Greg Sanders

What Caprica[‘s pilot got] right and wrong about suicide terrorism

I just started catching up on the second half of the first season of Ron Moore’s Caprica (I just got through episode 10). I won’t get into spoilery details but the sci-fi series is based on the richest world of a multi-planet civilization. The technology is not far advanced from ours and the social climate is typified by decadence escapist virtual reality networks. A key plot driver is a religious terrorist group, called the STO, which in a twist on our reality are monotheists in a polytheistic world. Andrew Sullivan had recently reminded of Robert Pape’s research on suicide terrorism and I thought it might be interesting to see how Caprica matches up. As a quick side note, I classify the STO as clear villains and as a general rule disapprove of any violent tactics target civilians, understanding motives shouldn’t be confused with condoning them.

What Caprica gets right:

• A strategy of weak actors: True enough, the STO are outcasts.
• Targetting democracies: Based on what was shown in Battlestar Gallactica, Caprica is the seat of government for the democratic civilization and thus this definitely holds.
• Suicide attackers “are most often educated, socially integrated, and highly capable people who would expect to have a good future.” This also seems to fit with the small number of bombers shown in the series as well as with their larger network.
• Terrorists are typically recruited through their social network: This isn’t directly from the Pape summaries but I’ve heard it elsewhere and it holds true of the STO network recruiting in Caprica.

What it gets wrong:

• Terrorism is primarily a nationalistic and not a religious phenomenon with the objective “to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from the terrorists’ national homeland.” The STO’s grievances appear primarily to be religious. They hate Capricans, often their own people, for their decadence.
• Notably, as Kate reminds me, Battlestar Galactica actually got this right as Spencer Ackerman covers in a spoilery Slate article from 2006. In that instance, some of the humans used suicide terrorism against Cylon occupiers (the Cylons were even a democracy of a sort, just an evil one).

So why does this matter? In many ways, Caprica works as a dark mirror of our world. Anti-heros abound and we know the civilization only a few decades away from apocalypse. I suspect that in addition to entertaining its meant to provoke hard thoughts about where we’re going as a people. The trouble is that it gets the casual mechanisms wrong, suicide terrorism is not about alienated youths in and of themselves.

To be clear, this research, summarized here in an op-ed and in slightly greater detail on wikipedia just applies to suicide terrorism and not other assassinations and bombings. The dataset they use to reach these conclusion is freely available online. I could find the STO quite plausible as a terror organization, but unless and until the STO gets a notable piece of future-tech working I don’t think they’d have a ready supply of suicide bombers available. I don’t think it’s a decisive problem, suicide terrorism hasn’t been a huge part of the series and if it hadn’t come up in a recent episode I wouldn’t have thought of this at all. Also, in fairness to Caprica, perhaps it is an aberration in the series universe as well, but if it is I don’t recall hearing any evidence to that effect.

Update: After sleeping on it, I wanted to emphasize the last point a bit more. After the two-part pilot, we don’t see that much action from the STO either way. So, conceivably, the big event that got the whole series rolling could have been a fluke. Pape’s research might not apply to the second half of this season based on spoilery exogenous technological advancements.

Low value choices in games

Lately my podcast of choices has been the complete run of Paul Tevis's Have Games Will Travel: For a Few Games More podcast. Episode 17 raised an issue that's dear to my heart, choices in games that don't really matter. Tevis had been discussing a game of Air Attack over Crete which he enjoyed but also annoyed him because every element of the game was a token and many of the tokens he placed, particularly static ones like coastal defenses, never ended up mattering. In role playing games in raised the the matter of equipment lists, which can take a fair amount of work and proves irrelevant 75% or the time. I'd also raise the issue computer/video tactical RPGs and strategy games, like say Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced or some versions of Civilization, where spending lots of time fiddling can result in small performance improvements.

These low value choices let you exchange time for results. This does teach some life skills, but they're often fairly game specific. To take the classic D&D example, few of us carry backpacks loaded down with rope and such up to our weight limit at all times. This time also has a cost, we can't spend it on other parts of the life or even on other games. I think this also reinforces a tendency towards low-level OCD for gamers while obscuring the opportunity cost on time. That said, obviously this is really an issue for turn-based games while real-time games have their own issues. (Side confession: I'm hardly immune to this tendency although of late I do it more for story stuff).

Jumping back to Tevis, he discussed a range of techniques that games can use to focus games on meaningful choices and avoid what he called false choices and I call low value choices. To hear more about some of the games that use these technique, notably Fast Action Battle of the Bulge, listen to the podcast. Here's my more general summary:

2010-10-21 The Train Ride Home

Trying an experiment in updating this during the day rather than in a last minute rush. Today I wrote up an book event for The Ultimate Weapon is No weapon Shannon Beebe and Mary Kaldor. I also attended a great speech by Dan Drezner that I intend to write up tomorrow.

Transcontinental Rail

• Matt Duss raises the question of whether Palestine will become the next Middle Eastern security state a la Egypt (via Yglesias). This seems like a real risk to me as we've already vetoed a Palestinian election result.
• A map of what parts of the world are likely to be most harmed by climate change, via Yglesias who notes that dumping trash without permission on the other side of a border is not classical seen as ethical or consistent with market principles.

Commuter Rail

• Yglesias argues that quantitative easing, which is to say encouraging inflation, could help the economy if the Fed was willing to use the tools at its disposal. I definitely buy his argument elsewhere that inflation in the U.S. makes more sense directly confronting China.
• Dan Shoup argues that organizations provide free parking in good part because of tax incentives, ironically including the Cato Institute. (Via Market Urbanism, which provides evidence of a Walmart being forced to provide more parking than it otherwise would).
• On the same topic there was a good op-ed in the Post by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck that argues that reducing subsidies for sprawl would help address oil dependency, climate change, and car crashes.
• Ezra Klein provides arguments for and against the Obama stealth tax cut of last year. I believe that from an enlightened self-interest standpoint, it's worthwhile for the party in power to improve the economy even if they don't get credit. However, I think the burden of proof is on the tax cut advocates to show that this worked.

Heavy Rail

• I'll be picking up What God Hath Wrought for Ta-Nehisi Coates' effete liberal book club.

Light Rail

• Trailer for Professor Layton vs. Pheonix Wright which is inherently awesome.

Book event: The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon

Book available here from Amazon or Diesel ebook store where I got the picture:

Bob Lamb: Emerging threats, now emerged, ethical development. At DoD in 2005. People were open to new ideas, population protection. Move in development community away from macroeconomic indicators to what do people have(how is that different), what can people do with what they have, capabilities. Human security, people can't get what they want because of conflict. As currently conceived, counterinsurgency is expensive and intensive, he doesn't think it needs to be in principle. In Afghanistan we often go with throwing all we've got. Criticism of human security, all bad go together, all good go together need to do everything at once.

Ashley Chandler: 20th century handling of 21st century problems can make things worse and is expensive. How can it be done where there's troops on the ground and elsewhere in the world.

Mary Kaldor: Many of the risks of insurgency, famine, etc. were always there although there's some new threats. Security services largely consist of conventional military force do a bad job of addressing these. However, up to the end of the Cold War, we were worried most about another world war, they emerged from the shadow of that worry. A myriad of private organizations from NGOs, to PSCs, to warlords, and gangs. If we don't think our institutions can keep us safe than they lose legitimacy. Private provision results in anarchy, market. So how can we provide public provision of security.

How do we define human security?

1. About the security of the individual and the communities in which they live, not states/borders.
2. Security from both violent threats and security from environmental risks/material deprivation. (UNDP is all soft, Canadian all responsibility to protect)
3. Blending of national/international. Security at home as police/firefighters, military backup while abroad means protecting from enemies. Extension of law paradigm rather than a war paradigm.

Is this different from a population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine? Yes. For counterinsurgency, population security is a means to the end of defeating America's enemies. Human security is about the security of Afghans and Americans. Afghans hear the goal is defeating Al Qaeda and feel like a pawn in a great game.

Solution: Replace traditional armies with human security forces. Not enough to bring military/civilian together. Six principles all centered around human security:

1. Human rights: For Afghanistan this would mean: collateral damage as unacceptable as it would be in our country, predation by Afghan government/local warlords is critical, enemies are criminals but human.
2. Legitimate political authority: Usually a state but could be a municipality or international administration. Need space where citizens can debate. Biggest problem in Afghanistan.
3. Bottom up, not focusing on warlords/political leaders. Traditional structures can be more sophisticate than we'd assume.
4. Effective multilateralism. Conceptual coherence rather than institutional coherence. E.g. there's two commands, NGOs that don't want to be associated with the war on terror.
5. Regional focus.
6. Clear, transparent, civilian command. McCrystal report was good, but should have been the Holbrooke report.

Criticisms:

1. Human security is a new form of interventionism, military humanism. Retort: Can't do what we do now, can't withdrawal.
2. Human security is too naive and soft. Retort: Weapon systems as soft, they're there for communications and deterrence, not to be used. Humanitarian means towards humanitarian ends. We need to signal we don't want future inter-state war.
3. We're doing it already. Retort: There is a lot of truth, last two decades were a huge learning experience. Look at figures on decline in conflicts and decline in casualties despite outliers of Afghanistan and Iraq. Need more, need conceptual framework.
4. Utopian. Retort: Yes that's utopian, believed in theory but extremely difficult to put human protection before force protection. Some utopian goals are necessary.

Lt. Col. Beebe: First off, speaking just for himself, not for the military. Shortly before the announcement of Africom went to go find out how Africans view their security. Answers with a 90% coherence with top African military leaders: security sector reform, poverty, health, climate change, environmental disaster.

DoD didn't have the language to discuss these concerns which is focused on kinetic threats. But the two greatest attacks on the U.S. as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, neither were traditional threats. Look at forces of nature, conditions based models, creeping vulnerabilities. Each problem individually isn't a threat, but it builds a system likely to collapse. But we wait until the vulnerabilities become kinetic. Somalia: take all of a man's fish away and he becomes a pirate. Climate change or any other single cause didn't cause Darfur, won't cause WWIII but collectively they might.

If we shift to this kind of language, how would it look, what are examples. Engagement brigades. Trying to draw down forces in Africa but often the armed forces don't have civilian skills. Try to convert them to human security forces, do buildings, etc. and then integrate them in to civilian sector. Often military is only functional institution. African government have choices, they'll pick what seems relevant to their security. Focus on duplicity of effort. 7 agencies doing it, 5 agencies in the same city. They didn't know, including one org that was a subsidiary of another.

My conclusions: containment must be a part of human security doctrine. Kaldor says that those are probably places you shouldn't intervene, wouldn't have intervened originally in Afghanistan, wouldn't have intervened in Burma post-crisis, but she think that there's a responsibility now that we're in Afghanistan. However, I don't think that the U.S. populace would be willing to pay the blood and treasure to implement a human security paradigm in Afghanistan now, even if it costs less than what we're paying now.

2010-10-21 [The Train Ride] Home

Catching up some. I should probably implement a policy of writing up items shortly after I share them rather than saving it for later. [Addendum, confused summary name with the film about Chinese migrants.]

Commuter Rail

• Seth Shulman of the Post liked The Polluters, a book about the history of environmental regulations  good review. (Disclosure one of the authors, Ben Ross, is a family friend). I'll do a post on it when I've had a chance to read it myself.
• A summary of John Quiggin's Zombie Economics. I wasn't impressed by the performance of neo-liberalism in the 90s, of course it wasn't implemented properly but as, Yglesias notes, nothing ever is.
• Erik Voeten summarizes an article that finds that weather related droughts tend to increase the possibility of Democratic revolutions.
• Cuba Embargo turns 50. Our clever plan to eventually kill Castro via old age seems to be paying off.

Heavy Rail

• Ta-Nehisi Coates tells a hell of a story regarding the "culture of poverty."
• Alex Tabarrok passes on a Bloomberg article on using inside Congressional information for trading on relevant industries.
• Ryan Avent again points out the cost of the D.C. height limits.

Light Rail

• Surprising aid critic, noted by Tyler Cowen.
• More on the Rock Band 3 keytar from Stephen Totilo.
• 1963 Czechoslovakian M&M commercial from Medium Large.
• Rob Donoghue on getting extra outcomes from a single set of dice rolls for games. Sounds like a popular choice for some recent table top RPGs.
• Alyssa Rosenberg discusses the apparently once real possibility of a female Doctor Who.
• Trailer also from Rosenberg for Four Lions which parodies low end inept terrorists.
• Same source, 21st century Sherlock Holmes without time travel gimmick.

2010-05-17 Departing L.A. and Union Station

We had reached our last day in L.A. and I still didn't have a smart card for the transit system, which would rather put a damper on my attempts to start a collection. I scurried about a few places in the government district downtown, but none actually had any TAP cards available. Setting aside that quest for the moment, Kate and I did our last exploration of Little Tokyo, checking out the exterior of a Buddhist temple in an alleyway and hitting the local bakery for breakfast. The Yamazaki bakery did seem to be fairly popular with the locals and was always busy of a morning with earlier risers and the local construction crews stopping in for various pastries.

We then decided to kill two birds with one stone and rode the light rail to Los Angeles Union Station. Even if you are arriving and leaving town by plane, as we were, the station is well worth visiting. It's one of the last of the grand American terminals to be built and it has a distinctively Western style. L.A. may be primarily associated with the automobile, but that doesn't mean that it's bereft of rail history. Aside from enjoying the architecture, the visit had a secondary purpose of finally allowing us to get TAP cards. Writing about this months later, we now have cards from three cities each and I have an additional one from Atlanta that I haven't used yet.

We rode back towards the hotel via the subway and after walking back by the L.A. Times building did one last circuit of the hotel garden and nearby open air mall with its somewhat surreal collection of murals. After that, we drove off to the airport and flew home. Thinking back now, I'm already nostalgic about the trip and I feel it certainly justified our preference for finding a hotel in a distinctive and walkable neighborhood. We should do more long-form travel, but in the mean time the closest we can come to really getting to know other cities is to gain some mastery over one part of town in addition to hitting some of the better-known sites. The real advantage of this technique is that it makes your home base a neighborhood rather than a hotel, which can't help but teach you more about the city.

2010-05-16 Exploring northeast of L.A.

Jumping back to our Sunday in Los Angeles, I realized that we'd forgotten to tell the story of how we'd gotten to the Huntington's Chinese and Japanese gardens. After playing around in the rooftop garden, we started that morning by driving up to meet with some of my cousins who were so gracious as to host us for lunch and to save us the price of one of our garden tickets. We unfortunately didn't capture some of the architectural thrills of the drive up; a few of the tunnels were cinematic in ways that we couldn't capture when driving back the other way. With the option to take the light rail into the city, I can see the appeal of living in Altadena or Pasadena, but Caltech had sensibly rejected my early application to undergrad, so I never found out.

After seeing my cousins, we went on to get as much time as we could in at the Huntington Gardens before they closed. The number of pictures we'd taken of various sections is actually a bit deceptive as we could only wander for an hour or two. Fortunately, we'd arranged our visit such that we were rather far away from the exit as closing time approached, allowing us to observe the lovely vine and flower-covered trellises that adorned a path back. That route skirted the rose garden which was obviously quite extravagant even at a distance.

Beyond the European-style arrangements our path wound through a tropical forest with more of a wild appeal that favored smaller numbers of exotic flowers. What we saw on just our exit would have satisfied me on a more typical botanical garden visit. With our time in Los Angeles then rapidly running out, we left the gardens and drove West to the Pacific Coast Highway. I do wonder how much irrigation it takes to maintain all this beauty and how L.A. may look to future generations if we have to retrench our use of water. On the other hand, the land seems to be so ridiculously verdant that I could easily see Angelinos supporting much of it at higher prices.

2010-10-10: Flag Ponds proves not to be eponymous

After Battle Creek we went on to another local park: Flag Ponds. The website waxes eloquent that "[f]rom early spring through the fall wildflowers such as Columbine, Blue Flag Iris (from which the park derives its name), and Rose-Mallow paint the landscape of Flag Ponds with an explosion of color." Perhaps fall is over by mid-October but we didn't see any evidence of the assertion and the park ranger at the gate said that the Irises were long gone.

Regardless, while the nature center at Battle Creek was fancier, we did still enjoy the jaunt down to the shell-filled beach and the various signs that documented the fairly dramatic movement of the beaches. One notable piece of evidence was the fact that the middle part of the short trail to Todd's Pond was actually under water. I'm not sure when the flowers would actually be around, as they weren't in many of the sign pictures, but it does seem to be a very popular park for people with dogs. I was feeling a little tired by the end so we didn't do any of the few miles of other trails, but some of the pond walks did look like they had some potential. That said, I think the beaches are probably the main appeal, both for collecting shells (here's the one I took) and their views and activities.

On both the way down and back, we did manage to avoid the football game traffic through the time we dropped my mother off at transit and got back on I-95 North. That proved to be a horrible mistake when an accident blocked off all four lanes of traffic at the exit just north of our entry point. It didn't take long to realize we should just turn off the car, put on an Arcade Fire CD, and read. Things got mildly warm, various other drivers were expressing frustration and bonding by smoking so opening the windows wasn't that appealing, but all and all not a bad situation because some of the day's packed snacks from Mom and Kate were still available. The drivers kept pretty polite, aside from some random weirdo beeping. I didn't feel like going on foot to investigate what their problem was. Given the duration, it wasn't surprising to see the occasional guy get out of a car, slip over the jersey barrier, and head down the embankment presumably in search of a private and convenient tree.

After 40 minutes or so we were moving again and made it home to a short notice birthday celebration for Kate with her parents and brother, which I suppose is the one advantage of my failure at due diligence for the trip we were supposed to be on.

2010-10-10 Emergency backup trip: Battle Creek in Southern Maryland

Due to insufficient prep on my part, a complication delayed my long awaited trip to spend time in Quebec including taking my friends in Montreal to Quebec City. We were able to cancel almost everything without financial penalty, but sadly screwing up people's schedules isn't as easy to fix and it looks like I'm missing the window of opportunity for Kate to do all or possibly any of the trip this year. All and all it could have been worse, but it was still a fairly dispiriting outcome.

Thus, on our end, Kate, my mother, and myself went on an emergency backup trip to southern Maryland to the Battle Creek Cypress Swamp. On the way, we got lunch at Stoney's Seafood House in Prince Fredrick, which wasn't cheap but gave ample fresh seafood. Battle Creek is just a short drive beyond Prince Fredrick and is the northernmost cypress swamp in the U.S. It features the bald cypress, which loses its foliage in the fall, making it an unusual conifer. For the curious, while there were clashes nearby in the War of 1812, the location is called Battle Creek not because of swamp warfare but because its settlers were from Battle, England. The nature center on site had a good mix of information on the local ecosystem, local history, and an upstairs loft with both local and more exotic caged snakes under the supervision of a gregarious ranger.

Despite ample recent rains, the water level was rather low, leaving the cypress 'knees' fully exposed in much of the swamp. Several creeks still ran through the park, so we learned more about the lay of the land and the depth of the water than we would have if the water was higher. After touring the park we took a quick walk around the next door arboretum. That location still seems to be a work in progress as many of the wooden stands by the trees are unlabeled and a significant percentage of the trees are saplings.

 

2010-05-16/17 Los Angeles Light Rail Transit Blogging

Having finished the San Francisco travelogue it's time to jump back to L.A. When last we left our explorers, we'd hit the Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica in our last full day in the city. The next day, we didn't have that much time, but we did have a chance to actually ride the light rail Gold Line. The first station we'd seen had been the day before in Altadena. There's no trolley in that picture because the station entrance is on a bridge over a highway which we happened to drive by. While the actual station look is cute, classical highway stations are tougher to integrate into the community which fails to exploit the comparative advantages of streetcars.

We got a closer look on our last day, which was a bit embarrassing as the station was actually quite close to our Little Tokyo hotel. That was when we first saw the trains, which seem designed to imitate the lined chrome of the L.A. subway. From the maps and the design of the trains, I think the city's transit authority actively worked to blur the line between the two different types of trains. Based on the signs I saw, it sounds like the light rail lines will be getting most of the new stations.

The station itself seemed well-designed and included seating that looks as if it was Jasper Jones-inspired. We rode for one stop and got off at Union Station, where the light rail had a platform to itself just like all the other trains. For all that I'm skeptical of some of the ways they're using light rail, I do think L.A. found some clever ways to add train lines to what's well known as an auto-oriented city, and I wish them the best of luck in restoring street cars in the city of angels.

Review: Last Train Home

There are 130 million migrants in China, working in factories in the city and typically coming back home en mass during [the two week celebrating the Lunar New Year]. Last Train Home tells the story of the tensions faced by one family where both parents worked in Guangzhou for the past sixteen years and [covers] a few of their trips home. The family drama is intermixed with terrific video of the sheer magnitude of the migration and the sometimes lovely landscapes on the way home and back in Sichuan province. Landscapes aside, the trip itself can be a nightmare and with ticket shortages and sometimes multiple day delays. Not surprisingly, on my main trip on a Chinese train (depicted above), the accommodations were a bit higher end if [both because bunks were available and] by virtue of being far less crowded.

The film is by the producers of Up the Yangtze, which told the story of a family displaced by the Three Gorges dam and a few workers on the river tour boats. In both films, the stories weren't particularly uplifting although as NPR noted they aren't anti-commercialist morality tales either. Often for these sorts of documentaries the filmmakers follow a range of people thus increasing the odds of some success stories in addition to some heartbreak. In this case, Last Train Home is a rather hard story, the families older daughter, Qin, feels no real ties to her parents and drops out of school to go work in the cities herself.

The one key piece of information that many western viewers may be missing is that the migrants can't easily change their official residences. They can't get access to various city services and thus taking their children with them is typically not an appealing option. This allows the PRC to slowly manage the urbanization of the country and avoid slums relative to other developing countries. However, the cost on the migrants can be immense even as the benefits of the work shows in their clothing and electronics. One thing the film didn't quite manage to do was to depict why the all but the young and the old were so eager to leave rural life. The [farming] communities can be quite beautiful, the cinematography was excellent and I can say from personal experience that the sheer extent of cultivation makes for quite a landscape. The answer is certainly that there aren't jobs there, I think the exploitation of all available arable land demonstrates that even a population of the young and the old provides most of the labor needed, making working age adults surplus.

Ultimately, I think the documentary would have benefited from a wider range of subjects, but there's certainly no guarantee that was an option. I suspect for one that they didn't have access to the rural schools. I also wonder if the presence of the camera changed things, we have ample evidence that cameras can encourage clashes but on the other hand one fight had gotten physical and may have been worse if not for the filming. In any event the documentary did an excellent job of making apparent and personal the internal problems facing China and is a great resources for curious Chinese, foreigners, and future historians.

Trailer from the official film site. Photographs by me, available under a creative commons license.