What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I just finished reading John Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War!” It was great! One of the reviews, Publishers Weekly, compared him favorably to Robert Heinlein. I agree with that. It was a great read. My only complaint is that I finished too fast. Now I have to go get the second in this (hopefully) series, The Ghost Brigades.

Hey! John Scalzi’s got a web site!

Dr. Sanity recently wrote a post that asnwers an earlier question posed by “The Adventures of Chester” about the compatibility of Islam and free society.

Her answer - that Islam appears to be incompatible with a free society - is based on the failure of Lebanon to curb Hizballah (she points the reader to Andy McCarthy’s post at “The Corner at National Review Online“).

I wonder if the question of what is happening in Lebanon, isn’t a different one than what Dr. Sanity addresses. Maybe it’s how fragile a free society can be and how quickly it can be hijacked by thugs and criminals.

I ask this question because I believe a free society is the best kind to live in. It is also the one that requires the most attention to nurturing and following the rules. It doesn’t take much to sidetrack democracy and freely elected governments. Democracy seems to be that rare thing that is especially strong in defending against outside attackers, but very susceptible to internal weakening and diversion. So maybe the question isn’t “how is Islam incompatible with free society,” but “how easy is it to derail the engine of a free society from within that society?”

I’ve just finished reading “Blog,” by Hugh Hewitt. I found the book very intriguing and thought provoking. Prior to that, I’d read “An Army of Davids,” by Glenn Reynolds. These two books got me to thinking about the “super-empowered individual” referred to in Mr. Reynolds’ book and the “blog swarms” mentioned in Mr. Hewitt’s book.

I was going to write about how these two descriptions of recent phenomena parallel parts of the war on terror. I had considered the characteristics of these individuals as similar - small, fast, communicative (or networked if you will), frequently with shared goals and similar methods for achieving the goals, but also individually no match for the defensive units of the “mainstream” or institutional elements opposed to these swarms.

I want to explore several features of the super-empowered individual, both strenghts and weaknesses over several posts. I see a lot of debate on other weblogs about whether this is a successful way to achieve an objective (not necessarily wage a war) or not.

In another of my posts, I talked about the super-empowered individuals described in Glen Reynolds’ book, “An Army of Davids.” Some of the characteristics of these individuals is that they can cause great damage in proportion to their size and effort. Just think about the effects of the 19 terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Or consider any of the terror bombings over the past five years.

One feature about these individuals is that they lack a strong defensive system. Their success in operations depends on stealth, speed, coordination, camouflage, dispersion, and adaptability, not in their ability to defend against counter attack. Just look at what happened to the fourth plane in the 9/11 attack. As Glenn Reynolds points out, the attackers were thwarted by a handfull of unarmed and untrained civilians.

Consider the swarming bloggers on an individual basis as super-empowered individuals. Could any one or two of the bloggers mentioned in Hugh Hewitt’s book, “Blog,” have “survived” a counter attack from major media or a powerful politician? I doubt it.What halts the counter attack is the presence of other super-empowered individuals - in this case other bloggers - to either refocus the attention on the objective, or take up the banner and attack (see Paterico’s Pontifications posts among others on the Jeff Goldstein DoS attack).

Some of the tools available to a swarmer, for example quick communications and the ability to organize a swarm on an issue, have some defensive capability, but only if they bring other swarmers to the fight.

Geez! Joe Wilson and his wall flower wife, Valerie Plame, just can’t get enough publicity. It reminds me of the Brendan Behan quote, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.” I agree with the Instapundit about this - “This seems quite unwise to me, as I think all sorts of things will come out in discovery.” The second part of Brendan’s quote may haunt Clueless Joe and the Vamp of Langley.

//Cross-posted from my Response39.TownHall.com blog//

This whole SWIFT program revelation has me really frosted. I am as frustrated by the lack of prosecution of both newspaper writers and publishers as I am about the leakers. It makes it look as though the rules regarding protection of government secrets have changed for the worse.

I disagree with Jacob Weisberg’s article in Slate on the reasons why the NY Times was wrong to print information about the SWIFT program. He trots out Keller’s weak arguement that, “They struggle mightily (sorry, that’s behind a subscription wall) with such decisions,” and attempts to cloak that in the protective barrier of the First Amendment. As one of the commenters on Just One Minute says, “The First Amendment is not a Get Out of Jail Free Card.”

The more I read the Mr. Weisberg’s article, the more I see it as an apologia cloaked in a mild wrist slapping “punishment.” To stand a phrase on it’s head, Weisberg’s article is praising with faint damnation. His instructions to the NY Times on what questions they should ask before printing an article on a to-that-point secret program must have been lifted from an introduction to journalism text.

The real problem with these decisions is that half the equation for making the decision is unknown, and maybe unknowable a priori. The only time you’re sure about an intelligence failure is when a calamity strikes that can be directly linked to prevous revelations.

“You never know until it’s too late,” might need to go on a memorial plaque at Ground Zero.