danalwyn

I've been reading a lot of the early commentary from the international relations wonks about the remake of Red Dawn and I've found that some of it mirrors some very perceptive comments made about some video games, like Homefront and Modern Warfare 3. It's a recognition of a trend that I find disturbing in a way that's hard to quantify.

Namely, America really, really, really wants to be the Taliban.

We want to be the ones wearing the ski masks and hefting AK-47s as we fight foreign occupiers from the ruins of our own towns. It matches our view of heroism, of the plucky little guy fighting insurmountable odds though skill, guile, and the willingness to take risks. We don't want to be on the side with all the firepower, or all the people, or all the rules, because that takes the fun out of it. We want to feel the exhilaration of taking incredible risk, of the adrenaline rush of danger after danger. We want to be the perpetual victims, so that our righteousness covers all possible actions and is rarely dimmed. We want to be the ones avenging a family wantonly slaughtered by foreign bombs. We want to sit, huddled beneath an outcropping of rock near our shattered house, and laugh at our latest narrow escape, because that's what heroism is for us, that's the kind of person we want to be. Who wants to be the foreign occupier who has to trudge back to home base and fill out paperwork? Given a fight between an outnumbered band of locals and a well-organized foreign army, we instinctively go for the locals every time.

You could talk about a lot of things here. You could talk about the inherent sexism - righteous revenge requires atrocity, atrocity requires victims, and in American media victims often require women. You could talk about modern racism - the most recent versions of this trope tend to make the enemies uniform in race, and non-white at that. You could talk about the almost pathological need Americans have to be a victim, as it's the only way we can safely dim our moral hazard lights, to ignore that voice of our consciousness. You could even point out that all you would have to do is change some names and digitally add American flags to the occupying, foreign forces and you would turn a Hollywood movie into a Taliban recruitment video.

But it's difficult to talk about the final lesson. This isn't the US. This isn't us. This is not the America that exists in this world. This is no longer what we are. For the foreseeable future America will remain on the other side. And it bothers me to see us continue operations on foreign soil, often in the role of occupiers, when at home we yearn to be the ragtag bunch of civilians, waiting in ambush for the foreign troops to walk by.

Courtesy of Foreign Policy, a list from Tuesday (and therefore outdated), of all the countries who have won less Olympic medals then Michael Phelps. That was when he still had 19 medals. How many countries does he outrank now?

(You could use this post to say something pithy about rich countries and athletic programs and all that, but why bother?)

It's official: CERN is claiming a five sigma result in the search for the Higgs Boson - with both ATLAS and CMS reporting a signal in the same region, 126 GeV, consistent with the last missing piece of the Standard Model. This fills in the last major gap in our understanding of the universe at the particle level, which will of course be rewritten in a few years. But in the meantime, it's a big step forward, and a major advancement in science. So party while you can.

Happy Fourth everyone.

In other news, the Kyoto Symposium came out with their findings last week, forcing an updated CERN press release. The final verdict is that all four Gran Sasso experiments, including OPERA, now measure the maximum velocities of neutrinos to be consistent with the theory of relativity. That means an end to the dreams of faster-than-light communication, and vindication for the vast majority of scientists who thought that the results were, at best, highly questionable.

As to the culprit? A fiber-optic cable not properly screwed into the case.

For a particularly thorough explanation of what went wrong, you can read this blog post from Matt Strassler from back in April.

So the coup in Mali is having some birthing problems. The whole point of the coup (ostensibly) is that the civilian government wasn't doing enough to fight against the Taureg rebels in the north of the country. The soldiers who overthrew the government swore that they would do everything the government was refusing to do and would supply the soldiers properly so that they could take the fight for the enemy.

They were dismissive of foreign protests. They were outright hostile to suggestions that civilian rule should be restored. When people questioned their methods, they claimed that foreigners had no place in Mali. When other countries complained, they were basically told to get out and stay out. And, when the leaders of several local countries proposed to lay out their terms in a visit to the capital of Bamako, the visit was canceled when armed coup supporters somehow managed to "evade" airport security and storm out onto the pavement - essentially threatening to assassinate several heads of state.

And the result of the coup? ECOWAS has embargoed the country, which is landlocked and depends on imports for almost anything. The Tuareg rebels first seized the city of Kidal, and now have seized the major city of Timbuktu.

And now, after having overthrown his government, deliberately threatened foreign heads of state, and demanded foreigners butt out, what is the new leader of Mali's strategy to defeat the Tuareg?

As the news was coming through, coup leader Capt Amadou Sanogo asked for foreign help to tackle the rebels.

Something tells me that this guy is not going to go down in history as one of the world's most brilliant leaders. Kicking people out and then begging them for help has never been a winning strategy.

So, in case you weren't watching, there was a coup this week.

Well, maybe. Maybe not. What's clear is that there's a lot of noise right now in the Maldives. First President Nasheed resigned in the face of the mass public protests. Then he declared that he had been forced to resign at gunpoint. Then his supporters took to the street. Now the new government has issued a warrant for his arrest, although they kept the grounds for the warrant secret.

Nasheed was thrown out by a public demonstration, which arouses sympathy for the demonstrators. But one of the claims that the demonstrators made was that he was not sufficiently Islamic, which raises suspicions. Also Nasheed's election in 2008 removed from power Asia's longest serving head of state, who is still active in politics, and may be manipulating events. But Nasheed's also given to a bit of grandstanding, being the first head of state to hold an underwater cabinet meeting (if sea levels rise about one meter, the Maldives will become a memory). Maybe people really did get tired of him. Maybe he did refuse to call the army out against the police. Maybe he's scheming something now. We don't know.

Now people should be doing something about it. Either a democratic leader was overthrown, or a leader was overthrown by democracy. Many countries have nationals there. Many countries have economic interests there. Diplomats should be busy. Trade ministers should be busy. In anticipation of violence, militaries should be at least planning to be busy.

But nobody's really busy right now. And it's not just indecision over what actually happened. The world's democracies just have not figured out how to deal with a coup - justified or not. Condone? Condemn? Ignore? Isolate? Engage? A lot of words get thrown around, but a basic fact remains - the world's democracies don't know what to do about the collapse of a government. And until they figure that out, there won't be any kind of unified response to anything. Which means a continuation of the status quo, where every country tries to play things to their own advantage and usually manages to make things worse.

Which is what we do every time, because none of us really wants to sit down and figure out what we should do ahead of time.

2011 Headcount - including the late Dear Leader:

• Than Shwe (Burma): retired (maybe)


• Ben Ali (Tunisia): deposed


• Hosni Mubarak (Egypt): arrested


• Fidel Castro (Cuba): retired (medical)


• Muammar Gaddafi (Libya): killed while resisting revolution


• Kim Jong-Il (North Korea): heart attack

Is it just me, or am I beginning to run out of people to make fun of?

Apparently, Mississippi is still over fifty percent sane.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether that means things are slowly getting better or still sliding towards worse.

ETA: Personally I'm holding onto optimism and hoping that this marks an overreach for the measure's backers and the beginning of a more sensible backlash against them. But I'm not optimistic enough to bet money about what will happen next time they push one of these laws to the ballot.

In other news that you might have missed, what with Gaddafi getting killed, Turkey getting hit by an earthquake, Kenya invading Somalia, and everything else that's happened this month, Michel Martelly, current president of the battered nation of Haiti, is considering rebuilding Haiti's military.

Haiti hasn't had a military since their last military went spectacularly insane some time ago, but they have two problems: they have a lot of veterans from that era who are owed a pension, and they have a lot of people without jobs. Martelly clearly thinks that he can kill two birds with one stone, and is budgeting US $95 million for the project (Fr), $15 million for pensions, $30 million for the joint civil service, and about $50 million over two years for paying for this new 3500 man force.

The first thought a lot of people have when seeing this is that $50 million is a lot of money, especially for Haiti where manpower is dirt cheap. I mean, in a country where a lot of the populace lives on $1 a day, it seems like you could spend a lot less on what is basically hiring 3500 men to go drive back and forth along a border in jeeps, and still have a lot left over to pay people to do something useful, like try to put the capital back together. I mean, if I just stick to the basics and avoid any frills, even I, who knows nothing about anything involved, could plan a military budget better then this, couldn't I?

No, but I can fail spectacularly in the process.

( This Stuff Is Surprisingly Expensive )

It seems crude to post 9-11 comments on 9-11, so I postponed a day, but here's a thought. According to the US Census's International Data Base, about 18% of the world's population is too young to remember September 11th. That means that within a few months one in five people on Earth will have been born after 9-11. For one-fifth of the people alive now, 9-11 will always have the kind of hazy distance to it that Vietnam had to my generation, and that World War II had for the Cold War generation.

The rest of the world is moving on. They've had larger tragedies, greater problems, and challenges that cut much closer to home. Many of them have put it behind them, and now an increasingly large number will never have had it in front of them. They are moving on. Hopefully, having marked off the ten year anniversary, the US can now do the same.