I went to Berkeley awhile ago, just after the Berkeley Campus cops learned the hard way that violently suppressing protests spurs riots. Fortunately, they were in a liberal institution at the time (Berkeley has since gotten a lot more conservative), so they had strong pressure to do things differently. They got really good at finding the leaders of protests and sitting down and talking with them about where the protest was to be staged, what its goals were, and what the legal boundaries were. For years after that, there were a lot of protests, but very little violence.
Now, had the Fergusion PD wanted to do that (and I get that they may not want to for reasons of bias), they could have, very simply, asked an outside institution (state or federal) to investigate the shooting, suspended the shooter while the investigation was occurring, supported the right of people to protest, and worked with the protest leaders and business owners to protect local businesses from looting. That way, if things did get out of hand and some "troublemakers" did want to start looting the stores, they'd have community support to crack down on the troublemakers. They' also have leaders inside the protests trying to keep things calm or risk losing their own credibility.
That's the point of talking with the community.
Notice that the political loyalty of the cops don't particularly matter here, as this tactic works whether you're liberal or conservative. This is purely about keeping the law. The devious part of this is that it's a great way to disempower protestors. The authorities give people a safe place to protest, everyone makes a lot of noise, and then they go home, energy expended without impact.
It is, however, hard for authorities to do if they think that they have a right to, shall we say, use their discretion to treat different people differently. The deep irony is that the jackboot treatment empowers the protests, as we've seen. I don't think the Ferguson PD understands this very well, and it will ultimately be to their deteriment, I suspect.
]]>In California, at least, the cops who deal with the most routinely, heavily armed populance are the game wardens. Since they deal primarily with hunters, poachers, and illegal marijuana growers, almost everyone they deal with is expected to be heavily armed. In fact, in California, the other cops often let the wardens take the lead in mixed-crime cases, simply because they have the experience that most other cops lack.
Now, how do wardens deal with the weapons issue? By talking. A lot. They carry heavy weapons, and they do tend to cuff suspects at the drop of a hat until they've determined that they're not armed and about to kill the wardens (and once it's safe, the cuffs come off, and the wardens talk about what they're doing and why they're doing it the entire time). They spend a lot of time talking with everyone, and that's one reason why they don't get shot as often as one might expect, given the situations they're in.
The key lesson here is one that others have pointed out: training and experience overcomes fear. Paradoxically, it's not the presence of weapons, it's the rare threat of weapons that makes cops paranoid. Most US cops never shoot a gun on their beats, even if they have an AR-15 in the cruiser. If you put them in a riot control situation, give them a bunch of vaguely familiar weapons and armor, and set them to work at night where everyone's angry at them, what do you think will happen?
This is what the "militarization of the police" crowd is angry about. Military police, among others, are specifically trained to deal with crowd control, because that's been one of their key roles for years, especially in Iraq. They've got the training and experience to deal with it, something that few beat cops have. What we're seeing in Ferguson is a force with the tools but not the training that goes with them, and a critical part of the training is how to use the tools to effectively control the crowd and calm the situation, which is what the Ferguson cops are failing to do.
Another key lesson is that the Ferguson chief of police failed the basic warden's strategy: he didn't start talking with the community immediately. Cops' most important tools are their brains and their mouths, and those certainly have been used to very poor effect in Ferguson.
]]>In general, the idea that different people get treated differently is considered one of the traits of an empire, not a nation-state. In theory, nation-state is considered to be a single people (the nation) inside a bounded territory (the state). Empires are states consisting of multiple peoples, some (or most) of whom are subjugated by the dominant nation.
One of the eternal tensions in the US is whether we're a nation or an empire. Ideally and ideologically, we're a nation, "One people, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" as the first (and best, IMHO) version of the Pledge of Allegiance has it. In practice, we're an empire, in that we've got a number of Indian Nations within our boundaries (on the Res, as they say) who do not get equal treatment. They even have a place in the 14th Amendment (that little part about "Indians not taxed."). Similarly, the US has big problems with equal treatment of women, Blacks, and Hispanics as well. That contradiction between ideology and practice has existed longer than the US has, and it's playing out in Ferguson right now, which is why so many people are so angry.
Going back to Garrett Kajmowicz's original comment, it's interesting to see a public servant espousing an essentially imperialist line, that the 14th Amendment is a hindrance to the "discretion" of discriminating against people seen as subordinate to the dominant people (in the US, white males).
As Barry noted, this is BS, and it's perfectly possible to have public safety officers who treat everyone equally. I'd just finish by saying that, if you believe the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, and don't treat it as an empty ritual, then you're pledging allegiance to one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The kind of discretion that allows discrimination has no ideological place in such a nation.
]]>I'm one of those people, incidentally, who think that the current insanity with the NRA et al. isn't just because Americans have become gun nuts, but because a bunch of gun manufacturers would have gone out of business unless they'd been able to find a profitable new market, that market being assault weapons. The reason for the gun manufacturers' alarm was, ironically, the quality of their older merchandise. I've shot a Garand from the 1920s that was perfectly accurate, as was a 1950s shotgun. Basic guns last a long time, and it's bad news for gun manufacturers when everyone has all the guns they want or need for hunting and home defense. If you follow Joe Biden's sensible advice to get a shotgun to protect your home, that shotgun will be functional for at least two generations. I wonder how long modern assault rifles will last, before some fiddly plastic parts break. Planned obsolescencein rifles, anybody?
So, possibly with US government collusion, we have the gun industry turning assault rifles into consumer items. These help the balance of trade, keep the technology in the US for when the military needs it, and so forth and so on. All good, capitalist stuff. But as with all good capitalist stuff, it has unintended consequences.
Unfortunately, this business tactic floods the world with cheap weapons. This happened in Honduras Central America (which is why the US has a huge refugee problem from people fleeing the violence), it's happened in the Middle East, it's happened in much of the US, and it's happened especially with law enforcement, who now have a huge amount of firepower on all levels, from stun grenades up to MRAPs, and insufficient training on how to use the damned things.
I happen to agree that, if civilian police are going to use military weapons, they should be under the same discipline and training as military police. But what I see in Ferguson is yet another replay of Gibson's "The Street finds its own uses for things." It's not the militarization of the police, it's the paramilitarization of the police, which is a lot scarier. However, I would say that this is due as much (or more) to the ready availability of the weapons, rather than to an ideological shift in the US. One could satirize it as CASE NIGHTMARE GUN, if one wanted.
I'd also agree with the others upthread who pointed out that the US has never particularly subscribed to the Peelian principles. That's too bad IMHO, but the Peelian Principles never been implemented in the US for much the same reason that the British Raj doesn't seem to have subscribed to Peelian principles either. There's just a bit too much of the Manifest Destiny, and the Old South, and the posse in US enforcement for them to subscribe to something as restrained as what Peel proposed. We never seem to get the idea of soft power, sad to say.
]]>I still wonder whether your cats ever hold your awards shelf hostage when negotiating their demands...
]]>By the way, do your cats ever hold your awards shelf hostage?
]]>However, if you're looking for messed up drugs, you can always figure out how to make methamphetamine from some poor Eurasian Ephedra plant (the relevant plants grow all through the drier Himalayas) and start a 20th century-style drug running operation almost anywhere. It would be interesting to see if it was more or less effective than the British and their opium wars. Unfortunately, their poppy fields were based in, um, much the same area. Speed-balls, anyone? On third thought, scratch this idea. I'm going to go wash my brain out now.
]]>There's a rather nice book about the Great Game called Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia by Karl Ernest Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, and it's one of my main references for what happened during that whole episode.
The relative absence of Iran from the book prior to 1920 and Churchill helping to form BP to go after Iranian oil is one reason I figured (wrongly, as Hugo pointed out), that Iran was a relatively peaceful backwater in the whole Great Game, and hence a reasonable target for an evil time traveler who wanted to bisect the Raj and bring down the British Empire.
The major action of the Tournament of Shadows as in an area we'd recognize now: the "'Stans," especially Afghanistan, which was the fractured northwest frontier of British India, and Tibet, which was nominally a Chinese protectorate and formed part of the northern boundary of the Raj.
We're still messing around in that area a century later, in part because of oil, but also in part because that whole area is what the sociologist James C Scott* might call a "shatter zone" eternally on the borders of major states and empires growing out of India, China, the central Asian steppe (in the days of the Mongols), the Ottomans (who combined the Mongol imperial playbook with the Caliphate and Byzantine playbooks) and later the Russian Empire (who similarly combined Mongol and Byzantine Imperial traditions). The question of where the boundaries of the great powers are, how porous they are, and how people who don't want to be ruled can interact with them seems to be one of those eternal historical conflicts. The Brits got entangled through the British East India Company and its relative incompetence at ruling India as a capitalist colony.
*Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed is another great read, although it focuses mostly on the southeast Asian end of the massif, not the northwestern end.
The general
]]>On the other hand, given that the Great Game seemed to be a training ground for the leaders of WWI, I'm not too sure I'd worry about imperial agents being able to do much, even if they were on the ground there.
Still, if that's a concern, the discerning evil time traveler might want to go to Qing Dynasty China instead, if bisecting the British Empire and taking over the Raj seems too improbable.
]]>It still makes for an interesting environment in which to work.
Getting back to Dirk's original post, if I wanted to take out the 19th Century British Empire, I'd still go after the connection to India, rather than after the British Isles themselves. If you're small and have a substantial tech advantage, it seems to me that the best place to exercise the advantage is where you can be close to resources and people, and your enemy cannot. The major British imperial weakness was that they had enormously long supply lines and slow communications. I'd go after those, rather than trying to corrupt the already-corrupt lords of industry. Given how good British spy-runners were in the Great Game (about as good as the generals of WWI, it appears), I'm not so sure I'd worry about British acting on what their agents found. Ditto the Russians.
Thinking it over even more, if you really wanted to change the Great Game, you could always take your advanced tech and go to China. It's always worth thinking about how, after the Qing Dynasty fell and after the Chinese had such incompetent military leadership up through WWII, they still basically fought the Japanese Imperial Army to a standstill, Rape of Nanjing, Unit 731, and all. It's worth thinking about what could have happened if they'd had the same kinds of technological advantages in the late 19th Century that they'd enjoyed before the start of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The Opium Wars would have ended rather differently, and Europe would have been deep in debt to China at the start of the 20th Century. Hmmmm.
]]>Since at least some of the Ottomans knew full well that they were at a technological disadvantage relative to the Europeans, quietly giving them a technical leg up would be a good strategy to get them to help you. This, incidentally, is the strategy that Pizarro used to conquer the Inca (he recruited about 10,000 warriors who were sick of the Inca and wanted them overthrown. Pizarro took the lead, then took down his erstwhile allies in the decades afterwards).
The tricky part would be getting the aluminum for the zeppelin or plane bodies, if you're going to make a 19th century air force. I haven't figured that one out yet. Someone else can have fun shooting the plan full of holes. Or Steve Stirling can come along and turn it into another alt-history book, which would be fine by me.
Thinking about it more, I'd probably go for Persia first, then the Arabian peninsula.
]]>Worse for the British, if you destroyed their Victorian warships while they were far out at sea, it would take a very long time for the Brits to figure out what happened, because they'd have no radio and no way to report the attack until they reached land, or unless some lifeboats got away.
On the economic side of the coin, trading with the Ottomans and the Russians would make it harder for other Empires (e.g. the British) to attack overland. You can easily trade in things like dyes, pharmaceuticals, plastics, perhaps, anything that requires petrochemical-level energy concentrations to create.
The key point here is that oil has way more energy per kilogram than does coal. Coal is more common, but if you're a time traveler wanting to overthrow a coal-based economy, go for oil, and go for all the other chemistry that petroleum enables, for good and ill. Since this includes industrial-scale nitrogen fixation, which also enables you to create lots of explosives and feed machine guns, this also enables you to become a major military power relatively quickly. Finally, since no one has seen this kind of power before, they'd deduce your dastardly plan only through dumb luck. For example, if you're building ammonia makers, all you're doing is making fertilizer to improve the agriculture of the backwards Persian and Turkish peasants, which looks like the work of a lunatic humanitarian, not a scheming, would-be emperor. Ditto if you're making pharmaceuticals and dyes. Who would suspect all the nasty chemicals you could so easily churn out by switching the production lines around? They didn't know those chemicals even existed.
]]>Then move to take over the Suez Canal and India.
Then modernize the Raj, and start out-competing the British mills. There's no particular point in dominating much more territory. The British could indeed attack you, but they've got to go through someone else first or sail around the Cape to attack you, the technologically and now numerically superior force with shorter supply lines and vastly more fuel to burn.
The point here is that much of the misery in modern Iran started when the British created BP to get oil from Iran to power their 20th Century military machine, an idea pushed by an obscure British pundit named Winston Churchill. Getting control of that oil in Victorian times would hamstring the British.
]]>