Issues of Definition: Two ways to make a mistake

There are always two ways to go wrong in a definition--too narrow and too broad. A possible example of defining the term terrorism too narrowly is in the case of Nidal Hasan, the "Ft. Hood Shooting." On the other had, I don't think anyone would agree with calling citizens who complain about water quality terrorists.

The Global War on Terror is also a contested term, in part because it is so hard to define.

It is worth noting that the universally admired Nelson Mandela was also considered a terrorist. His leadership of the MK (the militant arm of the South African National Congress) does raise interesting issues.

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Constructivism and terror

How Should We Classify the Sandy Hook Killings? - Reason.com: Joel Best points out that mass shootings have been classified a surprising large number of ways depending on the institution doing the classifying and the policy goals of opinion leaders.

Constructivism and terror

How Should We Classify the Sandy Hook Killings? - Reason.com: Joel Best points out that mass shootings have been classified a surprising large number of ways depending on the institution doing the classifying and the policy goals of opinion leaders.

If you believe the environment is the source of all evil you have to control everything.

Gun play: 'Zero tolerance' toward schoolkids could backfire, says expert | Fox News: Because we proceed from the assumption that people are naturally good we form the idea that to get rid of aggression all that is necessary is to avoid exposing children to the idea. People who reason this way are forced to go to ever greater measures to stamp out anything remotely likely to encourage violence. Failure is met with greater exertions and more fanatical restrictions.

If you believe the environment is the source of all evil you have to control everything.

Gun play: 'Zero tolerance' toward schoolkids could backfire, says expert | Fox News: Because we proceed from the assumption that people are naturally good we form the idea that to get rid of aggression all that is necessary is to avoid exposing children to the idea. People who reason this way are forced to go to ever greater measures to stamp out anything remotely likely to encourage violence. Failure is met with greater exertions and more fanatical restrictions.

Hate crimes and terrorism: a difficult call

NYC Hate Crime: Black man who pushed Korean man into incoming subway in custody - Philadelphia Jewish Conservative | Examiner.com: "Although the crime was clearly black-on-Asian, there has been no word yet that the crime will be classified as a "hate crime."" The problem is that two people of different races can have hate and attack each other for reasons having nothing to do with race.

Even when the crime seems to be motivated by ethnic animosity it is often accompanied by more mundane crimes. For instance, this case in which four Koreans beat a Chinese man seems to have started because of ethnic hatred, but once you have beaten a guy, why not take his wallet? By the same token, if you are beating a guy and taking his wallet, why not call him a few names?

Should we count as hate crimes confrontations between youth gangs that happen to be of different ethnic groups? Cases counted as hate crimes directed at Asian-Americans seem to often be cases of high-school kids and gangs bullying one another.

Here is a website that tracks incidents of hate crimes against Asian Americans. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a widely followed map of hate crimes in the US. 

Terrorism comes in many forms

hate crime rate | Abagond: Terrorism can be the attempt of one group to politically and socially subjugate another and thus does not need to be centrally organized or issue political manifestos. Private individuals can do the work and all the state need do is look the other way.

Taranto's discussion of Oakley's 'Pathological Altruism'

Best of the Web Today: Pathological Altruism - WSJ.com: Oakley argues that among the many bad things that Pathological Altruism can lead to is totalitarian regimes: "during the twentieth century, tens of millions [of] individuals were killed under despotic regimes that rose to power through appeals to altruism."

Then again, I am not sure how useful this distinction is. After all, what political movement has not claimed to be acting for the benefit of others?

Over reaction?

The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic: He argues that when measured by the number of people killed terrorism is far less of a problem than other causes of death that receive far less attention. Jeffrey Goldberg argues that we should look not just at how many people terrorists kill, but how many they want to kill. Another view from Megan McArdle.

The Founding Article

Annals of Religion: The Revolt of Islam : The New Yorker: Bernard Lewis' 2001 article laying out the intellectual foundations of the Bush administration's war on terror.

Steve Coll on Obama and Bush

The 'One-Way Ratchet' of Executive Power: Was Cheney Right About Obama? : The New Yorker: A Democrat argues that Obama has found the executive powers inherited from the Bush administration too useful to give up.

The difficulty of defining terrorism and terrorists

One man’s terrorist, another man’s freedom fighter - or journalist - Jerusalem Vivendi Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper: Two journalists that supported Hamas are killed in an air strike on Hamas. Are they journalists or terrorists?

Goldberg gives the counter example of a Israeli Army spokesmen's office cameraman--would they be included in a journalist's memorial?

Godfrey Bloom argues that governments are hypocritical in their application of the standard and looks at the case of Syria. Given that the government is secular and supports women's rights while the opposition is apparently fundamentalist, which side should the West be on?

Here is the source of the original quote, which apparently used the term "revolutionary" rather than "freedom fighter."

Boaz Ganor, director of the Israel based International Institute for Counter Terrorism, argues that the criteria should be based strictly on bringing intentional harm to civilians regardless of the terrorist's political motivation and critiques the Arab states' distinction between 'terrorists' and 'freedom fighters,' such as

Spy on your friends, ignore your enemies

Obama Restricts Spying In Mosques While Spying Everywhere Else - Investors.com: It is one thing to gather the phone records of all Americans. That is a neutral procedure that does not target anyone because of their religion or other characteristic that might be deemed invidious. But you can't look at Mosques. That would suggest that there might be a relationship Islam and the people that are committing murder in the name of Islam.

You have to admire the way that Obama calmly explains and defends his NSA's policy. In the face of withering criticism from his own friends he stands firm and unwavering. I only wish he could have been so firm when Islamic groups came to complain and succeeded in shutting down the FBI's surveillance of Mosques. I suppose there are a few people in Boston who might wish the same thing. 

Hypocrisy and greed: Alive and Well in Academia

EXCLUSIVE: NYU booting blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng amid its expansion to Shanghai - NYPOST.com: The non-business sector of society fancies itself as being morally superior to the business world, but they are curiously willing to sacrifice their principles when it suits them.

What Terrorism Can do

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan… | Foreign Policy: How Afghanistan looked in the 1950s, a reminder that we can loose.

Resources

Country Reports on Terrorism 2012National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism: Annex of Statistical Information: a good reference for those interested in terrorism.

Specification 'error'

Also Revealed by Verizon Leak: How the NSA and FBI Lie With Numbers | Threat Level | Wired.com: A good example of how numbers can be accurate but not really true. They say they issued some 200 orders for calling data from Verison customers, but the number of customers affected by just one of those orders runs into the millions.

Are you the next ham sandwich?

The Volokh Conspiracy » Perils of Prosecutorial Discretion in a World Where Everyone is a Criminal:
Short discussion of a short but extremely timely article. A government powerful enough to punish all the guilty will have to power to punish the good.

Smart Diplomacy

Under Obama, Egyptians’ views of U.S. worse than under George W. Bush presidency | Pew Research Center: It was always doubtful that being more popular in opinion polls would make the country safer from terrorist attacks, but the policy will certainly not be fruitful if you can't even make yourself popular.

My favorite conspiracy theorist's home page

David Icke Website: Most conspiracy theorists just attribute the nefarious deeds and machinations of our overlords to the innocuous pronoun 'they'. But Icke is forthright about the identity of our enemy: interdimensional lizards from outer space masquerading as humans . Aside from the obvious candidates like Bush he also includes Bob Hope and Queen Elizabeth.

A good way to think about terrorism policies

Discussion of Taleb's 4th Quadrant Problems - YouTube: Things seem to be working well--until they don't. Terrorism is definitely a fat tailed problem.

Truly Awful News from Europe

Europe's Record Youth Unemployment: The Scariest Graph in the World Just Got Scarier - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic: Youth unemployment rate in Greece hits 62.5%. Has there ever been a society so many young and highly educated people unemployed? This kind of mass irrationality can never come about by the actions of individuals alone--individuals can only afford to be stupid for so long. Long term mass stupidity requires government.

The tension between civil rights and civil liberties

Feds suggest anti-Muslim speech can be punished - POLITICO.com: Apparently your right to free speech ends at the hurt feelings of Muslims--at least in the view of one US Attorney.

When the government tries to help you

How Gov’t Student Loans Ruined College Education: Throwing money at education and lowering standards raised the cost of college and lowers the value of the degree. The screwedest generation.

The Bureaucratization of Terror

Al-Qaeda sets up complaints department - Telegraph: Standard practice for government, having a place where citizens can bring their complaints--as long as murdering people who disagree with you isn't one of your complaints.

Failure to Prevent Mass Terror

Bystanders to Genocide - Samantha Power - The Atlantic: A reminder of the dangers of the passive approach to peacekeeping.

Help your friends, harm your enemies, not other way around

The Friend of My Enemy Is My Enemy by Michael J. Totten - City Journal: The Obama administration is so tepid in its support of the opponents of Assad's regime that political liberals in the Arab world, our friends, think that we are on Assad's side. Working with Putin not helping.

The Dangers of Appeasement

Rubin Reports » Make Room for Islamistgate: The Obama Administration’s New Scandal: What happens when you reach out to the moderates and they turn out to be in league with the terrorists?

Bad Bunny

Hero Teen Punished by School for Stopping Knife-Wielding Bully: Our ruling class disapproves of its subjects behaving like free citizens.

Beautiful Introduction to Schelling's Thought

Seeing Around Corners - Jonathan Rauch - The Atlantic: Small and relatively insignificant differences at the individual letter can have huge consequences at the group level.

One interesting finding is that the law enforcement approach of punishment after the fact may be ineffective in preventing ethnic violence even when the population is practically saturated with peacekeepers at a 1 to 10 level:

Epstein concludes that simply throwing forces at an ethnic conflict is no answer; intervention needs to anticipate trouble. That, of course, would not have come as news to the reactive and largely ineffective peacekeeping forces in, say, Rwanda, Bosnia, or Sierra Leone. In Rwanda frustrated peacekeepers pleaded for permission to seize arms caches and intimidate extremists before large-scale killing could begin. Their pleas were denied, at a cost apparent in Figure 6. (See "Bystanders to Genocide," by Samantha Power, September 2001 Atlantic.) 

Islamists Winning Elections but facing protests from secularists

Protests in Turkey: Will Taksim Become Erdogan's Tahrir Square? | TIME.com: The conflict turns the tables on many of our preconceived notions. Poverty is not an issue, the Turkish economy is roaring along. The government is not unpopular as Erdogan wins free elections. The pattern we are used to is seeing in Arab countries is that dictators face protests, not democratically elected leaders that run the economy well.

The slippery slope from crime to politics via terrorism

Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance: The influence of gangs on Chicago politics is an example of how criminals can evolve into political actors.

A forgotten terrorist campaign

India’s ungoverned spaces: Out of the trees | The Economist: The whole conflict seems unreal--Maoists? Are there even any Maoists in China any more? The insurgents use the classic tactics of intimidation and assassination to deny the government access and power over outlying areas. The peasants are the ones that suffer. Here is a democracy with a good record on human rights and a quickly growing economy suffering from one of the worst terrorist campaigns in the world. It is a conflict that challenges many of our assumptions about terrorism.

Note to Reality Community: Dragon Bone Alert!

Fla. lawmaker’s chief of staff resigns amid absentee ballot probe - The Hill - covering Congress, Politics, Political Campaigns and Capitol Hill | TheHill.com: Someone should tell Jon Stewart.