Quotulatiousness

August 19, 2013

Jesse Walker on his new book, The United States of Paranoia

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:27

An interview by Tom Jackson:

What do you hope people will learn after reading The United States of Paranoia?

WALKER: I hope they’ll learn that conspiracy theories are not some new invention: that they’ve always been with us and that they aren’t going away. I hope they’ll learn that there isn’t a single all-purpose political or psychological explanation for why such stories take hold. I hope they’ll learn that the American establishment is prone to conspiracy thinking, no less than its critics on the left and the right are. I hope they’ll learn that these stories have something to teach us even when they’re entirely false — that a conspiracy theory doesn’t take hold with a lot of people unless it speaks to their anxieties or experiences.

And I hope that as they read about the things our ancestors believed, they’ll feel a little shock of recognition. The fears and folklore of modern times can sound a lot like the fears and folklore of earlier generations. We’re not as unique as we think.

It seems to me we are living in very paranoid times, akin to what the country went through in the 1970s. Do you think the timing of your book turned out to be good, perhaps by accident?

WALKER: Many people have said this to me. But as I say in the book, “it is always a paranoid time.” If this had come out last year, people would have looked around at all the election-year conspiracy chatter and told me how well-timed the book was. If it had come out the year before that, people would have pointed to the birthers or to the conspiracy theories about the death of bin Laden.

Do you hope some of your readers will become more tolerant? Much of the book seems to argue for tolerance of other peoples’ conspiracy theories, or at least an effort to understand where they are coming from.

WALKER: Well, I’m all for debunking claims that aren’t true, and that includes untrue claims about conspiracies. But I do hope the debunkers will approach their task with a little humility, an awareness that they’re capable of believing dubious tales too.

[…]

So, what do you think happened to JFK in Dallas?

Walker: Contrary to what you may have read in the Weekly World News, he died.

US Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS) program under budget threat

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

The US Navy is betting big on the eventual success of their Littoral Combat Ship program despite the early teething troubles (earlier posts here and here). The more traditional hull design (there are two distinct designs in the same class) is being built by Wisconsin’s Marinette Marine, as a subcontractor to Lockheed-Martin. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on the latest political hitch in the program:

The littoral program has been dogged by problems, including early cost overruns. The completed ships have suffered from mechanical problems as well as from delays in producing switchable mission modules aimed at making the ships adaptable to varied types of warfare.

Testing has revealed deficiencies with “core ship systems,” according to the July 25 GAO report, which says Congress should consider restricting funding for additional littoral combat ships until the Navy completes technical and design studies.

Littoral combat ships are meant to be fast and capable of operating in shallow waters close to shore in places such as the Persian Gulf.

“We continue to believe that the acquisition approach for this program, with large quantities of ships and modules being bought ahead of key test events, is risky, especially for a new class of ship like LCS,” Paul Francis, a GAO official, said in recent testimony before a House of Representatives subcommittee looking into the program.

“The current LCS program is not the program envisioned over a decade ago,” Francis said, adding the Navy still doesn’t know how well the ships will perform their missions, how well the unique crew and maintenance concepts will work, or how much it will cost to equip and support the ships.

Further, the Navy is still considering changes to the ships and determining whether there are advantages to having two radically different designs — one built by Lockheed and Marinette, and the other by Austal USA in Mobile, Ala.

“These are things the Navy and Congress should know before contracting for more than half of the ships,” Francis said.


USS Freedom at sea. Click for full-sized image at Wikipedia

The Dieppe Raid

Filed under: Cancon, France, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:12

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies has a two-part post on the Dieppe raid and the decision-making process that led up to the operation:

Professor Emeritus Terry Copp, director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies presents “The Dieppe Raid: A Decision-Making Exercise – Part 1: Operation Rutter.” This lecture, which explores Operation Rutter – the precursor to Operation Jubilee (the Dieppe Raid) – is the first in a series of two videos which will make up this decision-making exercise. The next video (Part Two) focuses entirely on Operation Jubilee and can be found here.

This decision-making exercise is offered as part of the outreach activities of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The exercise is based on the one we use to engage students in critical historical thinking at the strategic and operational level without the benefit of hindsight.

The main question we would like you to consider while watching these lectures is:

    After being presented with the same information that decision-makers had in 1942, would you still launch the Dieppe Raid?

Additional information will pop up throughout the video through the “Annotations” feature, so please do not disable this option while viewing.

Glenn Greenwald’s partner detained by UK authorities

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

The British government sends a message:

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London’s Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 — over 97% — last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.

Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

Since 5 June, Greenwald has written a series of stories revealing the NSA’s electronic surveillance programmes, detailed in thousands of files passed to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian has also published a number of stories about blanket electronic surveillance by Britain’s GCHQ, also based on documents from Snowden.

Update: The opposition Labour party calls for an investigation into this use of anti-terrorism legislation (but as Charles Stross point out … they passed the laws themselves).

Labour has called for an urgent investigation into the use of anti-terror powers to detain David Miranda, the partner of a Guardian journalist who interviewed US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said ministers must find out whether anti-terror laws had been “misused”, after Miranda was held for nine hours by authorities at Heathrow airport under the Terrorism Act.

His detention has caused “considerable consternation” and the Home Office must explain how this can be justified as appropriate and proportionate, she said.

[…]

“The independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson, has already warned of the importance of using schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act appropriately and proportionately. The purpose of schedule 7 is to determine whether or not someone is involved in or associated with terror activity. The Home Office and police need to explain rapidly how they can justify using that purpose under the terrorism legislation to detain David Miranda for nine hours. This has caused considerable consternation and swift answers are needed.

“The police and security agencies rightly work hard to protect national security and prevent terrorism. But public confidence in security powers depends on them being used proportionately within the law, and also on having independent checks and balances in place to prevent misuse.”

QotD: “The Genius of the Carpathians”

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

Tony Judt, “The End of the Old Order”, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005.

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