Sipsey Street Irregulars: "On Vladimir Putin, Black Swans And Pink Flamingoes."

Saturday, October 10, 2015

"On Vladimir Putin, Black Swans And Pink Flamingoes."

"What neither Taleb nor Hoffman foresaw, however, is that Black Swans can morph into Pink Flamingoes, at least in the arena of national security. We have an example of this phenomenon. Vladimir Putin has undertaken a series of political-military actions in various parts of the world, none of which were anticipated by Western observers and intelligence officials and each of which have had significant consequences."

2 comments:

Chiu ChunLing said...: It seems, on surveying the sorts of events that are referred to as "Black Swan" events, they already "cannot" be predicted only because of the cognitive biases of those who are in positions of power. For something to be genuinely impossible to predict, it would have to at the very least be something that nobody actually predicted. Vladimir Putin's various antics (along with the financial collapse, rise of ISIS, current "Syrian refugee" crisis, etc.) do not qualify, many people predicted them but they were all roundly ignored and marginalized.

There are occasionally events which genuinely cannot be predicted in the usual sense because the conceptual framework to describe them is not present before the event occurs and necessitates the development of the necessary language tokens to communicate about it. Even given the capacity to imagine such events in a given individual (or several), without the ability to describe it in understandable language, it is unavoidable that any warning attempted will fall on deaf (or at least uncomprehending) ears.

But a Black Swan, like the arch-typical example from which the term is derived, is something that can be readily imagined and described in simple terms but is rejected out of hand as an impossibility by those who 'know better'.; October 10, 2015 at 2:56 AM
Nemesis said...: All the poking and prodding of Russia by Europe-NATO-United States by the Obama admin over the past four years, for example; the coup in Ukraine, the 'sanctions' placed on Russia in order to collapse its economy, the stirring up of the Middle East into the very real problem the whole world now faces - these actions were not considered to provoke reactions from Russia????????

Black Swans and Flamingos? No, just bloody idiots who live off an ideology that pretends to know the real world.; October 10, 2015 at 5:58 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Saturday, October 10, 2015

"On Vladimir Putin, Black Swans And Pink Flamingoes."

2 comments:

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