Go read the new counterinsurgency blog, “Ink Spots” – great name – that just kicked off in late June. The content looks good, written by five anonymous D.C. security industry types: “Gunslinger”, “Alma”, “Lil”, “Gulliver”, and “MK”. Lordy knows that some fresh energy is needed in this field, but I’m also exasperated at the anonymity thing. 

I sympathize/empathize with the perceived need of legions of bloggers to opt for the anonymat. But some of us with serious reputations and careers have also openly and clearly opted to identify ourselves, partly in an effort to lend credibility to this fantastically accessible medium called blogging. 

Maybe the joke’s on me. As with so many of these things, anonymity is a thin veneer, and real identities a poorly kept secret, bounced around freely behind the camo-curtain of the COIN echo chamber. Mostly I’m reluctant to contribute or comment openly when the original author hasn’t seen fit to do so –  too uneven a playing field, with all sorts of potential reputational consequences.

Ink Spots’ header description:

Ink Spots is a blog dedicated to the discussion of counterinsurgency, stability operations, post-conflict environments, and whatever other security issues we deem worthy of comment. Our contributors are security professionals – from think tanks, government, consulting, and nonprofit work. We hope this site will be not merely a soap box for the five of us, but a forum for discussion and debate on those issues that matter to us all.

And its opening post, penned by Gunslinger on 27 June:

While we continue to recruit a couple of folks to join us, I’ll jump on the proverbial grenade and take a first crack at Ink Spots. Our description gives the basic details of who we are and why we’re here, but I’ll elaborate a little futher just to get things started.

As mentioned, we all work in security affairs. I won’t say “national” security as not all of us work specifically on U.S. issues. But the bloggers here are a group of young, smart security professionals. We are all friends, but we are rarely of the same mind on the issues that matter most.

I’ll keep this simple just to kick things off, but we are excited to provide a forum for us to express ourselves and to allow you all to comment on what we have to say. In the short term, we look forward to many interesting events that will affect international security: the withdrawal of U.S. forces from urban centers in Iraq, the command review in Afghanistan, the constant shenanigans in the DRC (and most of sub-Saharan Africa for that matter, though I’m sure our Africanists can speak to it more eloquently than “shenanigans” in the future), and the shaping of the U.S. military with the coming budget fights and longer-term QDR.

We’ll start tackling the issues shortly. We hope that you find our postings and analysis useful and entertaining. And we also hope that you comment on it – otherwise I’m just yelling into an echo chamber.

Apropos of nothing at all, Cambridge don and classicist Mary Beard has these suggestions for pithy latinate tubing:

1. “perfer et obdura! dolor hic tibi proderit olim” — or “Be patient and put up with it; one day this pain will pay dividends”. That’s Ovid (Amores III, XIa) reflecting on the insults of his mistress — but fits well enough for the rush hour commute.

2. “quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra” — or “How long Catiline will you abuse our patience?”. The famous first line of Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, attacking the would-be revolutionary (or innocent stooge), Catiline. But you can substitute any adversary for Catiline.. ‘quousque tandem abutere, Boris, patientia nostra?”

3. “arma virumque cano” — or “Arms and the man I sing”. The most famous line in the whole of Latin poetry, the first line of the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Though Virgil didn’t exactly mean the arms of the man digging into your side, as you’re stuck in the tunnel between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

4. “amantium irae amoris integratio est” — or “Lovers’ quarrels are the renewal of love” (that’s from Terence’s comedy, The Woman of Andros, 555). Something to cheer you up after a bad night.

5. “medio tutissimus ibis” — or “You’ll go safest in the middle”, from Ovid, Metamorphoses II, 137. Advice to Phaethon, who was about — disastrously — to drive the chariot of the sun. Probably not much better advice on the underground.

6. “audacibus annue coeptis” — or “Look with favour on a bold start” (as in Virgil, Georgics 1, 40). You could translate as — make for the tube door first, and dont worry about the elder;y, disabled or women with buggies.

7. “nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanus” — or “No-one dances sober, unless maybe he’s mad” (Cicero, Pro Murena 6, 13). More memories of last night.

8. “nil desperandum“ — or “don’t despair about anything” (Horace, Odes I, 7, 27). Self explanatory for the rush hour journey , but hard advice to follow.

9. Better perhaps would be “nunc est bibendum” — or “Now is the time to drink” (Horace, Odes I, 37, 1 — in the original celebrating the death of Cleopatra).

10. “capax imperii nisi imperavisset” — or “capable of ruling if he hadn’t ruled ” (or roughly, “he had a great future behind him”). This is what Tacitus had to say of Galba after the event. Too soon to tell if that’s true of Boris.

I’ve been mulling over zero tropes for a couple of years now, basically as a conceptual locus for the inherent reductivism of sanctuary in militant thought and practice.  Think patient zero, suspect zero, ground zero, all of which actually have very technical meanings in various specialist fields: as index cases in criminology, medicine and disease control; as hypocentres in seismology and nuclear science; as vanishing points in art and architecture.

They also have fascinating political relevance, via popular culture and historical memory: think Francois Ponchaud’s account of the Cambodian genocide in Year Zero (and John Pilger’s documentary on the same subject); Hiroshima and 9/11 as “time zero” for apocalyptic revelations in historical consciousness; the cognate implications of Aum Shinri Kyo’s underground sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway, and its impact on the Japanese psyche.

Serendipity. I was in Naples North over the last few days, and wandered into the Eaton Centre Indigo bookstore to pick up a copy of CTlab friend Geoff Manaugh’s excellent new release, The BLDGBLOG Book. One of the first things I spotted on the racks was a pulp fiction thriller entitled Patient Zero (so of course I picked it up, along with Geoff’s book). Today, while sifting through my RSS feeds, I noted that Geoff has just flagged the latest theme issue of the Harvard journal New Geographies. Entitled “After Zero” (unsurprisingly, not a new idea among architects and designers, who are much much better than the rest of us at conceptualizing abstract spaces), it explores the zero point:

Design disciplines are challenged by the condition of the zero point. “Zero-context,” “cities from scratch,” and “zero-carbon” developments all force designers to address important questions regarding the strategic relevance and impact of a design intervention. As much as the zero point presents naïve innocence and embodies contradictory notions—such as crisis versus abundance or context versus model—it also creates a ground for doubt, self-critique, and rejuvenation for architecture and urbanism. As projects, indeed entire “new” cities, are built before they can even be imagined and then repackaged and replicated as models for any context, what do these projects suggest for the design disciplines? Rather than reductive aestheticization, or total rejection, what are possible critical ways to reflect on this condition? Beyond a focus on the vast scales and ambitions of these projects, it is important to see them as symptomatic of a much broader condition within contemporary architecture and urbanism. Along with the challenges inherent in the zero point, perhaps more meaningful are the provocations of the AFTER the ZERO condition. The idea of an AFTER ZERO is crucial for us; not only to assert the need to reflect on the future following the zero condition but also in acknowledgment of the release of this volume after our previous volume zero. If the zero condition presents crises of form, context, and social relevance for architecture and urbanism, perhaps one way to deal with this is “to redefine crisis, not as crisis but more simply as symptoms of larger urban trends whose logicis revealed only when judgment is suspended,” as Albert Pope writes in the volume. If we assess the current moment of crisis as a zero point, how can we think about the social, political, and formal significance of design after the Meltdown?After an era of reality mapping or iconic formalism, this volume aims to investigate possibilities AFTER crises, AFTER mapping, and AFTER signature architectures. Without relying on totalizing narratives, naïve morality, or escapism, AFTER ZERO is an opportunity to imagine alternative futures and a revitalized project for the city.

Indeed. Looking forward to reading this.

This, via Drezner, on Blogosphere 2.0:

Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to. It’s a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out.Drezner and Farrell had a theorythat even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn’t bubbling to the top.

Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing….

In the past, I could easily figure out which blogs had linked to me and then send them a reciprocal link. For whatever reasons, Google Blog and Technorati aren’t picking up the smaller blogs, and I have no idea who’s linking to me….

So blogging has changed a lot in the past six years. It’s still an excellent medium for self-expression and professional networking, but it will no longer make mega-stars. It’s actually a good thing that the hoopla has died down. No one should spend that much time in front of a computer. The expectations were unrealistic. Use your blogs to target particular audiences and have a clear mission, and you’ll get a following. Blogging should be the means to another goal — a rough draft for future articles/books, a way to network with professionals, a place to document your life for your children, a way to have fun. Those are very real and good outcomes of blogging and that’s why I’m continuing to keep at.

Drezner’s response: the blogosphere is  now rife with echo chambers (can a sphere have chambers?), big events drive smart, qualified people to blog about them, and jack-of-all trade punditry is going the way of the dodo. That second point, I would add, is also about smart people setting out to use the technology ways that don’t mesh well with tried and true blogging. A blog can be a vehicle for independent, popular commentary absent the editorial machinery of larger or more established media. But a blog is also a technology module that can be subverted and put to work for the forces of good  as an enabler for good ideas, sharp thinkers, and, well… easy publicity. Which isn’t to say that I actually disagree with Drezner.