Category: Perversion

Alle Posts zur Verwirrtheit dieser Welt

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On a short note

The Bolsa program offers support for poor families in exchange for sending their children to school. It has been widely acclaimed at being one of the best tools to reduce poverty and enhance literacy at the same time.

I am by no means an expert on development aid programs and educational policies. However, what struck me is how the usefulness of programs like Bolsa seems to end as soon as they hit what the Economist termed “modern poverty” – domestic violence, drugs, gangs) as opposed to the traditional poverty, hunger and unemployment.

The reason to me seems to lie in the externalisation of discipline. The way the European countries developed was through a painful process in which they instilled discipline into most of their members. From the introduction of standing armies, the enforcement of punctuality at workplaces, the austerity and much-ridiculed exactness and rigity of their civil servants, all of these were different provisions to turn each and every member of their societies into a person that would maintain the schedules and routines that a modern industrial society needed – even if left to himself. Michel Foucault has been invaluable in describing this process, as have other french Philosophers such as Bourdieu and Virillo, probably cause their is a country that first started this “formation” of citizens.

It might just be a reactionary impulse, but I wonder whether it is possible to build a modern society without this internal clockwork, just based on incentives. I also do realize how fishy and self-righteous it may sound, advising peoples in a favela to “just develop some discipline”. That`s not really the point I am trying to make, and that`s not what I am saying. I just wonder whether this process, can be circumvented by replacing discipline by incentives.

I am not sure if this point is indeed a reactionary argument only, and if these “secondary virtues” – that,  as someone so rightly pointed out, can also be used to run a concentration camp,  are necessary, and if so, whether they can be created without all the hassle and pain the west went through. “No pain, no gain”, yes, the old yada yada.

I shall need to think about that some more.

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Establishing trends in warfare

(This Article is part of an unfinished series of thoughts about modern thinking about military development)

The most striking notion about war is, that every singly development tends to influence all other factors involved in determining the capabilities of an army. A change in the ability of moving cross country a certain equipment might lead to changes in the application of firepower, since a wider raange of terrain must be covered, or require different apporaches of providing supplies. This may in turn lead to different tactics alltogether, thus passing a certain threshold in the availability of a weapon may change the face of battle completely, as happened with the advent of rifled guns in the American Civil War, or the mass production of machine guns in the First World War.  And since more and more tools get added to the arsenal of the armed forces with each passing decade, each future invention effects needs more consideration and will have effects reaching even further than the last one. Of course, in most cases those effects can be discarded sa neglible, but for all the surprises that happened in the doctrines with every new weapon introduceed.

Anyone trying to predict future developments, too, faces the possibility that the whole web of connected factors that result in combat performance or simply victory turns into inconcernible mess if one pulls at the wrong threads first. Since war is an art more than a science, there is no given system or logical order of subjects in which to dissect the topic. The best an aspiring philosopher of war can do is to pick out the terms and sort them to his own logic, hoping that the inevitable omissions will not deter his readers from following.

This list of posts is mostly concerned with the question how warfare will develop in the future, so it seems to make most sense to first talk about those factors that are least likely to change, and proceed from there to the more frequently developing aspects of warfare. As we’re not concerned here with a definition of war itself, we shall start with basics and proceed to the specifics from there. This means talking about the constants of warfare, namely the space and time in which he is wrought, first. Afther that, we shall examine trends in the tools that humans use to fight, its weapons and technology. A third chapter will be devoted to take a look at the effects of warfare on humans itself, their bodies and their mind, before we shall in the last part of this series try to gauge how war I the future will shape those entities that define and accompany us for most of our lives: institutions of society, armies and governments of course, but of course also topics as science, economy, and morality.

While this series started out as a couple of blog posts, ther eis a distinct possibility that it might collapse under the weigth of its aspirations. So the author appologizes in advance, should he delay any publication or fall short of the expectations raised hereby.

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The Day The Music Lied

That not everything is bad about the interwebs, and that not everyone is feeling comfortable with cloned singers stright from the TV-ratlab has strikingly been prooven by a facebook campaign sucessfully lifting our old friend Zack de la Rocha to the top of the british christmas charts, beating the favoured X-Factor protegée Joe McElderly by a solid 50.000. You can read the rest on the BBC’s website by people who write better English than me, but at least I’ve pointed you into the right direction.

Of course this can only distract from the rather pressing problem that Britain seems poised to teach the Chinese something about censorship and freedom of speech, all in the name of the greater good, of course. No wonder that the dark lord is behind all this. of course, Britain does never stand alone. But that, annoyingly enough, is not really news these days.

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International Brotherhood Week

It is always a nice day on which you get something confirmed in hard data you already knew was true. For example the sweet fact that zodiacs contribute exactly zero, zilch, nothing to the question wether people match or not.

The best days of OKCupid are over, its no longer the geeky place where people exchanged long mails about smart quizzes and that got most of their new users from the Startup-screen of edonkey 2000. I do wish OKCs owners lots of money and fame for what they did with this site, but I do kinda miss the old days ;)

Anyway, I recommend following OKCs blog closely, they have a dataset that dwarfs Gallup and they are smart enough to do funny things with it.

And one does wonder how hindu marriages work out.