Case in point: a member of the British military recently cut the head off of a Taliban warlord and brought it back to his superiors. He did this not out of bloodlust or to take a trophy, but for the very sensible reason that he’d been asked to find this man, kill him, and provide proof of a positive ID. Taking the head was not an act of barbarism, but rather an expedient way for the soldier to provide that ID.

People are apparently upset about this. They say that it’s disrespectful to the Muslim Taliban. The same sort of people who have no problem “supporting the troops” as they get sent to the third world to get shot at apparently have an issue with it when those troops do the mission they were sent there to do. I would have thought that this was hypocrisy, but apparently the term for it these days is “cultural sensitivity”.

For those people, I believe that the definitive response re: the head-lopping Gurkha can be found here.

Take home quote:

IT’S WAR, YOU SODDING NUMPTIES, NOT A DAMNED GAME OF CONKERS!

Put another way: If you’re going to support sending your countrymen off to war, don’t be surprised when you find that they’re engaged in warfare. If this idea disturbs you, then do whatever it takes to make sure they don’t get sent off to war in the first place.

If the Bay Area were to secede from California, it would instantly become the world’s 25th largest economy, ahead of Austria, Taiwan, Greece and Denmark.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Alpha Cities and the ways in which certain metropolises affect not only their region or nation, but the entire globe. San Francisco is, economically speaking, a more important global player than many EU or Asian powers. Yet it would be strange to hear talk of San Francisco’s economic or fiscal policies in the World News. This, to me, seems like the interesting contra-positive to the U. N. Fallacy. Namely, the role of alpha cities on the world stage is downplayed simply because they aren’t recognized as nation-states, despite the fact that many have a far bigger impact on international affairs than do most U.N. nations.

In addition to the underplayed economic effects of alpha cities, there are interesting political concerns that again get short shrift. It seems to me that, as Saffo touches on in his article, cities are increasingly requiring a level of political autonomy that participation in a larger nation might not afford them. (It’s certainly a strange nation, after all, that can simultaneously support San Francisco, Dallas, and Cleveland without severe social and political dissonance.) Furthermore, the increasing trends of globalization and the rapid growth of communications networks are meaning the centralized governments are required less now than they ever have been before. There’s a very real sense in which centralized national power was useful (in part) because it provided a single point of contact between large groups of people. Nation states were useful because they were the only way to create global communities and for disparate peoples to interact, relate, and trade.

Such really isn’t the case anymore. Globalization means that the graph of international relation is getting more connected, meaning that it’s no longer necessary to go through centralized choke-points to get things done. Increasingly, governments are bottlenecks to, rather than facilitators of, international trade and relations. They are out of touch, inefficient, and slow to respond, and getting more so with every passing year. Local governments, however, are better in all three of these regards. They have a better sense of the needs and wills of their constituents, their inefficiencies are smaller in scale, and they are smaller and more agile, and thus able to better respond to changing environments.

In short, IF we are to have governments, then I think that local ones would be preferable. This is partly due to the fact that they are better equipped to deal with the demands of a populace that are both globally influential and increasingly globally connected. The San Franciscos of the world might well be better off on their own.

Just in my city (a metropolis of just under 500,000 people), I’ve seen a huge number of species in the heart of town.  A partial list includes raccoons, foxes, marmots, skunks, geese, ducks, mice, rats, coyotes, pigeons, hawks (several species), and crows.  On a recent walk down to the river and back, I counted eight different sorts of non-human animals living, apparently comfortably, in the city.  These are all animals that have adapted from their natural environments to thrive in these new, artificial¹ ones.

What struck me on this particular walk, is that this phenomenon, i.e. species adapting to a change in environment, is the fundamental driving force of evolution.  And human beings have instigated these changes in environments all around the globe. Both intentionally (e.g. through urbanization) and unintentionally (e.g. pollution). This lead me to thinking about epic climatic and environmental shifts and the fact that all of the environmental changes that we’re seeing all around the globe have qualitatively similar analogs in geological history. Temperatures have swung wildly just in human history, and have done even more so in the millions of years that large animals have been wandering the earth.

These historical changes in environment have caused the extinctions of many species and the adaptations of others. Indeed, there’s good evidence for the notion that we have one or more of these environmental changes to thank for many facets of our biology, including our giant brains, our upright gate, and our mostly hairless bodies.² These changes, and transitively the extinctions and evolution they elicited, have been caused by a wide range of factors, from the impact of celestial objects to volcanic eruptions to tipping-point changes in the amount of plant life on the planet.

And yet the only environmental changes in the history of the planet, which people ever talk about in moral terms are the ones that we credibly have a hand in. Now this is undeniably due to the fact that we are moral agents. One simply can’t hold an asteroid responsible for changing the earth’s climate.

But to simply make the distinction that human-caused ecological changes are moral issues and other kinds aren’t doesn’t really capture the way people think about climate or environmental change. We seem to only be willing to cast a certain subset of these changes in moral terms. We seem willing to accept our agency and take the blame for big, abstract changes to the environment that don’t really have any personal impacts, but not to smaller, concrete changes which many of us find personally convenient. After all, not even the staunchest adversaries of global warming seriously suggest that urbanization is a moral issue. And those that due tend either to be derided as nutjobs or just ignored like the crazy uncle at Christmas.

Urbanization has changed the environment (at least in a local fashion) all over the globe. What’s more, it’s done so to a much greater extent than has global warming. As of a few years ago, half the people on the planet live in large urban centers. About two dozen of these urban centers now have populations over ten million people. The largest of them, the megalopolis of Tokyo, has over thirty million.³ Many of these urban centers cover thousands of square miles of territory, with suburban sprawl spreading for many more miles outward from them. All of these radically changes the local environment, putting huge stresses on species, ecosystems, and even local weather.⁴

And yet no one seriously suggests that the existence of Tokyo is a moral problem. And if anyone did, they’d immediately be pushed to the margins of the conversation. We seem to simply accept radical shifts of local environment. Huge environmental changes that we see every day (e.g. roads, sky scrapers, suburban sprawl) are considered fine, dandy, business as usual. But take a few abstract steps back and say that the globe is warming (a phenomenon that none of us can really experience directly), and suddenly, it seems, people are far enough removed from the issue to talk about it in terms of moral outrage.

Tell me that my house is an environmental change and therefore evil and I’ll ignore and deride you. Tell me that my “carbon footprint” is evil and I’ll go right out and buy a bicycle. The only real difference, it seems, is one of abstraction. It can’t possibly be one of scope, after all, since the building of a house does far more damage to the local ecosystem (effectively obliterating a portion of it) than one car does to the global ecosystem.

It seems to me, then, that it’s the abstraction that allows us to consider environmental changes in moral terms. To consider the small, concrete changes that human beings make and benefit from every day (and have been for as long as we’ve been human), seems to just cut too close to home. Sure, my modest city of a half million people displaced hundreds of square miles of natural environment, drove out many species, and dwindled the numbers of some that are decidedly imperiled. But no one in their right mind is going to say that Spokane is Evil.

“And really”, we seem to say, “what does it matter? We still have hawks in the sky, geese in the river, and raccoons in the garbage bins. Sure we changed this environment, but it’s convenient, and anyway, some of the critters seem to be doing alright by the change.

Now if only we could do something about those accursed SUV drivers and their carbon footprints, everything would be just fine.”

“Society cannot be run by the lowest common denominator.”  Amen.

Second, when faced with the befouling presence of government busy-bodies, sometimes all you can do is point and laugh.  Ridicule is a powerful and effective tool, and it is often well-deserved when directed against government ineptitude and asshattery.  Anything that helps people to see how horrid and absurd the machinations of bureaucracy really are is a good thing.

Third, no matter how powerful and cathartic ridicule may be, it doesn’t always work.  In the article linked above, the leash law got passed even with the ridiculous amendments.  It will no doubt be selectively enforced by petty-minded town-council twats to raise revenue or exert influence.  (Per point one above, never underestimate the pettiness of apparatchiks at ANY level of government.)

Fourth, given a ridiculous state, prone to self-oblivious absurdity and bureaucratic wankery, sometimes one’s options are limited to having a drink and a laugh or abandoning the locality and moving to a better one.  Changing things for the better would be preferable, of course, but that’s not always an option.  After all, there’s only so much a person can do when facing “a zillion Young Mothers” rallying behind an odious government tool and the war cry of “do it for the children!”

If Iran is meddling in Northern Yemen, it raises the questions of to what extent and to what end. I’m intrigued, and inclined to believe al-Qirbi, but I’m at a lost to imagine what Iran stands to gain from a Yemeni civil war.

Interesting times in the Middle East . . .

“The casual use of the word ‘war’ has lead to a mentality among the public and even in the government that the rules of war could apply to those held at Guantanamo. But the rules of war apply only to those involved in a lawfully declared war, and not to something that the government merely calls a war. Only Congress can declare war — and thus trigger the panoply of the government’s military powers that come with that declaration. Among those powers is the ability to use military tribunals to try those who have caused us harm by violating the rules of war.

The last time the government used a military tribunal in this country to try foreigners who violated the rules of war involved Nazi saboteurs during World War II. They came ashore in Amagansett, N.Y., and Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and donned civilian clothes, with plans to blow up strategic U.S. targets. They were tried before a military tribunal, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt based his order to do so on the existence of a formal congressional declaration of war against Germany.

In Ex Parte Quirin, the Supreme Court case that eventually upheld the military trial of these Germans — after they had been tried and after six of the eight defendants had been executed — the court declared that a formal declaration of war is the legal prerequisite to the government’s use of the tools of war. The federal government adhered to this principle of law from World War II until Bush’s understanding of the Constitution animated government policy.”

He has an excellent point that, despite the rhetoric, none of the conflicts in which US personnel are currently involved are, legally speaking, a war.  Therefore, military tribunals cannot be used to try anyone detained in these actions.  Still, I can’t shake the notion that the trials in New York are anything more than a kangaroo court and that there must be a better way for justice to be done.  As it is, the planned proceedings seem like show trials designed to give the appearance of due process without the risk of any of the accused actually being found innocent.  After all, due process is, at this point, essentially an impossibility.  Yet statements from the government seem to indicate that they’re not bothered by that fact, and already have rather strong expectations for the outcome of the trials.

“TEHRAN, Iran — Tens of thousands of students, many shouting “Death to the Dictator!” and burning pictures of Iran’s supreme leader, took to the streets on more than a dozen campuses Monday in the biggest anti-government protests in months.

…

‘Death to the oppressor, whether it’s the shah or the leader!’ the students chanted, according to witnesses — making a daring comparison between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the pro-U.S. shah, despised in Iran since his overthrow in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.”

That chant is particularly interesting since it indicates that Khameini is now seem as the same sort of head-of-state that was deposed back in ’79.  This also seems to reject Slavoj Zizek’s assertion that the current trouble in Iran is a return to the roots of the revolution of ’79.  Rather it seems like the Islamic Revolution, having created a dictator so similar to the disgraced and despised shah, may be on its last legs.  Perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems likely that, should a new revolution occur, it may look like the ’79 coup, but that such appearances will be misleading.

This isn’t to say it will be radically different, but any new revolution will, of necessity, be a rejection of the powers of the old.  Out will go the Supreme Leader and in will come a different sort of power structure.  Mind, it’s almost guaranteed to be equally theocratic.  Whether or not it will fall back into the old patterns of faith-based oppression, however, would be an open question.  The current unrest is driven by forces that, while hardly liberal in any Western sense of the term, are certainly reformist in nature.

Of course, what those reforms will bring, if anything, remains to be seen.

“A topless teenage girl with a handgun holstered on her hip was arrested Sunday afternoon near a busy intersection in downtown Keene [NH].

Cassidy Nicosia, 18, was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure at about 1:30 p.m. near the Main-Marlboro-Winchester streets roundabout.”

Topless Equality + Open Carry = Falsely arrested for indecent exposure.  She was released and charges have been dropped.

I’m very glad that that we live in a country where Ms. Nicosia’s actions were perfectly legal.  I look forward to the day when actions like hers are perfectly accepted, as well.

Personally, I believe that one of the few roles of government is to protect people’s rights, including property rights.  If someone owns a chunk of land and wants to build a minaret there then they should damn well be able to.  And neither the government nor the majority of society should be able to stop them.  (Unless there are compelling negative externalities to such construction.)