Well, if there isn’t one element in current events which more clearly shows up the double standard not to mention the absolute uselessness of masks and so-called social distancing it would have to be Barak Obama’s lavish party with six hundred of his closest and dearest friends, at his plush estate in that playground of the old-money wealth, Martha’s Vineyard. The Commie Crud virus obviously must know the difference between the enlightened, sensitive members of the elite, and would not dare afflict them, unlike those stupid, unenlightened and no doubt racist proles attending the Sturgis motorcycle rally.
Society
Pwosesis Ayiti A
No reward for resistance; no assistance, no applause.
— Neil Peart, “Lock and Key”
For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.
— Paul of Tarsus, Epistle to the Romans
La merde a frappé le ventilateur; my earlier post became abruptly more topical on Wednesday the 7th, when we woke to the news of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. This follow-up will consider the implications of developments since late June and will specifically respond to commenters on Dilèm Aksyon Kolektif nan Matisan. Most of the structure of this post will follow the Deming process-workbench model, because history is, to a great extent, a series of contingent events, and because I am a giant process nerd.
Dilèm Aksyon Kolektif nan Matisan
Generatim discite cultus
(Learn the culture proper to each after its kind)
— Virgil, Georgics II
Stephen Biddle, Nonstate Warfare: the Military Methods of Guerrillas, Warlords, and Militias (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)
By way of making this more than a merely armchair review, I will be discussing the developing situation of state failure in Haiti, which is providing a personally harrowing example of the phenomena theorized and studied in this book. NB: additional situation reports like the one I quote from below will appear at this OCHA webpage.
I. Increasingly Scale-Free Military Activity in the 21st Century
In this follow-up to 2004’s Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (also from Princeton), Stephen Biddle continues to elucidate the many ramifications of the one-to-many relationship which came to dominate the battlefield between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. Over that century and in the decades that followed, individual-service weapons increased in rate of fire from a (very) few rounds per minute to ~10 rounds per second, in effective range from ~100 to >300 meters, and in accuracy from (optimistically) 10 to 1.5 milliradians. Say 2 ½ orders of magnitude improvement in RoF, half an order of magnitude in range, and one order of magnitude in accuracy; multiplying these together to create a sort of index of effectiveness, I get an overall change of 4 orders of magnitude, with stark implications for battlefield environments.
Generally Speaking
I can’t really speak to the matter of general officers from extensive personal experience with the rank; throughout my military career I was mostly in places removed from direct personal contact. A merciful deity, to quote the rabbi from “Fiddler on the Roof” kept the general ranks kept them far, far from us, although a SAC one-star did show up one day at EBS-Zaragoza, unannounced and unheralded. It was lunchtime, practically everyone save the radio and TV op on duty had left the building. I was sitting in my office, peacefully adding another layer of much-needed polish to my shoes, when a flight-suited guy appeared in the doorway and cheerily asked, “When you’re done with yours, can you do mine?” He was a youngish-looking, personable guy, and it took me at least five seconds to grok the single star that designated his rank. He introduced himself, Brigadier General Something-or-other. said he was visiting for a readiness inspection of the SAC unit. He just thought he would mosey around and drop in to visit some of the other activities on base which supported his people so well … and could he have a tour of our broadcast facility?
Well, duh like I could say ‘no, general, sir’. He got the brief informal nickel tour, conducted by yours truly, introduced to the few of our staffers who weren’t at lunch, and the other senior NCO, the maintenance chief, who hissed at me: “Why didn’t you tell us there was a one-star on the ground? We should have been prepared!” and I hissed back that I hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone anything, said one-star just appeared. It was likely, I added, that this general was probably much more knowledgeable about what was really going on in the activities that he visited, because of his practice of just casually dropping by … rather than doing the formal, pre-announced official inspection visit.
But to most junior and med-ranked enlisted, general officers are like saints to Catholics we know of them, about them, recognize their attributes, and experience the effects of their pronouncements and dictates.
Poison Fruit of the Poison Tree
Against considerable recent competition in the “Let’s All Hate on White” contest currently going on among our political leadership, the media, academia, national corporations, and the entertainment industry, I must nominate Dr. Aruna Khilanani as a stand-out member of the American team for the ultimate Racism Olympics. Dr. Kilanani identifies as a practicing psychiatrist, at least for the moment. I am not myself qualified as a mental health professional, but I have been around long enough to accurately judge when another person routinely maintains vast colonies of bats in their mental belfry. This woman apparently entertains strange resentments and ultra-violent fantasies of shooting white people for no particular reason than rage, fantasies which were expressed in a lecture at the Yale School of Medicine and only made public this week.