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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Duuvian]

Saddam deserved what he got, but the biggest fault of the Bush administration (apart from the illegality of the invasion) was not having a real plan for after Saddam.

You forgot the absurd recklessness with which the whole war effort was carried out, with much indiscriminate killing documented, and little effort made in general to minimize the effects of the conflict on the civilian population.

Indeed, I was shocked to hear the count of Iraqi civilian casualties inflicted by us Americans and friends after a half decade of not counting (publicly).

It was shortly after seeing a documentary that told me that this or another contracting company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBR_%28company%29#Controversy

had a contract with the US government that paid them $1.50 for every $1.00 they spent 'fulfilling' the contracts. In the documentary was video footage of a guy, apparently an employee, driving a bulldozer pushing laptops and computers onto a very large burning pile of other laptops.

EDIT: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-11-27-halliburton_x.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) — A third or more of the government property Halliburton Co. was paid to manage for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq could not be located by auditors, investigative reports to Congress show.

Halliburton's KBR subsidiary "did not effectively manage government property" and auditors could not locate hundreds of CPA items worth millions of dollars in Iraq and Kuwait this summer and fall, Inspector General Stuart Bowen reported to Congress in two reports.

Bowen's findings mark the latest bad news for Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, which is the focus of both a criminal investigation into alleged fuel price gouging and an FBI inquiry into possible favoritism from the Bush administration.

[SalmonGod]

I feel this is pretty relevant to that article about authoritarianism...

Pentagon funneling shitloads of money into social sciences aimed at measuring breaking points for social unrest and manipulation/containment strategies. 

Research proposal documents directly and specifically associate peaceful protest with terrorism.

[Duuvian]

Wow, they call dissent 'social contagion.'

[Sergarr]

Ironic. The US won the Cold War against USSR only to become like USSR.

[Morrigi]

I feel this is pretty relevant to that article about authoritarianism...

Pentagon funneling shitloads of money into social sciences aimed at measuring breaking points for social unrest and manipulation/containment strategies. 

Research proposal documents directly and specifically associate peaceful protest with terrorism.

Five years ago, stuff like this was batshit insane conspiracy theory. There are no brakes on the Happening train...

[palsch]

Holy crap, Nafeez Ahmed has gotten worse. From the article;

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:

    "In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."

That is, the study explicitly looks at people who, despite sharing causes with people who take violent paths, are non-violent as a control group to see why they are different to "supporters of political violence". Ahmed is a professor with reasonably good credentials, so I can only assume this is a deliberate misreading of the study which actually sounds very valuable.

All of the topics he mentions sounds like serious and valuable areas of research to me...

Wow, they call dissent 'social contagion.'

Note that that is in an out of context quote. Social contagion is a relatively common term for behaviours that spread through populations. I've seen it used for everything from yawning to unionisation efforts in a scholarly, neutral sense. More recently it's all about the social media as an alternative to 'meme' language.

[Sheb]

And how exactly is this bad?

[Duuvian]

Oh, ok. I didn't know that. I reactively associated that term with preparation of quarantine, immunization and possible destruction of all but heavily guarded laboratory samples as the goal would be for disease contagion. Thanks Palsch.

[palsch]

Oh, ok. I didn't know that. I thought they were terming it that in preparation of quarantine, immunization and possible destruction of all but heavily guarded laboratory samples as the goal would be for disease contagion.

Well, it would be interesting if such movements turned out to be heavily dependent on particulars of social media, but I personally believe they are more robust.

While Twitter, Facebook, etc are useful tools for protest movements and other social dissent, but I don't see the specific details of them (which a study like this would be looking at) as shaping the movements so much as amplifying them. If it turned out that something simple like trending on Twitter had a substantial impact then that might be something that could be used as a sort of immunisation (change Twitter's algorithms to prevent such trends, or at least have them vanish faster) but I doubt that's the case.

But trying to see how trends online relate to real life events could be interesting. If we know that these tweets directly relate to this real life action (which has been retroactively studied and understood in it's scope and form) then in the future we might better understand this ongoing action from these new tweets. Do the tweets from a protest about to become violent have any particular shape? Does a thousand person rally with good PR look different online to a ten-thousand person rally without? Could be a lot of interesting data there.

[SalmonGod]

It's not that I don't think it's an interesting or potentially valuable area of research.  I just don't trust the Pentagon's motives.  It reads to me like "how do we stop this Occupy shit from happening again, as frustration inevitably grows with all the stuff that movement was addressing."

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

[palsch]

Except that if you look at that particular paragraph he is drawing in an unrelated story from 2010 about the HTS. The section quoted is literally a wargame scenario; a hypothetical training exercise set in a region that had, "broken away from US control." The controversy isn't that techniques are being used domestically to suppress, but rather the general concept of using anthropologists in a war scenario, which may well conflict with the AAA Code of Ethics. Other criticisms involve the program being too narrow minded and basically ineffective, being a product of military training.

But it's mostly just drawn in here because it's the same source who is opposing both programs as militarisation of anthropology, despite this new one not really being military.

The other aspect here is that if people oppose the military doing such research, would they oppose private or other public bodies doing such research knowing the military could just read it afterwards? I don't really see much difference, so long as the results are going to be published either way. The only potential problem is that the funding will be tailored too narrowly under military leadership, missing out on some juicy scientific proposals that might be funded under a different body.

[Helgoland]

"how do we stop this Occupy shit from happening again, as frustration inevitably grows with all the stuff that movement was addressing."

It would seem that they already have found an effective method of dealing with such movements, no?

[palsch]

The latest on Obama's "fuck you Congress" executive action tour.

The White House announced Monday that President Obama will issue an executive order requiring that all companies who contract with the federal government must not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The order, expected to be finalized in the coming weeks, is an extension of orders previously issued by past presidents — most recently Johnson — similarly banning employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin among all contractors and subcontractors who do over $10,000 in business with the government in any one year.

Previously on this tour; a $10.10 minimum wage for such contractors, student loan repayment cap and carbon emission restrictions through the EPA (links selected purely for the urls, because it amused me).

EDIT: Really juicy part;

One of the largest companies that could be impacted by the executive order is Exxon Mobil, which last month voted down LGBT employment protections for the 17th time. The company claims to have a “zero tolerance” policy on the books for mistreatment, but that does not have the same legal force or consistency as the protections shareholders have voted down each year. Exxon is also facing an anti-gay discrimination lawsuit, although that suit might be terminated for jurisdictional reasons.

[RedKing]

Oh sure, just another stab at the hard-working bigoted small businessman.

[SalmonGod]

"how do we stop this Occupy shit from happening again, as frustration inevitably grows with all the stuff that movement was addressing."

It would seem that they already have found an effective method of dealing with such movements, no?

Yeah, sort of.  They were certainly effective at suppressing Occupy and containing its influence.  But never completely shut it down.  It was a major revitalization for activism in the U.S..  Major protest events have grown in frequency since (most wouldn't know it as mass media's discipline in ignoring them has grown stricter), and many local chapters and projects are still operating under the Occupy label.  The origins of the movement are still relevant and growing in tensions and awareness.  I think it's likely that there will be a full resurgence eventually, and it's hard for me to believe that the rapid escalation of surveillance and police militarization doesn't have anything to do with that.  Maybe the research in question doesn't, though.  I do see the bias in the author's writing style.