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"My fuck-stock is assprone: stories from the front line of the credit crunch"

"Outside: The story of one man's search for his bike."

That could be useful.

One of the main problems with 5GW is how it blurs the line between war and politics quite readily, and this criticism has been made both by people trying to get to grips with the theory, as well as the more skeptical.  It could fit, as part of cultural operations against a target.

[Slashfic]

I love those books.

But I am about ready to give up on them because stupid George RR Martin keeps promising that he's going to finish the next book, but he's been promising for YEARS (it was supposed to be released by the end of 2004, to give you context) and we're still seeing nothing. I understand that writing can't be rushed, but FOUR YEARS LATE? I'm not patient enough for this crap. Not when there's supposed to be something like seven or eight books and there's only four out and he can't even keep to his schedule.

He's an amazing writer and the books become darker and more ridiculous and more amazing the further in you get (though sometimes a bit over the top), but this is just absurd.

Yes, but you know what this means?

Slashfic.

Naturally, Tyrion/Jon Snow slash will feature highly.

That was what I meant about select conditions.  I was thinking martyrdom, but yes things along that line too.

However, that would also undermine the Dawkins conception of memes and evolution, where the entire purpose is centered around the individual, and not the group.

Which is why I asked the question.

What's the rationale behind 1)?

Surely that would only apply under very select conditions, right?

Was it a socioLOLgical experiment?

I really need to read that.

I'll put it on my List. Near the top, I think.

Of course, the problem is once people start thinking, they have this annoying habit of not stopping.  And before you know it, they're questioning the BBC and whether science is a culture-bound mode of thought and we've all become effete, latte-drinking postmodernists, tearing apart the foundations of Western rationality and replacing it with a nihilistic discourse of despair and the end of all grand narratives.

Or something.

[any]

To answer the OP: yes.

There are plentiful examples of history being dislocated by movements who do not have the interests of the status quo of the time at heart.  To name three:

The French Revolution/Napoleon
The October Revolution in Russia
Hitler's rise to power

Admittedly, they are not the sort of people who you would necessarily want to associate yourself with (I do have a preference for Napoleon's crusading liberalism, despite his own insincerity towards it), but they have managed to disrupt the international system many times before.

In fact, both in the case of Hitler and Napoleon, the powerful around the world reshaped their methods to explicity deal with such problems arising again.  Napoleon led to the British policy of safeguarding the balance of power - intervening when one side looked like it would become too powerful, in order to maintain the status quo (ie them).  As for Hitler...I'll quote Salter here:

"Hitler's successes in the realm of International Relations led to his adoption by the IR community as its worst-case scenario – a lunatic against whom they had to protect themselves. Hitler's philosophy of struggle, violence and brutality became the touchstone of postwar theorists. Just as Napoleon had caused a conservative reaction in European society, so too did Hitler elicit a defence of the Westphalian system, with its values of balance, statehood and sovereignty."

So, not the greatest role models in history.  Yet, at the same time, they do point us in a couple of useful directions.  Machiavelli is always a good starting point.  In chapter 6 of The Prince he says:

"Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed."

In short history, political elites, respect force far more than anything else.  And with good reason: elites are just as human as anyone else.  They also die when they get a bullet in the head, or are facing the guillotine.  Power is considered a zero-sum game as well, if someone else has plenty of power, then unless their power has increased to the level where it obliterates that advantage, they have lost power (this is an important rule of imperial expansion - since the aim is impose oneself as a hegemon, as an actual expression of the symbolism of the rule of the system, its aims are limitless and any increase in power is a threat).

The problem lies in the nature of the aims.  Our current system is born out of a compromise of reformist attitude (just enough to stave off revolution) created by rising expectations and the desire to retain systems of control and coercion out of the hands of anyone but the ultra-wealthy and well connected.  Therefore there is a "pulling" in both directions - one being the desire to do away with those currently pulling the strings, and the other realizing that despite this, our current system does see to our basic needs (decreasingly so, it must be admitted) and so perhaps does not deserve the violent maelstrom that revolution would unleash.

The problem is simply one of proportion.  Reformist aims generally mix badly with political violence.  In Weimar Germany, only those who viewed the liberal-democratic regime as intolerable (the NSDAP and and KPD - Nazis and Communists) had paramilitary arms to their political parties.  Proportion is a key element in the deployment of violence.  For instance, this is why nations with nukes refuse to disarm the rest of their military forces.  If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  And the mass use of nukes in, say, Vietnam or the first Gulf War, would not have been acceptable or conducive to achieving the aims required.

And thus it is with domestic politics.  You could unleash a Jacobin Terror 2.0, but if your aim is to tweak social security, have universal health care and reduce executive privilege, then you are going to be damned to hell and back, and quite likely lose any popular support for your policies.  Now, if you were ranged against an autocratic Absolute Monarchy or a new Hitler, you may have a little more support (though it is worth noting the history of the French Revolution, including the conservative backlash all over Europe against it).

This is why I am fascinated by the potential of 5GW.  The possibility of using memetics and emergence to influence an outcome, reducing the need for kinetic operations (ie killing people), to create a world I would prefer, is very interesting.  Because the violent aspect is much lower, and the use of indirect force/psychological operations/cultural capital are much higher, it could be a useful tool for change within partially reformist systems, such as modern liberal democracy.  The violence done to truly intractable elements could be seen as accident or the acts of others, meanwhile by utilizing the above methods the population could be mobilized behind such reformist ideals.

As an example.

Ah.

Well yes, that would be annoying.

It takes about 100 pages or so to get into this.  But once you do, it becomes much more interesting.  Assassination, intrigue, the games of great houses, uncertain and uncomfortable alliances...its all there.

I left it alone for a while for the same reason.  But I decided to give it another go, because so many people had told me it was worth it.

Look at the meme evolutionarily (is that a word?). How does the meme improve both survivability and self-propogate?


Survival = militaries and inquisitions, social stigma, particular reference to an Other within the doctrine

Propagation = social services, providing aid to the poor, co-opting of teaching centres, useful vehicle of ambition for dissatisfied nobility (in most feudalistic or caste systems, honours and titles are only bestowed on the firstborn, meaning other children of the rich and powerful may gravitate to the religion), make alliance with sovereign political power structure (ie include justifying doctrines of rule and political order).

Obama had an "underage affair" with a gay pedophile, apparently.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=12325

As Highclearing points out:

In the course of considering Peak Wingnut Theory, John Cole discovers Erick Erickson of Red State staying classy by booming a National Enquirer story about the possibility that, as Erickson puts it, "Barack Obama had an underage, gay affair with a pedophile." That's a pretty interesting way to describe what may have happened between the two. Obama met Frank Marshall Davis when Obama was ten years old. When people discuss (possible) sexual contact between ten-year-old boys who are not their political enemies and grown men, they usually refer to the "underage gay affairs" as sexual abuse. They also recognize that adults who have been abused may or may not wish to tell the whole world the details, and they respect it. Admittedly, most people are not members of the NAMBLA wing of the Republican Party, or, failing that, curdled into pure meanness. Maybe Erickson just holds with the more sweeping theories about the cultural construction of the age of consent. Whatever the reason, he's sure that that little vixen, ten-year-old Barry Obama, was asking for it man.

Fortunately, I haven't seen Thatcher recently, since unlike Palin she has shunned all media contact in the past few years.

A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin.

I think I guessed the plot about 100 pages too early.