Month: August 2016

Is environmentalist solidarity with Indigenous peoples opportunistic?

During the last few years, solidarity with Indigenous peoples has been a major area of emphasis for environmentalist, climate change activist, and anti-pipeline groups. In part, this seems to be based on the view that indigenous peoples have the strongest legal tools for blocking new fossil fuel projects, at least in Canada.

This raises the question of how genuine the support for Indigenous people really is. Do these environmental groups provide such support principally for the narrow (yet essential) purpose of avoiding catastrophic climate change? Is it somehow automatically the case that indigenous communities will choose low-carbon energy if given more power to influence political and economic choices? When Indigenous groups support fossil fuel development, for whatever reason, what is the appropriate response for those seeking to prevent catastrophic climate change? And even if the impulse to prevent catastrophic climate change is morally laudable, how should indigenous communities feel about being used as a means to that end?

Risks in the U.S. nuclear command system

Had the watch officer [who correctly identified that an apparent nuclear attack in 1979 wasn’t real] come to a different conclusion, the alert would have gone all the way to the president, waking him, and giving him perhaps ten minutes to make a decision about the fate of the world with little context or background to inform that choice.

That is why I regard as seriously flawed the nuclear alert decision process – it expects the president to make this fearsome decision in minutes and with very little context. But that was how our decision process worked then, and essentially, still works today.

With such a decision process, a huge premium must be given to the context that informs the decisions made – by the watch officer, by the commander of NORAD, and by the president – and by their counterparts in the Soviet Union. Achieving context is one of the critical reasons (largely overlooked) for pursuing arms control agreements.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.53 (paperback)

Perry on the politics of deterrence

Discussions of the adequacy of our defensive forces are typically based on their ability to deter. Indeed, that is a fundamental requirement. But I was soon to learn that it was not the only requirement, and not necessarily the primary driver of force size. Our deterrent forces were also weighed on a political scale: do they give us parity with the forces of the Soviet Union? I did not regard that as the key issue, but I can testify that during the Cold War, no US president was willing to accept nuclear forces smaller than those of the Soviet Union. And I believe that this perceived imperative did more to drive the nuclear arms race than the need for deterrence. But I am convinced that we could have confidence in our deterrence even if we only had submarine-based missiles. Thus, once we were satisfied that we had adequate deterrence, the reality was that the size and composition of the deterrent force was determined primarily by a political imperative: that our force was at parity with the forces of the Soviet Union. (This same imperative seems to apply. We do not need thousands of nuclear weapons to deter Russia today, but for political reasons we are unwilling to reduce our deployed weapons below the equal numbers – 1,550 deployed strategic weapons – agreed to in the New START arms agreement.)

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p.46 (paperback)

My new library

INOVA custom bookcase

Since moving out of Massey College, the great majority of my books have been inside a heap of banker’s boxes, both cluttering my room and impeding access to them for PhD purposes.

A few days ago, I finally received delivery of a custom bookcase from INOVA, designed to fill the largest available space in my room. It’s pretty close to capacity with my existing collection of books, and it greatly improves the visual appeal of my room and ease of reference.

Three additions to the Hive

For about nine months now I have been enjoying John Yianni’s excellent strategy game Hive, both online (on boardgamearena.com and more recently boardspace.net) and in person with Amanda, Nada, Ainslee, Tristan, Anna, and other friends.

In the basic version of the game each player has a queen bee, which they must protect at all costs; ants which are highly mobile but can’t squeeze through small openings; spiders which must always move three spaces in the same direction; grasshoppers which can jump straight over other pieces; and beetles which can climb atop the hive. Together, these set up a complex strategy game where the implications of every choice must be carefully considered, and where one surprise move can easily reverse the tide of the game.

In addition to the five classic bugs, there are three bug expansions available which I recently received as gifts. The ladybug is a cross between a spider and a beetle: able to move atop the hive, but only in a specifically prescribed pattern in each turn. It’s especially useful for endgames, when you need to fill in the last remaining spaces around the enemy queen. The mosquito adds a lot to the complexity of the game by inheriting the movement abilities and special abilities of any adjacent piece, friendly or enemy. I find it especially satisfying to force a win by placing a mosquito which is then able to surround the queen in either of two ways.

The real game-changer, however, is the pillbug. It’s the only bug that can pick up and move an adjacent piece, which adds considerable complexity. With a pillbug beside your queen, you are often able to make her escape when your opponent is on the cusp of victory. As such, any game with one or more defensive pillbugs becomes dominated by the need to neutralize your opponent’s.

I strongly recommend the game — especially to people who enjoy the chesslike combination of a game with no random chance (no dice throws, no cards to shuffle) and no hidden information. It works especially well for annotated play, in which players collaborate to choose the strongest move for each player in each turn, yielding a game at a much higher skill level than either could manage alone.

If anyone wants to give it a try on boardgamearena or boardspace, with or without the expansion pieces, please let me know. Especially with the new pieces in play, I am not yet consistently as good as boardspace’s ‘Dumbot’ AI, but that should progressively change with practice and further perusal of Randy Ingersoll’s How to Play Hive Like a Champion.