Vom Kriege
Vom Kriege is the basic work on the Western way of war. For Clauswitz, war is "politics by other means". It concentrates on defeating the enemy by massing overwhelming force at the enemy's weak point. In his rationalistic model, the prince (or other governing elite) begins with a set of objectives and chooses the most cost-effective way of accomplishing them. If force is seen as that way, then the prince chooses war. When the objectives have been achieved, then the war has been won regardless of conditions and dispositions on the field. Clausewitz is read by every officer cadet in every decent military academy in the world. Written in the 18th century, Vom Kriege is as relevant today as the day it was published.
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What Hacker News says
- Anyone who says violence is _never_ the answer is frankly, naive to history and power.
Violence and politics are both on a spectrum and means to the same end of asserting your will. Vom Kriege is obviously not the forefront of philosophy anymore but it’s a good place to start if anyone reading this hasn’t come across that idea and wants to learn more.
Even your non violent examples of King and Ghandi has very violent wings on the side showing society that if a resolution wasn’t achieved by peaceful ends then violence it is. Remember that the civil rights act didn’t get enough support to be passed until after King was assassinated and mass riots rose across the nation
- If someone is at the point where they are making society consider whether it’s worth punishing them anymore because they’d have nothing left to lose, then they already effectively had nothing left to lose. If you want to try and bluff society on acceptable behavior then you should read Vom Kriege and be prepared to fight hard or deal with the consequences.
That’s been the reality of any group that’s wanted to overthrow societal standards for good or bad. In this case at least the jury decided payment indicates to people with the resources to actually make peoples lives a mess, that they have ample resources to lose
- So, now you need the identities along the transmission chain too, up to: 1+3¹+3²+3³+3^n = (3^(n-1)-1)/(n-1).
It only makes the problem worse. Most of these identities cannot be recovered. It is not realistic to believe that the first 3 identities in the chain will be recovered. It may very well end up being identities further down the chain.
Furthermore, you will still need to try until you can find an identity in a jurisdiction in which you can sue.
Imagine that you find someone at step 12 with some fraction of the coins, who lives in Japan, and who bought the coin fractions at an exchange. Are you sure that the Japanese courts will cooperate with your recovery efforts?
By the way, the MPAA mostly stopped suing bittorrent users in Europe and elsewhere, because "Pirate parties" started springing up and gaining increasingly more elected seats. At that point, we are no longer talking about what the law would be, but what it should be, and things started looking bad for the MPAA. So, they backed off.
Suing lots of random people on rather flimsy grounds would very soon get political too.
Furthermore, as Von Clausewitz nicely argues in "Vom Kriege", war is just the continuation of the political negotiations but then by other means. So, that would be the next step, if even the political confrontation would fail. It was not that the MPAA was ever going to win.
- Having done a paper on cyber war for school, I was surprised to find that the two books that were quoted most often by war theorists were Carl von Clausewitz's "Vom Kriege" and Sun-Tzu's "The Art of War" - one is 200 years old, the other 2000...
- > Jonathon Riley served in Bosnia and Iraq, where he was the general officer commanding British forces.
A British officer who doesn't think highly of Napoleon? This is my surprised face.
> This is implicit in Karl von Clausewitz’s celebrated but often misquoted (and still more often misunderstood) remark that ‘war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.’
Can this guy read German? Because that seems like an over-translation of the simple „Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln“ (title of section 24, chapter 1, book I of Vom Kriege).
I would also note that Napoleon failed in the end, but that he did quite well in the meanwhile. He continued the Revolutionary Wars, and so was doomed to face the forces of reaction, who would never ally with him with any kind of sincerity. It's possible that his military successes blinded him to the possibility of stability through diplomacy, but could he really have allied with the Habsburgs?
He also had to contend with an ascendant Britain, willing to exploit her insular position to its full advantage through her renewed Navy and her economic strength. But just a few years before the French Revolution, Britain had come close to losing it all; with no allies on the continent to distract France, she might have lost not just her colonies, but her dominant naval position, which was so essential in Napoleon's defeat.
- The only books in that vein I know are "The Art Of War" by Sun Tzu and Clausewitz' "Vom Kriege". I suspect german book shops don't tend to stock as many books on war as some other countries (I remember seeing the "military" section of a bookstore for the first time in London).
Anyway, I would be interested in more detailed stuff, like how to use tanks, planes and so on. Maybe analysis of historical battles would be good, too.
I guess it won't help with a startup, but for some reason I have wondered about this (maybe for strategy game development...).
