Global Guerrillas

Foreign Policy's blog is a good resource: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ - you can sign up to get a daily brief.

I try to follow John Robb's Global Guerilla blog (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/). He discusses a lot of interesting topics that influence modern military thought, like systems & network theory, emergence, open source warfare etc.

But to be honest I'm not a great fan of the subject. I think this whole theme of death-porn (because war is first and foremost about killing other humans) in our society is repulsive. I can respect people like Robb dealing with this because ultimately this is a subject that should be understood well, but I've seen families tear to pieces when one member died in a war so the idea of some "War Nerd" drooling over a new missile that can kill a 1000 people is sickening.

As for War Nerd being "consistently more right", I'm not sure what you mean. I don't believe anyone can truly predict anything (except the obvious) and I can't say I see War Nerd accomplishing this. Same goes for CNN and NYT, but at least they make a conscious effort to base their reporting on actual facts.

These groups already know that blood and guts terrorism is politically self-defeating. Well-funded material attacks are only made on valuable targets, like oil pipelines after you've stockpiled call options. Political objectives are pursued in other ways. Here's an article on Inspire magazine: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/note-on-innovation-in-warfare.html

It's funny that the author says they were inspired by Robin Hanson, because he certainly is one of the best examples for a kind of person who confuses their intelligence for a kind of universal expertise, one that requires no schooling, no study, no direct experience or theoretical grounding. "It's better to come to the field from the outside," they say, "so I can better disrupt it!"

The only thing that stops the post from being truly Hansonian is it stops short of openly arguing for solving the problem by "giving" women to dispossessed young men.

The structural problems of American democracy are because candidates are unaccountable outside (except to their donors) outside a small election window, where they temporarily perform whatever act will allowed them to attain or hold onto power.

If Altman is sincere about wanting better candidates, I'd suggest pushing for technology-driven direct democracy, candidates who, in real time, act and respond to feedback from their constituencies. Trump was elected because he did an informal version of this via Twitter. John Robb outlined how this would work:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2017/02/three-choices.html

We essentially need to disrupt the notion of candidates and turn them into our true avatars for interfacing with the political system.

This should be required reading for aspiring cyberpunks.

Assange is an archetypical agent of 5th-generation warfare, and Wikileaks is a perfect example of a Robbian superempowered group: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/02/journal-on-supe.html

And he's winning. He might die, in horrible agony, in an Argentinian embassy, but he'll take the CIA down with him.

What a time to be alive indeed.

The US (and now also Israel) siding with Saudi Arabia and condemning Iran has always been madness in my opinion.

See also:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2015/02/isis-isnt-the-problem-saudi-arabia-is.html

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2015/01/saudi-arabia-on-the-edge-of-an-abyss.html