In Erin O’Connor’s academic blog, she details the incoming orientation for Brown frosh-of-color.

That pomp is also a politics: the TWTP web site offers a remarkable explanation for why well-heeled, privileged Brown students should choose to call themselves “third world” students. It’s a remarkable explanation, which I quote here in full:
Students first began using the term “Third World” over “minority” because of the negative connotations of inferiority and powerlessness with which the word “minority” is often associated. Although the term “Third World” may have negative socioeconomic connotations outside of Brown, Third World students here continue to use the term in the context originating form the Civil Rights Movement.
Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), urged readers to band together against oppression and colonialism, by pioneering a “Third Way” meaning an alternative to the ways of the first world (U.S. & Europe) and also the second world (USSR & Eastern Europe). When students adopt the term “Third World”, they use it in the sense of a cultural model of empowerment and liberation.
Brown students of color continue to use the term “Third World” in a similar fashion: to describe a consciousness which recognizes the commonalities and links shared by their diverse communities. This consciousness at Brown also reflects a right, a willingness, and a necessity for people of color to define themselves instead of being defined by others.
The concept of “Third World” has special meaning for minority students at Brown. It is not to be confused with the economic definition of the term used commonly in our society today, but understood as a term that celebrates the cultures of Arab, Asian, Black, Latino, Multiracial and Native Americans.
TWTP thus understands itself as a local materialization of Frantz Fanon’s vision of resistance to oppression and colonialism–a vision that was explicitly violent in nature: “Violence,” Fanon argued, “is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” The TWTP website glosses over the fact that Fanon’s “Third Way” was the way of revolution, that his notion of liberation involved completely destroying the present world order. But in affiliating itself with Fanon’s vision and vocabulary, TWTP nonetheless expresses a distinctly militant perspective on what exactly constitutes racial empowerment. The Wretched of the Earth, hailed by TWTP as the origin of Brown’s ideal “cultural model of empowerment and liberation,” was hailed by its publisher as “the handbook for the black revolution.” A Marxist account of Fanon’s experiences in Algeria during its struggle for independence, the book outlines the role of class conflict in the creation of a new nation’s national consciousness, arguing that postcolonial African nations will implode if they merely replace white leaders with black ones while conserving an essentially bourgeois capitalist social structure.

I don’t see the priviledged underpriviledged of Brown lubing up their AK-51’s and packing Semtex into suicide belts. But I do see hpw a national leadership weaned on Fanon (and the leadership of this generation was) could be paralyzed into inaction by the guilt this ideology lays on them, and more, be inwardly sympathetic to the ‘liberating purity’ of the Palestinian and Al Queida ‘militants’.

E-Gray : Government favors at auction prices – Gray Davis.
Via The Indepundit.

Check out the latest Field Poll (requires Acrobat Reader); After shooting himself in the head at least three times by my count, Simon only trails Davis by 6 points…down, Ann!! Down! Please don’t hurt me!!
I just finished Embattled Dreams, the latest by Kevin Starr, and believe me, I’m inclined to vote for Earl Warren over these morons, and he’s been dead for a long, long time…

I read Part 3 of Wright’s article with glee…while he and I differ slightly (and I think he’s done a much better job of laying out his arguments than I have done)…we fundamentally agree that the enemy we are facing is a contagious mindset…a meme…to which I’ll add that this meme is rooted in a philosophical tradition here in the West…which must be addressed.
I’ll follow up with an amplification of his points, but want to first address Eugene Volokh’s response to him.
Here are some key points made by Volokh:

But I think Wright is missing an absolutely fundamental point: Trying to get people to love us — especially the sorts of people who might become suicide bombers, or even cheerleaders for suicide bombers — may actually make them love us less. The problem with appeasement isn’t some abstraction about honor or sticking to one’s guns. Appeasement is often in a very basic way counterproductive.
…
So the brutes end up having a competitive advantage over the nice guys (or, to be precise, more of one than they had before). Either the nice guys will turn brutish, or the nice guys will be overrun by the brutes, and it is the brutes, not the nice guys, who will reproduce their brutal culture of terrorist threat. Evolution will help the fittest survive — except in the policy structure that Wright recommends, the fittest (the ones whose interests we’ll treat with the most concern) are the ones who are the most likely spawning grounds of terrorists.
What then, should be done, given the risk that small groups could kill millions of Americans? I don’t know the answer to that. But I am pretty sure that while technology may have magnified the power of small groups (for good and for ill), it hasn’t repealed basic laws of human nature: Behavior that is rewarded, as I mentioned, gets repeated. The violent appeased come to demand more and more of the appeasers, and come to have more and more contempt for the appeasers. And to the extent that willingness to murder becomes an effective weapon in deterring us, the result will be more groups that choose to use that weapon against us.

I have a couple of responses.
First, that he would be right if in fact Wright’s point was to lavish the potential terrorists with love, instead of threats of violence. But my take on Wright’s point is more subtle. He says:

The Philippines escapade resulted from taking the phrase “war on terrorism” literally and thinking of the enemy as a finite group of warriors, rather than a contagious mind-set that may spawn new warriors faster than you kill the old ones. We mounted a “show of force”—something that may work when you’re trying to intimidate a potentially aggressive nation but that may backfire when the enemy is, in part, Muslim resentment of American power and arrogance. This suggests Policy Prescription No. 4: In a war on terrorism, applying force inconspicuously makes sense more often than in regular wars.

He also suggests:

Policy Prescription No. 2: The substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse.

and

Policy Prescription No. 3: The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.

And here he is right on the key point. While you could (and Volkh does) interpret Policy #2 as “appease them”, and some of the actual points made by Wright lead you there, the substance of what he says is simple: our deeds and policies have both physical and ‘psychological’ reactions. We need to think through the ‘psychological’ ones carefully, and make sure that the reaction in that sphere doesn’t outweigh the physical effect.
Number 3 is useful because it lets us decide to target the origins of the problem, rather than the symptoms. Now here, as in first aid, we must be aware that the symptoms can kill us, and that they need to be managed. But the simple fact is that the costs of terrorism are so low, relative to the costs of defending effectively against it, that we will be bankrupted (forgetting the moral and political consequences of a tight terrorism defense) if we allow it to continue. We must both find ways to defend ourselves, and simultaneously find ways to carry the attack to the sources of the problem…which may require a war where the weapons are ideas.
Number 4 is critical. It is about the difference between ‘bluster’ and ‘threat’. Because we can effectively turn the whole of the Middle East to a glass plain, we expect our to be respected and our desires to be obeyed, or at least considered. But because of the (literally, if you’re a Believer) apocalyptic nature of our response, it’s also clear that there’s a pretty high threshold for triggering it.
On the other hand…does anyone else remember the story in the 80’s about the Russian response to a kidnapping of one of their embassy staff in Beirut? This was when Western diplomats and journalists were being kidnapped and held hostage fairly frequently. The story was, and I remember reading this in the paper at the time, that the Russians had sent over a spetsnaz team, who kidnapped members of the clan who did the kidnapping, and sent several of their body parts in lieu of cash to the kidnappers…who promptly released the hostage, and never took another. We parked aircraft carriers off the beach and sent a bunch of negotiators.
Which was the effective response?? And, in the context of who we are and want to be, how do we duplicate the effect of the effective response? I’m not exactly sure, but it involves small, quiet, probably lethal actions in lieu of the large and loud actions we tend to take.

‘Threat assessment’ is something I mentioned in the post below; it is a simple concept. Martial arts skills can be crudely divided into two parts: what to do and when to do it.
The ‘what to do’ part is more easily taught, and is what is studied in dojos and on traditional shooting ranges. The ‘when to do it’ part is more complex, both because it deals with real-life situations in which there are many uncontrolled variables, and because it introduces the element of uncertainty and risk.
Uncertainty is important because in real life, threats seldom walk up to your door, knock, and introduce themselves as threats (actually, two of my favorite cinema bits…the ATM mugger in “LA Story”, who introduces himself as “Hi, my name is Bob and I’ll be your robber tonight.”; and the brilliant Wile E Coyote v. Bugs Bunny cartoon…have threats that introduce themselves). So you have to make a decision, and the problem is that on one hand the decision probably shouldn’t be to shoot anyone who seems vaguely menacing, nor should it be to wait until that vaguely menacing guy is within Tueller range or worse, has you in “the hole” (a close enough distance where being armed or skilled isn’t enough to overcome the element of surprise, and where a skilled opponent could effectively control you). These concepts are important, because they add the variable of ‘potential threat’ that must be assessed. A guy with a knife is not necessarily a significant threat to someone with a gun, until the opponent is within about 21 feet…the Tueller range at which someone can close and strike before a typical person could unholster and shoot. A skilled jujitsu practitioner will most likely control, disable, and kill an armed opponent if the fight starts with the two within arm’s reach.
The best class I have ever seen (although I did not take it) in dealing with this issue is the IMPACT/Model Mugging series. They teach their students to actively interact with potential threats, which allows you to make the determination of risk at a range you select. When I walk up, the IMPACT student is taught to say “Excuse me, but you’re coming too close to me,” and then escalate from there depending on the response. If this were directed at me (affable, but sometimes irritable), I’d back up, and probably shake my head at the oversensitivity and lack of trust in the modern world. The Bad Guy won’t, and that difference in behavior lets you know what you are dealing with.
My role model Clint Smith puts it pretty well: “You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”
This is relevant to our situation in the ME, because we are, as they would say in the South, all full up with ‘what to do’ and pretty well dry on ‘when to do it’.
Neither the leadership of the country nor the citizenry has really come to any resolution on what constitutes a threat, and how we agree we can appropriately react.
I genuinely believe there are people who wonder why we haven’t turned the Middle East into glass in response to 9/11, as I believe there are folks whose response to two nukes and smallpox in U.S. cities would be “but killing all those innocent people won’t bring back the dead”.
Somewhere between those two factions, we’d better come to a conclusion on the level and source of the threat and our response and do so fairly quickly.

OK, it’s getting interesting, and I have to finish reading a 300 page document in time for a 0900 interview in BFE tomorrow morning. So comments will be delayed until tomorrow afternoon.
But meanwhile, read Part 3 of Wright’s article, then read Eugene Vokolh’s reply, and think about them…

Over at Blogcritics, they’ve got an interview with Homer Flynn, graphic artist for The Residents.
If you’ve been listening to Jon Bon Jovi for your whole musical life, you may not know them; they are a troupe of two men and two women, along with associates, who record and perform some of the most amazing pieces around.
I saw their performance of the King & Eye here in LA, and it probably ranks with one of the most amazing concerts or dance performances I’ve ever seen. In it, they deconstruct American music, culminating in…wait for it…Elvis.
Go check these guys out. As far as I’m concerned, The Residents and Survival Research Labs alone justify the entire artistic pretentiousness output of the San Francisco Bay area…

Chris Bertram emails:
From the preface to Hobbes’s De Cive:
“For though the wicked were fewer than the righteous, yet because we cannot
distinguish them, there is a necessity of suspecting, heeding, anticipating,
subjugating, self defending, ever incident to the most honest and fairest
conditioned.”
Relevant to your latest post, I thought.
The more things change…

Chris Bertram, as well as Eric Tam highlight the American Prospect article by William Galston on just war theories and Iraq. The key quote:

Saddam Hussein may well endanger the survival of his neighbors, but he poses no such risk to the United States. And he knows full well that complicity in a 9-11-style terrorist attack on the United States would justify, and swiftly evoke, a regime-ending response. During the Gulf War, we invoked this threat to deter him from using weapons of mass destruction against our troops, and there is no reason to believe that this strategy would be less effective today. Dictators have much more to lose than do stateless terrorists; that’s why deterrence directed against them has a good chance of working.
In its segue from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, and from defense to preemption, the Bush administration has shifted its focus from stateless foes to state-based adversaries, and from terrorism in the precise sense to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. Each constitutes a threat. But they are not the same threat and do not warrant the same response. It serves no useful purpose to pretend that they are seamlessly connected, let alone one and the same.

While well-intentioned, I believe that this construction has a fatal flaw.
Before I get into it, let me explain that I am not today waving flags to encourage an invasion of Iraq. I am a fence-sitter, probably tipped slightly in favor of invasion but anxious about the prospect that will face us afterward.
But as to this argument, I have a serious problem. First, that any WMD attack on the US (or any of our forces protected proxies) will certainly not be readily traceable to Saddam, or anyone else with the absolute level of proof that I believe would be required before some people would grudgingly support the idea of war.
Remember that there are many who do not today believe that Al Quieda was behind 9/11, and it is unlikely that we will get access to video of Saddam handing Joe Terrorist the keys to a truck loaded with smallpox ampoules, or of Saddam pushing a big red button labeled “Blow Up Tel Aviv”. As I have discussed below, the probable response looks more like:

“Wow!! Bummer about Tel Aviv!! Who would be crazy enough to smuggle a nuke in there? Wasn’t us, promise!! No, really!!”
While the tame game theory model suggests that he and others can be managed successfully through boundary and consequence-setting, the only thing that might work would be something Godfather-like:
If anything bad happens to me; if I catch a cold and go to the hospital; if I get hit by a car while rollerblading drunk; you will die. You are now the guarantor of my wellbeing.

and I have a hard time imaging some of the more profoundly antiwar folks being willing to accept anything like this.
Let’s talk about this for a minute.
I will not pretend to be an expert on warfare, conventional or otherwise, but I have studied and practiced a number of ‘real world’ martial arts for a number of years.
And the consistent most significant problem that is shared by all of them is ‘threat identification’; i.e. how do you know who is a threat and who isn’t? It’s easy to know on the mat or at the shooting range, but much muddier out in the streets and alleys of the real world.
…actually, I just realized that this is a longer and more significant point than I originally thought, and will polish it and try and post later today. Sorry about that!

Over at Slate, an interesting series by Robert Wright has begun, on Terrorism. So far two parts are up, and in them, he makes these assertions (with which I agree completely):
Proposition No. 1: Al-Qaida and radical Islam are not the problem.
Proposition No. 2: For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people.
Go read it, it’s gonna be interesting. I was referred there by Matt Yglesias, who comments regarding assertion#2:

I think this is basically wrong because at the same time as technology reduces the number of people you need to carry out a destructive attack it also makes it easier and easier for big rich states like the United States to locate their would-be attackers. Admittedly, all our satellites and communications gear may still have let bin Laden get away (though it does seem like he’s dead) but even so they let us find and target rather precisely any number of Al Qaeda facilities that would have taken forever to find without 21st century IT.

I’ll respectfully disagree with Matt, simply because of the disparity between the potential number of attackers to monitor and the resources (and level of intrusiveness) necessary to monitor them. Plus, if I’m correct (and Wright makes a parallel argument when he says:

This high-tech mobilization of radical constituencies needn’t be centrally orchestrated. Since 9/11, American pundits have griped about the propaganda issuing from TV channels run by Arab governments. But take a look at the free market at work: The new, unregulated satellite TV channels—notably Al Jazeera, founded in 1996—haven’t exactly been a sedative for irate Muslims. The uncomfortable fact is that a free press often fuels antagonisms because people choose channels that bolster their biases. (Which is the most popular American cable news channel? The most ideological one—Fox.) Increasingly, “tribes”—interest groups of any kind, including radical ones—will be, in effect, self-organizing.)

the overall level of ‘spontaneous’, or ‘self-generated’ terror will increase.