Month: February 2005

Some people really should read the job adverts a bit more thoroughly:

Nintendo is no stranger to viral marketing, having dabbled in it during the N64 days with Perfect Dark and Majora’s Mask, but the marketing technique has recently had a spotlight cast on it thanks to Microsoft’s well-publicized ilovebees campaign for Halo 2. Nintendo, not to be outdone, orchestrated their own viral campaign for Metroid Prime 2 that spanned multiple websites for fictional companies, blog entries, and more.Perhaps most interesting of all was the seemingly innocuous (at the time) posting of a ‘Bounty Hunter’ job entry on Monster.com. Although plenty of Nintendo fans got the joke and sent in “applications” of their own, over 90 serious applicants expressed interest in the job. Yes, over 90 people submitted applications to become an intergalactic bounty hunter.

Bounty Hunters Having Trouble Finding Work?
A quick glance at Nintendo’s initial posting on Monster would tip off most readers that something was amiss: “Candidate must also be comfortable using high-tech (some would say alien) weaponry… Experience operating in subterranean, low-oxygen, zero-gravity or other harsh, unforgiving environments is a definite plus.” The obvious tells that all was not as it seemed didn’t stop the genuine applications from rolling in.

“Many of the serious applications we received came from users who reply to job postings without carefully reading the job description. Most of these applicants are ex-military, and they jumped at the chance of working in an exciting and high-risk field. As for the alien technology and other out-of-this-world references in our job posting, perhaps these ex-military personnel know something about government weapons research that we don’t?” Nintendo’s Senior Director of Public Relations Beth Llewelyn told GameDAILY BIZ.

…

It didn’t take Nintendo long to realize that the response to the job posting wasn’t going to be strictly the net-savvy Metroid fans that they expected. “Within the first day of posting the job, we had several replies from real applicants who seriously wanted to be an intergalactic bounty hunter for a living. The skills and experience these people listed went beyond surprising into the realm of frightening. We never expected such a wide array of replies from so many people who were actually pursuing interviews for gainful employment as a space warrior. However, Metroid fans did start to catch on and submit applications,” Llewelyn said.

I supppose that it’s a bit late to use Iraq as flypaper for people whose skills and experiences go “beyond surprising into the realm of frightening” [sic]. Maybe they can at least be used to soften up some of the remaining dictatorships – how about large cash prizes for those who kill all enemies in the first three levels of Metroid Prime 2’s Teheran map?

The Iraqi elections turned out to be an unqualified success, and I’m very happy about that. I’m somewhat less happy about the attempts before the elections to set standards of voter participation and security by which to measure the legitimacy of the elections. The unspoken expectation of those who did it was that they could have disqualified the vote if it didn’t measure up to the unrealistic standards set by themselves. But what would it have mattered if hardly any Sunnis had shown up? And what if the terrorists had succeeded in killing large numbers of voters? The responsibility would have rested on the terrorists, and nobody else.

Anyway. Iraq is very likely not the last Islamic dictatorship to fall during GWB’s tenure, so I would like to propose, for future reference, a simple criterion for legitimacy (for it really isn’t necessary to jump over every stick the anti-war crowd is holding up for us):

The new form of government shall be considered legitimate if it offers more freedom and better conditions of living than the previous one, and also offers room for further improvement within the same system, that is without a further revolution.

You probably noticed that I’m not mentioning democracy. That is because it might not be possible to hold elections as soon as in Iraq, for the security situation in countries like Syria (apart from some Druze and Kurds, almost all Syrians are Sunni Arabs) and Iran (three times the size of Iraq and a population of 65 million, with a corresponding potential for problems) might be much worse than in Iraq. But as long as the criterion I set above is met, I don’t see how this would diminish the (as yet potential) new governments’ legitimacy, for it would yet again be the responsibility of the terrorists in those countries, and anyway, there are plenty of internationally recognized governments that are not democratic.

If there actually are elections, they also don’t have to be perfect the first, or even the third or fourth, time around, depending on local conditions at the time. There will be plenty of time to work out any problems. The same goes for rule of law; it would be nice if it could be imposed from the start, but that, too, takes time, and probably longer than democracy itself; Western countries had rule of law centuries before they became democratic, after all. Learning from the West, and the Iraqi example, they probably will be able to muddle through in the meantime; not that Iraq has real rule of law as of yet, but it certainly is muddling through very well.

For all my optimism I don’t expect any of this to be easy, but this time around let’s at least strangle frivolous debates about ‘illegitimacy’ in the cradle. If the people in those countries are made better off as a result of the process then it is legitimate – period.

Back in September I wrote about winning in Iraq:

“If we succeed, we will not realize it at the time. It will be as in the Cold War, we will look around one day and suddenly realize that Iraq is largely peaceful and stable. We will realize that our goals were accomplished and everybody except leftist academicians will say, “we won, I don’t know exactly how or exactly when, but we won.”

It has begun.

(update: Does anyone know how to statically link to a specific day-by-day cartoon? I realized that the code I used above will cause a different cartoon to get loaded everyday.)

A very interesting observation via Instapundit.

On his site, Wheeler includes a subscription article comparing the Aztecs with Arabs: “Both the Arabs and the Aztecs invented a religion of jihad as a rationale to justify their imperialist empires. …”

“War – Holy War – became the purpose of the Aztec state. All soldiers in the Aztec army were holy warriors, warriors of the gods. Peace was dangerous. No war meant no prisoners to sacrifice, no food for the gods, which risked the destruction of mankind and the universe itself. The only way to avoid cosmic disaster was for the Aztecs to accept the burden fate had given them and wage perpetual war for the salvation of humanity.

“All in all, a pretty clever rationalization for a monstrous imperialist tyranny, wouldn’t you say? Sounds like they were taking religion-inventing lessons from the Arabs.”

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