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Decades ago Samuel Huntington penned a dismal, dystopian tome aboutthe future of conflict. He predicted a great cultural clash. How right he wasjust not in the way he thought.

Witness the rabid reaction to the revised travel ban issued this week by the Trump administration. It reflects not the battle between Islam and the West, but the West waging war with itself.

Huntington's thesis held that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. In his Futureworld, Western modernity and the Islamic polity would endlessly clash.

Certainly, we have problems along these lines today. Look no further than Europe's unsettling efforts to accommodate immigrants and refugees from the Middle East. It's a deeply complex situation, one that reflects European economic malaise, the collapsing European welfare state and failed multiculturalism as much as the Islamist terrorist threat that thrives in the dark, damp clammy spaces in between.

Yet, arguably, Europe is experiencing more a case of cultural frictionrather than an outright clashbetween civilizations. For every fault line between the greater Islamic World and the West, there is a bridge of economic, military, political, culture and civil society holding the world together.

The bigger cultural war in the West is between Trump and his critics. On the one side is a new administration fiercely committed to tearing down the institutional constructs of progressivism and globalism. On the other, are those seeking to destroy the last remnants of nationalism. It's a battle that is not confined to America. Brexit was the first big offensive in a parallel conflict in Europe.That's not say there the United States and the rest of the West don't have serious problems with balancing patriotic assimilation and cultural diversity. This is an enduring challenge for free and open societies, and one that we must get right. But that's different than saying the West is at war with the rest of the world.

As this battle of ideas has escalated, so too has the rhetoric. Increasingly, both sides seek to demonize the other camp.

Indeed, a key tactic of the resistance against Trump is to accuse his administration of fomenting Huntington's dreaded clash of civilizations. Labeling Trump's policies as fascist and racist only douses smoldering differences with gasoline.

That's not a new rhetorical attack vector. The same tactics were used against Bush, most famously in the kerfuffle over the Patriot Act. Rather than have an honest debate over appropriate measures to combat terrorism in the post-9/11 world, Bush's opponents went postal.

The American Civil Liberties Union raised millions by mischaracterizing the act as a threat to Americans.Their website still admonishes: While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects. But the ACLU should realize that that culture war is over. The Patriot Act has been around for more than a decade and a half now, through Republican and Democratic administrations. Yet the Constitution is just fine, and there no concentration camps full of American citizens.

But old habits are hard to break. Since labeling Bush an anti-Muslim fascist seemed to workat least as a money-maker if not as a winning policy argumentdoing the same to Trump looks to be a no-brainer to the Left.

Arguably, Trump's opponents couldn't have picked a better target than his executive order pausing some refugee and other traffic into the United States. After all, all seven countries subject to the orders travel restrictions were majority Muslim. The administration was just getting its feet on the ground. Further, the White House did a poor job rolling the measure out, and it was unprepared for a swift and sweeping counterattack.

But that was over a month ago. Now, the White House is back with a sequel, issuing its revised and updated order yesterday. And opponents are as angry as everand using the same talking points. For example, theyre still characterizing the executive order 2.0 as anti-Muslim.

Yet the travel restrictions never were designed to be anti-Muslim. Rather, they were clearly intended to address a legitimate, emerging security threat: the likelihood that, after ISIS is defeated on the battlefields, its surviving foreign fighters will flow into these countries and from there try to make their way to the West. Their goal: to pull off terrorist attacks in the midst of the enemy to prove that transnational Islamist terrorism is still in the fight.

The revised order is built to address that threat. Moreover, it has been constructed in a way to make clear that it is not anti-Muslim. First, all of the original orders references to religious minorities have been removed, undercutting the argument that somehow the order was intended to disadvantage Muslim travelers at the expense of others.

In addition, the revised order removes a predominantly Muslim countryIraqfrom the ban. The reason for its removal is telling. After the first order was issued, the Iraqi government agreed to implement additional security measures that made terrorist travel from the country less likely. Since enhance security is the true purpose of both orders, this adjustment make perfect sense

A Department of Homeland Security official said of the revised order that there were no current plans to add any more countries, Muslim or otherwise. But he also said that, after the implementation phase, they would assess what steps to take next. That's the right answer. The global Islamist terrorist threat is dynamic. The U.S. response should be dynamic, determined not just to keep up withbut to stay ahead ofthe threat.

Meanwhile, in the West, the culture wars will doubtless continue. All we can ask is for more maturity from both sides to keep legitimate security measures out of the crossfire.

Visit link:
The Culture War Surrounding Trump's Travel Restrictions | The ... - Heritage.org

Look! Squirrel! Lawmakers tackle divisive social issues

Its become something of a tradition for the Mississippi Legislature which convenes Tuesday for its 2017 session to have at least one humdinger of a bill that gets the collective knickers of lawmakers and the commonwealth all in a twist and draws national attention of the What the heck? variety....

...Most such legislation is probably a bit of all of the above. And, it appears to be part of the legislative condition. One person's ridiculous or unneeded legislation is another's top priority.

Mississippis Legislature isnt alone in coming up with weird, divisive or socially or religiously charged proposals. We just seem to be better at it than most. And, given our history and the perception of us by others, we seem to get more national attention and criticism for it. "Saturday Night Live" once described Mississippis Legislature as 30 hissing possums in a barn in response to some bizarre pending legislation. PR like that is, again, priceless. Possum dolls still occasionally show up on the House or Senate floors....

...A couple of well-placed sources have told me that legislative, religious and other leaders have met and vowed to avoid such a barn burner this year, or as one put it, They said were not going to fight the culture wars this session.

Clarion Ledger 1/1/17

Posted January 2, 2017 - 11:06 am

See more here:
#msleg leaders seek to not fight the culture wars this session - Yall Politics

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Nicholas Rigg/Getty Images

Major General Dale Meyerrose jokes that he doesnt think much of millennials. But he does largely credit that generation with fundamentally changing the way the US intelligence community collaborates.

In 2005, when Meyerrose worked as the Associate Director of National Intelligence, he was tasked with figuring out how to get 16 different spy agenciesall accustomed to decades of siloed secrecyto talk to each other. In the end, one of his most lasting accomplishments was championing a small grassroots effort led by young analysts that resulted in what would become Intellipedia.

Think of Intellipedia as a Wikipedia for spies. It works the same, except that theres no anonymity for contributors, and nothing can ever be unsourced. Its contents range from Unclassified to Top Secret, though its the lowest rung of Top Secret. Anyone in the executive branchwhich includes the intelligence communityhas enough clearance to access it. According to one intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the community, the Intellipedia that exists today is part wiki, part bulletin board, part internal newspaper. Its a great place to come in and see whats happening in the community as a whole, the official says.

Thats helpful, but its not the game-changing collaboration tool National Geospatial Intelligence-Agency analyst Chris Rasmussen, who was one of Intellipedias earliest and most ardent users, had hoped for. Back in 2006, he and his fellow Intellipedians, as they called themselves, imagined full crowd-sourced intelligence reports, those official documents that land on the desks of high-level government officials and shape foreign and domestic policy. Its fallen well short. Intellipedia helped the intelligence community catch up to Web 2.0, but still has far to go before it lives up to its original promise.

In the days after 9/11, intelligence operatives learned that their aversion to sharing information had allowed warnings about the attack to go unheeded. The spy agencies were operating as they had since the Cold War, when their main enemy was the Soviet Union, a monolith they understood and, more importantly, could predict. Now, not only was the enemy more broadly distributed, there was more information than ever, and no single place to organize and share it.

The idea for Intellipedia first caught on after D. Calvin Andrus, an Innovation Officer at the CIA, wrote an essay in 2005 that suggested the same power of Wikipedia and blogs to aggregate and share information could also support the high-stakes world of spying. The essay spread, and before long, Meyerrose gave the all-clear to set up a server to try it out. It was truly a grassroots effort, bottom up in the analyst community, he says.

What wasnt obvious to the powers-that-be back then, before the iPhone or Facebook existed, was that anyone would use it. Nobody thought it would catch on, Meyerrose says. Looking back on it, Im absolutely certain of all the senior officials I told Oh, this is a good idea, most of them thought that it would die of its own weight.

It didnt. Rasmussen and the other young analysts just kept writing articles and submitting them to the growing Intellipedia library. There was cachet in getting your contributions accepted. When people contested facts in the discussion section, things got hairy. This is tribal warfare, Meyerrose says. By 2008, when he retired, he couldnt go into any field office and not see a shortcut to Intellipedia on every computer screen.

Over a decade since its inception, Intellipedia has grown into a standard part of the intelligence communitys workday. It has a homepage with featured and developing articles, help pages, and requests for collaboration. You can find tips on tradecraft in its pages, and primers on conflicts in certain parts of the world. After news broke Tuesday of a leak of CIA hacking data, you can bet theres a page explaining whats known about that. It runs on Intelink, the internal classified intranet network that links all the agencies and is operated by a team overseen by DNI.

Its the spying worlds office water cooler.

The New York Times reported last week that Obama aides had scrambled to get as much information about the investigation into Russias meddling with the 2016 election onto Intellipedia as they could, knowing that would mean a broad range of analysts across multiple agencies would see it. Which makes sense. Intellipedia can help spark conversation. Its the spying worlds office water cooler.

Rasmussen always wanted it to be more, though. His dream was that eventually analysts could use Intellipediaor something like itto streamline the process of creating National Intelligence Estimates. But when Intellipedians tried to write NIEs on Intellipedia in 2006, 2007, bureaucracy got in the way. Every agency has a slightly different process for writing reports, and getting people to deviate from that for something so radically crowd-sourced proved impossible.

Realizing Intellipedia wasnt ever going to be accepted as an official voice of the intel community, Rasmussen tried to create a more official version of it after-the-fact. He called it the Living Intelligence System, and you can watch his YouTube video pitch about the specifics of how it worked here. Though it won accolades from the community, and became a real opt-in program, Living Intelligence never caught on.

Everyone agreed that the tech was better, most people agreed that the process benefits were better, but they just couldnt make the pivot, Rasmussen says.

But Rasmussen is tenacious. He fervently believes that the intelligence community would benefit from streamlined collaboration. To find a place for it, he just needed a part of the process that wasnt already mired in bureaucracy.

He found it by focusing on a specific chunk of most intelligence reports. Any given report will be roughly 20-percent classified infothe spooky stuff, Rasmussen calls itand 80-percent unclassified context and background that someone reading the spooky stuff needs to know to understand why the hell it matters. Its less sensitive. It represents an opportunity.

For the past few years, Rasmussen has led a team working to create an entirely new way to crowdsource that 80 percent. It still wont live up to that original dream of fully crowdsourced reportingbut it could get the community most of the way. Itll even, because this is 2017, have an app.

As Meyerrose would say, the millennials will love that.

Read more here:
The Wikipedia for SpiesAnd Where It Goes From Here - WIRED

Shia LaBeouf, Rnkk and Turners ongoing He Will Not Divide Us protest has proven to be divisive. What wasostensibly a place for supporters to congregate and express their disapproval of the election of Donald Trump, and to stand up against the ongoing division faced by US citizens as a result of his rhetoric, eventually became a breeding ground for conflict, and has now been dismantled by users of the controversial anonymous image board 4chan.

Originally staged in Queens, New Yorks Museum of the Moving Image, the live streamed ongoing protest was prematurely shut downin February as a result of the continued unrest, despite LaBeouf, Rnkk and Turner intending for it to remain active for the full four years of Trumps presidency. He Will Not Divide Us was then moved toAlbuquerque, though LaBeouf was again forced to move its location after shots were fired nearby. Eventually LaBeouf changed the protest from a public event to a live streamedvideo of a flag waving in an undisclosed location, though now 4chan users have discovered its whereabouts and replaced it with a flag bearing the alt-rights co-opted Pepe The Frog symbol, along with a Make America Great Again hat.

4chan used contrails and the alignment of the stars to work out the flags location.

Users on 4chan began searching for the location of the flag after analyzing the stars that appeared in the stream during the evening. After determining a general location using the location of the stars, they then used the contrails left by planes that were visible in this stream, comparing them with FAA flight paths to narrow down the position of the flag. A nearby 4chan user then drove around this location, honking his horn until it could be heard in the live stream, until it was eventually found. They then replaced the white He Will Not Divide Us flag with an image of Pepe, the cartoon frog that has been adopted by supporters of the alt-right, along with a MAGA hat for good measure.

The push to ruin LaBeoufs protest, which 4chan users referred to as Capture The Flag, has been one of few moments of solidarity on the site since the US election. As we previously reported,4chan previously made efforts to stand up against politicians and the establishment regardless of its users political inclinations, though the Donald Trump presidency has caused the site to become fractured. Anonymous, the hacktivist collective forged on the image board, has spoken out against its inability to protest Trumps presidency as a result of this division, calling upon its members to still hold the 45th president of the US accountable for his actions. Unfortunately, it appears that the majority have already picked their side, as the continued growth of the alt-right has enveloped channer culture and made the two indistinguishable from one another.

Watch the video of 4chan capturing the flag below:

See the rest here:
4chan Replaces Shia LaBeouf's 'He Will Not Divide Us' Flag With Pepe - Crave Online

Author Ann Coulter said that immigration authorities should concentrate their efforts to stop the immigration of people who "rip off government programs."

Coulter said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that there should be a way to stop certain immigrants "whose specialty is committing crimes against our entitlement programs."

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"There's a specialty in computer hacking and credit card stealing and ripping off government programs," she said.

Coulter said it is difficult to track statistics involving crimes committed by immigrants, and that it is "telling" that advocates for strong border enforcement like herself are "always" the ones wanting the stats.

She said it is easier to get statistics on how many American houses have "broken stair railings" than it is to find certain data involving criminal illegal immigrants.

"They absolutely want to take [Attorney General] Sessions out because they want to keep this dump of the third world going on America," she said of her ideological opposition.

"How many [immigrants] are committing crimes, what kind of crimes, and how much does that cost the country?" she asked.

Tucker Carlson said such obscuring of statistics would constitute "willful [and] in effect a cover-up."

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Coulter: We Must Stop Immigrants Who 'Rip Off Government Programs' - Fox News Insider