The Adventures of Floating Clausewitz Head: Floating Clausewitz Head and the Strategy of Tactics

Meet Sola Aoi.

Aoi is a Japanese porn star that has a vibrant Chinese fanbase.

Because we like to arbitrarily pick aspects of foreign popular culture (weiqi/go explains Chinese strategy!) to explain their foreign policy and security strategies, this means that Sola Aoi Explains Chinese Strategy (TM).

Meanwhile, when we last saw Floating Clausewitz Head, he had been summoned to deal with the horrendous llama insurgency.

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After Floating Clausewitz Head had arrived at the command center, he quickly took charge of the situation. Clausewitz Head asked the General in question what the problem was. The General was eager to explain. “You see, the problem here is that we have a strategy of tactics,” said. His subordinates were baffled. “But Sir,” they asked, “does this mean I have to retake that awfully boring JPME online class where I practice repeating that we need a strategy and whole of government?”

“SILENCE YOU CRETINS” the General said. As Floating Clausewitz Head looked on in astonishment and puzzlement, the General patiently explained that the only way to defeat the llamas was to get a strategy instead of a bunch of tactics.

“So what is the strategy?” Floating Clausewitz Head asked.

“The strategy is that we need a strategy!” The General said.

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Meanwhile, Gendo Ikari

……err Thomas Friedman

….realized that the world was hot, flat, and crowded by illamas.

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What could defeat the llama menace (the llamas, not Kaoru, are the seventeenth angel) and re-unite Ikari/Friedman with Yui?

Ikari/Friedman journeyed to China, where you can get wifi on trains. “Wow,” Friedman said. “Such an advanced civilization!”

Well, David, it’s been decimated. It’s been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don’t like where you’re going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control — really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that’s really what, what it’s come down to. So I don’t — I, I — I’m worried about this, it’s why I have fantasized — don’t get me wrong — but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don’t want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

How did China become such an advanced civilization? Friedman asked a random cabbie driver that he spotted watching pr0n on the Internet of Things That Little Children Should Not Watch. The cabbie told him to go away and let him enjoy his pr0n in peace. “Wow, what a masterful stratagem!” Friedman said. “This crafty Chinese person is using Sun Tzu-like tactics of misdirection and deception to try to fool me into thinking that pr0n isn’t key to Chinese success!”

Friedman then read a book on the flight back about how China has a 100-year strategy to use pr0n to become global hegemon. Every year, Chinese government officials from Mao to Xi have used pr0n to steadily undermine American power. Indeed, this also explains why Chinese hackers are so succesful; all of the time they spend on the Internet looking at pr0n.

The General, unable to outline exactly what kind of strategy we ought to use to get a strategy to defeat the llamas, hired a DC think tank consultant to develop the strategy. The consultant argued that the reason that the llamas were revolting was pr0n deprivation. “You see, if we had only given the llamas pr0n instead of bombs, they would have been able to become productive members of society,” he said. “We need a laptop with an internet connection and plenty of pr0n in every llama household.”

“But Dr. Hot Take,” the soldiers said, “llamas don’t live in houses.”

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The consultant did not listen and began to send soldiers to the llama farms to distribute laptops with pr0n to the llamas.

This had a catastrophically counterproductive effect, as the result was llama love:

and (NSFW for work around llamas) exponentially more angry llamas were born:

Dr. Hot Take was fired after we were reminded once again that technology is not a cure for society’s problems. Especially problems with llamas.

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Floating Clausewitz Head was growing concerned.

He asked the General again what the strategy was.

“We need a strategy to get a strategy!”

Clausewitz Head suddenly ordered the General to be forcibly restrained. When the soldiers protested, Clausewitz Head revealed a secret letter from the President giving him command authority. “I am the Czar for Floating Clausewitz Head activities,” he explained. “I supersede your commander’s authority.” The soldiers immediately restrained the general.

Clausewitz Head produced an Voight-Kampff detector device, and within a few seconds demonstrated that the general was actually a sexy robot.

Floating Clausewitz Head ordered the soldiers to start furiously searching for a thread on Stack Overflow to explain what had gone wrong with the robot. Unfortunately, there was a thread but the programming question had never been answered.

Floating Clausewitz Head then traveled to Berkeley, CA to ask some top computer scientists what had gone wrong.

“It appears that this robot is suffering from the Frame Problem” they said. “You see, according to defense pundits a strategist must consider the second, third, fourth, and nth order effects of a strategic action. “

“Because of this,” the computer scientists said, “it appears that someone gave up and just programmed the robot to say ‘we need a strategy’ recursively. I can see some commented out code in the source code folder of this robot’s OS with a note to developers to ignore attempts to solve the frame problem because it’s just too hard.”

“That’s interesting,” Floating Clauswitz Head said, “but this still doesn’t answer the problem of why the commander of US forces fighting the llama insurgency turned out to be a defective sexy robot.”

Floating Clausewitz Head decided to then consult someone that interprets the cultural logic of computation for a living. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a false lead:

Golumbia is evidently fond of the ad hominem. Golumbia also associates “geeks” with “straight, white men,” insulting 19th century programmer Ada Lovelace, gay theoretician Alan Turing, and the vast population of queer and non-white programmers, linguists, and geeks that exists today (many not even Korean or Japanese).

Yet Golumbia finds time to praise Wikipedia, founded and run by fundamentally libertarian Ayn Rand acolyte Jimmy Wales. It’s strange for Golumbia to call Wikipedia a salutary effort to demote expert opinion when Wales himself says it should not be cited in academic papers. And strange for Golumbia to see Wikipedia as progressive when many of its entries still come from that well-known bastion of hegemonic opinion, the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. (The explicitly racist ones have been scrubbed.)

Beyond the technological confusions, Golumbia’s philosophical background is notably defective. The book is plagued by factual errors; Voltaire is bizarrely labeled a “counter-Enlightenment” thinker, while logicians Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege somehow end up on opposite sides: Russell is a good anti-rationalist (despite having written “Why I Am a Rationalist”), Frege is a bad rationalist. (He also enlists Quine and Wittgenstein to his leftist cause, which I suspect neither would have appreciated.) He thinks Leibniz preceded Descartes. He misappropriates Kant’s ideas of the noumenal and mere reason.

Around this time, Ikari/Friedman was giving a speaking tour in Berkeley about why the world is hot, flat, and crowded. This means we need Big Data, because it’s so hot, flat, and crowded that it can’t fit into a SQL database.

Floating Clausewitz Head realized that Friedman might be able to explain what was going on. “Mr. Friedman,” Clausewitz Head asked, “could you tell me how and why this robot impersonated an US general?”

Friedman took one look at the bot’s twerking and instantly fell in love.

You see, that robot worked that pole so seductively that it could put the whole of the adult entertainment industry out of business.

Just as Friedman was about to break a ring out of his suitcase to propose, A Pimp Named Slickback arrived.

“My name is A Pimp Named Slickback, and I believe I may have misplaced some merchandise at this residence.”

“Who?” Friedman asked.

“A Pimp Named Slickback.”

“Now hold on here Mr. Slickback -”

“My name is A PIMP NAMED SLICKBACK! Like A Tribe Called Quest, you say the whole thing.”

But just as Slickback was about to intervene to forcibly drag the robot back into his Pimpmobile, Sony copyright lawyers arrived.

As it turned out, the robot did not belong to A Pimp Named Slickback. It was originally made by Sony in the 1980s as part of Japan’s abortive quest to create Fifth Generation Computing. It was the centerpiece of Japan’s plot to dethrone Silicon Valley:

Unfortunately, the robot became self-aware and decided that it wanted to become a pr0n star. After all, it looked around and saw that as computers were networked together and the world became connected by information, humans decided to use it for pr0n.

It used learning and feedback to optimize itself so that it could improve its own fitness as a pr0nbot:

Escaping from the Japanese AI research facility, the AI became known as the AV star Sola Aoi.

“OK,” Floating Clausewitz Head said, “but how did a pr0nbot become mistaken for a US general? And why was it evidently re-programmed to make strategy?”

The plot had thickened. How did the pr0nbot indeed become in charge of US strategy? Meanwhile, the llamas were still on the loose.

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