Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS.
In his treatise on the lessons from the beef between Jay-Z and The Game for American foreign policy, Marc Lynch has just uncorked what has to be one of the most ridiculously awesome blog posts in memory. Despite my West Coast roots, I'm rooting for the "superpower" Jay-Z over the "insurgent" The Game. In counterinsurgency terms, I guess that's kind of like a Sunni insurgent joining the Sons of Iraq.
Yeah Niggah! Dat's what I be sayin.
Actually I don't get it. It is painful to read that stuff. Somebody will have to explain it to me sometime. I like rap music or hip-hop, or whatever you assclowns call it, but really, WTF does this have to do with anything. Tom Ricks' posts about "Auto-Tune" have to be some of the most phenomenally ignored posts in the history of international-relations related blogging. Is there anybody that knows what this way-past-middle-age douche is talking about.
If somebody here needs something to read, try this:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/pdf/RoryStewart/LRB_RoryStewart_Irresis...
5000 words by Rory Stewart on Afghanistan. Appears he knows what he is talking about. Appears Obama and McChrystal don't. But we'll have to let history decide.
Fo shizzle, my nizzle. This fool gonna get his ass capped by one of Jay-Z's boyz-zuh. Sheeee-it.
"In counterinsurgency terms, I guess that's kind of like a Sunni insurgent joining the Sons of Iraq."
Uuumm. Forgive me if I don't know what I'm talking about, but didn't Jay-Z go out with like 1998? Or was that Tupac?
I think it's all about lil Wayne now.
But that point included, this seems like decent analysis. We still have no idea who the Sunni insurgents are (we have little knowledge of the Iraqis in general). I don't think the Sunni insurgents know much about the Sunni insurgents. Thank God (Allah) we are finally getting the eff out of there.
Hey, anyone remember this one? What year was this? 1999 they made this? 2000? Great flick. Classic lines.
"This is not Iraq. This situation is much more complicated."
That is some funny shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJJJDtaFN4k
I've got Australian friends who hate Eric Bana. They can't understand why Americans love him so much. I tell them it is because of his awesome acting in "Cutter."
Part 3 seems to verify Steele was the ground commander. Somebody will have to check IMDB. Who plays Steele? Sizemore?
If you guys are cool, Gentile will play the Indians, SNLII will play Ann Margret, and I'll play the Gooks. That's Gooks with a Big G, I still have a lot of respect for my little Asian Brothers.
"How can you kill women and children!"
"Hah, ha,ha! That's easy!"
"Ya just don't lead'em that much!"
Wow. Tom Sizemore was credited with "McNight." Maybe some of you guys can tell me who McNight was. Sgt. Capt.?
Who was McNight? Steele escapes notice. So does McChrystal. Who was McChrystal? Garrison?
I heard "Steele" in part 3. So come clean. Better now than when Cheney gets his balls slowly sawed off.
Don't put your faith in the CIA. They're finished, too.
Oh. I'll talk. I'm not being paid to keep my mouth shut.
For a long time the assumption has been that captains are competent. That we should only look above captain's rank for problems in leadership.
I say the captain is the problem. They are just not trained right or they are chosen on bad stuff, bad grades, good looks, good talkin skills.
I say the captain is the problem. The US military's biggest problem is it does not know how to create captains. These should be the leaders, yet it is rare you see a star emerge. Statistics say we are promoting people who turn out to be relative retards.
We are talking about company commanders. These are the Vietnam equivalent of generals in an Afghan war. Just like in Vietnam, where battalion commanders were like division commanders.
And this won't stop. I'll see you in two years for an update.
The people that will come down on me aren't qualified. They don't know the difference between tactics and combat. They couldn't describe stategy in a paragraph. But they will come down on me very soon and call me an asshole.
My advice to them is to be careful. Very careful.
you crackers think you're so fresh listening and talking about jay-z and the game.... and then since you talk about it using big words and vast analogies, then you're "intellectual." get over yourselves and stop stroking each other off.
Shut down this blog. It's become little more than a press release for CNAS fellows.
The prose is from Tiger Beat, the thinking from a wool factory and the commentry inside baffled and, increasingly, shrinking.
Make this stop.
I was hoping for another comment from Johnny Rico
Feel your pain, SNLII. I just wish things could go back to the way they were when I first started reading here; The authors were poorly paid academics with relatively novel perspectives who spoke in the third person for no discernible reason about things I had never heard of before. Plus, there were no trolls.
I'm with SNLII and WCOG...... This blog used to provide a fresh and exciting perspective and now it's as useful as an old, beat up vagina. This has been the case for much of the past year and I don't see an end in sight. When a bloggers ego increases beyond their true status and role, they are more or less worthless. Now it's all about ass-kissing, name-dropping, and dick-sucking. Stay clear of the splash zone when the third lets loose.
Thanks for the link to the New York Times article that we all have already read..... Also, thanks for the link to the blog post which linked you in his post about a post you previously made on his post.
Whose side is Johnny on?
snlii: maybe it had to happen this way. maybe it was only natural that after Population-Centric Counter-Insurgency became conventional wisdom in the beltway, we get to read things like this. coin doctrine is convenient for american political leadership for painfully obvious reasons, hence its acceptance, and its commentators no longer burdened by boring stuffy shit like intellectual rigor.
a really long time ago the la times published an article by kim murphy, reporting from a moscow jazz club. "did stalin have a boogie soul?" she asked.
explaining a rap feud with 50 cent IR words brings to mind the smug, vapid idiocy crystallized in murphy's writing that passes for thought in beige america. it's also fucking dull. unimaginative incongruity passing for smarts. lynch's article is cute, almost wretched, in its irreverence, but it says nothing. nothing about american foreign policy, nothing even about the rap feud. you will not find a single interesting sentence in that blog post. and i've just now realized that it, uh, kinda has absolutely nothing to do with coin. shouldn't be surprised, it's not about anything else really, but i hope my broader, more rambling and confused, point about coin still stands.
anyway now that everybody feels entitled to run they mouths about insurgencies (be optimistic here and call it intellectual populism) just wait for the upcoming piece on coin in the new yorker. the intro is a poem by wh auden. welcome to hell.
abu sharmuta:
all of those things are defining traits of dc zombies. coincidence?
I find it amazing and incredible that we can use struggles for position in the world of music as an example of international politics. For both hegemonies I would suggest a conservative attitude (in the sense of how quick they are to act, not the social sense) until the one perfect moment when their lesser rivals do something so incredibly stupid that the hegemonies are practically invited to accomplish all of their goals in it. Rash grabs for more power have been the doom of many powerful leaders that should have known better. In 1812 Napoleon did not need to go to war with Russia, he could have held back and contented himself with an unparalleled power in Western and Central Europe. In 1941 Hitler didn't have to invade the Soviet Union, he could have accepted the existence of Communism for a while longer.
Sort of kind of agree with you SNLi, though Im waiting for Exums return from Kabul in August before passing judgement.
And now Im off to Sardinia. Hep.
@ Johnny Rico:
Speaking of Auto-Tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGhsbRb_pqE&feature=related
Kabul? Why? and who's side is he on?
Uh,
Not quite sure what all the feather ruffling is about but glad to know you folks are still able to call each other assholes. As to THE SUBSTANCE of the article, whether or not you like hip-hop, it is an interesting if flawed comparison. Is the author being too clever? Probably, but that doesn't further the conversation any more than decrying the current state of this blog.
The question I have to ask is this, Is the US still the Hegemony? I mean, militarily we can thump ANYBODY (probably) in a conventional war but there is more to the power of nation-states than bombs. To whit: Is China the new global hegemony? As Coffee Talk put it "discuss"
I have to agree with snlii, that the blog-o-storm surrounding the post is problematic, but I think that the problem is more then just the cuteness of the posts or the clichiness of the writers. At the end of the day this is a model, in the same tradition of grand strategy IR modeling. Lynch could have said big country X and small country Y and we could all be having exactly the same argument (lord knows I know nothing about hip hop, and that didn’t stop me). This one is cute and entertaining, so it gets written about, but at the end of the day Jay-Z and the game have the same problem that most models do. They are, by definition simplifications of the actual complexities of the International system.
That makes them fun as a new test grounds for establishing baseline knowledge and intelligence of commenter about alliance dynamics, signaling and basic IR models. But for those who are crafting current policy, I hope there is both a recognition of when something is just a model (something that hasnt been brought up in most of the posts explicitly), and an expectation of a greater depth of knowledge about a particular arena before it is turned into policy.
cross posted at http://phoenix-of-athena.blogspot.com/2009/07/so-ive-enjoyed-waltzs-seri...
"Unfortunately, in our culture, we are conditioned to see white(straight) people as Real People, and black(people of color/LGBT) people as sort of thin slices of people, operating in one of a very few available modes and with only a very few emotions and interests."
"...race is not invisible to most of us and it doesn't (lack) consequences."
RaceFail 2009
"I was hoping for another comment from Johnny Rico"
a) Dude, I have other blogs to attend to. SNLII does fine on this one. He is much younger and cooler than me - he has obviously read Tiger Beat (WTF is that?). I'll be back.
b) (In the case that you were being facetious). I hope your mother fucks you in the ass with a gold version of Saddam's fist... How was that?
"Whose side is Johnny on?"
My father was in the American Army in Ethiopia. He met my mother there. She was in one of the first groups of Peace Corps volunteers. Her parents didn't want her to go because they honestly believed she would be "eaten by crocodiles." This was the same parents who:
a) Dad - flew B-17s in the Pacific and was shot down 4 times and brought every one of his crew home every time. He was based in New Guinea. Was carried back to base by natives one time. (yeah, I know, war stories).
b)Mom - was a pilot (yes, 1942) and trained men to fight. her brother dissappeared flying missions over the Hump.
I was raised in Greece and Saudi Arabia. My father was a language genius and worked for what is now a subsidiary of Halliburton.
Two of my only two "best" friends served in Nam. One at Khe Sahn.
I'm a white male who scored above 600 on both SATs. I have an American passport. My last name is German and the same as a famous contemporary TV star. I love Mexicans.
And I can type slowly.
Whose side do you think I'm on?
My family is from Nebraska, North Carolina, and Boston. We've got branches in Seattle and Chicago. Maybe I'm Ukrainian. I've never really thought about it
el-belle, lynch's post had nothing to do with an IR model. It had everything to do with trying to be hip and cool.... and trying to fit some sort of model to jay-z. It was simply an excuse to write about it and an attempt at being "cute." We would definitely not be having this same argument if it were about "big country X" and "small country Y." And I still can't believe the post created such a "blog-o-storm." It's not only problematic; it's pathetic.
@abu sharmouta - thanks for capitalizing everything.
"blog-o-storm." ?
26 comments?
You meant to say "blog-o-not."
Thanx for your input, sharmouta, now fuck off.
@ Michael the G:
A more pertinent question might be whether terms like "hegemony" and "conventional war" actually mean anything.
As if states can cross a quantitative threshold of relative power (a melange of political, military, and economic power) to become "hegemons" and thus obey different a different set of rules from the rest of the world.
As if any political conflict today can be solved with a decisive victory in the "conventional war" stage.
As for China, I don't know. I'll let you know when the International Relations Guild invents a vocabulary that's useful beyond getting tenured jobs for the dumb and shameless. Until then, I could regurgitate what I know about their strengths and weaknesses versus those of other contenders, but I don't have the fifty cent words I need to get peer-reviewed.
@Johnny Rico:
To me, "Yeah Niggah! Dat's what I be sayin." is more painful to read than un-capitalized English. I can smell the black shoe polish from here. I really like the article you linked in your first post, though. Respek, nigga.
The "Jay-Z vs the Game: Lessons for the American Primacy Debate" post was trash. I was so relieved when I read "one of the most ridiculous" and nearly collapsed when I saw "ly awesome". Sure, it's cute. But useful? Interesting? Valid with respect to either hip hop or international relations? Only in the most superficial sense.
Oh well.
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