I read that site and I like it. But it’s important to get a variety of views. I would never want to get most of my world news from a single site. In fact, if I had to pick a single source of world news for some reason, then I’d want to pick one that I disagree with, as long as it still has good coverage of what I care about.
I generally don’t look for world news any more; when I did I’d generally follow Current Events on Wikipedia:
It’s short,
It coveres world events more evenly than French or American national media, and
It tries to be unbiased
When I want more in-depth coverage on a subject, I generally turn to wikipedia too. I think it has a better trade-off between providing context and covering breaking events as they unfold (something that I consider is overvalued).
The website in question seems to be a partisan website that focuses on a narrow set of issues which has no coverage of science or math at all. I am unfortunately not surprised to note that even in the context of the issues they care about they don’t understand when science or math should be relevant. For example, I see no articles mentioning anything about cryptography. Anyone who has the apparent ideology of the website and doesn’t realize that crypto matters is suffering from major failings of rationality. This website seems like one massive Mindkill.
But there are no non-partisan sites, are there? but that aside, I meant political world news, not scientific.
I get the point about politics being icky, but we Do live in this world, and IMO the way of the cloistered monk doesn’t seem to be a viable option..
also, could you go into more detail about how is it that crypto is so vastly important given the ideology of the website? not to mention you reached that conclusion rather quickly, hmm
Partisanship is something that has degrees. It isn’t an on/off thing. Moreover, there’s a big difference between sources which try to be non-partisan and sources which are avowedly partisan. Using any single source, even a source claiming to be non-partisan, for news is a bad idea. Using a single avowedly partisan source is a really bad idea.
but that aside, I meant political world news, not scientific.
These aren’t disconnected at all. Science matters for many political issues. Look at stem cell research for example or global warming. Or to use one that has less mindkilling among the general public, fusion research. Multiple countries have had political disputes over whether to fund ITER and if so by how much. The chance of magnetic confinement fusion succeeding is a scientific issue that has a lot to do with politics. Science impacts politics.
I get the point about politics being icky, but we Do live in this world, and IMO the way of the cloistered monk doesn’t seem to be a viable option..
The claim isn’t that one should avoid politics. But there are ways to minimze mindkilling. Using multiple sources regularly is a major one.
could you go into more detail about how is it that crypto is so vastly important given the ideology of the website? not to mention you reached that conclusion rather quickly, hmm
I didn’t say it was “vastly important” but rather that it matters. I reached that conclusion from a quick perusal at the website in question base on the following reasoning: First, they had multiple articles about Wikileaks and clear support for Wikileaks as a good thing. If you care about anonymous leaks, how strong civilian crypto is matters a lot. More generally, they take a general anti-war position (clear from both the title and their articles). Crypto is relevant because strong crypto can make centralized control more difficult. It levels the playing field for asymetric warfare. How much it does so and will do so in the next few years is not clear. Thus, this isn’t “vastly important” but it doesn’t take much to see this as something that needs to be watched. The balance for guerrilla warfare already gives major advantages to guerillas especially when they have a somewhat sympathetic population base. If this continues, wars like those currently in Iraq and Afghanistan will become even more difficult for large militaries to engage.
Incidentally, I’ve now looked through the site in more detail and I see a tiny handful of articles mentioning cryptography, but it seems clear that they a) don’t know much about it b) don’t understand its significance.
now, as a generality your first statement is correct, but after searching for some years I’ve concluded the easiest method is in fact mild support for a partisan anti war website, reason being; on average wars are more destructive than no-wars, and definitely inductive of irrationality.
a note about the particular partisan site, it’s not a single source by any means-I believe this is the cause of contention?- it’s actually an aggregation of ‘anti war’ news from multiple sources including mainstream channels and others.
as such the ‘single source’ label is negated.
second statement: yes, science and politics are connected, but I believe this misses the point, in the domain of national policy, the more hawkish elements have been in control for quite a while now, pitting the US against third world destitute farmers and shepherds. that’s not exactly a rational path, and so, as much as we should support stem cell research for eg. that wasn’t the angle I was coming from.
third; answered, see above.
fourth; it does as an issue to be concerned with, but surely not in context of the discussion? strategic theorizing on possible crypto use by say an afghan warlord concerned for his poppy production is quite a marginal concern compared to the US government launching wars that cost trillions and benefit humanity little to nothing while increasing likelihood of retaliation etc.
now, as a generality your first statement is correct, but after searching for some years I’ve concluded the easiest method is in fact mild support for a partisan anti war website, reason being; on average wars are more destructive than no-wars, and definitely inductive of irrationality.
What do you mean by support? In the context of your earlier remarks, “support” seems to mean “use as sole newsource.” I don’t see how even if one accepted your premises one would get that as a conclusion.
it’s actually an aggregation of ‘anti war’ news from multiple sources including mainstream channels and others. as such the ‘single source’ label is negated.
This makes no difference. For purposes of getting relevant data and avoiding mind-killing, a partisan aggregator will be functionally identical to a partisan single source.
science and politics are connected, but I believe this misses the point, in the domain of national policy, the more hawkish elements have been in control for quite a while now, pitting the US against third world destitute farmers and shepherds. that’s not exactly a rational path, and so, as much as we should support stem cell research for eg. that wasn’t the angle I was coming from.
In regards to the connection between science and politics, I’m not sure I can parse what you are saying and in so far as I can parse it, it seems like you have a problematic attitude. Not everything is about simple ideological support or not, and your response above seems to almost be an indication of Mindkilling spreading from politics to science. This is precisely why I gave the example of ITER and whether or not it should be funded and if so by how much. Science impacts policy. And it isn’t anything as simple as “oh, we should support this but not support that. Stem cells, yay! People who don’t like stem cells cells, booh!” To use your example of stem cells, how much resources should go into stem cell research is quite complicated. The standard reaction against theistic arguments against embryonic stem cell research is to conclude that we should have massive amounts of research into stem cells. But that’s not necessarily the case. We have a limited amount of resources that is going to go to biological and medical research. How much of that should go to stem cells? That should be the question that you should ask and not come away with some general notion of “support.”
trategic theorizing on possible crypto use by say an afghan warlord concerned for his poppy production is quite a marginal concern compared to the US government launching wars that cost trillions and benefit humanity little to nothing while increasing likelihood of retaliation etc.
You are missing the point. The change that crypto brings (and for that matter is actually bringing) is the benefits it brings to the little guy, the decentralized individuals, not the warlord. The person leaking documents or the resistance fighter/terrorist/guerrilla/etc are the types who benefit from having strong crypto. This is why for a long time the US classified cryptography as munitions for export purposes. And saying that you don’t think crypto is that important isn’t an argument that has any validity in this context given that as you noted you are talking about a news aggregration site, so they can easily include relevant articles. The lack of articles about crypto (and for that matter a fair number of other issues) on the site indicate an oversimplified view of what issues are relevant to warfare and ongoing war.
Incidentally, I’m curious what evidence you have that any of the US wars in the last decade have put the US up against “third world destitute farmers and shepherd” as the main opposition.
Crypto is relevant because strong crypto can make centralized control more difficult. It levels the playing field for asymetric warfare.
I do not see it. Can you explain?
The biggest advantage crypto can confer on the insurgents in Iraq or Afganistan under my current models probably comes in the form of encrypting cell phones.
But if the insurgents deploy them, the occupying power declares that from now on, only non-encrypting phones are permitted and makes their declaration stick by taking control of the base stations.
The insurgents can respond by deploying radios that do not require base stations.
The occupying power’s counter-response is to set up electromagnetic-radiation monitoring to detect and triangulate the radio signals.
The insurgents can respond by replacing the use of voice conversations with the use of text messages (well, voice messages for the illiterate fighters) that are recorded by the phone and then when the user presses “Transmit” transmitted as quickly as possible to make them as hard as possible to triangulate.
But radio signals are a lot like light. Light is in fact just another form of electromagnetic radiation. So, as an aid to intuition, consider the situation in which the insurgents try to use visible light to communicate. I suppose that if there is already a lot of light, e.g., from the sun, the light from the communication devices might be able to hide. But it seems to me that the proper analogy or aid to intuition is probably the situation in which the insurgents to try use light to communicate at night because if there is enough radiation for the rebels’ signals to hide, the occupying power shuts down the sources of the radiation (TV broadcasters, base stations for unencrypted cell phones, jammers depolyed by the rebels).
I do not know enough about spread-spectrum radio to say whether it would give the rebels the advantage, but if it does, the rebels would not need to encrypt the messages, and your statement was that not spread-spectrum radio but rather crypto confers advantages on rebels.
ADDED. Come to think of it, the above analysis pertains mostly to conflicts where the stakes are sufficiently high: e.g., if insurgents tried to take over, e.g., Alaska, or whether the People’s Republic as occupier could hold Taiwan against Taiwanese insurgents backed by the U.S.. If the occupying power’s main goal is “to bring democracy to Iraq” or to deny the territory of Afganistan to al Quaida, well, that might not be high enough stakes to justify the cost to the occupying power of achieving and maintaining comprehensive control of the communications infrastructure of the occupied territory and reimbursing the population for the economic losses caused by the restrictions on communication caused by the comprehensive control. (Reimbursement would tend to be necessary to keep the population on the occupying power’s side).
I do not know enough about spread-spectrum radio to say whether it would give the rebels the advantage, but if it does, the rebels would not need to encrypt the messages, and your statement was that not spread-spectrum radio but rather crypto confers advantages on rebels.
Spread-spectrum is crypto—the idea is to select a pattern (of frequencies) that eavesdroppers can’t distinguish from random noise but which is predictable to the intended recipient.
You’re forgetting about steganography; encrypted messages can be made to look like vacation photos, music, spam or something else. Using steganography sounds complicated when you describe it, but in practice all the details are handled transparently by some software, so it’s just one-time setup.
The occupying power announces that until the insurgents stop killing innocent civilians and sowing disorder, no one in contested territory is permitted to use the internet to transmit vacation photos, music, spam, etc. Civilians whose livelihoods are interrupted by these restrictions can apply for monetary compensation from the occupying power. Music and other entertainment will still be available from iTunes and other major centralized services (unless and until there are signs that these centralized services are being used to broadcast hidden messages).
In the Malay Emergency, the occupying power, which won the conflict, required 500,000 civilians to relocate to new villages surrounded by barbed wire, police posts and floodlit areas. Compared to that, restrictions on the internet are mild.
Also, the need for steg reduces the bandwidth available to the insurgents—perhaps below the level required for voice communication, which requires the communicators to be literate, which denys the communications channel to a large fraction of the world’s insurgents.
“One-time” is a bit of a stretch (all it takes is being found out once to greatly impair the value of any particular method), but yeah—steganography is an established and worthy technique.
You are thinking about radio communication much more than I was. My thought process centered on encrypted use of the internet to allow insurgents to communicate both with each other and with sympathizers or allies that are elsewhere. I agree with your analysis that crypto is unlikely to do much in terms of radio communications.
http://antiwar.com/ I use this site to get most of ‘world news’, what about you guys?
I read that site and I like it. But it’s important to get a variety of views. I would never want to get most of my world news from a single site. In fact, if I had to pick a single source of world news for some reason, then I’d want to pick one that I disagree with, as long as it still has good coverage of what I care about.
I generally don’t look for world news any more; when I did I’d generally follow Current Events on Wikipedia:
It’s short,
It coveres world events more evenly than French or American national media, and
It tries to be unbiased
When I want more in-depth coverage on a subject, I generally turn to wikipedia too. I think it has a better trade-off between providing context and covering breaking events as they unfold (something that I consider is overvalued).
thanks, that’s actually what I wanted to know.
The website in question seems to be a partisan website that focuses on a narrow set of issues which has no coverage of science or math at all. I am unfortunately not surprised to note that even in the context of the issues they care about they don’t understand when science or math should be relevant. For example, I see no articles mentioning anything about cryptography. Anyone who has the apparent ideology of the website and doesn’t realize that crypto matters is suffering from major failings of rationality. This website seems like one massive Mindkill.
But there are no non-partisan sites, are there? but that aside, I meant political world news, not scientific.
I get the point about politics being icky, but we Do live in this world, and IMO the way of the cloistered monk doesn’t seem to be a viable option.. also, could you go into more detail about how is it that crypto is so vastly important given the ideology of the website? not to mention you reached that conclusion rather quickly, hmm
Partisanship is something that has degrees. It isn’t an on/off thing. Moreover, there’s a big difference between sources which try to be non-partisan and sources which are avowedly partisan. Using any single source, even a source claiming to be non-partisan, for news is a bad idea. Using a single avowedly partisan source is a really bad idea.
These aren’t disconnected at all. Science matters for many political issues. Look at stem cell research for example or global warming. Or to use one that has less mindkilling among the general public, fusion research. Multiple countries have had political disputes over whether to fund ITER and if so by how much. The chance of magnetic confinement fusion succeeding is a scientific issue that has a lot to do with politics. Science impacts politics.
The claim isn’t that one should avoid politics. But there are ways to minimze mindkilling. Using multiple sources regularly is a major one.
I didn’t say it was “vastly important” but rather that it matters. I reached that conclusion from a quick perusal at the website in question base on the following reasoning: First, they had multiple articles about Wikileaks and clear support for Wikileaks as a good thing. If you care about anonymous leaks, how strong civilian crypto is matters a lot. More generally, they take a general anti-war position (clear from both the title and their articles). Crypto is relevant because strong crypto can make centralized control more difficult. It levels the playing field for asymetric warfare. How much it does so and will do so in the next few years is not clear. Thus, this isn’t “vastly important” but it doesn’t take much to see this as something that needs to be watched. The balance for guerrilla warfare already gives major advantages to guerillas especially when they have a somewhat sympathetic population base. If this continues, wars like those currently in Iraq and Afghanistan will become even more difficult for large militaries to engage.
Incidentally, I’ve now looked through the site in more detail and I see a tiny handful of articles mentioning cryptography, but it seems clear that they a) don’t know much about it b) don’t understand its significance.
a belated reply:
now, as a generality your first statement is correct, but after searching for some years I’ve concluded the easiest method is in fact mild support for a partisan anti war website, reason being; on average wars are more destructive than no-wars, and definitely inductive of irrationality.
a note about the particular partisan site, it’s not a single source by any means-I believe this is the cause of contention?- it’s actually an aggregation of ‘anti war’ news from multiple sources including mainstream channels and others. as such the ‘single source’ label is negated.
second statement: yes, science and politics are connected, but I believe this misses the point, in the domain of national policy, the more hawkish elements have been in control for quite a while now, pitting the US against third world destitute farmers and shepherds. that’s not exactly a rational path, and so, as much as we should support stem cell research for eg. that wasn’t the angle I was coming from.
third; answered, see above.
fourth; it does as an issue to be concerned with, but surely not in context of the discussion? strategic theorizing on possible crypto use by say an afghan warlord concerned for his poppy production is quite a marginal concern compared to the US government launching wars that cost trillions and benefit humanity little to nothing while increasing likelihood of retaliation etc.
What do you mean by support? In the context of your earlier remarks, “support” seems to mean “use as sole newsource.” I don’t see how even if one accepted your premises one would get that as a conclusion.
This makes no difference. For purposes of getting relevant data and avoiding mind-killing, a partisan aggregator will be functionally identical to a partisan single source.
In regards to the connection between science and politics, I’m not sure I can parse what you are saying and in so far as I can parse it, it seems like you have a problematic attitude. Not everything is about simple ideological support or not, and your response above seems to almost be an indication of Mindkilling spreading from politics to science. This is precisely why I gave the example of ITER and whether or not it should be funded and if so by how much. Science impacts policy. And it isn’t anything as simple as “oh, we should support this but not support that. Stem cells, yay! People who don’t like stem cells cells, booh!” To use your example of stem cells, how much resources should go into stem cell research is quite complicated. The standard reaction against theistic arguments against embryonic stem cell research is to conclude that we should have massive amounts of research into stem cells. But that’s not necessarily the case. We have a limited amount of resources that is going to go to biological and medical research. How much of that should go to stem cells? That should be the question that you should ask and not come away with some general notion of “support.”
You are missing the point. The change that crypto brings (and for that matter is actually bringing) is the benefits it brings to the little guy, the decentralized individuals, not the warlord. The person leaking documents or the resistance fighter/terrorist/guerrilla/etc are the types who benefit from having strong crypto. This is why for a long time the US classified cryptography as munitions for export purposes. And saying that you don’t think crypto is that important isn’t an argument that has any validity in this context given that as you noted you are talking about a news aggregration site, so they can easily include relevant articles. The lack of articles about crypto (and for that matter a fair number of other issues) on the site indicate an oversimplified view of what issues are relevant to warfare and ongoing war.
Incidentally, I’m curious what evidence you have that any of the US wars in the last decade have put the US up against “third world destitute farmers and shepherd” as the main opposition.
I do not see it. Can you explain?
The biggest advantage crypto can confer on the insurgents in Iraq or Afganistan under my current models probably comes in the form of encrypting cell phones.
But if the insurgents deploy them, the occupying power declares that from now on, only non-encrypting phones are permitted and makes their declaration stick by taking control of the base stations.
The insurgents can respond by deploying radios that do not require base stations.
The occupying power’s counter-response is to set up electromagnetic-radiation monitoring to detect and triangulate the radio signals.
The insurgents can respond by replacing the use of voice conversations with the use of text messages (well, voice messages for the illiterate fighters) that are recorded by the phone and then when the user presses “Transmit” transmitted as quickly as possible to make them as hard as possible to triangulate.
But radio signals are a lot like light. Light is in fact just another form of electromagnetic radiation. So, as an aid to intuition, consider the situation in which the insurgents try to use visible light to communicate. I suppose that if there is already a lot of light, e.g., from the sun, the light from the communication devices might be able to hide. But it seems to me that the proper analogy or aid to intuition is probably the situation in which the insurgents to try use light to communicate at night because if there is enough radiation for the rebels’ signals to hide, the occupying power shuts down the sources of the radiation (TV broadcasters, base stations for unencrypted cell phones, jammers depolyed by the rebels).
I do not know enough about spread-spectrum radio to say whether it would give the rebels the advantage, but if it does, the rebels would not need to encrypt the messages, and your statement was that not spread-spectrum radio but rather crypto confers advantages on rebels.
ADDED. Come to think of it, the above analysis pertains mostly to conflicts where the stakes are sufficiently high: e.g., if insurgents tried to take over, e.g., Alaska, or whether the People’s Republic as occupier could hold Taiwan against Taiwanese insurgents backed by the U.S.. If the occupying power’s main goal is “to bring democracy to Iraq” or to deny the territory of Afganistan to al Quaida, well, that might not be high enough stakes to justify the cost to the occupying power of achieving and maintaining comprehensive control of the communications infrastructure of the occupied territory and reimbursing the population for the economic losses caused by the restrictions on communication caused by the comprehensive control. (Reimbursement would tend to be necessary to keep the population on the occupying power’s side).
Spread-spectrum is crypto—the idea is to select a pattern (of frequencies) that eavesdroppers can’t distinguish from random noise but which is predictable to the intended recipient.
Thanks for the info.
You’re forgetting about steganography; encrypted messages can be made to look like vacation photos, music, spam or something else. Using steganography sounds complicated when you describe it, but in practice all the details are handled transparently by some software, so it’s just one-time setup.
The occupying power announces that until the insurgents stop killing innocent civilians and sowing disorder, no one in contested territory is permitted to use the internet to transmit vacation photos, music, spam, etc. Civilians whose livelihoods are interrupted by these restrictions can apply for monetary compensation from the occupying power. Music and other entertainment will still be available from iTunes and other major centralized services (unless and until there are signs that these centralized services are being used to broadcast hidden messages).
In the Malay Emergency, the occupying power, which won the conflict, required 500,000 civilians to relocate to new villages surrounded by barbed wire, police posts and floodlit areas. Compared to that, restrictions on the internet are mild.
Also, the need for steg reduces the bandwidth available to the insurgents—perhaps below the level required for voice communication, which requires the communicators to be literate, which denys the communications channel to a large fraction of the world’s insurgents.
“One-time” is a bit of a stretch (all it takes is being found out once to greatly impair the value of any particular method), but yeah—steganography is an established and worthy technique.
You are thinking about radio communication much more than I was. My thought process centered on encrypted use of the internet to allow insurgents to communicate both with each other and with sympathizers or allies that are elsewhere. I agree with your analysis that crypto is unlikely to do much in terms of radio communications.