John Robb on the French Riots

Different aspects of this disturbance I have heard on the mass media for the last several days suggests the rioters are using modern communications to expand the disturbance beyond what a centralised command and control structure can handle (ie the French police and government). However, John Robb has a comment which has massive global ramifications for the authority of the nation-state.

From John Robb's Global Guerillas entry titled, "Journal: Opensource Warfare in France" ;

This limited violence carries a simple but limited message: "we don't want your help, get out of our way." It does so without crossing the line into full scale war (an earmark of westernized global guerrillas?). Over time, this may become a familiar pattern of evolution: as the state loses its ability to monopolize the provision of economic opportunity, it will soon lose its monopoly on violence.

Makes the Sedition laws that the Australian government is trying to pass look like a death throe in the same way that the DMCA laws in the US and Au-US FTA are a solid recognition of an industry choking on the irrelevance of their business model.

It is entirely possible that the "National Security State" is a political and artificial fabric designed to re-assert the authority of the state and centralised government. It can be seen as a response to the crowd, the agile, and decentralised challenges to the nation-state which we have seen in Costa Rica, Iraq, and now France.
cam: The uprisings are a national phenomonen: I was surprised to see this map from the BBC . The rioting was national, from Nice, Marseilles in the Mediterranian, to Nantes and Rennes on the Atlantic, to Rouen and Lille on the channel and numerous internal cities such as Paris, Nancy, Dijon etc.

cam
cam: A further note on the weakness of centralised: systems. The two isolated (and ineffectual) attacks on the subway system and a bus have provoked the centralised state into stopping all rail and bus traffic after 7pm.

This is not too far different from what I argued with the $700 fine for speeding in Qld. Due to a couple of deaths from speeding, and a parliament and political system which plays \"zero tolerance\" to the nth degree in order to \"keep us safe\", leads to a cruel and unusual fiscal punishment. The continual dropping of the speed limits also leads to a certain paralysis of the road system. There are parts of the M2 in NSW that drop to 90 kmh for no apparent reason.

cam

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