KeepNet 10 June 2008
Time is short. Normal posting will resume soon. It better do – I’ve got a stack of half-written posts I need to finish off. Until that happens …
Raffaello Pantucci in The Guardian suggests in Why talk to al-Qaida? that any attempts to negotiate with Islamic extremists would undermine attempts at combating violent radicalism and alienate populations left stranded in a partial caliphate. Shouldn’t be a problem – I can’t remember AQ offering us the chance of a cosy chat recently.
Roadrunner computer busts through the petaflop barrier. Not impressed? “If each of the world’s 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.”
It’s not possible to resist a post titled Iran’s Mini-Quasi-5GW?. Read what Soob means, and why he’s killing “two birds with one multigradient stone”.
Liz Losh at VirtualPolitik:
one might hope that lawmakers would refrain from overemphasizing the opportunistic rhetoric of criminality when it comes to characterizing the policy implications of distributed information technologies. Unfortunately that is still not necessarily the case.
Read the rest of her post addressing institutional responses to the online threat.
I had no idea Steven Metz had a blog – Strategy and National Security Policy [h/t ZenPundit]
Chris Levesque at Historicus adds more to the debate on the Human Terrain System, in part a response to my original post on the issue at Complex Terrain Lab.
Thanks much for the link!
Didn’t AQ offer up some semblance of a “truce” with Europe not too long ago?
That aside, negotiating with a stateless entity who’s catalyst is purely ideological and brings nothing more to the table than “we’ll stop killing you” is a ridiculous notion.
Hehe, no problem at all. Debate shouldn’t really start from a “do-everything-we-say-or-we-won’t-stop-killing-you” position, let alone true negotiation. AQ will never be able to negotiate, as their terms are non-negotiable. Perhaps that’s a failing of the state system, perhaps that’s its strength. It’s also not possible, politically, to negotiate with AQ, but it is possible, even desirable, to talk to the Taliban in their various guises, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc, i.e. nationalists. AQ’s global demands effectively preclude any form of negotiated settlement. And round we go …