups have attempted to use the coup methodology to obtain power.  According to Lawrence Wright, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and successor to Bin Laden in Al-Qaida, originally sought to displace Egypt's leadership by means of a coup.  Quoting Zawahiri's biographer, he notes ""[Zawahiri] thought they should have waited and plucked the regime from the roots through a military coup"  rather than via the assassination of Anwar Sadat.  Zawahiri however never got to put his planned coup into practice, due to the security service reaction to the Islamic Group bombing campaign, which "nearly eliminated both organisations in Egypt."

A second example comes from the Italian experience of terrorism.  Donatella Della Porta quotes an Italian parliamentarian who recounted how "direct action or involvement by the secret services can be singled out in all the trial records referring especially to the most serious crimes of right-wing terrorism, such as ... the attempted coup of the Rosa Dei Venti and Golpe Borghese."   The latter coup in particular included the involvement of Fronte Nazionale and the Avanguardia Nazionale, both groups strongly linked with terrorist attacks during that period of Italian history.

However, by and large, the coup strategy has been a difficult one for terrorists to achieve.  The crucial involvement of the security services make such an attempt beyond the means of most terrorists.  Futhermore, the strategy of the coup is itself opposed to terrorism, as al-Zawahiri noted.  The issue of covert warfare is also even more critical in the coup attempt than in terrorism, which is perhaps odd given the later is often seen as a form of covert warfare.  There is furthermore a strong temporal difference between the two modes of conflict, where the coup is intended to be a very brief phase of activity, terrorism is by contrast something that tends to occur over a far longer period of time.