there's something in the water

blogging about how fucked up everything is just doesn't seem to be enough any more.

i know the feeling.

eurotrip 2011: footwear (and poker)

Knowing I'd be doing tons of walking in Europe but wanting to pack light (i.e. few socks), I decided none of my shoes or sandals were adequate to the task. This meant I'd need to acquire new footwear, which is actually a challenge for me. See, I never buy my own clothes, though I have lots. Nearly all of it came from women in my life - mom, sisters, exes. I wouldn't really even know how to go buy a shirt - I don't even know what size I wear! The only thing I really buy on my own is shoes for sports: cleats for softball, basketball shoes, etc. So I know very little about how to by clothes, and on top of that, I have the hyperactive conscience about where products come from.

I got a friend to help me (thanks!), and I ended up with this sandal-shoe hybrid thing. The company claims that they're doing noble things, but who knows. If they're full of shit, they got me. But I was very pleased with their performance. Aside from a small blister the first time I wore them, they were very comfortable. I probably walked 10 miles some days with no problems. I was worried about sweat-stink wearing them without socks, but I found this was actually only a problem when I was sitting or standing around. When I was walking, air got through and there was no sweat problem. So I started wearing socks (I brought 3 pairs) only on days I knew I would be sitting around a lot, and all was good.

My shoes actually helped me find a happy resolution to a confrontation with some old demons. On my last night in Brussels I noticed a casino a few blocks away from my hostel. I figured I'd go in and just see what the poker scene looked like. After a surprisingly invasive security/registration process, I went in and found a small poker room with 3 games going, all no-limit hold'em. The games looked soft! I considered playing, but it was late and there was a long waiting list. Plus I'm a bit conflicted about poker these days anyway (sitting around with strangers for hours trying to outsmart them for their money just doesn't seem like a good use of time any more), and my cash on hand was limited. Eventually I decided that I didn't come to Europe to play poker and wanted to be fresh for the next day, and headed back to the hostel to call it a night, feeling good about the decision.

After restlessly tossing and turning in bed, I got dressed and went back to the casino. So much for the decision I felt good about! I guess that rush of excitement that comes from walking in a casino door demands fulfillment, careful consideration be damned. I stopped at a cash machine, planning to sit in a 2-2 (euro) NL game for an hour or two. Only this time the burly security guy stopped me at the door and told me I'm not allowed in because of the dress code, pointing at my shoes! I could have argued, perhaps successfully. Or I could have gone back for some socks. Instead I immediately walked back to the hostel and fell soundly asleep, pleased with my choice of footwear.

eurotrip 2011: intro

I recently returned home from my first trip to Europe.

June 29: Montpellier, France
July 3: Amsterdam, Netherlands
July 6: Brussels, Belgium
July 10: Bruges, Belgium

I'll do a trip report over a series of blog posts. Topics will include:

• sex: about Amsterdam's Red Light District
• drugs: French wine, Belgian beer, and Amsterdam's coffeeshops
• rock-n-roll: street music
• hostels
  
• academics: I went to a conference in France
• footwear: I bought a pair for the trip, and they helped me win at poker, sort of
  
• traveling alone
  
• coming home

And maybe more. I'll link them above as I write them.

obama's position, as i understand it

the last vestiges of decency in the us government must be slashed, or else the world will end! also, MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR!!!!!!

what does it mean when we call such people "ancient"?

on the Kanazawa controversy

I haven't blogged here about the Satoshi Kanazawa controversy and its negative impact on popular opinion about evolutionary psychology, but I've discussed it elsewhere (see the comments). I just want to point out this story to anyone who thinks Kanazawa represents the field.

Spoiler: he doesn't.

meanwhile, south of the border

...except for the massive conservative victory

eh?

this canadian election is pretty cool.

wound up

BOSTON -- It'll come as little surprise to anyone who has watched him head-butt the hoop upright before the start of a game, but Boston Celtics forward Kevin Garnett admits that he's often so wound up with intensity that he doesn't always remember exactly how things have played out over the course of the contest.

Asked about a key theft of Jared Jeffries in the final moments of Tuesday's Game 2 triumph over the New York Knicks, Garnett struggled to recall exactly what he was thinking or what he saw as the play developed.

"What's crazy is I don't remember anything about tonight," Garnett said.

Just thinking out loud here, but maybe head trauma is a better explanation for memory loss than "intensity."

is this meant to be funny?

The NYTimes says, about the debate leading up to bombing the shit out of Libya:

[Clinton and Gates] and other senior officials had to weigh humanitarian values against national interests.

and,

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged Sunday that the unrest in Libya did not pose an immediate threat to the United States.... On the key question of whether Libya constituted the kind of vital national interest that would normally justify military intervention, Mr. Gates offered a blunt denial .... “No, I don’t think it’s a vital interest for the United States"

So they had to choose between humanitarian values and a war that wasn't a vital interest. At least not the kind of interest that "normally" would "justify" killing lots of people. The Times seems to think that war is some plucky underdog facing long odds. But, somehow, the cute little underdog always overcomes the big bully of humanitarian values. America loves an underdog!

Hillary explained that Qaddafi has a "history" and might have caused problems, and besides, all our friends in the area (i.e. repressive Arab dictators) wanted us to bomb the shit out of Libya, so we had to help our friends, right? "Let's be fair, here." Bombs away!

The article explains what a great relationship Clinton and Gates have, "practically completing each others' sentences." We're told how Clinton fired Philip Crowley because Crowley said that the military was "mistreating" Bradley Manning by torturing him for months, which apparently Gates, a straight-talker who likes to "call a spade a spade," couldn't handle. On the other hand, "unified message [is] prized by the Obama White House," so maybe BO had a little something to do with it.

The Times assures us "Mrs. Clinton emphasized that the administration did not view the Libya intervention as a precedent." So I'm not the least bit worried that the Libya intervention will be used as a precedent!

"She and Mr. Gates will share the burden of selling the Libya policy at home and abroad." In other words, the leaders go to war regardless of what the people think, and then go around trying to convince a reluctant populace that war is a great idea. That sounds like how Democracy ought to work! Go Democrats!

brazil!

awesome.

why "inexplicable"? and why for BO but not bush?

it ain't my system!

Justin laments that "our system" produces people with idiotic ideas. Naturally that's what the system will produce, because the system isn't "ours." It's Theirs. And one thing They do is employ people to spout ideas that are idiotic, in the sense that the ideas fail to accurately describe reality and/or are internally inconsistent, but useful, in the sense that the ideas help to preserve and expand Their power.

rich people get screwed over by even richer people

When I read a story about a recent basketball trade, it made me realize that, whatever you think about highly paid professional entertainers generally, one has to acknowledge that a very difficult aspect of most of their lives is that they constantly have to move around. People want to be entertained by new things; the same two teams playing every night isn't considered fresh enough (despite the fact that we love a long playoff series...) Having to move around all the time could be fun for a few years when you're young, but when you reach a certain age it is nice to settle down. At least I think so.

Anyway, this trade is getting a lot of attention because it involves a "superstar" player being traded to New York City. I use the scare quotes because this player is a superstar not because he helps his team win, but because he makes a lot of flashy plays, or so say the data. So he's either stupidly more style than substance and happens to get rewarded for it, or he is cynically selfish and willingly makes his team worse in a way he can profit from. Perhaps the other facts suggest which. This player has (openly) been wanting to be traded to the NYC team for almost a year, while also refusing to turn down an (open) lucrative contract offer from his current team, and his pressure tactics finally seem to have worked. To accomodate his demands, the teams involved had to trade other players, who were (openly) considered mere pawns used to make the math work for the superstar player.

Well one of those "pawns" is the best player in the deal at helping teams win games (which is the ostensible professional responsibility of a basketball player), and one of the most respected veterans in the league. And he had openly been very happy to be living in Denver, where he grew up. And now, because of this trade forced by the young hotshot, he has to uproot his life and move from Denver to NYC. I know he's receiving rich financial reward for his services, but when I read:

"I can't deny that when the trade went down last night, I was kind of more sad than happy," Nuggets coach George Karl said after his team's short-handed shootaround Tuesday. "I think most of that sadness was because of Chauncey."

it just hits home that these guys, despite being modern day gladiators, are also just people trying to make a living, and sometimes they get screwed over by some young hotshot and a systemic bias of the medium by which richer people make money off of them.

And then I realize that I can just pick a random story on the front page of the NYT and it will involve people getting screwed over way harder by people who are way richer, and without their own $15 million contract to ease their pain.

BINGO!

usually i just delete emails from my alma mater, but i paid attention to a recent one long enough to decide it deserves ridicule. check this out! let's have a big gambling contest and pretend we're learning something!

non-issues

Until your discipline can dispense with unproven modularity, gender and race essentialism, arguments from a presumed "mental fossil record" which of course can never be demonstrated, sociobiology, Dawkins' selfish gene and its general use as a justifier of the worst social norms and localized prejudices, I'm not really interested in discussing its value to leftist revolution.

- Jack Crow*

My discipline has never relied on unproven modularity. We have no interest in race essentialism, and to the extent that our theories involve what you might call "gender essentialism," they are supported by overwhelming cross-cultural evidence**. We don't argue from an undemonstrable mental fossil record, and we don't use The Selfish Gene to justify norms or prejudices, because we understand very well that one cannot infer a moral "ought" from an empirical "is."

So, now we can talk about the value of ev psych to leftist revolution!

(And please tell me where you got these mistaken notions.)

* I don't mean to pick on Jack specifically. I like his writing, and I appreciate his willingness to discuss the topic. I think his views are likely shared by many others, so I'm using his public remarks as a representative sample of leftist objection to evolutionary psychology.

** Yes, we do think that just as there are, on average, physical differences between men and women, there are psychological differences, and that evolution explains these differences. This is a value-neutral observation, and we acknowledge huge variance in behaviours and preferences within and between sexes. These differences are in no way used by the discipline to encourage discrimination or to restrict individual freedom.

advocacy is hard!

ok, i suppose i'm not really surprised to encounter such seething hostility to ev psych (see the comments sections). hell, if ev psych really were what they think it is, i'd be contemptuous too.

but i am surprised that these people, good folks with whom i so often agree in other domains, seem so confident in their criticism and rejection despite very strongly appearing to misunderstand fundamental principles. i understand that people have to choose what they want to spend their time learning about and that they have good reason not to have devoted as much time to the subject as me, but it appears to me that they're knocking down straw men and seem unwilling to even entertain the possibility that they're doing so. that's frustrating! i have thoughts about the mechanisms that poison people so strongly against ev psych, but i'll save that. i'm mostly just saying this for my own sanity (a good summary for the entire history of the blog), and don't intend to dwell on the point. and i don't mean any disrespect to anyone; i hope that's clear.

anyway, i think i'm going to try a different approach. every once in a while i'll highlight some good research. it is a lot easier to talk about one specific study than to just dive into a defense of an entire discipline against people who don't want to hear it. hopefully some of them will stick around for those more focused discussions.

questions for critics of evolutionary psychology

i've encountered lots of generalizations about the entire field, presumably based on exposure to a small sampling. and people seem to have some extremely confused ideas about ev psych. so i'm wondering exactly where you're getting your info. mainstream media? primary literature? books?

Chomsky on Egypt

We should remember there's an analog here. I mean, it's not the same, of course, but the population in the United States is angry, frustrated, full of fear and irrational hatreds. And the folks not far from you on Wall Street are just doing fine. They're the ones who created the current crisis. They're the ones who were called upon to deal with it. They're coming out stronger and richer than ever. But everything's fine, as long as the population is passive. If one-tenth of one percent of the population is gaining a preponderant amount of the wealth that's produced, while for the rest there 30 years of stagnation, just fine, as long as everyone's quiet. That's the scenario that has been unfolding in the Middle East, as well, just as it did in Central America and other domains.

...

Furthermore, Egypt cooperates in the crushing of Gaza. That terrible free election in January 2006 not only frightened the U.S. and Israel -- they didn't like the outcome, so turned instantly to punishing the Palestinians -- but the same in Egypt. The victor in the election was Hamas, which is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. That was very much feared by the Egyptian dictatorship, because if they ever allowed anything like a free election, the Muslim Brotherhood would no doubt make out quite well, maybe not a majority, but it would be a substantial political force. And they don't want that, so therefore they cooperate. Egypt, under Mubarak, cooperates with Israel in crushing [Gaza], built a huge fence on the Egyptian border, with U.S. engineering help, and it sort of monitors the flow of goods in and out of Gaza on the Egyptian side. It essentially completes the siege that the U.S. and Israel have imposed. Well, all of that could erode if there was a democratic movement that gained influence in Egypt, just as it did in Palestine.

source.

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.

i think i'm dying of a cold, so i'll mostly continue to not blog for the next 2 to 5 days.

go egyptians!

keep 'em coming!

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

Let me get this straight. Management can lock the doors, prevent workers from working, not pay the workers signed to contracts, and also prevent them from working for anyone else, even in another country? What the fuck?

burn baby burn

I walked by this a few days ago and wished I had a camera.

which victims matter (updated)

In my last post I tried to make a very simple point, which now IOZ has made much more cleverly, and Justin has made much more eloquently. And Ethan found a nice quote that sums it up nicely:

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

If you read only one of those links, read Justin's, which illustrates this dynamic using two recent killing episodes.

update: Jack Crow too!

a short story

Gabrielle Giffords repeatedly used her considerable political power to support killing people. Then someone tried to kill her.

The end?

surely it is our words, not our violence, that causes this violence

All the respectable liberals are supposed to be blaming the violent rhetoric of the political class for the Arizona killings, presumably because that makes it all the Republicans' fault. Mister Smith takes a swipe at this, as does IOZ. It strikes me that Arthur Silber had the best response, but it was written almost four years ago.

If the question is what does the US political class do that inspires violence, I suppose their violent rhetoric might be a concern, but surely a distant one.

We've bombed, invaded, and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, and we're threatening Iran with the same. We're conducting half-secret wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else. Hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority non-combatants, are dead as a result. We provide weapons and support for brutal regimes around the world and flagrantly disregard the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. We spend more money on war than the rest of the world combined (while our healthcare system is a joke, and our education system and infrastructure rots away). Thousands die and millions more are in cages because of our stupid war on drugs. We torture and kill prisoners, including our own citizens.

Insane violence is what the US political class is all about.

update: good stuff, Jack Crow

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!

a few unrelated items

On my brief trip to Maryland for the holidays I had a run in with the police. My "suspicious" activity was pulling into the parking lot of a community park at 6pm and walking around near my car. I was detained for questioning for about 20 minutes by an armed asshole who, when I didn't give meaningful answers to his questions and asked if I was free to go, threatened to arrest me, called for backup, and had me thoroughly frisked.

I found Life of Birds at the library, and, well, I couldn't pass that up. Katsu loves it too. He's been staring like that for 10 minutes.

I found some ground water buffalo in the freezer last time I went to Cumbraes, and, well, I couldn't pass that up. I don't think I could blindly distinguish it from beef by texture or flavour. I won't be offering Katsu any of the spaghetti I'm making.

great job david house

one less reason to torture him...

Remember how Bradley Manning is getting mindfucked at least in part because they want him to testify against Julian Assange?

Greenwald's excellent offering of the day preemptively establishes that any testimony Manning could give is worthless, since getting Manning to say that Assange asked him for secret documents doesn't make Assange a fucking spy, it makes him a fucking JOURNALIST! Not only that, what Assange did was clearly LESS harmful - by the standards loudly proclaimed by government and journalists alike - than what the NYT did today. And has done a million other times.

So, there's one less reason for them to keep torturing the kid. I'm sure they've got more though.

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.

lies are the world

Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.

- Chris Floyd

wikileaks

alternate addresses since the main site is shut down:

http://213.251.145.96/

http://46.59.1.2/

http://wikileaks.ch/

http://www.wikileaks.nl/

glimmers of hope in the madness

Powerful forces in the US government are shutting down Wikileaks. Free speech is under attack. With that in mind, Julian Assange says (emphasis mine):

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.

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.

more of my students ought to hire this guy

what is bo good for?

we lost another great one

Ugh, first Howard Zinn, and now Chalmers Johnson.

let's solve the problem of homelessness by making it illegal!

the banality of evil (updated x 2)

How do we spread peace, justice, and sweet freedom to Afghanistan? With "68-ton tanks... propelled by a jet engine and equipped with a 120mm main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away" of course!

Is this really a good idea? Anonymous officer thinks so!

"The tanks bring awe, shock and firepower," the officer said. "It's pretty significant."

That doesn't sound like a way to win hearts and minds to some people, but anonymous officer knows better, as does his boss:

"Petraeus believes counterinsurgency does not mean just handing out sacks of wheat seed," said a senior officer in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency "doesn't mean you don't blow up stuff or kill people who need to be killed."

Let's talk about blowing up stuff and killing people. The silly people who's stuff is getting blown up wonder why their stuff is getting blown up, and don't seem to like it.

"Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?" a farmer from the Arghandab district asked a top NATO general at a recent community meeting.

And we understand farmer's point. But farmer doesn't seem to understand the way anonymous officer does! See, when we blow up farmer's fields and homes, that is a good thing for farmer, because he gets the privilege of filing a complaint!

Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor's office to submit a claim for damaged property, "in effect, you're connecting the government to the people," the senior officer said.

Maybe we should start blowing stuff up everywhere that the government isn't connected to the people! The people's stuff, of course. Not the government.

So, who are these people that "need to be killed"? And doesn't this all sound a bit desperate?

Although the officer acknowledged that the use of tanks this many years into the war could be seen as a sign of desperation by some Afghans and Americans, he said they will provide the Marines with an important new tool in missions to flush out pockets of insurgent fighters.

"Pockets of insurgent fighters" are who must be "flushed out." In other words, anyone who doesn't like foreign armies blowing up their fields and homes and slaughtering their family needs to be killed. Why?

...to protect Afghan civilians from insurgents.

Has anyone asked these Afghan civilians what they think? If they want more 68 ton tanks? If they want Petraeus or anonymous officer in their backyard? Of course not. Why ask them when we could just talk to anonymous officer?

Anyway, you might be wondering how Petraeus can get away with this, yet alone live with himself. Don't worry, he's doing just fine!

"Because Petraeus is the author of the COIN [counterinsurgency] manual, he can do whatever he wants. He can manage the optics better than McChrystal could," the adviser said. "If he wants to turn it up to 11, he feels he has the moral authority to do it."

He can get away with anything and feels morally justified because he wrote a book about how to kill people, and because he can manage optics. I'm pretty sure that "optics" means The Washington Post.

Update: Arthur Silber comments on the same article, including a genuine compliment to its author for his fairly straightforward depiction of the evil under discussion. Arthur's entire essay, as always, is well worth reading.

Update 2: Yeah, the more I think about it, "optics" means US domestic media - TV networks, local papers - more than the Washington Post. This comment seems right to me.

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.

art

I love the graffiti around town. If I had a camera, I'd take pictures of it and post it on my blog. But I don't have a camera, so I direct your attention to... Guelph Graffiti Blog! Naturally, this one is my favorite.

vote for change? impossible

American elections, in a nutshell:

Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes and prospects, and out of hope for their children's careers are angry. But the political system offers them no way of bringing about change. They can change the elected servants of the oligarchs, but they cannot change the policies or the oligarchs.

Another key point:

The control of the oligarchs extends to the media. The Clinton administration permitted a small number of mega-corporations to concentrate the US media in a few hands. Corporate advertising executives, not journalists, control the new American media, and the value of the mega-companies depends on government broadcast licenses. The media's interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.

On top of all the other factors that have made American elections meaningless, voters cannot even get correct information from the media about the problems that they and the country face.

killers and thieves suck each other off

via GG:

MILITARY OFFICERS TOUR JPMORGAN -- JPMorgan Chase yesterday hosted about 30 active duty military officers (across all branches and agencies) from the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. The officers met with senior executives, toured the trading floor and participated in a trading simulation. They discussed recruitment, operations management, strategic communications and the economy. Aside from employees thanking them for their service as they passed by, they also received a standing ovation on the trading floor. Said one officer after a senior JPM exec thanked him for his service: "We promise to keep you safe if you keep this country strong."

communication styles

When I talk to people, I often almost entirely attend to the literal semantic meaning of the words being exchanged. Perhaps I make some adjustment for the literal semantic meaning that was intended, in cases where there was some imprecision of speech. This strikes me as a purely intellectual, conversation as mutualistic truth-seeking kind of approach.

I'm realizing that I ought to pay much more attention to the other kinds of information being conveyed by being more attentive to context, tone, and subtle meanings behind the literal meaning of words. This would be more of a real world, communication as negotiation amidst some shared and some conflicting interests kind of approach.

I suspect that most people do a lot of the latter without even realizing it, guided by emotions rather than conscious deliberation. In fact I'd suspect that the level of emotion in the conversation is a reflection of the extent to which the latter kind of process is happening. I often find myself in a conversation where I'm much less emotional than the other party (and what emotion I do feel or express is often related to the intellectual content!) which is often a source of extreme frustration for that other party. They feel like I don't realize what's really going on, yet are unable to counter when I dutifully and accurately recite the actual words as evidence that I do understand, because their understanding that something more than the words is going on isn't fully conscious.

I'll have to consciously force myself to pay more attention to the other stuff until it comes more naturally; in doing so, I fear I'm being cynical and that I'm risking being regarded as such. Of course I already am regarded as cynical so maybe that's not much of a risk.

asshole toronto cop can't stand being called an asshole, so he files a lawsuit... like an asshole

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!

prison

yeah, i'll just keep going with my wildly unpopular criticism of institutionalized education and say i agree with that perspective.

if i'm correct in assuming that the use of physical or authoritarian coercion is truly avoided except in self-defense or the immediate defense of others, the only thing i can see wrong with this alternative system after a quick perusal is that it isn't the system for every part of everyone's lives. it almost seems unfair to provide people with such an ideal environment, knowing that it will be extremely different to replicate that experience later in their lives.

thanks to dan for the tip.