Noble fight or lost cause?
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 20, 2009 - 16 Comments
What to do in Afghanistan was the subject of a Maclean’s panel debate last week in Halifax, broadcast live by CPAC.
Wells: In Kandahar, they actually poll the residents quite frequently about how they feel. Kandahar residents feel substantially less safe than they did a couple of years ago. They have a lot less confidence in the government than they used to. No wonder, after the lurid spectacle of the elections this summer.
Until 2009, the deadliest month for coalition forces in Afghanistan was July 2008: 46 soldiers died. We are now four months in a row with a substantially higher—nearly double—death toll than in July 2008. These rates could be sustainable if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but what we keep seeing is more tunnel. Afghanistan is the smaller of a sort of duplex of international terrorism, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When we concentrate on Pakistan, the bad guys just move across the mountains into Afghanistan and vice versa.
Coyne: Afghanistan has to be seen in the context of the situation in Pakistan—where we have an insurgency that would take enormous heart from a defeat for NATO in Afghanistan—and in the broader fight against “jihad international,” where the best slogan for recruiting al-Qaeda fighters is, “We’re winning.” Everybody wants Pakistan to get serious about going after its own Taliban. Why are the Pakistanis going to do that if they think we’re going to leave Afghanistan, if they’re going to have a Taliban government on their doorstep? It’s true that we have not defeated the Taliban. But the Taliban haven’t defeated us either; they cannot seize power as long as we’re there. As long as NATO remains we can train up the Afghan army.
If we were proposing no change in strategy that would be one thing, but we are on the verge right now of bringing in 40,000 more troops from the U.S., of changing fundamentally the strategy toward counter-insurgency. That’s an odd time to pull out.
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Is the web’s ‘free’ ride over?
By Colin Campbell - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 13 Comments
A new book says ‘free’ is the future. Critics say that’s just crazy.
The release of Chris Anderson’s latest book Free will likely go down in the annals of publishing as a book launch from hell. It began when Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and author of the bestseller The Long Tail, was accused of plagiarizing passages from Wikipedia in his much-anticipated book. Anderson apologized, explaining it was a mix-up that would be corrected. But that was only a minor hiccup compared to when the actual reviews started rolling in.In Free, Anderson argues that in the digital age, the cost of distributing goods and services is being pushed ever closer to zero, and therefore most things will, in some form, eventually be offered for nothing. Already, he notes, the proliferation of free services online has created what Anderson estimates to be a $300-billion “country-sized economy.” It’s a provocative theory—and it was immediately and ruthlessly attacked by a horde of respected thinkers and writers. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, wrote the harshest review so far in The New Yorker, suggesting that Anderson is thinking like a classic “technological utopian,” and his theory has little grounding in reality. Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, also railed against the idea, writing in his blog that the creed of “Free” will ruin companies that fail to focus on making money. “The problem with companies who have built their business around Free is that it is far from free to remain successful.” Continue…
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When ‘free’ becomes really expensive
By Andrew Potter - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 4:25 PM - 31 Comments
In the age of digital culture, it is not just access to art that has been democratized, but its production as well.
My iPod is packed with thousands of songs I’ve never listened to, by bands whose names I don’t recognize. The hard drive of my laptop contains dozens of movies I’ve downloaded and never watched, and if all goes according to the pattern, I will soon have a Kindle full of books I’ll never read by authors I don’t appreciate. I’m far from alone in this: in the age of digital reproduction, we treat art as a commodity—cheap, ubiquitous, and disrespected.There’s been a lot of talk recently about economics in the digital age, thanks to a new book by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his challenging review in The New Yorker, Anderson’s book is little more than an extended riff on the old cyberlibertarian slogan, “information wants to be free.” Gladwell’s review sparked a bit of a free-for-all amongst bloggers, with everyone from branding guru Seth Godin to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban chiming in with their own opinions on the matter. Continue…
