While on vacation I had a chance to read Alex Abella’s Soldiers of Reason: The Rand Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. The book itself is sometimes a haze of evolving nuclear strategies entwined with the curious personal lives of its scientists, one of whom was the basis for the title character in Dr. Strangelove:
One part that did stand out to me though was a study done by Rand on the Vietcong fighters captured by the South Vietnamese:
“[Rand consultants] emphasized that the Vietcong saw themselves as waging a war against imperialists for the independence of Vietnam. They neither were communist zealots nor were they animated, like some Asian version of Mexican Zapatistas, by a simple desire for land. They were patriots and they were in the war for the long haul… These were not roving bandits or just plain bad guys, they were men of principle who were willing to die for a cause - and unless the conditions that gave rise to their discontent changed, the guerrilla campaign would go on until they all died or the central government fell.”
To what extent does this profile resemble the Taliban in Afghanistan today? I haven’t seen a lot of study done on this topic. Yes there are lots of speeches calling them “gangsters” or “scum” but I have seen precious little on what animates them. How much of it is sheer Pashtun nationalism? How much of it is religious? I don’t know, but I would like our government to figure this one out. Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense during Vietnam) claims to this day that he had no idea that the Vietcong saw themselves primarily as patriots, and yet his government commissioned the Rand study that found just that. Does Canada already know something about what animates the Taliban. We deserve these sorts of answers.
After owning it for seven years, I finally registered my bike with the police. Having seen how many bikes will not be reunited with their owners after Toronto’s big bike-theft bust, I reckoned it was stupid not to do it. The cops have a website and it’s a relatively painless process to sign up. There are some out there that feel antsy about registered anything with the police, but being in a profession where police background checks are routine, I’m not terribly concerned that they will also know what bike I own. My tax dollars are paying for the registration database, I might as well use it. Seriously, just register your bike. Do it now.
Stockwell Day (along with Rob Nicholson and some other Harper hand-puppets) loves to talk about how the Conservatives are getting tough on crime. They point to their mandatory minimum sentences and try to indicate how this will act as a deterrent.
To whom?
I don’t imagine that deranged sex predators or the bus murderer from yesterday are really thinking, “You know, I was hoping that I would get light sentence, but now I’m not so sure.”
But what about those running various property crime operations, surely they must be more rational - it’s like a business for them right? I’ll point to my post the other day about Igor Kenk the alleged bike theft mastermind of Toronto’s west end. The man had something like 3200 bikes cached all over the city, just piled in garages and stuff. I don’t think he wins any awards for supply-chain management doing business that way.
The idea that criminals are rational economic actors who are responding to incentives and who would include jails terms in their calculus of how to behave just doesn’t seem correct to me. I reckon that most of them don’t even think they’ll be caught in the first place.
For those of you who have yet to see the new Batman film, the Joker is a portrayed here as a madman who commits crimes just to mess with people more than he aims to actually, you know, profit from them. In the same summer Toronto police have spent the better part of July tracking down bikes (allegedly) stolen by one Igor Kenk. They have now found over 3000 bikes prompting Torontoist to observe that “[t]his whole bike-stealing thing is starting to look less like a practical criminal enterprise and more like some kind of weird obsession.”
Big surprise, they’re trying it out at the Torch already. It all starts well enough by an approving quotation of a favourable Economist segment on the general. The ensuing commentary by Damian Brooks gets a bit silly though:
“The point they fail to make - and it’s an important one - is that the general’s fame wasn’t his aim. Rather, it was a necessary evil in order for him to do the job with the level of effectiveness he needed. In other words, Hillier wasn’t chasing cameras and microphones for his own sake, but for the sake of his men.”
Now I know that Brooks loves to write about military stuff and that he’s from the same region as Hillier, but how can he even assert to know this about Hillier? Outside of our close friends how can we know an individual’s deepest motives? Even among our close friends we might be misled. Generally people who are vainglorious assholes don’t get up and say “look, I’m not altruistic, I’m a camera-hog because I need the attention.” I really have no idea why Hillier put his mug in front of the cameras so much. It may not be an either/or thing too. He might have legitimately thought he was doing right by his soldiers and furthering some nascent political ambitions.
This one is now ranking higher on IMDb than the perennial top two, The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. I don’t think a comic book action movie can do better than this film.
It’s very easy to throw around accusations of racism and that makes me loathe to do it, but how else can you contrast the treatment of Maher Arar, Omar Khadr, and now Abousfian Abdelrazik when it is compared to what happened in the case of Brenda Martin. Why is the Harper government not straining to get this man out of the clutches of the Sudanese government?
I want to be careful here, because I am not casting aspersions on Martin or her supporters, but the contrast is remarkable between the vigor with which questioned the legitimacy of the Mexican legal system and the presumption of the same that we granted the dubious Gitmo show trials (fought at every step by military attorneys who really don’t get lauded as defenders of liberty the way they should be) or worse - what passes for a “justice” system in Syria or Sudan.
Why did we presume though that Martin was telling the truth that she was innocent and take on Mexico but shrug when those with the wrong skin colour find themselves in trouble? Let’s demand the Brenda Martin standard for every Canadian held in legal limbo elsewhere.
