Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

One of the (now classic) statements against those of us who feel that sacrifice of our essential liberty for temporary safety in the Global War on Terrah is that we simply don't understand that "the terrorists will destroy the United States." Frankly, there are two arguments against this. The first is the most obvious to me: "Al Quaeda can't destroy the United States. Only we can." If we lose sight of what the United States was meant to be, we can legislate it out of existence. Our Founding Fathers didn't just foresee this event, they encouraged it. The reason we aren't governed under the Articles of Confederation is because it was voted out of existence by the nascent United States. This wasn't just a provisional post-colonial form of government. The fact that the Articles of Confederation provided for their own abolition represented a giant leap for democratic governments. Without a bloody revolution, the whole structure of the country changed overnight. The United States of America will continue until we kill it. Even if the US Government loses its "monopoly on force" inside our borders, as long as we hold the Constitution as the authoritative voice here, the US has survived. The second is that the "Teherrarists" might kill a lot of people. Let's face it, this is true. This week, on the anniversary of Little Boy's detonation over Nagasaki I would just like to put this in perspective: To date, international terrorists have destroyed six airplanes and three buildings. I grew up in the 1980's. We had nuclear weapons drills when I was young, which seemed to tell us that the cinder block walls of my school would protect us from a nuclear attack on the uranium refinement center near our home. This was bad. But this is still renders the current threat almost laughable. As America huddled around their 1980's televisions to watch The Day After it was obvious that global thermonuclear war meant not just the end of the American Experiment, but the end of humanity as we have known it for ~500,000 years (or 6,000 years, depending on whether or not you are a fucktard). Compared to the end of Civilization with a capital C, does the threat of a terrorist detonating a nuclear weapon seem even remotely relevant? Sure, the Sum of All Fears scenario is horrible, but frankly, as a "Child of the 80's" it seems like a damned near piddling threat. Hell, under this administration we lost a "Tier 2" American city, and in spite of the fact that the government seems to not care, life certainly goes on. If I learned anything from "Bush fiddled while New Orleans Drowned," it is that the threat of an isolated "WMD" in the hands of a terrorist is not something that even remotely threatens this country. I had a brief exchange this evening w/r/t the American Civil War. I briefly mocked the South's lack of shame for their deplorable actions -- at least the Germans have the good sense to be embarrassed by their role in history. However, after a bit of discussion we both agreed that maybe secession might not be such a bad idea in the modern world. The US has become so large as to not be governable. At least, not by a government that represents the people adequately. This doesn't mean I yearn for the destruction of the Constitution. I think it is still one of the seminal documents in the history of humanity. What I mean is that "Democracy" suffers from a scalability problem. It failed at the City-State level in Greece. The advent of "Republicanism" in Rome fell apart at the Trans-State level. Certainly the greatest inspiration on our Founding Fathers to believe Republicanism could scale was the printing press. The problem is, again, one of scale. While I would like to believe the Internet represents the technology that can scale Republicanism to hundreds of millions, given its inherent conflict with broadcast media for the foreseeable future, I am just not sure. If "Open Source" and its derivatives -- Linux, Wikipedia, etc -- have shown us anything it is that the greatest power in the Internet age comes from self-organizing communities. Even down to Islamic (or Christian) fundamentalism, it only takes a few people to fuck it up for everyone. If self selective communities on the Internet can't represent a viable real-world community, what does it mean for the future of the Nation-State? I will grant you this graph trails off into some seriously abstract crap, but I don't think we have a frame of reference for what geographically independent, self-organizing communities mean for humanity. To reign this post in, can we PLEASE stop pretending that Al Quaeda represents an existential threat to the United States. For that fucking matter, Iran, North Korean and Pakistan COMBINED don't represent such a threat. When WWII broke out, Germany and Japan represented the #1 and #4 GDPs on the planet. Frankly, all-out war against any of the Axis of Evil represents less of a threat than the State of California declaring all-out war. We survived the Confederated States of America. If worse comes to worst, the USA can survive any threat posed by the countries that are being held up as objects of irrational fear today.