The Culture has no laws, anybody can do pretty much what they want to do. It would be very hard for a member of the Culture to kill someone else (it would be considered very strange to even want to) but if you did do this you would be slap-droned, which is having a drone follow you around forever, making sure you didn't do it again. Worse though would be the social reaction; no one would want to talk to you.
-- The Culture FAQ
From Bobbitt comes an essential insight. The difference between war of the 20th C and that of the 21C is that states made distinctions between strategy and law. Herein lies a problem.
..we do not sufficiently understand the symbiotic relationship between strategy and law - between what we do to protect ourselves from others, and what we do to protect ourselves from each other - and how that relationship is changing with the emergence of a new constitutional order.
Again this goes right to the heart of my calls for The Last ID. Does it matter that it's the Zodiac killer or McVeigh or a jihadi that commits the act of terrorism? In important ways it does not. Because it is not necessarily their motive that makes them particularly dangerous, it is the fact that they are unnoticed within the population of the open society. They use society against itself, they are by definition sociopathic. If we could mark these human pathogens in society, we could work more effectively against them.
A human is a human, and sooner or later they must interact with the rest of us. If they are on a mission against society, we want to isolate them, some accumulation of cues is necessary. We already know who's popular, but who is unpopular?
It seems to me that given Megan's Law it is somewhat inevitable that we will ban people in open society. We already do so in many ways. If you have a bankruptcy, a felony conviction, or a divorce, there is bad juju that attaches to you and hampers your fortunes in certain activities. What might the next step be? What goes beyond a restraining order?
BTW, has anyone seen the film 'Disturbia'?
The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. OK? That's the key point. The enemy can run away. The population can't. They have houses, relatives, businesses. They live there. They can't move. And so you can't defeat an insurgency by fighting the insurgents, because they'll just run away and you chase the guy around. And it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you're actually destroying the haystack to find the needle. So you do this damage to the population, which alienates the population, creates a recruitment base for the insurgents, and it just creates a cycle of destruction.The way to do it -- and you know, we've been doing this for a long time and there's a very solid body of understanding on how to do it -- is, if you like, to comb the flees out of the dog. OK? So you get in there and you work with the population. You drive the enemy off, and then you focus on the population and you try to restructure the environment so that the insurgent can't come back when you leave.
That's Megan's Law on child molesters. That's the DARE program. That's youth gang intervention. That's all counter terrorism. Now here's the somewhat scary part. Look at your kids and imagine them as adults knowing that they will not befriend you unless you have a mySpace page and at least 15 friends with pictures that they like. This is how circles of trust may expand and why slap-droning people can isolate us from criminals and terrorists in the future.
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