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.

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.

leave those kids alone

I just sat through this talk about how you can maybe treat ADHD by treating associated working memory deficits that pissed me off.

Working memory is supposed to be useful for "goal-directed activity." The behavioural patterns associated with ADHD include things like poor academic performance, not sitting still in class, talking out of turn, and poor performance in memory tasks in the lab. It strikes me that all these behaviours involve goals imposed on them by authorities, authorities who then cite a child's reluctance to subordinate his own goals to the goals of the authority as evidence of a "disorder" that requires pharmacological intervention or behavioural modification therapy. Seems to me like ADHD is an independent-minded social strategy that doesn't fit well with our social system, so we're trying to modify the individuals to fit the system, rather than the other way around. Procrustes smiles.

When I brought this up to the speaker, she cited ADHD kids' poor perform at video games ("their favorite thing to do!") as evidence for inability to perform well at their own goals. I've played video games; sometimes you just don't want to do what you have to do to "win." Sometime you just want to go jump on that thing and see what happens. When I questioned the ecological validity of video games, she said something about how when they play baseball ("what could be more ecologically valid!?") they have trouble remembering how many outs there are or some shit. Uh, maybe they just want to catch and throw a ball without keeping score? God forbid we try to have fun without a way to keep track of winners and losers.

It just strongly felt to me that I was in the presence of the worst evil of academia, where some "expert" is highly paid to make it sound like fucking people up to serve the interests of power is somehow "science" that we should all take seriously and respect. Fuck them.

My friend at Think Love, who studies psychological phenomena related to so-called ADHD, has some further commentary, touching on some important points like how this kind of "science" is funded, and what might constitute natural child behaviour (hint: it doesn't involve sitting still in a classroom all day and filling in the right circles with a #2 pencil).

her nipples are showing

another thought about this.

americans like to make righteous noise about women being forced to cover themselves from head to toe in muslim countries, lest they risk being stoned to death by angry mobs. definitely a terrible situation. of course, in america if a woman doesn't cover her breasts, she risks being chained and thrown in a cage by men (who might use lethal force against her at any moment).

yes, the latter is better than the former, but it isn't anything to be proud about. america only looks good by comparison to misogynist totalitarian fundamentalism. how about this for a radical crazed leftist lunatic perspective: women should be able to wear whatever they want, and not liking their decision doesn't justify physical coercion of any kind. justification for the use of force against another person requires a high burden of proof. "her nipples are showing" doesn't qualify.

but i know, i know, that's fucking batshit insane, and couldn't even be contemplated in civilized society. so how about this for a perfectly reasonable and moderate position, argued from the popular progressive standpoint of basic gender equality: armed agents of the state should allow a woman to appear in public wearing anything that a man is allowed to appear in public wearing.

image via

My personal statement for grad school applications

Here are the opening sections of the personal statement I attached with my graduate school applications. Below this would be a customized paragraph expressing interest in the work of specific faculty members at each school, and sections about my academic, research, and other experiences.

In this personal statement I essentially want to summarize where I am and how I got here. Along the way I will discuss my research interests, career goals, and relevant experiences.


Worldview

My views include the following ideas:

• The foreign policy of the United States Government has been grossly immoral for at least 100 years. Many of its executive branch and military leaders during this time should be considered war criminals, with Congressional leaders of both parties fully complicit.
• Increasingly authoritarian domestic policies have eroded personal liberty in a multitude of ways, and are contrary to our supposed national ideals.
• The vast majority of our national dialog on these and related matters is remarkably ill-informed, predicated on false assumptions, and dominated by people with an interest in keeping it that way.
• The American lifestyle is perilously unsustainable and unhealthy. Our transportation, energy, and agricultural systems depend on unsustainable resource consumption and environmental destruction. Our economy is propped up by unsustainable debt levels. Our high-calorie diets and sedentary lifestyles are leading to deteriorating health while our healthcare system becomes increasingly unaffordable.
• Religion is a negative societal force. Its destructive consequences include the following: encouraging pride in scientific illiteracy and historical ignorance; glorifying sexist, racist, and homophobic ideas and actions; inhibiting compassion and stunting our moral reasoning abilities in favor of punishment and deference to authority.

These views are based on a great deal of reading and reflection, but each point would take far more space to adequately defend than I have available in this format. So I present them as an unsubstantiated list of my personal views, for which I believe I could argue convincingly and passionately, though I always consider myself open to intelligent counterargument.

Taking all of those views together, I find the hypocrisy, injustice, and immorality disturbing, almost indescribably so. I see understanding the thoughts and behaviors behind each of those points as a necessary contribution to fighting them, and I find myself driven to pursue this understanding.


Academic, Career, and Faculty Interests

I want to understand how individuals can hold obviously contradictory beliefs. Why do people have strong opinions on subjects about which they know almost nothing? I want to understand how each individual within a population can assume patterns of behavior that seem so obviously self-destructive to the group as a whole. How can people come to value superstition and dogma over logic and evidence? What forces drive these behaviors?

I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in trying to make sense of these things, and I’ve concluded that an academic career in psychology would be the best avenue for continuing this pursuit. I envision myself as beginning an academic career with a unifying theme of studying conditions that encourage or discourage reasonable behavior, drawing on findings from, and contributing to the body of knowledge in the fields of personality/social psychology and evolutionary psychology.

My interest in those particular fields developed because they’ve offered the most compelling insights for me as I’ve explored those questions. The classic social science experiments – Milgram, Stanford Prison – shed valuable light on Abu Ghraib and our national torture debate (I still can’t get over that there is any debate). I’ve found the personality research of Dr. Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba, who has extensively studied authoritarianism and religious attitudes, similarly illuminating. Evolutionary Psychology offers the insight that many of the disturbing problems I listed could be united by a common theme of human confrontation with evolutionarily unprecedented situations: huge states, agriculture, powerful weaponry, hydrocarbon energy, and advanced scientific knowledge. The vast majority of the evolution of the human mind occurred in the absence of these innovations, and thrusting our stone age brains into the space age seems bound to cause trouble.

I’ve given political issues a prominent place in this essay because they arouse my passions these days, but I’ve touched on other areas as well: education, morality, health, religion, media consumption. There are a number of kinds of behavior that interest me under all of those headings. I hope to have the opportunity to explore one or more of those interests as a graduate student and beyond.

the power of the pen

This email, whether genuine or not, reminds me very much of my personal correspondence with check my ip. It has the same aggressive condescension towards someone for questioning authority, the same disregard for logical argument, and the same sprawling agrammatical style.

It is an endless source of personal frustration that people with the mindset demonstrated in this kind of writing achieve positions of immense power. This frustration seems pretty pointless though, as there's nothing I can do to change it. There are reasons why such people are in such positions, and the reasons why they shouldn't be involve abstract values that are meaningless to people who think only in terms of raw power.

How dare you not let me abuse my power!!

Where people whose job it is to enforce the law go to complain when they aren't treated like they're above the law.

Or as Thoreau says:

They even announce the names of cops who gave them speeding tickets, in hopes that other cops will take notice of this “unprofessional behavior.” Um, yeah. Sure.
I doubt that the creators of that site realize this, but by highlighting instances where the law is applied even to cops they are actually portraying law enforcement in a positive light.

I say “Bravo!” to the cops who apply the law equally and impartially to all of their fellow citizens, including people who enjoy positions of trust and authority.

Post-Mortem America

We are told that in the weeks before 9/11, then CIA chief George Tenet and his colleagues across the intelligence community were so alarmed by the flood of reports about an impending major terrorist attack that they felt their "hair was on fire." God only knows what the truth of this self-serving, after-the-fact assertion might be, but it is indeed an apt term for a sense of imminent doom in the public sphere. And given the headlong rush to a new war against Iran, and the G-force acceleration into the tyranny of a lawless, all-encompassing surveillance state that is unfolding before our eyes -- not to mention the Democratic Party's complete abandonment of even the pretense of carrying out the people's mandate and opposing the Administration's maniacal, murderous, criminal policies -- anyone whose hair isn't on fire today is either brain-dead, bought-off, or an active, eager, conniving traitor to the American people, and the human race.

Chris Floyd wrote that today. It is a fitting introduction to this post I've been trying to try to write for weeks now.

I'd strongly recommend reading this Chris Floyd essay from 3 weeks ago, as well as these 3 responses to it: Arthur Silber, IOZ, and Jim Henley. Those links contained well expressed thoughts by excellent writers. All of them have their hair on fire. So do I. And if you don't, you're either brain-dead, bought-off, or an active, eager conniving traitor to the American people, and the human race.

Floyd begins:

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.

The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there ... Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.

I don't think there's really any question that Chris Floyd is right. We're living in a different country than the idealistic America we grew up believing in, and we're little more than subjects of an elite ruling class that cares nothing for anything but preserving and expanding their own influence. Read his entire essay.

Then go read Arthur's, which puts the Bush carnage in a larger context.

The destruction of America has been accomplished in the manner of a particularly skillful and diabolical con game: it has been done completely in the open. No one was fooled or misled. The ruling class has always stated explicitly exactly what they intended to do -- and then they did it. You didn't think they meant it, not really, not all the way down.

But they did. They counted on the great majority of Americans not to believe what was directly before their eyes, or to identify its full, inevitable meaning. Most of you obliged. Most of you still oblige. They could not ask for more.

And most Americans still don't believe the destruction has already occurred, because there is no thunderous crashing of chords, no widespread calamity or destruction (at least, not yet, although we've had some previews) or, as Chris puts it, it won't come "with jackboots and book burnings," or with "tanks on the street." Poor, pitiful, pathetic Americans: it isn't like a movie.

And so it has come to pass. The lives of most Americans will go on as before, for that is the plan and the point. Be careful not to credit the ruling class with too much cleverness or intelligence for having achieved their heinous end, for most of them don't begin to understand what they're doing either. They are moved for the most part by the views of the "consensus," which views come from they not know where, nor do they care about or understand the original reasons. Their concern is much narrower: consolidating and expanding their own power, and that of the State. Their focus is on how power is actualized in the petty, sordid details of their pallid, drab, arid lives. The larger dynamics never concerned them, and they don't give a damn about any of that today.

So now that we see the big picture for what it is, the question now is what the hell are we supposed to do about it? It is impossible to imagine the massive uprising that would required for genuine change actually coming into being.

Winter Patriot had the idea of a general strike on 9/11/07. Did you hear about that? Me neither.

Capt. Fogg reacts understandably to the whole mess:

I'm past caring. America will do the stupid thing - we always do and when the piper presents his invoice we will spend generations rewriting history to protect the idiots - we always do. And then we'll do it again, using fake lessons from this debacle to justify another one. We always do.

It takes the slightest knowledge of history to get the "we always do" sentiment, unfortunately Americans have no understanding of history. And Americans won't do shit about any of this. So,

First noting that we're now past any Liberty-or-Death moments for the salvation of the Republic, and further noting that violent revolutions, even where possible, aren't generally advisable or supportable, the question naturally arises: what now? The answer is not much. In large part the more pertinent question is simply how do we as individuals comport ourselves to post-citizen lives? Where do we make accommodations and accessions, and where do we offer our small resistances. What does will it mean to be a subject in the era after consensual government? What power, if any, will we have to mitigate the evils of empire abroad? Since the institutions of democracy will remain superficially central to the United States (Rome retained a Senate), to what degree is it useful or valid to participate in the preserved processes of actual democracy? Is it now meaningful to take sides in the factional disputes that will continue in the immediate future as our governors sort out their tribal affiliations and solidify a neater process of succession? What are the ethical and moral obligations of the subject, as opposed to the citizen, for the actions of his nation? If we are to some degree absolved of responsibility and culpability for something like the coming bombing of Iran, does that also abrogate our calling to speak out against it? To what extent does it remain valid to cite the extant catechisms of Republican government--the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the ideals of the Framers--and to what extent is that citation merely willful complicity in a charade?

As a wise man once said, How the fuck should I know?

I think there are two reasons we ask those kinds of questions. First, we have some sense of moral decency (a.k.a. "moral casuistry and solipsism"). When we see something bad happening, we want to try to stop it. But what if we can't? That leads to the the second reason, which is for the sake of our own sanity.

Chris, Arthur, and IOZ seem to converge on two main strategies for dealing with our moral and mental health concerns. We can refuse to acknowledge the illegitimate power our government has amassed, with Thoreau-like nuggets of civil disobedience, taking that as far as we can safely take it. And we can insist on calling things by their rightful names.

"Torture is torture. War crimes are war crimes. Police-state procedures are police-state procedures." Jim Henley says that calling things by their true names is what "bitching on the internet" (a.k.a. blogging) is all about. It helps us feel less crazy in this up-is-down, black-is-white world, and it offers some feeling of moral contribution, because "[a]t minimum, the collective record of American dissent might be some minor use to the next crew that decides to give the liberty thing a go."

So is there anything more we can do than honest bitching and minor resistance? What about Winter Patriot's general strike? Floyd concludes his article today with the acknowledgment that any efforts are almost certain to fail to divert disaster. But,

We must keep sounding the alarm, even in the face of almost certain defeat. What else is our humanity worth if we don't do that? And if, in the end, all that we've accomplished is to keep the smallest spark of light alive, to help smuggle it through an age of darkness to some better, brighter time ahead, is that not worth the full measure of struggle?

Do something. Anything.

disturbing police brutality

This story of police in Florida using a taser on some poor guy is ridiculous on its own (disturbing videos at each of those links). But the crowd applauding it and John Kerry just blathering on while it happens is unreal.

I've referenced before that authoritarians personalities reflexively claim that we shouldn't worry about abuse of power. Somehow amazing things like this just rolls off their back. And what is even more disturbing is knowing that for every one of these attacks that gets caught on video, there are dozens more happening that never come to light. Many of those are far worse, and I'd bet that minorities are disproportionately the victims, probably by a large margin.

A guy talks to much and police torture him while an audience of students and an internationally prominent politician watch and do nothing. "America" doesn't really have any meaning does it?

update:

I'm posting the video of the student as well as a group of police officers tackling a man, breaking his leg in the process, for wearing a "I love the people of Iraq" button while waiting in line to enter a Congressional hearing.

hard work

I have a lot of political ideas that many people regard as extreme. I of course don't seem them as extreme; I seem them as logical and fair. The only way I see to ever improve things is by convincing people of the need for change, which is really fucking hard.

Recently, I sent a group of friends this article, by two retired military leaders (generals or admirals or something way at the top), about how using torture as a tool in the "war on terror" is a terrible mistake. One of my authoritarian friends replied to all of us essentially with 3 points (I'm respecting his wishes not to use his name or exact words). Here are those 3 points and my responses.

1.) That's crap. It makes sense in theory but isn't practicable.

Yeah those retired generals are crap! But what do you expect from elite military leaders? They're known for thinking in the clouds; certainly after decades of distinguished military service at the highest levels they have no idea what is practicable.

2.) Their ideas hinge on the notion that changing the way we deal with people will change how those people think of America. But those people won't change how they think because their religion dictates their opinion of America.

Yeah some people have this rigidly dogmatic view of America that is instilled in them from a young age. And no matter how much evidence you present those people about the role that America really plays in the world, no evidence could ever change their true-believing religiously-warped minds!

What facts might possibly convince these people to change their minds about America? How about these:

1953 -- Allen and John Foster Dulles, using the spectre of Communism, had convinced President Dwight Eisenhower to authorize the CIA and its operatives to overthrow the immensely popular and democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran (the US, of course, was after Iran's oil, and Mossadegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in an attempt to get fair payment for his country's resource). The CIA installed the dictator Reza Shah. This action did provide the US with oil, but it turned Iranians against the US: it radicalized whole sections of the population. The authoritarian government allowed radical (and anti-American) segments of Islam to flourish. During the coup, some estimates are as high as 10,000 of number of civilians killed; more were killed during the Shah's regime. Read Stephen Kinzer's book All the Shah's Men for more information.

1954 -- Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected reformist leader of Guatemala is overthrown by the US. Arbenz had incurred the wrath of the US owned United Fruit Company when he overthrew the corrupt Ubico government (the UFC made a lot of money while Ubico was in power because it was allowed to fix prices, avoid taxation, and exploit its workers). The CIA, in collaboration with the UFC, installed the military dictator Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in his place. During the overthrow and the subsequent bloody regime of Guzmán, 200,000 civilians were killed.

1963 -- US first assists in installing Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. When he made decisions that were "too independent" and strayed from the US vision of the region, the US backed his assassination. The war that resulted in part from this meddling killed 4 million people in southeast Asia.

1977 -- US backs military rulers of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadorans killed.

1981 -- The Reagan administration trains and funds contras in Nicaragua, who target civilians in their attacks. 30,000 civilians die.

There are *many* more examples listed here:
www.wordiq.com/definition/List_of_U.S._foreign_interventions_since_1945

Wait those don't sound like the actions of the land of the free do they? The people with a warped view about America are Americans.

For over a hundred years now, starting with the Philippines in 1898, through all those listed above and more, and into Iraq, America has routinely invaded countries for any reason we see fit, which are usually reasons that tend to make our rich people more rich, killing many thousands of non-white poor people in those countries, ruining millions of lives, destroying their homes and resources and farms, and telling them that it is for their own good!

Why don't they love us? Why do they hate us with a religious passion? I can't fucking imagine.

3.) All the hype about torture is going to make the public think that thousands of people are being tortured every day, which isn't the case.

How would we know what is the case when our government won't tell us? They say such information is secret because of national security interests! They refuse to allow any oversight of their behavior, stonewall investigations, ignore Congressional requests, and issue signing statements to reserve their right to ignore laws they don't like.

So what do we know? Quick hits:

• In Iraq as of March 2005:
• As of this week, the military is holding at least 8,900 detainees in the three major prisons, 1,000 more than in late January. Here in Abu Ghraib, where eight American soldiers were charged last year with abusing detainees, 3,160 people are being kept, well above the 2,500 level considered ideal, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the detainee system. The largest center, Camp Bucca in the south, has at least 5,640 detainees.
• Wikipedia says there are 775 detainees in Gitmo.
• We know that there are secret prisons all over the world but we don't know how many people are held there.

So in 5 minutes of Google searching, we're probably holding over 10,000 people related to our actions in the war on terror. And that doesn't even start to count people being held here, like Jose Padilla, who has be held without trial or access to lawyers and tortured for the last 5 years (he got limited access to lawyers about a year ago I think).

Many of these prisoners are being held by a military force where over a third condone torture, and less than half say they'd report unethical behavior of a team member. And commanding this military force is an administration that has explicitly reserved the right to torture, who brag about their use of "aggressive interrogation techniques," and who have repeatedly apprehended and abused innocent "suspects" on the flimsiest of evidence. Other prisoners are shipped to countries known for their human rights violations to be tortured there.

But he assures me that it is "isn't the case" that we're torturing thousands of people a day. Rest easy! We sure wouldn't want to let the generals and their "somewhat crap" opinions give anyone the idea that America is torturing any more than just a few hundreds of people per day!

His response was to tell me how oversimplified and naive my views are. This is from the guy who says that changing how we treat people won't change what they think of us since they hate us because of their religion. Certainly there is a religious aspect to people's opinions, but flatly rejecting the idea that treating people better would improve their opinion of us is about as "oversimplified" and "naive" as you can possibly be.

He also said I "blindly" accepted the ideas I argued for. I presented evidence and reasoning; he simply asserts his beliefs. Yeah, I'm the blind one.

This inevitably degraded into a personal attacks, which led to everyone discussing what an asshole I am. While I regret my inability to ignore personal attacks and understand that it would often be preferable to ignore them, I'm constantly amazed how effectively one can avoid discussing the substance of an issue by criticizing your opponents' form (even when your side initiated the downslide into that poor form). This doesn't just work well in group emails with your high school friends. It is a pervasive technique that I recently mentioned in the lightning rod part of this entry.

Don't want to debate the war? Attack your critics' poor form! Questioning a war is insulting to the troops!

Here's an excellent example of Fox News trying to use this tactic on Christopher Hitchens, and his impressive ability to thunder away despite of it.

so much to say, so little time to say it

Here come a bunch of links with commentary.


My boy Richard Dawkins takes on critics of The God Delusion. The Courtier's Reply that he mentions is here.

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Here's one about how paternalistic our culture is becoming. I'm not sure that is expressed the right way, but you get the point. In other paternalism news, the Pope recently said this mind-blowing bullshit:

Benedict said Latin American Indians had been "silently longing" to become Christians when Spanish and Portuguese conquerors took over their native lands centuries ago, though many Indians were enslaved and killed.

"In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," he said.

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And speaking of mind-blowing, here is a story about Tom Delay excreting pure authoritarian self-blindness.

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Here's a story about how the only bias that CBS is concerned about is anti-Bush bias. Pro-Bush bias is quite acceptable. Damn that liberal media.

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Chuck is a smart man.

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And to sum it all up:

The situation is now so godawful, so completely coo-coo, and so totally out of control that future historians will shake their heads in amazement trying to figure out why, by the spring of '07, the US politicians and the public haven't demanded the immediate removal of the Bush administration from office and their incarceration in the Hague to stand trial.

We live in very strange times.

Apathy and denial

I'm sure we can just ignore this story. Bad things can't happen here, right?

more interesting stuff today

That was so much fun that I'm going to do it again. Actually the real reason I'm linkdumping all over my blog is because my gmail isn't working so I can't just email this shit to people. I imagine that they are grateful for this change of venue.

Let's start with a few stories about how completely pathetic the mainstream media is. Glenn Greenwald had a field day yesterday with two posts on Chris Matthews and his Sunday panel of pathetic asshats who giggled nonstop about the US Attorney scandal. Following up on that theme is a strong criticism of David Broder, who cautions Democrats that it would be politically unwise to investigate the Bush administration's conduct with the scandal.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? We've got information that strongly suggests executive branch was using its clout to pressure the Justice Department into partisan politically motivated prosecution, and these media fuckheads just laugh about it like it is a cute little joke and then urge those nasty Democrats not to take anything too seriously and actually investigate. This is just mind-blowing to me. None of these people give a shit about anything but preserving their own power. And it could be the case that those in Congress who are pushing these investigates are doing it for their own partisan political reasons too (though I have no reason to think so), but that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. For fuck's sake James Madison thought that dismissing qualified public servants was grounds for Presidential impeachment, but David Broder says investigating the Bush administration is oh such a bad idea for Democrats. WHO GIVES A FUCK IF IT IS GOOD OR BAD FOR A POLITICAL PARTY? It is good for the fucking country to have inappropriate and possibly criminal behavior exposed and dealt with.

Moving on to other areas of media worthlessness, here's a good piece today from the Daily Howler, which is my new blog obsession. These guys cut through the bullshit in a way that makes it look easy. Today's link continues their recent (well as recently as I've been reading which is about 2 weeks) of the media's burning hatred of Al Gore and their absolute failure to engage in responsible reporting on the global warming issue. I'd strongly recommend browsing through their incomparable archives.

Think Progress offers an amusing picture of Republican hypocrisy and characteristically authoritarian self-blindness, at the expense of Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee. This dummy blasts the investigation into the attorney firings as partisan grandstanding and supports the Bush Administration's refusal as a right of executive privilege, meanwhile Smith is trying to get President Clinton to come testify about Presidental pardons. (It is possible that Clinton used pardons inappropriately, but the obvious contradiction in regards to executive privilege is glaring, plus it is going to be tough to argue that his mission is nonpartisan but the attorney firing is political grandstanding.)

And to finish up on a lighter note, this guy rules.

getting out of the house and more school thoughts

Today the Smithsonian was showing some of the winners from the 2006 Wildscreen Festival, so Kira and I went to check it out. We watched 3 of the films, including the one on my primate obsession, the bonobo.

As I try to get myself geared up to apply to go to grad school, I think I'm narrowing my interests down into two main areas. I'm interested in the kind of psychology research Robert Altemeyer does, particularly into authoritarianism, and I'm interested in something around the anthropology/primatology area, where I'm especially fascinated by the potential for insights into human evolution from study of the bonobos. Both seem to combine my natural attraction to the topics and an element of urgency to the research.

To elaborate a bit more, my interest in Altemeyer's research is well expressed by this description of him that I've seen on some of his papers:

Bob Altemeyer is associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. He does research on authoritarianism, prejudice, dogmatism, love, and the impolite topics of religion, politics, and sex.

I have to be honest, I would love to be able to put "he does research on impolite topics" every single place my name is written. So that's my personal attraction to the area, and the urgency of the research should be obvious to anyone who's been paying much attention to my blog over the last few months. Basically, authoritarianism has become a devastating political force in this country, causing tremendous damage here and around the world. The more we understand it, the better we can fight it. And the sooner the better.

And my interest in bonobos is about my longstanding fascination with evolution in general, human evolution in particular, and probably evolutionary psychology as well. Reading Robert Wright's books about evolutionary psychology and then Steven Pinker's books really opened my mind back up after years of intellectual dormancy. I'm having trouble deciding exactly what to think about evolutionary psychology (I get the impression that lots of biologists scoff at it pretty hard), but I know that I'm totally sold on the human mind as a biological adaptation and I know that whatever I do I want to have some scientific rigor. Anyway, I imagine there's enough there to be studied to satisfy a lifetime of curiosity, and I think I could be quite happy trying to learn more in this niche for a long, long time. The element of urgency to this is that bonobos are dangerously close to extinction and their habitat is threatened by a raging genocidal civil war in the Congo. Our opportunity to learn about them could be almost gone.

Speaking of getting out of my house and trying to learn something, last weekend I went to see James Randi as the featured speaker at a National Capital Area Skeptics 20th anniversary celebration. That was an entertaining and enjoyable event. His James Randi Educational Foundation does good work and deserves more than this brief mention.

Read the Bills

An aspect of the U.S. Attorney scandal that needs to be aggressively highlighted, but won't be, is that the Bush administration was able to slip a measure into the reauthorization of the Patriot Act allowing the Attorney General to appoint "interim" federal prosecutors to indefinite terms, effectively bypassing the checks-and-balances provided by the Senate confirmation process. The desire to create an unaccountable authoritarian executive branch has long been an obvious characteristic of the Bush administration, and it isn't the least bit surprising that they'd take every opportunity to enhance their own power. That is an important aspect of the story that should be noted, but what I want to highlight here is the broken mess of a process that allows a law to be passed without Congress actually knowing what it says. These are our elected representatives, who are supposed to be looking out for our best interests, and they're voting on laws that have drastic effects to the country without even knowing what they say. How is this acceptable to anyone? How is the media not making this a featured story every day?

You might notice I put a small banner on the right sidebar featuring the Read the Bills Act. I strongly urge you to visit the site, read the material, and support their efforts. They have an easy system to let you directly email your Representative and Senators, and they appreciate small donations. The main provisions of the Read the Bills Act include:

• Each bill, and every amendment, must be read in its entirety before a quorum in both the House and Senate.
  
  
• Every member of the House and Senate must sign a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that he or she has attentively either personally read, or heard read, the complete bill to be voted on.
  
  
• Every old law coming up for renewal under the sunset provisions must also be read according to the same rules that apply to new bills.
  
  
• Every bill to be voted on must be published on the Internet at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give public notice of the date when a vote will be held on that bill.
  
  
• Passage of a bill that does not abide by these provisions will render the measure null and void, and establish grounds for the law to be challenged in court.
  
  
• Congress cannot waive these requirements.

These are laws that absolutely everyone should support, regardless of your personal politics.

all lies all the time (updated)

More stories are coming out showing how the Bush Administration lies about just about everything they do.

Justice Department: Liars (liars!) about FBI abuse of power
Attorney General: Liar about politically-driven attorney purge
White House: Liars about Bush's history of undermining global warming science

Plus there was the whole Libby trial, illustrating how Cheney was obsessed with attacking the credibility of someone who dared dispute the lies about Iraq's non-existant WMD program.

UPDATE: Nice! My boy Greenwald comes through with a post on exactly this topic, and relates it to the extremist authoritarianism that characterizes this administration and the Republican Party in general:

Lying to Congress is what this administration generally -- and the DOJ specifically -- has done continuously....

None of these acts occur in isolation. They are all part of the broader view of the Bush administration that the President's power cannot be constrained by the law or by the Congress. They believe they have the right to lie to Congress about their behavior, even though lying to Congress is, as Atrios noted today, a felony...

It's so vital to note that this Republican belief in the right to lie to Congress has deep roots back in the Reagan administration and, even before that, in the Nixon administration...

Of course, the reason that lying to Congress is a felony is because Congress is composed of the representatives of the American people, and when executive branch officials lie to Congress, they are lying to the country. They subvert the entire constitutional order by preventing the American people from exercising overisight over the executive branch through their representatives in Congress, and it turns the President into an unchecked, unaccountable ruler.

Conservatives Without Conscience

In Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean writes:

Clearly the most serious threat from terrorists is that they obtain a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). But we face another very serious threat: namely, that our own government terrorizes us so much that we are willing to give up the ideals of democracy in exchange for reducing our fear. This threat to democracy seems well understood by Osama bin Laden and his troops. I have noted in the past, and I believe even more strongly today, that "the real danger posed by terrorism for our democracy is not that they can defeat us with physical or military force," rather "terrorism present its real threat in provoking democratic regimes to embrace and employ authoritarian measures that (1) weaken the fabric of democracy; (2) discredit the government domestically as well as internationally; (3) alienate segments of the population from their government, thereby pushing more people to support (passively, if not outright actively) the terrorist organizations and their causes; and (4) undermine the government's claim to the moral high ground in the battle against the terrorists, while gaining legitimacy for the latter." This is precisely what is happening in America today, as Bush and Cheney are being sucker punched by Osama bin Laden. Authoritarianism is everywhere in the federal government, not because Bush and Cheney do not realize what they are doing, but because they are authoritarians, and they are doing what authoritarians do. In the process they have weakened the fabric of democracy, discredited the American government as never before in the eyes of the world, caused people to wonder if the terrorists have a legitimate complaint, and taken the United States far from the moral high ground in refusing to abide by basic international law.

He goes on to note that despite the Bush administration's constant reliance on the politics of fear-mongering, they've done remarkably little to actually address the threat of terrorism.