cringe and then chuckle

I've read almost everything Glenn Greenwald has written since the Unclaimed Territory days.  He's great.  I had to say those nice things because I was starting to complain about something he does every once in a while that makes me cringe.  A throw-away line he used a few days ago was sticking in my craw, something like "the founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves!"  Come on, Glenn! Fuck the founding fathers, man!  They openly sought to design a system to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority!"  They were the original 1%, ruthless exploiters of the working man, and they wanted to keep it that way!  Those rich fucks!  This whole fucking thing! That's what bugs me a little; Greenwald often seems too reverent to the mythology of The Founders, those glorious secular saints who gave us The Holy Document. But then again I refuse to acknowledge other people's sneezes lest I encourage superstition, so maybe I'm overly sensitive. 

Now I see that the piece I'm remembering was shorter than his usual, and the tone more exasperated.  I shouldn't take it especially seriously, and I certainly don't begrudge him the occasional outburst amidst his typically meticulous and methodical work.  In fact, I admit this one is pretty entertaining.  How about that next-day-update where he actually laid down some fucking scripture on us, from the 1777 Epistles of St. John!  (He's the patron saint of the 1% because when he recognized that the dependence caused by extreme inequality compromises the political autonomy of the poor, his solution was that the poor wouldn't have any formal political power in his shiny new democratic nation!)  Anyway, is Glenn making fun of himself?  Either way it is funny, and dark.

serve somebody

If Geithner and Obama really wanted to convince the world that America’s markets weren’t broken, they would effectively police fraud, and by extension prove to everybody that at the very least, our regulatory system is not broken.

But by taking a dive on fraud, and orchestrating mass cover-ups like the coming foreclosure settlement fiasco, what they’re doing instead is signaling to the world that not only are our financial markets corrupt, but our government is broken as well.

The problem with companies like Lehman and Enron is that their executives always think they can paper over illegalities by committing more crimes, when in fact all they’re usually doing is snowballing the problem so completely out of control that there’s no longer any chance of fixing things, thereby killing the only chance for survival they ever had.

This is exactly what Obama and Geithner are doing now. By continually lying about the extent of the country’s corruption problems, they’re adding fraud to fraud and raising such a great bonfire of lies that they probably won’t ever be able to fix the underlying mess.

If they looked at the world like public servants, and not like corporate executives, they’d understand that the only way out is to come clean. That they don’t look at things that way should tell people quite a lot.

- Taibbi (emphasis mine)

I just want to point out that (1) "our" government is not "broken" at all but functioning exactly as it was designed and always has functioned - preserving the privilege of elites - and that (2) the success of the powerful is measured not by how long they last in a given position ("survival" in the 2nd highlighted passage above) but how much money and power they personally accumulate. That we don't look at things that way should tell people quite a lot.

a picture and a poem

Democracy don’t rule the world
You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid

-Bob Dylan

the state says: don't try to help people!

Cuban doctors prevented from providing medical help to Katrina victims.

Volunteer helping clear trees after tornado forced out of town, fined $275.

"They basically carted them off to jail for feeding hungry people"

what do we do with violent people?

As more and more stories and videos of police brutalizing Occupy protesters come out, I'm reminded of something I wrote about a year ago.

the NYT is sounding defensive

The people who got fucked over are happy :)

The kind of people who fucked them over are sad :(

So, everything is okay!

quibbles with greenwald

As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.
- Glenn Greenwald (emphasis mine)

Arthur Silber is fond of pointing out that policy which fails to meet the goals of its creators is quickly modified. Glenn's choice of words is inappropriate. The intentions he attributes are how law is often described, but talk is cheap. Law has always been a weapon of the powerful.

Otherwise, right on!

thinking out loud

what would happen if all these Occupy groups demanded the release of Bradley Manning? if they started talking a lot about him... he becomes a rallying cry... that makes BO look pretty bad, right?

governments don't understand

“They don’t know why they’re there. They’re just mad,” Broun told us. “This attack upon business, attack upon industry, attack upon freedom – and I think that’s what this is all about.”

Note that on the one hand the Occupy protesters are "just mad," worthy of dismissal for not channeling their anger to an end that a Republican can comprehend, but on the other hand they're "attacking," which is presumably a serious threat, making them deserving of ridicule if not more severe punishment. Note further that the one thing the protesters aren't doing is "attacking," and that they've been attacked by police.

Expressing anger by any means other than violence is clearly confusing and threatening to governments.

what's the Patriot Act all about?

in my last post i gave an example of how the state "exploit[s] fear to increase the power of the state at the expense of personal liberty, and then immediately use[s] that increased power in ways other than how it was originally justified." for another especially vivid example see this graph.

police proud of their illegal tactics

Here is the state's playbook. Exploit fear to increase the power of the state at the expense of personal liberty, and then immediately use that increased power in ways other than how it was originally justified. Today's local new provides one tiny example.

As I understand it "RIDE programs" allow police to detain motorists in the absence of reasonable suspicion. Presumably citizens don't like being detained by men with weapons, but accept loss of liberty associated with these programs in the hopes of reducing impaired driving and making roads safer. If such programs failed to make roads safer (an empirical question), or if such programs were used for other purposes, it would violate the terms under which the liberty was surrendered.

Well, here in my hometown, police openly - and rather proudly - acknowledge that they can and do use these programs for other purposes.

evolutionary psychology for leftist anarchist types

I'm always surprised by the hostility to evolutionary psychology (ev psych) from the left (meaning further left than loyal Democrats), because I consider the science extremely supportive of the leftist-anarchist worldview. Since many bloggers cover political issues much better than me, maybe as a lefty-anarchist evolutionary psychologist, my blogging efforts would be well spent debunking some common objections to ev psych and highlighting some findings that should be of great interest to. My first pass will skip the references (I'm feverishly ill, but fired up), but if people comment and want the primary literature I'll be happy to provide it!

First of all, the theory of evolution by natural selection is the unifying principle of biology. Since humans are biological organisms, we are no more exempt from the forces of evolution than any other life form. I actually am kind of uncomfortable calling myself an "evolutionary psychologist" because psychology, being the science of brain and behaviour, must be evolutionary; if a central principle or finding in psychology conflicts with evolutionary theory, something is wrong! Furthermore, evolutionary theory has been wildly successful at predicting and explaining animal behaviour, including human behaviour.

Misconceptions (feel free to suggest other objections for me to try to debunk!):

In a comment thread over at Jack's place, I encountered a few common misconceptions about ev psych, all of which I'd like to eventually address, respectfully. Among them (these aren't necessarily exact quotes, just my understanding of the objections raised):

1. "Sexual attraction is not scientific."

I think the intended meaning (correct me if I'm wrong) is that sexual attraction isn't a topic that science can attempt to understand. If that's the intended meaning, it is very wrong. We know a great deal about the science of sexual attraction; see my comments in that thread for an intro, and feel free to post questions in the comments.

2. "Ev psych is Lamarkism applied to mind."

Originally I wrote: Nobody (or close to it) takes Larmkian inheritance of acquired characteristic seriously in any field of biology, ev psych included. If you think otherwise, please provide specific references and I'll gladly take a look.

Update: I was a bit hasty with the outright dismissal of inheritance of acquired characteristics, because a lot of work in epigenetics is showing exactly that. Still, I don't know of much, if any, use of Lamarck's theories in ev psych; our models are Darwinian (and modern synthesis).

3. "Ev psych claims that human nature is fixed, which can't possibly be right given the extraordinary variety in human behaviour, culture, and social structure."

Indeed, it cannot possibly be right that human nature is fixed. Learning, conditioning, and plasticity are very important parts of understanding behaviour. I think this misunderstanding comes from a root confusion thinking that "genetically based" means fixed. A better way to think of it is that our genetic structure allows flexibility within a certain range.

One commenter highlighted the common occurrence of cross-species adoption, presumably as a way to argue "evolution could not possibly favor an animal investing so heavily in the offspring of another species?" The confusion here is between proximate and ultimate levels of explanation. Evolution by natural selection creates proximate mechanisms that are adaptive on average. That "on average" is key! In the case of cross-species adoption, the evolved proximate mechanism might be something like "take care of younglings in my nest." Since the vast majority of such younglings would be your own offspring, this behavioural tendency is adaptive on average. But there are many species, cuckoos for example, that exploit parental sollicitude mechanisms as a way to avoid the cost of raising their own offspring.

4. "Ev psych is innately conservative."

The next section mentions some key findings that I think are deeply subversive, but I'd be curious to hear what people think are the conservative aspects of ev psych.

Findings that lefties ought to like:

1. Inequality seems to be at the root of a variety of social ills.

Since natural selection can be conceived of as intrasexual competition for a share of the parentage of the next generation, it follows that inequality of outcome should be associated with heightened competition. Where there is a "winner take all" situation, for example in elephant seals, where one dominant male beachmaster gains the vast majority of sexual access to females and thus a large share of the parentage, we expect fierce competition, which we certainly see. Humans are no different! There is no better predictors of male-male homicide (from a cross-national scale, all the way down to neighborhood level) than income inequality (except possibly life expectancy, which I can address later if someone is curious). A variety of other social ills (e.g. a myriad of health outcomes, problem gambling, traffic fatalities) are also strongly correlated with income inequality. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but the findings are overwhelmingly supportive of the basic concepts of biology, and are equally supportive of the anarchist worldview of skepticism towards power structures! A common confusion is that these issues are related to absolute poverty, as opposed to relative poverty, but these correlations remain extremely strong once you control for various poverty measures (plus poverty is a relative concept anyway).

2. The classical economics model of humans as purely self-interested rational maximizers is totally inadequate.

Cooperation and conflict is my specialty within the field, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies debunking the conservative models common in economics. In fact one group of evolution-minded researchers has proposed that humans are innately cooperative, even in situations where we do not stand to gain ("strong reciprocity" theory); I find the details slightly misguided, but its popularity if nothing else is indicative of how seriously the discipline takes cooperation and altruism as a fundamental characteristic of human psychology.

Ok, that's all for now. I'll update or make new posts if I attract some attention.

keep 'em coming!

wikileaks, palestine papers, tunisia, yemen, egypt, jordan. exciting, inspiring times.

some people get it

Here are a pair of inspiring blog posts I came across today:

America Via Erica's valedictorian speech (via Ethan)

the Anarchist Mother's unfooding experiment

both of them have other interesting items on their blogs. check them out!

more on Wikileaks

Wikileaks is giving me more hope than any political organization/movement I can remember. I see a few main reasons so far to support what they've been doing:

1.) The information they've made public has revealed numerous previously unknown instances of corruption and crime in the US, Australia, Kenya, Iceland, Peru, and other places. I'm particularly impressed with all the dirt they've uncovered about the US Government in their most recent release. A quick sample:

• Bush and Obama used the US State Department to pressure the Spanish and German government not to investigate torture (and death) of their citizens at the hands of US agents.
• Obama is conducting a secret war in Yemen that has killed dozens of civilians, and his State Department has lied to cover it up. One strike targeted a US Citizen, consist with Obama's claimed power that government can order the murder of its own people without any judicial due process.
• Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to do all kinds of spying on UN leaders - gathering fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, credit cards, frequent flier numbers, computer passwords and encryption keys, etc. This shit is very illegal under US and international law.

These crimes just wouldn't be uncovered by the mainstream press without Wikileaks. Bush was able to get the New York Times to delay publishing the story (for over a year!) about Bush's illegal warantless surveillance of telephone communication by US citizens. Wikileaks is uncovering similar stories by the handful, and getting the mainstream press to publish them.

It might sound weird to be so enthusiastic about these things. But what I'm enthusiastic about is the disclosure, not the crime. Given that these crimes have happened, it is definitely a positive thing that they be made public, and that wouldn't be happening without Wikileaks.

2.) Their overall strategy is brilliant. Contrary to the popular idea that they won't matter because in response to these leaks, the government will just lock down information even tighter and then go right back to doing the same shit, there is good reason to think that these leaks will genuinely disrupt government operations. This is because government is essentially an authoritarian conspiracy - "conspiracy" not in the crazed Hollywood sense, but with the more mundane meaning of a network of associates working together and whose plans are not fully public. Making leaks a part of their communications environment makes it harder for them to operate, because they either have to become more secretive, making it more difficult to operate and thus less efficient in their operations, or less secretive, in which case their actions will outrage people and inspire greater popular resistance. Wikileaks' tactics have also been brilliant, but I'll just leave it at that for the sake of brevity.

So many groups who claim to care about the kinds of things I care about have no clue how to actually make positive progress in the face of brutal opposition, and in fact they often fail to even recognize who their opposition is. This group seems to have a real sense of how, and against whom, to fight!

3.) The response to what they've done is revealing the ugly workings of power.

• Wikileaks hasn't been convicted of, or even charged with, any crime. Yet the US Government has pressured Amazon.com into cutting off their website (which Amazon hosted). Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard have refused to process funds transfers to Wikileaks. Banks are freezing their assets. These are all lawless, state-sponsored, politically-motivated attacks on a journalist organization.
• Bradley Manning, who allegedly was the source of these leaks from inside the US military, is being held in solitary confinement, and not allowed visitors. This is a severe punishment (certainly psychological torture) despite not having been convicting of any crime, and despite Obama's campaign pledge to increase protections for whistleblowers.
• Various high-ranking government figures are calling for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be killed, labelled a "terrorist", or charged with treason (absurd, as he's not a US citizen) and Assange was apparently also being held in solitary confinement in the UK (on very fishy sounding charges of weird sex crimes). He was recently granted bail release, but the (Swedish?) government is appealing that ruling.
• Media and political figures endlessly repeat a series of blatant falsehoods, e.g. "Wikileaks has blood on its hands," despite not a shred of evidence that anyone has come to harm because of the leaks (aside from the accused leakers), or "Assange isn't a real journalist because he just publishes documents indiscriminately" when in reality, for the recent leaks he's published fewer than 1% of the documents obtained, and only after the New York Times published nearly all of them.
• The US Government has sent absurdly authoritarian memos to all of its employees warning them not to read any of the leaked material, despite being available on literally thousands of websites, including the sites of major newspapers, since the material is still technically "classified." Universities, noble progressive institutions of truth that they are, have sent similar memos to their students. The US Air Force is blocking the New York Times.
• The US Attorney General says the Justice Department is investigating Assange despite him not being American or in America, and despite there being no laws that he's broken.

All of these things are so obviously corrupt and hypocritical. Officials of the US Government, an organization responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere over the last few years, accusing anyone of having "blood on their hands" would be funny if it weren't so disgusting.

Again, it might sound weird that I'm so enthusiastic and hopeful about an organization that is being so viciously attacked, and inspiring such a disgusting authoritarian backlash, but the intensity and open criminality of those responses is a measure of how threatening Wikileaks is to the corrupt people who hold all this power. They're willing to look like bloody fools just to try to stop the damage.

4.) Wikileaks is inspiring others to action: not just polite protest, but cyber-attacks on the bottom line of corporations who have sided against Wikileaks. When their site got shut down, thousands of other sites popped up to mirror Wikileaks. Their ability to win other groups to their cause is impressive and encouraging.

There are a few different worthy sub-causes to which I'm considering donating:

• Wikileaks itself
• Julian Assange's defense fund
• Bradley Manning's defense fund

But there are some problems. It is hard to get money to some of these groups because of the crackdown. Also, it would be reasonable to fear reprisal, like being charged with "material defense of terrorism" or some crazy shit like that. I'm trying to get a better feel for my options.

on Wikileaks

I love it. Duh.

Beyond that, there's lot to say, much of which has already been said. But you must know what I think, so here's a thought.

First, consider that many of these leaked documents are totally mundane and offer no new information about the foreign policy or military policy of the USG. But the fact that such material is classified in the first place DOES reveal something, a point made by Glenn Greenwald:

It is a "scandal" when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy. Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified -- whether because it's innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing -- is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers. Because we're supposed to have an open government -- a democracy -- everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That's not just some lofty, abstract theory; it's central to having anything resembling "consent of the governed."

The alleged social contract is that we the people will allow the government to have insane amounts of power, as long as they let us know what they're doing with it. "Ok, we'll let you keep a few secrets in some special cases where secrecy is appropriate, but generally you need to be telling us what you're up to." Wikileaks come in and proves that the government is making a mockery of that social contract, by making EVERYTHING secret.

If the government isn't respecting the deal, why should we? And aside from what it is that Wikileaks is exposing, the fact that they're in the exposing business is also a problem. Wikileaks is being defiant, refusing to obey as Michael Smith points out, which might make other people less inclined to obey. Power has good reason to be pissed off at Wikileaks.

And so various high profile political and media figures, like good servants of power, are running around saying we should kill the Wikileaks guy. They're the more fringe crazies like Sarah Palin. What about the more "respectable" figures? Consider what Greenwald pointed out and IOZ emphasized about Wolf Blitzer: he was outraged at the idea that the government failed to keep secrets from him! This is a leading "journalist" and he demands that we all should know LESS about what our government does. Or consider that the Attorney General is running around threatening to prosecute foreign citizens, who aren't on US soil, for violating laws that don't exist:

"To the extent there are gaps in our laws... we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say . . . that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that's ongoing."

This entire Wikileaks episode should reveal very clearly that the people who control the power of Government and of mainstream media have no respect for democracy (i.e. they want an uninformed citizenry) and have no respect for law (i.e. they break it or change it when it serves their interests). The entire power structure of government and media exists to serve certain interests - not yours.

how to make things better

I recently suggested to some friends that a way to work towards a more equal society would be to get more involved with their union. This was met with rather vehement objection, on the basis that their union doesn't serve their interests. The more I've thought about this response, the more amazed I am because of how backwards this logic is.

Whether they like it or not, their union is the (strongest) vehicle for collectively representing their interests as employees. The union hasn't served their interests well in the past precisely because a small number of biased people have been making decisions on behalf of a larger group (I know this because I used to be in the same union and had many of the same frustrations as them). So I'm advocating that my friends get more involved so as to make their union more effective at representing their interests.

So basically I'm saying: the current power structures of society don't serve your interests, so you need to work more for your own interests and do less delegating of that work to others.

And they're responding: but those others don't work for my interests.

And they seemed to think that undermined my point!

In retrospect, I think that a big source of confusion is that they, like most North Americans, have only the faintest notion of what democracy actually is, aside from voting. Not because they're stupid, but because they're deluged with propaganda and they have little exposure to genuinely democratic organizations. They have little concept of how people could possibly manage their own affairs rather than letting someone else control things. To them "the union" and "the people who've been leading the union" are indistinguishable - pure authoritarianism. Thus, "getting more involved with the union" doesn't work because they can't imagine that meaning anything other than just doing what the union leaders tell them to do. The idea of working together to force powerful people to respect your interests is just utterly foreign. Again this isn't because they're dumb, but because they've never known anything else.

The topic came up in the first place when I made a broader point about helping people that has been on my mind lately. I noted that, given the existence of human suffering, there are two main ways to make things better. You can either find a suffering person (or people) and try to heal them, or you can address the root causes of that suffering. It turns out that social structures can be pretty strong root causes of suffering. (There's a pretty convincing body of evidence that economic inequality leads to all kinds of nasty shit, see this book for a good start, and so I suggested that if you want to help people, fighting for greater equality is a way to address root causes.) Because there are entrenched interests that will resist changes to social structures, and because working directly with a suffering person can create a more immediate improvement, I argued that the root cause approach is too neglected. (Not to mention that there's more money to be made in treatment!) I think that if people shifted their total helping efforts to do slightly more root cause work (even at the expense of treatment work) I suspect we'd all be better off.

Their resistance to my idea tells me I'm fighting an uphill battle.

answering anarchy's toughest challenge

An obvious problem that society has to cope with is that some people just want to hurt other people, to control them, to dominate them, to humiliate them. How does the anarchist propose to deal with that?!!!.

Anarchists propose that we all take note that the state's solution for dealing with these people is to (1) hire all of them, (2) train them to kill people, (3) give them guns, (4) set them loose among the population, and then (5) use its power to shield them from accountability for their unjust use of violence. Anarchists then suggest that maybe the state's solution isn't the best idea!

worship of state

Rolling along with the idea, popular in my head, that statism is a religion, here's the good professor (emphasis mine):

These conventions are so widely observed that further citation is unnecessary. A notable feature throughout is the lack of any felt need to justify the flattering doctrine that in the Third World, the U.S. has sought only to thwart the Russians and their totalitarian goals while upholding its lofty principles as best it can in these grim and trying circumstances. The reasoning is that of NSC 68: these are necessary truths, established by conceptual analysis alone. Scholars who profess a tough-minded "realistic" outlook, scorning sentimentality and emotion, are willing to concede that the facts of history hardly illustrate the commitment of the United States to, as Hans Morgenthau puts it, its "transcendent purpose" -- "the establishment of equality in freedom in America," and indeed throughout the world, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But the facts are irrelevant, because, as Morgenthau hastens to explain, to adduce them is "to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it," while the actual historical record is merely the abuse of reality, an insignificant artifact. The conventional understanding is therefore self-justifying, immune to external critique.

Though the sophistication of traditional theology is lacking, the similarity of themes and style is striking. It reveals the extent to which worship of the state has become a secular religion for which the intellectuals serve as priesthood. The more primitive sectors of Western culture go further, fostering forms of idolatry in which such sacred symbols as the flag become an object of forced veneration, and the state is called upon to punish any insult to them and to compel children to pledge their devotion daily, while God and State are almost indissolubly linked in public ceremony and discourse, as in James Reston's musings on our devotion to the will of the Creator. It is perhaps not surprising that such crude fanaticism rises to such an extreme in the United States, as an antidote for the unique freedom from state coercion that has been achieved by popular struggle.

hippies and small farmers have unfair advantage say men with guns

People organize to get the food they want. They leave giant corporations out of the process, so those corporations send men with guns to steal that food. This is called "leveling the playing field for producers" by the government. Ha!