This is useful for life in general, not merely on the game-board of strategy.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
This is useful for life in general, not merely on the game-board of strategy.
The obvious answer is: “be Afghani.” That implies being in place, having local support (whether coerced, enthusiastic or not) and being indistinguishable from the local population. That’s an approximate recipe for a successful insurgency.
Imagine you are walking down a dark alleyway, alone, at night. Suddenly, the menacing music starts and the fog-machine turns on. You spin around and see, coming out of the fog toward you, a ${whatever} clutching a sharp knife that’s already dripping blood from previous use.
This is a counterpoint to our lesson regarding the parking pastor. [stderr] [Read more…]
Warning: Weird, Sexual, Fetish
This sort of nonsense is the consequence of allowing “but I’m a preacher!” to carry some kind of implied moral status – or as a general-purpose excuse for anything. The reason is simple: by assuming there is something special about a preacher, we may mistakenly think they are better strategists than they are.
The strategic genius says, “when you are throwing people under a bus, make sure that your other staff won’t realize you’re the kind of person who will throw them under a bus, too.”
My posting about the paradox of “self defense” triggered much more response than I expected. [stderr]
Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.
It seems that the current trend in conflict is not to merely defeat your foe, but to humiliate them afterward.
Terrorism is the process of manipulating the public’s perception through the fear of violence.