Defensive walls are a universal technology. When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 to explore the American southeast, he found “a well inhabited and a fat country” with “some great and walled towns, and many houses scattered all about the fields, to wit, a crossbow shot or two, the one from the other.”1 These walls were built “of great posts thrust deepe into the ground and very rough, and many long railes as big as ones arme laid acrosse between them, and the wall was about the height of a lance, and it was daubed within and without with clay, and had loope holes.”

Defensive walls are also an entirely bourgeois construction; the concept of a gated community existed in the New World before Columbus. One Native American capitol called Pacaha was “very great, walled, and beset with towers, and many loopeholes were in the towers and wall” with “a great lake, that came neere unto the wall: and it entered into a ditch that went round about the towne, wanting but a little to environ it round”, suggesting enormous expenditure of community resources. Each fortified town was close enough to support the others, a peer among equals, but also separated from the others, the palisades creating exclusion rather than inclusion.

This pattern is not unique to the New World. A similar, if smaller, 10,000-year old Siberian site at Amnya was clearly meant to be seen and respected. Similar ditch-and-palisade constructions appear globally in the archaeology.2 From the first appearance of palisaded communities, wooden walls and ditches were high-visibility markers of status, a form of conspicuous consumption before the invention of money. All defensive structures are designed to manage risks, however, and palisades are consistent with risk management in a world of raiding activity. Grim archaeology shows that these defenses were necessary, and not simply for show.

This essay is cross-posted for premium subscribers from Polemology.net, where it will be locked until 2027. It is presented here for premium subscribers to Osborne Ink.

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The Walls Of Cahokia And The Palisaded Communities Of The Middle Mississippian

Defensive walls are a universal technology. When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in 1539 to explore the American southeast, he found “a well inhabited and a fat country” with “some great and walled towns, and many houses scattered all about the fields, to wit, a crossbow shot or two, the one from the other…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

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In a recent piece at Pirate Wires, police body camera footage aficionado Lou Perez wrote that the body worn cameras (BWCs) introduced at the demand of police reformers a decade ago did not produce the expected evidence of broad police misconduct. Instead, they “have only succeeded in recording perps acting against their own best interests.” I share Perez’s fascination with these videos, and I can confirm he is correct.

Police, it turns out, are almost never the ones who make a situation dangerous. “In every single bodycam video I’ve watched, the civilian insists on escalating the situation with the police officer” (emphasis added). Police unions resisted the cameras at first, and departments balked at the expense, but “I can’t think of anything that’s hurt the police reform movement more than the very bodycams activists demanded.” They capture irrational, impulsive violence that no mental health professional could be asked to contain.

Citizens file fewer frivolous complaints when BWCs are in use and officers are cleared of them more easily. Conversely, when police do misbehave on camera, the footage does get used against them, but this is much less common. Most of the complaints that are upheld by body cameras do not seem to be about use of force, either, but police behavior or criminal procedure. Cops get upset and say things they shouldn’t, or get excited and enter somewhere they shouldn’t, more often than they get upset and shoot someone they shouldn’t. These are normally training issues.

Nor do body cameras seem to create the scenes they document; they are not a stimulus for bad behavior. In fact, the very first experiment with police body cameras in 2013 was correlated with both a drastic reduction in use of force and a massive decrease in citizen complaints. From any utilitarian perspective, the technology would seem like an elegant solution to long-running disputes about American policing. A way to move forward and build a more just society. A triumph of progressive policy, even.

Unless you are an anti-police activist like Alec Karakatsanis, of course, in which case the police BWCs that the American Civil Liberties Union and Black Lives Matter wanted, that the Obama administration funded to the tune of $263 million nationwide, are now “essential propaganda tools” of American police. The emergent narrative is that the police are not sharing all the BWC video they have in every incident, therefore the picture that the public gets from BWCs is a false one. Now we have to get rid of the BWCs so that we can be free of the spooky mass surveillance. Spooooooky!

Karakatsanis recently appeared on Democracy Now! to talk about his new book, Copaganda, which, per the title, is a work of propaganda against policing. He says that the cameras are now a deception program brainwashing Americans into believing that the police are not racist genocidaires. Who do you trust, this disingenuous unshaven hippie asks: Me, or your lying eyes?

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Almost three years old to the day, reposted for the new Avatar film.

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Originally published three years ago almost to the day.

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María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition figure, escaped her country this week to receive her Nobel peace prize in person. According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, the group which exfiltrated Machado “made an important call to the U.S. military before they set out to sea, warning American forces in the region of the vessel’s occupants t…

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According to a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration wants taxpayers to have a stake in the quantum computing industry. Shareholder agreements would provide a minimum of $10 million in “funding earmarked for promising technology companies” in this emerging economic sector. Whereas the 20th century model of science funding …

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Legend has it that Col. Maximillian Kloss, an Austrian-born German immigrant to Mexico, offered his services to Pancho Villa in an El Paso hotel bar in 1913 as the teetotaling warlord sipped a strawberry soda, his favorite. In exchange for his military expertise, Kloss wanted Germany to have basing rights in Mexico. The offer never came to fruition, and…

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The very expensive antenna systems on these vehicles are painted the same basic white as the civilian vehicle that has been converted to carry them, or else painted in a similar ‘ghost gray’ color, while parts of them are just bare metal. In the clip below, the system has been secured in the bed of the pickup truck with orange ‘hi-vis’ ratchet tie down straps — for safety, one supposes.

But even if the crew had wanted to paint their system in a less-visible color, it is not clear that they could have, for it turns out there is in fact a paint shortage in Russia due to western sanctions. It was not just my imagination. For despite having plenty of oil, Russia never developed the ‘low tonnage’ chemical industries that turn refined oil into things like paint. Turns out that Russia has to import most of the stuff that goes into a can of tactical paint.

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