BBC2 The Trap Adam Curtis: RAND Corporation + Game Theory

[jackchit]

The Trap (Whatever Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?), from Sun 11 March, BBC2, 9pm.

Power of Nightmares' Adam Curtis is back with a new polemic. This time pretty much everything out there takes a pasting.

[TonyGosling]

The BBC have been messing Adam around, altering and delaying this series after the success of The Power of Nightmares. I know from a mutual friend that Adam finds the heavy supervision imposed on his filmmaking by the BBC patronising and irritating.

Even though he's just about the most award winning documentary maker in the world the BBC managers and commissioning editors (some of whom came into the BBC as accountants!) Still think they know how to make documentaries better than him.

What a bunch of silly chaps and chapesses these lame excuses for media managers are and ... isn't their mock idiocy handy for the Zionist push to bring British public opinion into line ready for an attack on Iran?


Cold Cold Heart (film)
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Cold_Cold_Heart_(film)
Cold Cold Heart is the title of an upcoming documentary series originally scheduled to be aired in Autumn 2006 by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. The films were not however broadcast as announced and remain unaired.
According to the BBC announcement for the Autumn lineup, the series will consist of three 1-hour films exploring "the death of altruism and the collapse of trust – trust in politicians, trust in institutions and trust in ourselves, both in our minds and our bodies."

[fixuplooksharp]

this is good news. I just really hope that it is impartial. I feel for that Cutis guy...

[rodin]

Altruısm ıs a myth ınvented by socıalısts. We are not on thıs board for altruıstıc reasons - any of us. We are here to shıll or because we want a just socıety of because we lıke dıggıng ın the dırt or because we lıke the company.

Apparent altruısm ın nature always has an ülterıor motıve and the elıte know thıs.

[blackcat]

[fixuplooksharp]

rodin, why are there no dots on top of your i's?

[EmptyBee]

[Batrabill]

Is it just me, or is Rodin scary?

[Jayhawk]

Look out for the new series by Adam Curtis who made 'The Power of Nightmares', starting tonight at 9pm. This, unlike most of BBC output lately, might actually be worth a watch. It's about notions of freedom and what we mean by it in the West

[TonyGosling]

Get your videos and DVD recorders ready as this will almost certainly never be released on DVD just as Curtis' past BAFTA award winning documentaries haven't.

[conspiracy analyst]

[fourddream]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/listings/programme.shtml?day=sunday&servic e_id=4285&filename=20070318/20070318_2100_4285_8729_60

BBC SUNDAY 9pm.
Adam Curtis, de maker van de must see documentaireserieThe Power of Nightmares heeft een nieuwe serie op de BBC: The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom.

[fixuplooksharp]

http://sanityforsale.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/bbc-documentary-the-trap -what-happened-to-our-dreams-of-freedom/

Digg it aswell, people need to see this!

[scubadiver]

What do others think of this programme? I thought it was interesting but a must-see? Not so sure.

[brian]

Lots of interesting stuff but Curtis's interpretation of the Neo Cons/Blairs motives was as daft as they come. Blair writing to Isiah Berlin to ask if his idea of negative democracy could be tweaked to suit Blair's agenda showed not only Blairs lack of undestanding of Berlins ideas but his desperation to rationalise the events to come.

The idea that Bremmer was put into Iraq to foster this "negative democracy" was laughable.

Curtis was asked on a BBC board re The Power of Nightmares if he thought it possible the Neo Cons could have been behind 911 - he answered No. No qualifications to the question which by its nature demands it.

"Do you believe it possible that the American Neo-Cons engineered the 9/11 atrocity as a catalyst for their program?"

Cliff Babbs, Daventry

No.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/4202741.stm

We might expect too much but from someone like Curtis I expect a well argued case - much of the latest was far from it IMO.

[Thermate]

i thought the series connected alot of dots, some erroneously. a must see? perhaps not, but worth seeing definitely. plenty to think about and alot of good information that's rarely publicised or discussed.

[conspiracy analyst]

9/11 was an Inside Job, it would be commercial suicide for everything else.

That is clear beyond a doubt.

He does show that the invasions in the 1980's and their justifications by the Reagan regime were similar to Blairs justification for going to war in Iran.

If we are around 15 years behind America in everything, our Iran-Contra scandal must be coming soon.

Unless a new war intervenes and it is put on hold.

[ian neal]

I agree Brian. How he portrayed negative liberty and unquestioningly accepting that Kissinger or Reagan or neo-cons or Bush or Blair were genuine in their protestations that they were/are fighting for negative liberty or any kind of liberty or justice was deeply misleading bs.

I hadn't come across the concept of negative liberty before seeing the programme but I understood what Issiah Berlin was saying. Tony Blair is no revolutionary or (negative) libertarian.

Worth watching if only to remind us that we live in interesting times

[andyb]

from Spike (or so I'm told as I got from a friend on email, no link I'm afraid)

[Chaos Warrior]

[TonyGosling]

Center for Gaming
U.S. military and Japan Self-Defense Forces in a war game exercise.Photo by Staff Sgt. Nathan Allen/U.S. Air Force
https://www.prgs.edu/research/methods-centers/gaming.html

The Center for Gaming promotes the use of games in research to improve decision-making across a wide range of policy areas. The Center supports the innovative application of gaming, the development of new gaming tools and techniques, and the evolution of existing forms and methods.

A "game" can be thought of as any interactive process with five basic characteristics: (1) multiple independent decision-makers, who (2) compete to achieve goals, (3) in evolving contexts that change according to their interactions; (4) which are governed by a set of rules; and (5) the results of the interactions do not directly impact on the state of the world.

The question "What are games good for?" can most easily be answered by a stroll through the toy department at any local department store. The shelves are full of games of business and conquest, of war and diplomacy, of crime, education, dating and marriage, of life and death. Similarly, "serious games" have been used—at RAND and elsewhere—to explore issues ranging from urban planning, climate change, drug policy, and disaster response, to nuclear proliferation, and of course, military operations and warfare.

Nobel-prize-winning economist and RAND alumnus Thomas Schelling put the value of gaming quite succinctly when he wrote that alternative approaches to strategic analysis can fall short because no-one can “make a list of things you never thought of.” Games create opportunities to think of things you wouldn’t otherwise.

"One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him"


Map and game pieces from RAND-conducted war game

METHODOLOGIES & TOOLS
Games can be used at various points in an analytic process to achieve different objectives. At the outset, games can help to make sense of poorly understood problems and identify hypotheses to be tested. Gaming can also be used for experimentation, to test concepts and plans and to explore the problem space. Finally, at the end of the research process, games can be used to assess whether findings can survive contact with human decisionmakers.

Because games offer a visceral first-hand experience, they are also powerful tools for training or educating players. They can spark communication and collaboration among people who otherwise would never see the benefits of interacting, or would lack a compelling opportunity to do so.

GAMING
SIMULATION
MODELING
REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS
Paratroopers perform an airborne training exercise
Photo by Capt. Tom Cieslak/U.S. Army
Army airborne forces are unique in their ability to quickly deploy worldwide from the continental United States via transport aircraft, including to objectives that may be deep inland and generally beyond the reach of maritime forces. Examples of this type of mission include quick-response efforts to seize and secure weapons of mass destruction, to protect an enclave, or to prevent genocide. A RAND project focused on the pivotal role that airborne forces could play in key missions in the future—particularly against hybrid threats and in anti-access environments.

In the future, airborne forces will likely be confronted with increasingly sophisticated anti-access threats, and improved tactical combat capabilities in the hands of potential opponents. To overcome these new threats, the airborne force will need new capabilities. A very important consideration in this research was the need to identify potential enhancements to today’s airborne forces that could be made in the next three to five years. The research team identified the concept of enhancing today’s airborne forces by adding a light armored infantry that could be airdropped by parachute or air-landed at an airfield. Such a capability provides airborne forces with increased speed and mobility once it arrives in the objective area, as well as greater survivability and firepower.

After developing the initial concept, the research team conducted extensive analyses of vehicle options, as well as the airlift requirements that such a concept would generate. An important part of this analysis was a series of tabletop exercises conducted with subject-matter experts to explore how such a concept could be employed in a variety of scenarios.

Related Research


Enhanced Army Airborne Forces: A New Joint Operational Capability
EXPERTISE
The RAND Center for Gaming co-directors

Stacie L. Pettyjohn
Codirector, Center for Gaming; Senior Political Scientist
@StaciePettyjohnSave to My RAND
Contact
Stacie L. Pettyjohn is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and codirector of the Center for Gaming. She is also an adjunct professor and Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Her primary research areas include wargaming, military posture,…


David A. Shlapak
Senior International Research Analyst; Codirector, Center for Gaming
Save to My RAND
Contact
David A. Shlapak is a senior international research analyst at the RAND Corporation and codirector of the RAND Center for Gaming. Since joining RAND in 1982, he has led research on topics ranging from counter-terrorism to nuclear strategy. His primary current areas of research include U.S.…

RAND's Long History of Gaming
The RAND Corporation has been at the forefront of gaming for nearly seven decades. In the 1950s it pioneered the use of political-military crisis games to study nuclear deterrence. The idea for the U.S.-Soviet "hot line"—the famous "red telephone" that allowed the American president and his Soviet counterpart to communicate directly and securely in a time of crisis—grew out of a 1961 RAND game. During the 1990s it developed the innovative "Day After" approach to explore the consequences of nuclear proliferation, and the platform has subsequently been used for topics as diverse as global warming and cybercrime. Among other topics, RAND is currently using gaming to examine impending changes in national health-insurance regulations, key issues in U.S. national security strategy around the world, and political transformation in volatile regions.