Archive for October 15th, 2007

4 results.
Oct15

The Benefits of Ethnological Reboot

by tdaxp on October 15, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted In: Iraq, Thomas Barnett

Tom Barnett notes Patreaus appears to be detaching Iraqi Shia from the worst of the militias, like he earlier helped detach Iraqi Sunni Arabs from al Qaeda in Iraq:

Interesting. To extent this repeats like Al-Qaeda in Anbar, Petraeus may be pulling off a double.

Like the Anbar Awakening, Patreaus appears to be smart enough to recognize victory when it presents itself. (This is no small accomplishment.) In particular, now that the Shia appear to have captured the seat of the Caliphs from their Sunni Arab rivals, the main benefit of the Shia militias (clear out Sunni houses, protection from Sunni terrorism) have gone away.

Here’s a second possible explanation: the Shia have basically won the Battle of Baghdad. Given their victory plus the additional security that has resulted from the surge of U.S. forces, there simply isn’t the need to rely on militias, especially thuggish ones.

Ethnological reboot — successfully completed ethnic cleansing — can provide the social harmony a nation needs for growth. It looks like Iraq is getting close to possessing that public good.

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Oct15

Publicity, Dozier Internet Law, and DirectBuy’s choice of super-lawyer

by tdaxp on October 15, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted In: SLAPP

Another day, another round of Dozier Internet Law links. (As always, check out the preliminary case study for background.)

Simple Justice‘s “Practical Blawgosphere: The Dozier Demand Scam” is a must read. Joining many other lawyers (Greg Beck, Andrew Bluestone, William Patry, Eric Turkewitz etc.), SJ‘s Scott Greenfield sees through Dozier’s poor arguments:

But Dozier added a new twist that elevated him to new heights of blawgosphere ridicule. He claimed that his cease and desist letter was itself copyrighted, and therefore directed Public Citizen not to publish the letter itself on the internet. So naturally, that’s exactly what they did.

Greenfield also addresses the question of whether their mangling of the DirectBuy case is scheme to gain attention at the expense of a client.

The scuttlebutt around the blawgosphere is whether this is a cynical attempt to get the Dozier name out there amongst the blawgs to up their google page rank and get this firm on the radar of people who would otherwise never have heard of it. If so, then Dozier deserved more credit than he’s given. But this motive has been met with skepticism since Dozier has been universally viewed as a jerk, and worse yet, a jerk whose actions have hurt his client by alerting as many people as possible to the allegations of scam and discontent.

The subject of publicity brings up a mistake by me… To announce the launch of Dozier Internet Lawsuits, I added it as breaking news over at Jim River Report. Unfortunately the news, which ran yesterday and today… 404′d! Because I transposed the link and title of the story, the “http://dozierinternetlawsuits.blogspirit.com/” appeared as the text and “dozier internet law” functioned as the URL.

I salved this by creating a new page in that location, Jim River Report: Your Window to Dozier Internet Law. I use it to save for posterity the google search results for Dozier Internet Law as of this morning. The result? 18 of the top 25 results are negative.

If this was John “Super Lawyer” Dozier’s plan: congrats!

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Oct15

OODA Alpha, Part IV: Decision

by tdaxp on October 15, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted In: UNL / OODA

Decision occurs when individuals “decide among action alternatives that are generated in the Orientation phase” (Osinga, 2007, 232) corresponds to thinking, the purposeful tasks of argumentation, decision making, judgment, planning, and problem solving (Moshman, 1995a). This portion of the OODA loop is familiar from many of the more noble theories in educational psychology. It also is important for understanding rationalization, which impacts its most important role: long-term change of orientation.

Rationality is often seem as falling under decision. Decision is necessary but not sufficient for rationality, thinking about thinking (Schraw & Moshman, 1995; Moshman 2005) or having good reasons for one’s actions (Moshman 1994). It is also critical for the development of epistemic cognition (Southerland, Sinatra, & Matthews, 2001; Moshman, 2007a), identity (Marcia, 1966; Erickson, 1968), morality, (Arnold, 2000; Kohlberg, 1981, 1984; Piaget, 1932/1965) and rational moral identity (Moshman, 1995b, 2004, 2005). The development of rationality, and thus better decision making ability more broadly, has even been argued as the proper focus of education (Moshman, 1990b, 2005; Stanovich, 2001) .


Post-hoc rationalizations also are driven by System 2 processes. Decision making is the normally invoked explanation for decisions (Maier, 1931; Wegner, 2002), even when such contradicts an individuals observations (Thompson, et al., 2004). For example, individuals claim activities they completed successfully are more worthwhile than tasks they do not so complete (Tesser & Paulhaus, 1983). This is especially true of people who show self-serving behavior generally (Tesser 2000, 2001; von Hippel, Lakin, & Shakarchi, 2005). However, any desire to undo or dampen this must be moderated by findings that self-serving processing correlates with higher performance (Nasco & Marsh, 1999).

OODA Alpha, a tdaxp series
1. Abstract
2. Dual Processing Systems
3. The OODA Loop
4. Decision
5. Orientation
6. A Theory of Mind
7. Reorientation
8. Disorientation
9. Education
10. Instruction
11. Student Interaction
12. Creativity
13. Conclusion
14. Bibliography

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Oct15

Beyond the Gates of Bizarro Land

by tdaxp on October 15, 2007 at 12:00 am
Posted In: SLAPP

If you had any doubt about the good sense of Dozier Internet Law, read this comment.

Here’s the first paragraph:

First, you seem to think that US law will govern this copyright matter. It likely will not.

While I’m glad that “John W. Dozier Jr, Esq.” agrees that it’s unlikely that an American court will give a serious hearing to his claims, John’s threats of extra-legal actions are chilling. Not just in the chilling sense. But in the virus sense.

No one asked that anti-Cuppy’s postings be removed from Blue Mau Mau, said Don Sniegowski, who started the franchise blogsite Blue Mau Mau in Salt Lake City in November, 2005. But at about the same time, “someone inserted a malicious piece of software into our program, which took down our entire Web site for a 12-hour period and kept it going on and off for a few days,” he said. Sniegowski told Franchise Times this summer that he still doesn’t know who planted the software.

The same thread includes a post by Ronald Riley of Inventor Ed. How did Inventor Ed get involved in the subject?

They’ve been SLAPP’d by Dozier, too!

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