Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Part 1. How We Got into the Cold Civil War. The Evangelical Dilemma and the Search for Public Philosophy -- The End of the Vital Center -- Part 2. Mapping Our Differences: The Quadrant Framework System. Freedom Left 2: The Theory of the Godless Constitution -- Freedom Left 3: From Open Society to Closed Society -- Order Left 2: The Rise of the Welfare State and the Great Society -- Order Left 3: The Reified Postmodernism of Antiracism -- Freedom Right 2: Libertarians and the Quest of Open Borders -- Freedom Right 3: Radical Libertarians, the End of the State, and the Rise of Utopian Technocracy -- Order Right 2: Poison Pill Conservatives -- Order Right 3: The Illiberal New Right -- Part 3. Forming the New Vital Center. The New Vital Center: The American Synthesis and the Four Souls -- Patriotic Citizenship: The Sweet Offer for Resident Aliens and Alienated Residents -- Christianity: The Second Constitution -- Conclusion: The Heroic Role for the Church.

"America is experiencing extreme polarization and fragmentation that could split the country in two. How can we bring America back together before its too late? Laying out a quadrant framework of understanding today's political climate, Jim Belcher reveals both why we're divided and how to move beyond the left-right stalemate toward a new vital center"--

This article analyses a mid-20th century computerized pacification reporting system, the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), used by the US military to measure hamlet-level security and development trends in the Vietnam War. The significance of the HES was its capacity to translate US Military Advisor observations of Vietnamese hamlet life into a machine-readable format used by US military systems analysts to disclose 'patterns of life.' I show how US Military Advisors operated as 'embodied sensors' within the HES, producing a distinctive location-based event ontology – a 'view of below' – accompanied by rudimentary digital maps in-formation from incoming hamlet-level observation streams. I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of 'epistemic violence,' rooted not so much in the narrative subjection of the 'Other,' but in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.

In autumn 2010, the United States military partially or completely razed several villages in Helmand and Kandahar provinces as part of its counterinsurgency campaign in southern Afghanistan. In the spring 2011, U.S.-led forces rebuilt one of the villages, Taroke Kalacha, to showcase the "humane" side of contemporary U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. This article analyses the logics and rationalities informing the reconstruction of Taroke Kalacha, and why the rebuilding effort ultimately failed. I examine a wide spectrum of biopolitical initiatives involved in the 2010–2011 "Hamkari" counterinsurgency operations, and show how violence became a protracted condition for displaced villagers as durable lines of force were inscribed into the communal relations and material arrangements of the built environment(s) in Kandahar. I focus on what I call "securing the intimate"; namely, the attempts by U.S. forces to harness Afghan households as sites of indirect rule. In this anatomy of a village razing, I analyse two specific problems with the reconstruction of Taroke Kalacha: (1) the bid to establish a new political order by bringing the villagers closer to local governance structures through the dubious process of U.S. military compensation schemes; and (2) how the rebuilt structures in Taroke Kalacha deviated from the "local style" with devastating effect, especially for women in the village.