Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Terrorism 2024

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24-10-16 How Egypt’s Army Smoked ISIS - T&P > .24-8-22 Hamas’ Exploitation of Schools - IDF > .24-4-8 Ruscia, America, & West: Security Concerns = Islamic Radicalism - TBN > .
24-4-8 [Hamiganda]: How Terrorists in Gaza Manipulate the World - IDF > .
24-2-25 Iran's Bold Claim on Antarctica & Egypt's Gaza Barrier | TBN > .  23-2-27 Alternate Techniques to Fight Pirates in Mid-Ocean - Fluctus > .
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23-10-10 Hamas: Gazan terrorist militants behind atrocities in Israel | ABC > .
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24-4-25 Red Sea | US Strategy Against the Houthis - Shipping > .
Resisting Terrorists - αλλο >> .

Most modern terrorist attacks occur in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. 

This is your brain on terrorism - Vox > .


Versus Terrorism ..

Most terrorism experts would probably agree that terrorism is an ideologically non-specific tactic, used to achieve political change, and in play since prehistoric times. It is non-specific (neutral), although not necessarily acceptable, in that it has been used by militants embracing most political ideologies – except for pacifism – and by authoritarian as well as liberal states such as Great Britain, France and the USA.

Although no universally accepted definition exists, there is agreement about its main elements. Terrorism is the threat or use of violence, it is politically or ideologically motivated and the violence is used to communicate a message of political change and intimidation to individuals or groups beyond its immediate victims. In short, terrorism is best understood as violence used as a form of political communication manipulation.
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Although modern terrorism followed the emergence of modern mass politics and mass media, terrorist violence has probably been used as a political tactic since time immemorial. The Jewish Zealots and the Islamic Assassins were ancient terrorists. They used violence to communicate messages of freedom from opposition and resistance to submission.
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Terrorism’s modern meaning and use to label an intentional political tactic came with the French Revolution. During The Terror, Robespierre described it as a virtuous form of violence, to be used by the new revolutionary democratic state against its domestic enemies.

Following this, the labels of terrorism and terrorists were used by 19th century newspapers to describe intimidation and violence by states against their subjects, such as “the terrorism practiced by the police” in Russia and the “oppressive system of military terrorism” in Poland.

Modern terrorism, which implies the systematic use of violence against the state, rather than by it, emerged in Europe in the 1870s. The person generally recognised as the first terrorist was the 26-year-old social revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who shot the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878 to protest the Russian state’s repression of domestic political protest.
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The new violent political practice was soon institutionalised with the emergence of organised terrorist groups. First came Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), a group of Russian social revolutionaries and self-proclaimed terrorists, who in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II with a dynamite bomb.
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Britain's first bomb disposal expert: Colonel Vivian Majendie and the original ‘war on terror’.

On the last day of February 1884, the then home secretary Sir William Harcourt rose in the UK parliament to answer a question about a series of bomb attacks on two of London’s major railway stations. He read out details of an initial investigation of two bombs, one which had detonated at Victoria Station and another which had been discovered, unexploded, at Charing Cross.

The bombs, which had been deposited in the stations’ left luggage offices, were of a similar design, and resembled the remains of bombs that had detonated, Harcourt said, in Glasgow, Liverpool and elsewhere in London. The unexploded device, discovered by a vigilant ticket clerk at Charing Cross, and the remains of the bomb that had detonated at Victoria were rushed to the Woolwich Arsenal.
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It is almost impossible to pinpoint the very first act of terrorism carried out within British territory. The most famous incident in early modern history is probably the gunpowder plot of 1605 when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the House of Lords. And although he is the best remembered (on November 5), Fawkes did not act alone. He was part of a larger network of 13 conspirators who sought to destroy parliament and trigger a popular uprising.

In the second half of the 19th century, European anarchism introduced the idea of “propaganda by deed” as a tactic of anti-government resistance. This consisted of the assassination of government officials and bomb attacks in public places such as cafes and theatres.

Although anarchist attacks were actually more common in continental Europe, England was an important hub for anarchist thought. The less restrictive laws of the United Kingdom made it a haven for radicals fleeing political repression in their own countries.

In the same period, the heavy death toll of the Great Famine in Ireland from 1846 to 1852 prompted calls for Irish home rule and resulted in the formation of networks of radical revolutionaries, the Fenians.

Although the largest Fenian campaigns were waged in Canada and in Ireland itself, attacks within England included the bombing of Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867, in which 12 people were killed and more than 100 injured. The result was a severe backlash by British authorities and the public, which undermined the political reforms that would have made future attacks less likely.
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Recent acts of spectacular violence, such as the mail bombs sent by a tRUMP-supporter to American anti-tRUMP critics, or the mass killings by Canadian “incel” misogynist Alek Minassian, demonstrate a widespread reluctance among media outlets, politicians and authorities to label some acts of ideologically motivated violence as “terrorism”. Such hesitations might give the faulty impression that “terrorism” is reserved purely for anti-Western or Islamist political violence. That is a wrong and dangerous conception.

The first examples of people being labelled “terrorists” were almost exclusively reserved for acts of non-Western terrorism. When terrorist tactics were used against governments and civilians in Western Europe or the USA – by Fenians and anarchists or anti-colonial separatists in British India, for example – "terrorism" was generally not mentioned. Instead, such violence was more often described in terms of "outrage" or "assassination".

This is despite the fact that these groups used the same terrorist tactics and technologies as the Russian terrorists. The new terminology was apparently reserved for the Russian revolutionary cause. It was only after WW1 that these other forms of terrorism in and against Western governments started to more generally be labelled as "terrorism".



Tuesday, July 27, 2021

B3W - Build Back Better World

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23-12-6 Biden's Inflation Reduction Act: impact on world | FT > .
23-10-24 [PooXi, P00ti Secrets at BRI Forum: NoXious World Order - Insight > .
23-9-24 $6.5T Problem: BRI, Unproductive, Decaying Infrastructure | EcEx > .
23-9-16 "Belt & Road to Death" - [XiXiP targeted corrupt governments] - Obs > .
23-9-9 Rich vs Poor African Economies - Econ > . 
23-9-7 Kidnappings, ghost towns: 10 years of Xi’s BRI masterplan | Tele > .
23-8-29 Understanding the Limits of Innovation || Peter Zeihan >> .
23-5-2 America Spends $800 Billion on Vets & War Prep - T&P > . skip > .
23-4-19 [XiXiP whines about G7 2023] - Update > .
23-4-17 G7 2023 Japan - G7 Ministers vs Xinese, Ruscist threats - DW > .
23-4-16 R-U Hybrid Warfare: P00paganda, cyber, hybrid methods - Perun > .
23-1-11 Xinese Warships Spotted in South Pacific - Focus > .
22-11-11 Fortress Xina - Xi's Plans for World Domination - laowhy86 > .
22-10-25 Xina's Q3 details - Update > .
22-9-5 European Union Trust Fund for Africa vs Xina's BRI - IntoEu > . skip > .
22-7-31 How PGII & IPEF could checkmate BRI - CaspianReport > .
22-7-4 PGII/QUAD/NATO - Alliances -> XiXiP Fears | Insights > .
22-3-28 China's Economic Rise—End of the Road - cfr > .
22-1-22 America's New $1.2T Infrastructure Program - TDC > .


22-6-26 PGII (B3W) ..

Build Back Better World (B3W) is an initiative undertaken by G7 countries. Launched in June 2021, the initiative is designed to counter China's strategic influence of the BRI Project (Belt and Road Initiative) by providing an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative for the infrastructure development of the low and middle income countries.

Led by the United States, the G7 countries will work to address the $40 trillion worth of infrastructure needed by developing countries by 2035. The initiative aims to catalyze funding for quality infrastructure from the private sector and will encourage private-sector investments that support "climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality". The initiative builds on the Blue Dot Network, a collaboration that aims to build a global network through lending-based financing to build roads, bridges, airports, ports, power plants.

The B3W efforts are in line with the standards and principles of the Blue Dot Network, relating to the environment and climate, labor and social safeguards, financing, construction, anticorruption, and other areas. On November 4, 2019, U.S. Under Secretary of State Keith Krach formally launched the Blue Dot Network with his Australian and Japanese counterparts with access to $60 billion (United States dollars) of capital from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation ("DFC") at the Indo-Pacific Business Forum in Bangkok.


Krach announced the Blue Dot Network's global trust standards, which are based on "respect for transparency and accountability, sovereignty of property and resources, local labor and human rights, rule of law, the environment, and sound government practices in procurement and financing." Under Secretary Krach committed $2 million (USD) of U.S. State Department seed money for the steering committee and issued an invitation to other G7 members to join. On October 19, 2020, on behalf of the twelve Three Seas nations, President Kersti Kaljulaid endorsed the Blue Dot Network and the Three Seas Summit in Tallinn, Estonia.

On June 7, 2021, the OECD committed to support the Blue Dot Network at the meeting of the Executive Consultation Group in Paris, France. On June 16, 2021, Keith Krach was awarded the Westernization Award by StrategEast for his work as Under Secretary of State in the country of Georgia for leading the Clean Network and Clean Infrastructure initiatives which provides an alternative to the "One Belt One Road" for the countries of Eurasia and is supported by all G7 countries as the "Build Back a Better World".
Building Back Better (BBB) is a strategy aimed at reducing the risk to the people of nations and communities in the wake of future disasters and shocks. The BBB approach integrates disaster risk reduction measures into the restoration of physical infrastructure, social systems and shelter, and the revitalization of livelihoods, economies and the environment.

BBB was first officially described in the United Nations' Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction document, which was agreed on at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction held on March 14–18, 2015, in Sendai, Japan. It was adopted by UN member states as one of four priorities in the Sendai Framework for disaster recovery, risk reduction and sustainable development. The UN General Assembly adopted this document on June 3, 2015.

21-11-18 House Votes To Pass Build Back Better Legislation (D for; R against) > .

The Build Back Better Plan, also known as the Build Back Better Agenda, plan is a projected $1.7 trillion COVID-19 relief, future economic, and infrastructure package proposed by President Joe Biden. If fully enacted, it would include investments in infrastructure, and is projected to create 10 million clean-energy jobs. Expenditures would also include government funds on housing, education, economic fairness and health care.

The plan is divided into three parts: the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 relief package, which passed in March 2021; the American Jobs Plan, a proposal to rebuild America’s infrastructure and create jobs; and the American Families Plan, a proposal to invest in areas related to childcare and education. As of October 27, 2021, the American Rescue Plan is the only plan that has been signed into law, though proposals featured in the American Jobs Plan have been passed in the Senate through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Proposals featured in the American Families Plan are currently under negotiations through the Build Back Better Act.

Shortly before the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States, Biden laid out the following goals for his "Build Back Better" agenda:
  1. "Build a Modern Infrastructure": The United States has consistently underinvest in the development of workers and millions of positions in rising industries, such as construction and healthcare, have not been fulfilled. President Biden's Build Back Better Plan would invest in training initiatives to help the millions of American workers to create high-quality employment in expanding fields through high-quality career and technical education paths and registered apprenticeships.
  2. "Position the U.S. Auto Industry to Win the 21st Century with technology invented in America"
  3. "Achieve a Carbon Pollution-Free Power Sector by 2035"
  4. "Make Dramatic Investments in Energy Efficiency in Buildings, including Completing 4 Million Retrofits and Building 1.5 Million New Affordable Homes": Schools were faced with an estimated shortage of 100,000 teachers before the pandemic, which undermined the education of children. President Biden's Build Back Better Plan will address the lack of teachers and enhance the education of teachers, including providing teacher residencies and by developing programs that provide greater results and generate more POC teachers. During the course of the school year, it would extend free school food to another 9.3 million students and assist families buy food in the summer. The plan includes investing in modernizing school infrastructure to ensure school buildings are up to date, energy efficient, robust, and have technology and laboratory equipment to educate children for the future.
  5. "Pursue a Historic Investment in Clean Energy Innovation"
  6. "Advance Sustainable Agriculture and Conservation"
  7. "Secure Environmental Justice and Equitable Economy Opportunity"

Monday, June 28, 2021

Anglosphere - CANZUK

22-2-14 Australia's Liberal Party = appeasers of CCP - Kevin Rudd > .
22-2-14 The real (Australian) Liberal record on China - Kevin Rudd > .

Saturday, May 22, 2021

Glocalization, Neomedievalism

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Neo-Medievalism and the New World Order - Geopoliticus > .
23-9-1 Rise of economic nationalism | Business Beyond - DW > .
Sociopolitical Conflict

Globalization ⇔ Decoupling ..

The theory of Neomedievalism proposes that the international system is rapidly transforming into a world order similar to that which existed in Medieval Europe, with overlapping structures of authority and multiple loyalties of international actors, which is gradually eroding the power and agency of nation states.

There are two imagined futures in a Neomedieval worldview: one, of a coming anarchy, an era of systemic breakdown and perpetual wars; the second of a New Universalism in which new transnational regimes, which are secular version of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, will be constructed to bring order to the world.
 
Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political theory about modern international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull, it sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping and incomplete sovereignties

The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was first discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the contemporary globalized world:
It is also conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages. In that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with the Pope and (in Germany and Italy) the Holy Roman Emperor above. The universal political order of Western Christendom represents an alternative to the system of states which does not yet embody universal government.
Thus Bull suggested society might move towards "a new mediaevalism" or a "neo-mediaeval form of universal political order", in which individual notions of rights and a growing sense of a "world common good" were undermining national sovereignty. He proposed that such a system might help "avoid the classic dangers of the system of sovereign states by a structure of overlapping structures and cross-cutting loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society while at the same time avoiding the concentration inherent in a world government", though "if it were anything like the precedent of Western Christendom, it would contain more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than does the modern states system".

In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political authority was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has complete sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" include the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as well as the spread of sub-national and devolved governments, such as those of Scotland and Catalonia. These challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Private military companies, multinational corporations and the resurgence of worldwide religious movements (e.g. political Islam) similarly indicate a reduction in the role of the state and a decentralisation of power and authority.

Westphalian sovereignty, or state sovereignty, is a principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. The principle underlies the modern international system of sovereign states and is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that "nothing ... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state." According to the idea, every state, no matter how large or small, has an equal right to sovereignty. Political scientists have traced the concept to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War. The principle of non-interference was further developed in the 18th century. The Westphalian system reached its peak in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it has faced recent challenges from advocates of humanitarian intervention.

Stephen J. Kobrin in 1998 added the forces of the digital world economy to the picture of neomedievalism. In an article entitled "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy" in the Journal of International Affairs, he argued that the sovereign state as we know it – defined within certain territorial borders – is about to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in part to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating outside of the jurisdiction of national law.

Anthony Clark Arend also argued in his 1999 book Legal Rules and International Society that the international system is moving toward a "neo-medieval" system. He claimed that the trends that Bull noted in 1977 had become even more pronounced by the end of the twentieth century. Arend argues that the emergence of a "neo-medieval" system would have profound implications for the creation and operation of international law.

Although Bull originally envisioned neomedievalism as a positive trend, it has its critics. Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror argues that neoconservatives "have exploited neomedievalism's conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends." Similarly, Philip G. Cerny's "Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" (1998) also sees neomedievalism as a negative development and claims that the forces of globalization increasingly undermine nation-states and interstate forms of governance "by cross-cutting linkages among different economic sectors and social bonds," calling globalization a "durable disorder" which eventually leads to the emergence of the new security dilemmas that had analogies in the Middle Ages. Cerny identifies six characteristics of a neomedieval world that contribute to this disorder: multiple competing institutions; lack of exogenous territorializing pressures both on sub-national and international levels; uneven consolidation of new spaces, cleavages, conflicts and inequalities; fragmented loyalties and identities; extensive entrenchment of property rights; and spread of the "grey zones" outside the law as well as black economy.

Glocalization (a portmanteau of globalization and localization) is the "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems." The notion of glocalization "represents a challenge to simplistic conceptions of globalization processes as linear expansions of territorial scales. Glocalization indicates that the growing importance of continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of local and regional levels."

Glocal, an adjective, by definition, is "reflecting or characterized by both local and global considerations." The term “glocal management” in a sense of “think globally, act locally” is used in the business strategies of companies, in particular, by Japanese companies that are expanding overseas.

The concept comes from the Japanese word dochakuka, which means global localization. It had referred to the adaptation of farming techniques to local conditions. It became a buzzword when Japanese business adopted it in the 1980s. The word stems from Manfred Lange, head of the German National Global Change Secretariat, who used "glocal" in reference to Heiner Benking's exhibit Blackbox Nature: Rubik's Cube of Ecology at an international science and policy conference.

"Glocalization" first appeared in a late 1980s publication of the Harvard Business Review. At a 1997 conference on "Globalization and Indigenous Culture", sociologist Roland Robertson stated that glocalization "means the simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies."

"Glocalization" entered use in the English-speaking world via Robertson in the 1990s, Canadian sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman in the late 1990s and Zygmunt BaumanErik Swyngedouw was another early adopter.

In literary theory regarding the use and abuse of texts and tropes from the Middle Ages in postmodernity, the term "neomedieval" was popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1986 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages".

Since the 1990s, "glocalization" has been productively theorized by several sociologists and other social scientists, and may be understood as a process that combines the concerns of localism with the forces of globalization, or a local adaptation and interpretation of global forces. As a theoretical framework, it is compatible with many of the concerns of postcolonial theory, and its impact is particularly recognizable in the digitization of music and other forms of cultural heritage. The concept has since been used in the fields of geography, sociology, and anthropology. It is also a prominent concept in business studies, particularly in the area of marketing goods and services to a heterogenous set of consumers.

Although the Westphalian system developed in early modern Europe, its staunchest defenders [users] can now be found in the non-Western world. The presidents of China and Russia issued a joint statement in 2001 vowing to "counter attempts to undermine the fundamental norms of the international law with the help of concepts such as 'humanitarian intervention' and 'limited sovereignty'". China and Russia have used their United Nations Security Council veto power to block what they see as [claim is] American violations of state sovereignty in Syria. Russia was left out of the original Westphalian system in 1648, but post-Soviet Russia has seen Westphalian sovereignty as a means to balance [oppose] American power by encouraging a multipolar world order [A pseudo-principle diametrically opposed to the military Sovietization of nations occupied and forcefully subsumed into the USSR.].

Some in the West also speak favorably of the Westphalian state. American political scientist Stephen Walt urged U.S. UNpresident Wanna-Be-Autocrat to return to Westphalian principles, calling it a "sensible course" for American foreign policy. American political commentator Pat Buchanan has also spoken in favor of the traditional nation-state.

Addendum to the video presentation -- emergence of Cyberspace as a realm where we might already be seeing Neomedieval structures of power developing and influencing the trajectory of global politics.

New World Order - End of Liberal International System? - https://youtu.be/90rjypFSLVg .

Spheres of Influence in the Cold War - https://youtu.be/tGKnwFNWmQ8 .

Podcast: Theatres of the New Cold War - https://youtu.be/cve8XyTxjiI .

Podcast: Outer Space and Fourth Dimension of Geopolitics - https://youtu.be/Ri3ag1wRIZA .

Americanization .
Cultural homogenization .

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...