I can’t count the times, watching last night’s debates, that (a) my jaw dropped at the inanity or dishonesty of some remark, or (b) I wondered what the speaker actually thought he or she was saying.
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Donald Trump wants us to make those wicked moozlims stop using “our” Internet? Really? Does he know what the Internet is?
The Internet is a collection of communications- and switching protocols designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to insure that the government’s computers would be able to talk to each other in the event of a hostile nuclear strike that disrupted communications. The Internet exists to protect communications, to assure that messages get through chaos, and the only way we’re going to prevent ISIS from using “our” Internet is to cut every wire, and disable every wireless transmitter, that crosses its borders.
And, of course, ISIS sympathizers outside the territory controlled by ISIS would remain able to propagandize on that criminal syndicate’s behalf, even as we diminished our own ability to intercept their messages.
We would do better to setup a Web-based analog to the old Voice of America.
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How many times did one candidate or another stick a finger in the air and bravely declare that “we are at war”? To the degree that is true, it is in only a very narrow sense.
ISIS is not going to anchor a fleet off Virginia Beach and wade ashore. ISIS is not going to launch a nuclear strike. ISIS-inspired freelancers are unlikely to ever equal the murderous record of the Weather Underground. They are not, in any meaningful sense, a military threat; as philosopher Robert Woolf remarked a while back, more Americans are likely to die of illnesses contracted in hospitals than they are of ISIS-inspired violence.
Our greatest exposure is in the realm of electronic communications. Fortunately, that Internet thingy ought to survive their attempts at mayhem, too; remember, that’s what it is designed to do.
ISIS’ grievances against America are ideological, and they are not directed exclusively at America; they are directed at the whole of modernity. Defending the modern world from the backward-looking monotheisms is going to be this century’s project, just as defeating communism was the last century’s project.
We are talking about the work of generations — not 10-days.