Rhinocrisy

I’m only three years late discovering this - maybe I heard it before and it slipped my memory. Yes, yes, that will do nicely.

Anyway, it was a bit about Iran offering a fairly comprehensive negotiation with the U.S., including ending support for armed groups, recognizing the state of Israel, and accepting much tighter IAEA controls, in exchange for access to “peaceful nuclear technology”, normalization of the relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and a two-state solution for Palestine. Some more detail is here, including the incredible U.S. response:

But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was “literally a few days” between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.

Astounding. I think my blood is actually boiling - steam is coming out of my ears.

It’s always nice to hear from a security professional who cares about security more than he cares about getting on CNN. Bruce Schneier is such a person. His new column at Wired News is worth a read.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want….

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

I’ve been saying for years, the best response to terrorists is to treat them as particularly meddlesome criminals, not as threats to the basic essence of society. That gives them too much credit and our society too little. The only reason bin Laden and friends were able to destroy much of American democracy is because of their allies in high places.

At the local vegan cafe, the dishes are all named for positive affirmations. You can ask for the “live bruschetta” and the waiter will say, “One `I am bountiful,’ coming up.” You might want a pecan pie, but you will be served an “I am perfect.” Yerba mate chai is “I am triumphant.”

It’s a bit like Starbucks, where you can order a medium coffee and hear the clerk — who is either a barista or a partner, depending on the context — call out, “Grande Americano!” But it’s worse because at least “Venti Americano” has a single referent. Its cloud of meaning in the mind is concentrated and precise. It doesn’t hijack perfectly good words and herniate their meanings. To me, Cafe Gratitude’s menu is Operation Iraqi Freedom all over again.

It would be harmless except that I’m kind of dumb. Euphemism fogs my thoughts. The best thoughts come directly and unencumbered, like a great dancer leaping up, tapping her feet together a few times and returning silently to the stage. But my thoughts rarely do that. They are tied up with mental fascia that drag on my mind just as fascia tissues drag on my legs when I try to jump a high-hurdle. If the word “freedom” is tied in the mind to aerial bombardment, and the word “graceful” is tied to steamed quinoa with fresh basil-almond pesto, those words will flow less freely in my head, language will become more cumbersome, thoughts come more slowly and arrive laden with distracting and antisocial subtexts.

Worse yet is the lack of sincerity. A close pal of mine works at a school where the staff have routine 15-minute staff meetings where people can offer a shout-out, thank yous, apology or call-outs — you know, a STAC. ^* If I’m happy with someone, I tell them face-to-face. I think public affirmations are a way of showing off. They are mainly about making the thanker look good, not the thankee. Formalizing and mandating thanks for other people replaces a beautiful feeling with an often-empty public display. People who do this too often can come to confuse the public display with the real feeling. I have known performers — actors and other showoffs — who become so good at ersatz feeling that they lose the capacity for the heartfelt variety.

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^* Even the name of the ritual is an offense against language. What does it have to do with any of the meanings of “stack”? A neat pile of flat objects, a bunch of speakers, a series of computer memory addresses, boobs — doesn’t this word carry enough meanings already? Why make an awkward, phonetically ridiculous acronym for a something people already know?

Over at UFO Breakfast, Cmdr. J. Alva Scruggs is complaining about leechers on BitTorrent downloads. This is a pretty classic kind of example of people defecting from a mutual aid scenario.

My own morning was beclouded by the discovery that my spam filter has been a mite too strict. Leaving aside the possibility of spam poetry and the fact that it led to my favorite post ever, we should consider spam a serious problem. A large study by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group concluded that something like 80-85% of incoming e-mails are spam messages. This is an alarmingly high number.

But spam isn’t a tragedy of the commons scenario like the above; leechers damage the efficacy of torrents roughly proportionately - if there are few leechers, the system survives and isn’t really bothered. On the other hand, according to Spamhaus, a mere 176 spammers are responsible for 80% of the spam generated worldwide. Your pardon for doing this, but the best analagous situation I can think of is terrorism in an open society - open structures demanded by a free society allow the possibility of massive harm by a few malicious individuals.^*

At present a grand debate over how to properly treat such malicious individuals is being played out on the world stage, with on the one side those advocating “draining the swamp” and weakening the pins that hold up the philosophical edifice that drives many terrorists; and on the other those who advocate a muscular militarism as the appropriate response: kill them all and show others what will happen to terrorists.

This is extremely bad policy with regards to terrorism, but I’m not certain the same is true for spam. It’s certainly impossible to drain the swamp - the simple motivating factor is profit, and there will always be enough gullible idiots who are interested in purchasing bulk quantities of Cialis that profit is irremovable. Technical solutions seem to be mostly ineffective. However, the judicious application of punitive measures (not necessarily catching one of them in a public restroom and administering a severe caning) might prove efficacious. Imagine the class action lawsuit that could be brought to bear, for example. That would certainly be intimidating to future spammers.

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^* This isn’t quite appropriate, since spammers actually do cause widespread harm, as opposed to the mostly hypothetical harm caused by terrorists, who on average kill only a few thousand people a year.