Drone Strikes

When I first heard about drone strikes, I was a little bit concerned and I definitely shared an anti-US government sentiment regarding them.

Why? Because the prospect of another country using "bots" to bomb people out of nowhere is downright scary. And for Pakistanis, drone strikes are just a part of everyday life. How unfortunate they must be, how terrified, they must feel.

Only... apparently it only happens in the tribal areas. In fact the more I read about it, the more apathetic I feel towards the issue. Wikipedia seems to think that drone strikes are ok; they seem to be only hitting military (ie taliban) targets and civilian targets who spend a suspiciously large amount of time with said military targets.

And so far they have only killed a couple of thousand people (so the estimates say), which is nothing in the grand scheme of wars and such.

The counter argument to this is that whoever wrote or contributed to this wikipedia article has a strong bias. That may indeed be the case.

Nevertheless, I must congratulate the US on the ingenuity of using UAV's. It certainly keeps their own casualties down...

Honour Killing

So I was watching the last half of a documentary tonight. "Forbidden Lies" tells the story of a writer who wrote a book about an honor killing in Jordan, but as it turns out is a complete fraud.

Which I find sad really. Because these honor killings do occur, and all a fraudulent story serves to do is discredit all those true accounts out there. It is a very real problem.

Before I get too in depth with it though, I should explain what honor killing is. Put simply it is the killing of a family member in order to protect the family's honor. An example might be that a woman in the family committed adultery, if the girl knew she was found out then she might save her honor and her family's honor by suicide bombing some Israelis, if not then the family might kill her to save their honor. That might be an overgeneralisation but that is the gist of what happens.

It is wrong. Unfortunately I don't know how the problem can be solved. On one hand the problem seems rooted into the islamic belief system but if that is the case then why is the figure only 5000-20000 a year? If All muslims were that fundamentalist then presumably the figure would be higher. Then again, maybe the women of islam are just that good at following the laws and customs of their faith.

I'm somewhat inclined to side with Richard Dawkins on this one. If the Muslim faith is causing all these killings then this religion is dangerous.

Before I end this post on such a note however, I would like to add that women are not the only sufferers of honor killing. Fratricide is not as common but it does happen too. And let's not forgot those poor blokes out there who readily kill themselves because they feel they have let Allah and their family down.

As I said before, I can offer no solutions to this problem. But that is no reason to turn a blind eye to it. We all need to be aware of this travesty.

Religion as a Method of Cultural Assimilation

So I was playing empire total war yesterday, and the game crashed, which made me very sad. Before it crashed though I had a bit of a struggle getting my recent islamic conquests to stop rebelling.

I immediately thought of the prospect of training a priest to convert the populace but then found to my dismay that in Empire Total War that you can't train agents.

Now the concept of using religion to maintain control isn't new in these games, but in the past it may have been oversimplified (eg building cathedrals does not convert people to christianity, people convert people to christianity).

I do applaud them for their realism of this aspect of how religion works though.

The fact is, religion is an efficient way to culturally assimilate people. Where religion fails to culturally assimilate though, is where there is another religion present.

Carbon Cash

Carbon Cash sounds a lot better than boring old carbon tax, which is why I used it as the title for today's post. Unfortunately, I am not talking about carbon based angiosperms growing hundred dollar bills on them.

I hate carbon tax. It hasn't been implemented yet in Australia but it is a very hotly debated subject in parliament.
I can see why the government would want it; the government increases its revenue all in the name of being concerned about the environment.

I don't believe for a second that any politician of the major parties genuinely cares for the environment. All I can see that will come of this carbon tax is that the far majority of the revenue from it will just get absorbed by the bureaucracy and a tiny smidgen of it might go towards actually fixing our carbon addiction.

But that isn't my main concern. It is the effect that it will have on the people. Not everyone can afford to pay this carbon tax. Taxes are high enough as it is, the last thing we need is another tax.

My rudimentary economics knowledge begs to differ, higher taxes just mean less private spending which reduces economic growth (on the consumer side) and inflation. This is not a bad thing. Unfortunately, with the advent of credit cards, higher taxes will probably just mean higher private debt as citizens resort to using their credit cards to pay the bills.

It has been suggested to leave those who are financially struggling exempt from the tax or give them some kind of compensation to make up for the new tax. This sets a dangerous precedence for class warfare though.
And what happens in a big recession and unemployment hits 40%? Suddenly the carbon tax revenue crashes and the government has a big black hole in their tax revenue (on top of all the other losses in revenue that happen to a nation's government during a recession).

We could just keep the carbon tax for industry and not consumers... In which case this puts direct economical pressure on small businesses (the big businesses can easily afford a carbon tax). It doesn't even address the problem either. 68% of carbon dioxide produced in Australia comes from our power plants and most of their power goes to major cities to supply the consumer (http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/gh_faq.htm).
Another ~20% is produced by agriculture, but we wouldn't want to tax our farmers would we?

Whether you believe in climate change or not ( I do, just for the record), this is a bad policy. There are other ways to fight climate change, slapping a tax on the problem will not make it go away no more than throwing money at it will make it go away. Here are some better suggestions: legally restrict carbon emmisions (eg energy suppliers cannot produce more than a tonne of carbon dioxide per kilowatt), subsidise renewable energies, etc. They aren't the best suggestions,I know, but they seem a lot better than adding a carbon tax in my opinion.

Finally, may I just finish off with a quote another climatically concerned citizen brought to my attention:

"We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-Winston Churchill

venting

For those who read my posts purely for the warfare, religion or politics, stop reading now. This is a personal post. I'm terribly sorry. There is, however, nothing more prominent on my mind than what has been troubling me this afternoon.

It all started when I let my nephew play Dawn of War Dark Crusade on my laptop. He finished his homework and I was busy reading Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov anyway so it seemed like a reasonable request.
 Suddenly, during Dark Crusade, the unthinkable happened. It crashed in a vehement, violent display of vibrant colours.




At first I thought it was just the game crashing my system because of some random error which probably would only occur once every million uses. So I rebooted.

And I felt a sickening twisting deep in my gut as I saw 7 white columns of horizontal lines appear as my computer posted, then they disappeared. Windows started to boot but then crashed with a blue screen, implying that "nvlddmkm.sys" was to blame. So it seemed as if there was either a problem with the graphics card or driver. Funny that, seeing in all my years of having this desktop with that particular driver and graphics card I have never had this problem.

So I rebooted in safe mode (in safe mode the display drivers are disabled) which worked and then proceeded to update my drivers. The white columns of lines were still present. My pessimism returned with fervor.
 Then windows crashed during start up. My pessimism was realism in disguise.

So it seems my old nvidia 8800 GTS has died.... Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't see what else might be causing this problem. Any techies out there, feel free to give some advice...

In the meantime, Farewelll Graphics Card. I will miss you...

What can games tell us about War? -Rome Total War and Medieval Total War 2

Last post I mentioned how games can be historically informative, this post I shall go more in depth on the matter.

The game I indulged in last weekend was Medieval Total War 2. Medieval Total War 2 is an excellent example of a game that not only sticks to the history but also teaches some history in the process.

Firstly, there is the campaign screen where the player chooses their faction. Each faction has a description which give an excellent historical background on the faction as well as a historically accurate list of their chief advantages and disadvantages.

For example, I chose the Byzantine Empire. Within a minute of reading I am reminded that the Byzantine Empire is in decline during this period, the empire is stagnating and gradually losing territories. Furthermore, their advantages consist of good cavalry and reasonable archers while their disadvantage is that their late game technology is quite poor (again this is historically accurate).

The game play is historically accurate too. For example, spearmen are quite good against cavalry provided they do not get flanked. But their are also more subtle things like the fact that when it comes down to  heavy infantry vs cavalry, the cavalry will do a lot of damage during the charge but then as the fighting drags on, the heavy infantry come out on top.

Finally, there is the pop ups for the various inventions, the plague and the Mongol and Timurid invasions which are historically accurate and historically timed.

And just like in the history books, the Mongolian hordes have a weakness; their cavalry rich composition means they are ill equipped for siege warfare.

I have not played Rome Total War for a while but it too is historically accurate for the most part. The gameplay is definitely historically accurate; the Roman infantry is the best in the game and history tells us that the Roman infantry was the best in the world (although this depends on the era). Again, the pop ups, like the Marian reforms are accurate,

My only complaint as to the historical accuracy of Rome Total War is the 3 Roman factions. While individual patricians would command Roman armies and individual patricians were made governors, patrician families did not have their own armies and provinces. And when the provincial governor died,  a new governor was appointed by the senate (more specifically, the praetors and consuls).

Overall, these two games are historically accurate and I am impressed by them.
As for what they can teach us about war? Quite a substantial amount.
In Rome Total War I learnt about the power of Roman heavy infantry but how they had trouble against the eastern cavalry based armies in the field (eg Parthian cavalry).
In both games I learnt the importance of protecting one's flanks. Or about how cavalry are good at protecting the flanks and also at flanking the opponent but how they are mostly useless when it comes to siege warfare.

What can games tell us about War?

So you have no doubt read about my comparisons between Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and the nature of human society.

This weekend I actually had enough free time to play a computer game much to my pleasant surprise. So let's have a look at how historically accurate they are and what they can tell us about our own history. I would argue a lot, but games are a bit like websites; some are remarkably accurate and others are completely wrong.

In the category of historically accurate games I would place:
Rome Total War.
Medieval Total War 2 (maybe I should put the whole total war series up here but i haven't played them all :(, would my readers care to help me out here?)
Civilization 4 and 5 (at the very least the quotes are historically accurate)
Stronghold Crusader (purely because of the historical missions, which I thought were pretty bad)
Pharoah -the gameplay may be slightly misleading but I can forgive the game developers for this. The mission briefings are excellent
Medal Of Honour Allied Assualt

And I'm sure there are plenty more but they are all I can think of off the top of my head.... Feel free to add to the list.

In the category of slightly misleading games I would put:
Call of Duty 1  -My main complaint is that you play as an allied soldier and you kill vast numbers of Germans who clearly outnumber you, in reality the US and USSR pretty much zerg rushed the Germans who had their forces stretched out very thin. For this game to be historically accurate, you would either have a huge allied army on your side throughout the missions, or you would be a lone German soldier facing overwhelming numbers of allied troops
The Age of Empires series+Age of Mythology -While most of the briefings are more or less accurate, the missions are ridiculously divergent from history. That goes for age of mythology too, but in it's case it is the mythology that is wrong.
Caesar 5 -At first glance the briefings seem accurate, but as soon as I started looking up the names of the settlements I was building, I found that it was not the case.

As for the category of very misleading games, I can't think of any games to put into it but I'm sure there is a plethora of them...