[WarOnTheRocks] Niccolo Machiavelli is best known for The Prince, his guidebook on ruling an Italian city-state. But for a long time after his death, Machiavelli’s Art of War was better known and more influential (alongside his Discourses on Livy, both of which were written after The Prince but published before).
Machiavelli’s Art of War takes the form of Socratic dialogue between the warrior Lord Fabrizio Colonna and Florentine nobles. Fabrizio was a real person, but his character in this book has been interpreted as a stand-in for Machiavelli himself. In Art of War, the dialogue explains and predicts changes in European warfare and military affairs as a consequence of larger social, economic, and technological evolutions. The text is wide-ranging. At the end of the dialogue, in Book Seven, Machiavelli’s Fabrizio offers 27 "general rules" of war, which are listed here:
1. What benefits the enemy, harms you; and what benefits you, harm the enemy.
Continued on Page 49
[DAWN] THE gradual but steady transformation of Mumtaz Qadri’s grave into a shrine is a powerful indictment of both society and state. Qadri was tried, convicted and hanged for murdering the then governor Punjab, Salmaan Taseer -- the man who Qadri, as part of his security detail, was duty-bound to protect. Instead, the police commando turned his gun on Taseer for the ’crime’ of sympathising with Asia bibi, a poor Christian woman accused of blasphemy, and asking that changes be made to the blasphemy law to prevent its abuse. And he gloried in his act till the very end, without compunction or regret -- and garnered a huge following in the process. The travesty that a killer is on track to being immortalised as a saint flies in the face of our cultural traditions where saints in their lifetimes were recognised as icons of tolerance and pluralism. It also makes a mockery of the state’s claims of tackling extremism.
What we are witnessing is the effects of a far right narrative allowed to percolate unchecked through society for decades. No doubt, the state has vowed to counter the religious extremism that has exacted such a terrible toll on the people of Pakistain, and its prosecution of Qadri may have been an effort to assert its writ. Nevertheless, the varied manifestations of religious extremism, the different strands that make up the whole, continue to flourish. Banned organizations hold public rallies; sectarian elements participate in the electoral process; religious activists are mainstreamed as charity workers; madressahs continue to resist government regulation and control, etc. Lal Masjid ...literally the Red Mosque, located in Islamabad and frequented by all sorts of high govt officials. The proprietors, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, unleashed their Islamic storm troopers on the city, shutting down whorehouses and beating people up who weren't devout enough. The Musharraf govt put an end to the nonsense by besieging the place. Abdul Aziz Ghazi was nabbed while he was trying to escape dressed up like a girl. BBC reported that the corpse count at 173, but other claims, usually hysterical, say there were up to 1000 titzup. Among their number was Abdul Rashid Ghazi. Everyone then said tut-tut and what a nice guy he had been... ’s Maulana Abdul Aziz ...nutball holy man who runs the Lal Masjid in the heart of Pakistain's capital. After instigating a rebellion against the state in 2007, he was caught trying to sneak away dressed in a burka. He rejects democracy as un-Islamic, which it probably is... , who not too long ago declared his support for the krazed killerIslamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... group, named his library after the late Osama bin Laden ... who is now beyond all cares and woe... , and called for jihad against the government, apparently remains above the law. While no longer in retreat as it appeared to be in the last few decades, the state seems unwilling or unable to confront the problem in its entirety. Its politically expedient approach -- or timorousness, as the case may be -- can only send mixed signals at a time when there must be a clear-cut policy based on an unequivocal rejection of any semblance of religious zealotry. Military campaigns and intelligence-based operations can only rid the country of the symptoms of extremism. It is the disease itself that must be cured, and that requires far more consistency than the state has thus far demonstrated.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/28/2016 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
We are blessed and fortunate to have people keeping a keen eye on Pakistan.
[IsraelTimes] PM believes the carrot of Israeli cyber, intel and anti-terror expertise is so attractive that nations will ignore concerns about the Paleostinians. He’s using the stick to make plain such expertise will be denied to those he sees harming Israel.
One of the thirteen principles of the Jewish faith, compiled by the medieval philosopher Maimonides, reads as follows: "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and although he may tarry, I wait every day for his coming."
Replace "the Messiah" with "a drastic increase in Israel’s global popularity," and you’ll get the first article of faith from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy gospel.
Continued on Page 49
Especially for anon1, who objects to being forced to buy halal meat because it's all halal. A taste from a much longer essay:
[Medium.com] How Europe will eat Halal — Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section — Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king –How to prevent a friend from working too hard –Omar Sharif ‘s conversion — How to make a market collapse
The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.
The minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of courage, for society to function properly.
This example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher. The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing they were Kosher liquids.
Criminals With Peanut Allergies
A strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:
A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.
Or, rephrased in another domain:
A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[DAWN] THE gradual but steady transformation of Mumtaz Qadri’s grave into a shrine is a powerful indictment of both society and state. Qadri was tried, convicted and hanged for murdering the then governor Punjab, Salmaan Taseer -- the man who Qadri, as part of his security detail, was duty-bound to protect. Instead, the police commando turned his gun on Taseer for the ’crime’ of sympathising with Asia bibi, a poor Christian woman accused of blasphemy, and asking that changes be made to the blasphemy law to prevent its abuse. And he gloried in his act till the very end, without compunction or regret -- and garnered a huge following in the process. The travesty that a killer is on track to being immortalised as a saint flies in the face of our cultural traditions where saints in their lifetimes were recognised as icons of tolerance and pluralism. It also makes a mockery of the state’s claims of tackling extremism.
[IsraelTimes] PM believes the carrot of Israeli cyber, intel and anti-terror expertise is so attractive that nations will ignore concerns about the Paleostinians. He’s using the stick to make plain such expertise will be denied to those he sees harming Israel.
