Is war worth it? What veterans think

As the US teeters on the edge of another war of choice thanks to the actions of Prince Joffrey  President Trump, it might be good to take a look at what veterans think of the last couple wars.

According to the Pew Research Center,

Among veterans, 64% say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting considering the costs versus the benefits to the United States, while 33% say it was. The general public’s views are nearly identical: 62% of Americans overall say the Iraq War wasn’t worth it and 32% say it was. Similarly, majorities of both veterans (58%) and the public (59%) say the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting. About four-in-ten or fewer say it was worth fighting.

 Veterans who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan are no more supportive of those engagements than those who did not serve in these wars. And views do not differ based on rank or combat experience.

Since these are the people, mostly from the working class, who are going to put their bodies at risk next time around in another war started by rich people, it might be good to consider what they think.

I keep going back to what John Adams, our second president, had to say on the subject: "Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."

And then there's this line from Dylan: "Here I sit so patiently waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice."

Thoughts on evil, Iran and the nuclear deal

This op-ed of mine ran in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail:

I’ve become fascinated with what might be called the science of evil, or what research tells us about violence, cruelty and conflict.

I’m not personally into all that myself (most days anyway), but I think the more we learn about such things, the better will be our chances for reducing them. After all, medicine wouldn’t have gotten very far if it didn’t study diseases and injuries.

It turns out that the science of evil has a lot to teach us. Psychologists like Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have shown how normal people can be induced to do things they otherwise wouldn’t through pressures of conformity, obedience to authority, and social situations and systems.

I’ve been particularly struck by the research of Roy Baumeister, whose book “Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty” I discovered in the wake of 9/11.

According to Baumeister, “Evil requires the deliberate actions of one person, the suffering of another, and the perception or judgment of either the second person or an observer. Very few people see their own actions as evil ... ”

Victims and perpetrators generally have vastly different perspectives on the acts in question. For perpetrators, the actions in question usually aren’t a big deal, while to the victims they are a very big deal indeed. In fact, perpetrators, even very violent ones, often see themselves as victims and see their victims as perpetrators. Evil, Baumeister maintains, is in the eye of the beholder.

Baumeister calls this difference in perspective between victims and perpetrators the “magnitude gap,” and it is one reason why acts of revenge are often out of proportion to the original offence. This is why violence often doesn’t cycle — it spirals.

One thing that keeps us from understanding evil and dealing with it is what he calls “the myth of pure evil,” which most of us pick up from sources such as myths, comic books, action movies, etc.

According to the myth, evil involves the intentional infliction of harm for the pleasure of doing it. Victims are all innocent and good and perpetrators are all evil. Evil is always “the other, the enemy, the outsider, the out-group.” It has always been around and always will be; it is the enemy of order, peace and stability. We’re all good; the “enemy” is all bad.

One problem with seeing the world in this way is that in any serious conflict, both sides see each other in terms of the myth, which makes it harder to de-escalate a potentially violent situation.

According to Baumeister, “the myth of pure evil conceals the reciprocal causality of violence. By doing so, it probably increases the violence. The myth of pure evil depicts innocent victims fighting against gratuitously wicked, sadistic enemies. The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it ... belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.”

As Bob Dylan sang, “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”

To use a fairly recent real life example of the danger of the myth of pure evil in action, shortly after 9/11, then President George Bush promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”

That didn’t happen, as you may have noticed.

Instead, he led the country to an unnecessary war in Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11) that cost nearly 4,500 American fatalities and over 30,000 non-fatal U.S. casualties in addition to an Iraqi death toll somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, depending on the estimate. Not to mention a trillion or so in wasted money that could better have been spent or invested elsewhere.

I hope we can avoid that kind of outcome in the case of Iran. True, the U.S. and that country have glared at each other since the Iranian revolution of 1979, each seeing evil in the other.

Many in the U.S. see in Iran a repressive regime which seized American hostages, supports terrorism, pursues nuclear weapons, and threatens our allies. Many Iranians see the U.S. as an imperial nuclear power that helped overthrow their democratically elected government in 1953, installed the Shah’s repressive regime, aided Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and invades Muslim countries on flimsy pretexts.

That kind of mirror-imaging could be a recipe for international disaster. Fortunately, the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany have reached a deal with Iran that would prevent that country from developing nuclear weapons; shrink its nuclear program; allow for inspections; and reduce the likelihood of another disastrous war in the Middle East. Without a deal, the inspections and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program go out the window.

No deal is perfect and this one doesn’t resolve all the issues or differences between the U.S. and Iran. It probably won’t bring about the Peaceable Kingdom right away. But it is a step in the right direction.

Congress has to vote on the measure in September. Bluster and tough talk are cheap and plentiful these days, but I hope some — or at least one — of West Virginia’s leaders will have the courage — and common sense — to support diplomacy and avert another avoidable disaster.

The logic of climate change denial

Despite living in a weather-disaster-of-the-week world, major segments of the ruling class of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia and the United States as a whole remain invested (pun intended) in denying climate change, or at least delaying action on it until it's too late and then saying that nothing can be done.

Truth or science has nothing to do with it; it's all about the money.

The sad thing is that there is a good chance they can get away with it, although that probably won't win them a lot of gratitude from future generations.

Recently, however, Senator James Inhofe, intentionally or not, opened a window on the real mindset of denial. While appearing on Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC, Inhofe said of climate change

I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this. I thought it must be true until I found out what it cost.

There you have it.

WAR WITH IRAN would be a big drag, economically speaking. Probably in other ways as well.

HEALTH CARE REFORM means big savings for Medicare.

MORE ON THAT here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WE COULD BE HEROES

The ancient Greek hero Theseus didn't take any bull from anybody. Here he is in a dust up with the minotaur.

Aside from news and links about current events, the theme at Goat Rope lately is Homer's The Odyssey. If this is your first visit, please click earlier posts. The series started Aug. 4.

Odysseus, the eponymous main character of the Odyssey, is one of many classical Greek heroes, although the word meant something different then than now. We tend to think of heroes as morally exemplary people who do good things. Think about the firefighters who died on 9/11.

For the ancient Greeks, a hero was someone who lived larger than life and whose deeds were remembered after their death. Many prominent heroes did as many or more bad things as good one. Oedipus, for example, was a hero. On the positive side, he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. But then there was that whole father killing/mother marrying/plague causing thing...

King Agamemnon in the Iliad was a hero--and a jerk who sacrificed his own daughter, caused a plague of his own, and enraged his best fighter Achilles at great cost to the Achaeans, as the Iliad recounts. Heracles and Theseus were heroes who did some good things, like killing the occasional monster, but some of their other deeds were not so nice.

Being a hero didn't save you from coming to a bad end, either. Jason of Golden Fleece fame had a miserable fate after dumping the witch Medea for a new model. Medea didn't go quietly, to say the least.

Still, Greek cities treasured the tombs of their local heroes and offered them sacrifices in the hopes that they would aid the home team when it needed it. There was a nice legend about the ghost of Theseus appearing at the battle of Marathon to help defend Athens from the Persian invasion.

The thing to remember is that Homer is not trying to prepare Sunday School lessons or political propaganda. He tells a story that shows the characters with warts and all. The message is not so much "be like them" as it is to learn from the story.

OH GOOD. Israel may be preparing to attack Iran. That should make everything just perfect.

GREEN DAY. Businesses are starting to get serious about sustainability, according to Newsweek.

MORE ON WAL-MART'S POLITICAL AMBITIONS here.

GOT KAFKA? Here's a review of a biography of the world's most realistic writer. And I'm not just saying that because I woke up as a giant bug today.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RELIGION OF THE HEART

Camp meeting, circa 1839, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme this week at Goat Rope is a paradox of the American religious experience: while the US is among the most religious and religiously diverse countries in the world, many residents measure pretty low on surveys of religious literacy--both of the religions they profess and of those they don't.

One thing that may have set the tone for this was the popularity of revivalism on the American frontier, of which the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the 1800s is a prime example. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote,

Long before America was discovered, the Christian community was perennially divided between those who believed that the intellect must have a vital place in religion and those who believed that intellect should be subordinated to emotion, or in effect abandoned at the dictates of emotion...under American conditions the balance between traditional establishments and revivalist or enthusiastic movements drastically shifted in favor of the latter. In consequence, the learned professional clergy suffered a loss of position, and the rational style of religion they found congenial suffered accordingly. At an early stage in its history, America, with its Protestant and dissenting inheritance, became the scene of an unusually keen local variation of this universal historical struggle over the character of religion; and here the forces of enthusiasm and revivalism had their most impressive victories.

Of course, given the hardships of farm and frontier life, this kind of religion provided relief from toil, a chance to socialize, and a welcome form of entertainment. Abraham Lincoln, who was pretty unorthodox in religious matters, enjoyed such spectacles while growing up. He once said "When I see a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees."

The effects of the Second Great Awakening can still be felt in El Cabrero's neck of the woods. I remember many conversations I had growing up about religion with people for whom religion was preaching and who suspected educated clergy to be instruments of the devil. They believed every word of the Bible, even if they were a little hazy on what these might actually be.

As Stephen Prothero notes in Religious Literacy, this religion of the heart was a marked change from the kind that prevailed before when the nation was founded:

As has been noted, religious faith and religious knowledge were inseparable in the colonies and the early republic...But early Americans didn't just know Jesus; they knew the Sermon on the Mount (often by heart). They believed, as the Reverend John Lathrop of Boston's Second Church wrote, that "the connexion between knowledge and faith, is such, that the latter cannot exist without the former."...All that changed, however, with the rise to public power in the early nineteenth century of a new form of Protestantism called evangelicalism. By the end of that century a lack of elementary knowledge of Christianity would constitute evidence of authentic faith. What for generations had been shameful--religious illiteracy--would become a badge of honor in a nation besotted with the self-made man and the spirit-filled preacher.

The triumph had unintended consequences:

In the name of heartfelt faith, unmediated experience, and Jesus himself, they actively discouraged religious learning. To evangelicalism, therefore, we owe both the vitality of religion in contemporary American and our impoverished understanding of it.

LEAVING A RECORD...DEFICIT. President Bush will leave his successor the biggest one yet.

THAT'S JUST SWELL. The US has reassured Israel that it might whack Iran. Here's more on the subject from Scott Ritter.

LOSING TIME. This doesn't show up on official unemployment statistics, but millions of American workers have had the hours of work cut.

IF "SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN" RAN HOROSCOPES, here's what they would look like.

OLD SCHOOL COMPUTING. This is an interesting look at an ancient Greek computational device. Where did they plug it in?

HYPERION TO A SATYR. A professor from El Cabrero's alma mater Marshall University will write a biography of George W. Bush. The author, Jean Edward Smith, has previously written 12 books, including a prize-winning and bestselling biography of FDR--peace be unto him. The contrast between the two is mind boggling.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

INFLUENZA

This man is easily influenced.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been insights from the social sciences about human violence, cruelty and...well...evil. Once again, I highly recommend social psychologist Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect and its accompanying website.

One of the themes that jumps out over and over again from all the research (not to mention history) is that people are extremely susceptible to situational and systemic pressures which can make them do things they would otherwise never have done.

The sad thing is that a lot of the things that can get us into trouble are basic human tendencies we all share, such the need for acceptance, the desire to be liked; reciprocity; the sometimes very useful trait of obeying authority (which is only as harmless as the authority itself); our tendency to take cues from the actions of others (social proof); etc.

While the focus at Goat Rope lately has been on violence and cruelty, we can all fall under different forms of social influence in less extreme settings, including the workplace, buying and selling, relationships, etc. Not to mention advertising and politics...

At the Lucifer Effect website, Zimbardo and Cindy X. Wang have a useful section on resisting social influence that covers most of the bases. It's worth checking out.

So like obey me or something...

WHAT WENT WRONG? Conservative thinkers are trying to figure it out. El Cabrero has an idea or two...

NEEDED: A NEW SOCIAL COMPACT. That's what she said. I concur.

SLOWING DOWN THE NEXT WAR. Here's a positive assessment of recent citizen efforts in the US to prevent war with Iran.

MINIMUM WAGE. The federal minimum wage is increasing to $6.55 per hour. Twenty three states and the District of Columbia already have laws mandating a higher minimum.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LESSONS LEARNED?

Salem witch trial, courtesy of wikipedia.

It would be nice to think that people who have experienced violence, oppression or discrimination would ever thereafter sympathize with people in similar situations. Sometimes it works out that way, but it could just as easily have the opposite effect.

El Cabrero has often shown the PBS documentary A Class Divided to sociology classes and other groups. It showed how elementary school teacher Jane Elliot tried to teach a group of white children what discrimination was like by segregating them on the basis of eye color. One day students with blue eyes are given top status and extra privileges, while the brown eyed students were marginalized.

On the next day, the roles were switched. One might hope that those who had been unfairly treated would refuse to treat others in the same way.

Not a chance. They couldn't wait to claim top status. It was only after a period of debriefing that students could begin to process the experience and learn from it.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil puts it like this:

...what are the deeper lessons to be learned from such situations? Admire power; detest weakness. Dominate, don't negotiate. Hit first when they turn the other cheek. The golden rule is for them, not us. Authority rules, rules are authority.

These are also some of the lessons learned by boys of abusive fathers, half of whom are transformed into abusive fathers themselves, abusing their children, spouses, and parents. Perhaps half of them identify with the aggressor and perpetuate his violence, while others learn to identify with the abused and reject aggression for compassion. However, research does not help us to predict which abused kids will later become abusers and which will turn out to be compassionate adults.

Thus it is that in history the children of the oppressed can quickly become the oppressors and persecuted groups sometimes persecute others in kind when the opportunity occurs.

DEEP IN DEBT. The NY Times had an interesting item about the nation's debt crisis. Here's an excerpt:

Just two generations ago, America was a nation of mostly thrifty people living within their means, even setting money aside for unforeseen expenses.

Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22 percent since 2000 alone, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The average household’s credit card debt is $8,565, up almost 15 percent from 2000.

College debt has more than doubled since 1995. The average student emerges from college carrying $20,000 in educational debt.

Household debt, including mortgages and credit cards, represents 19 percent of household assets, according to the Fed, compared with 13 percent in 1980

SELF HELP NATION. Also from the Times, here's an entertaining item about the burgeoning self help publishing industry.

OPPOSING THE NEXT WAR. People around the country are mobilizing to prevent a possible war with Iran.

STATE OF THE UNION. A new book makes the case for how labor unions strengthen working families. But the author says we need to help the general public connect the dots.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

St. Anthony tormented by demons, by way of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is understanding human evil, along with links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Most normal people have internalized moral norms about how other people should be treated. However, under certain conditions, these moral restraints can be shut off. The result is what psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement" and it is often a key feature in acts of violence and cruelty. Here's a link to an essay of his on the subject.

This is the abbreviated Goat Rope version:

Under normal conditions, people have both inhibitive and proactive moral tendencies. Inhibitive means we understand it's not nice to hit little Tommy with a sledge hammer. Proactive means that if little Susy falls into a pit of boiling sludge we should pull her out. That's the good news. The bad news is that people all too often have ways of tossing both out the window.

Here are a two ways that can happen:

*Reconstruing the situation or coming up with moral justifications to treat people badly. Labeling them as the enemy usually works pretty good here. So does ideology. As Voltaire once said,

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

*Using euphemisms. Orwell was all over this one:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

We don't blow away villages; instead, we use surgical strikes. We don't torture, we just use rough interrogation. We don't kill innocent civilians, although collateral damage happens.

There are other ways of kicking off the switch, about which more tomorrow.

THE WIDENING GAP between rich and poor isn't just about money; it's about life expectancy, as the latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute suggests.

OH GOOD. Inflation may be the order of the day. That's all we need during a recession...

HEALTH CARE. A new report from the Commonwealth Fund found that

the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care...

A TOUGH TEA LEAF TO READ. The US is finally sending a high level official to talk with the Iranian government. With a normal administration, I'd say that was a good sign, but I trust this one about as far as I could throw it. A worst-case scenario would involve the Bush administration prematurely declaring diplomacy to be a failure in order to try to justify yet another war.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE, many Americans oppose a rush to war with Iran, if anybody is listening.

MEGAN WILLIAMS CASE. Bobby Brewster pleaded guilty to charges related to the kidnapping and torture of Megan Williams and faces up to 40 years in prison.

MINE SAFETY. Federal investigators are winding up a criminal investigation related to the fire at Massey Energy's Aracoma mine that killed two workers in Jan. 2006.

URGENT EXTINCT FLYING REPTILE UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TURNING ON THE HATE SWITCH

World War I recruiting poster.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been human evil and the kinds of things that make it thrive and grow (or not). If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, a typical workday includes an official two minute "hate session" aimed at enemies of the state. An image of an enemy appears on a screen and the faithful are expected to snarl, hiss, yell, jump up and down and otherwise to dutifully express their hatred.

You know, kinda like Fox News...

One of the most effective ways to create a climate in which evil flourishes is to label and dehumanize certain groups. This is usually an important step that governments and political movements use to pave the way to war, genocide, torture, and other atrocities.

For a good overview, click here.

As Philip Zimbardo wrote in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,

The powerful don't usually do the dirtiest work themselves, just as Mafia dons leave the "whackings" to underlings. Systems create hierarchies of dominance with the influence and communication going down--rarely up--the line. When a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a program of hate. What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torture, them even kill them? It requires a "hostile imagination," a psychological construction embedded deeply in the minds by propaganda that transforms those others into "The Enemy." That image is a soldier's most powerful motive, one that loads his rifle with the ammunition of hate and fear. The image of a dreaded enemy threatening one's personal well-being and the society's national security emboldens mothers and fathers to send sons to war and empowers governments to rearrange priorities to turn plowshares into swords of destruction.

Good thing that never happens anymore, huh?

100 YEARS? Majorities in the US and Iraq want a withdrawal of American troops.

NO MORE BLANK CHECKS. Here's Scott Ritter talking sense on Iran.

TOUGH DAYS FOR THE MARKET GOD. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne argues we're witnessing the shipwreck of market fundamentalism. The news hasn't reached everybody in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia yet.

THIS IS YOUR PET on drugs.

LOOK TO THE ANT, THOU SLUGGARD. That's what evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson does.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BAD SEED

In his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, psychologist Philip Zimbardo comes up with a good working definition of evil:

Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others--or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf.

People have a strong tendency to believe that human actions are guided by why Zimbardo calls inner determinants (motivations). This can cause us to neglect the force of outer determinants. This leads in turn to a kind of moral dualism in which we see some people (like us) as inherently good and others as inherently evil.

Zimbardo suggests that

The idea that an unbridgeable chasm separates good people from bad people is a source of comfort for at least two reasons. First, it creates a binary logic, in which Evil is essentialized. Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. ...

There are problems with this simplistic view. The idea of a Good/Evil dichotomy

takes "good people" off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror and violence. "It's the way of the world, and there's not much that can be done to change it, certainly not by me."

He suggests instead that we should think of evil in incrementalist terms, i.e. as something we are all capable of, depending on the situation. This view is more conductive to helping people take steps to prevent its spread.

WILL THEY OR WON'T THEY? Here's another look at Iran, the Bush administration, Israel and likely scenarios.

ANIMALS AND RIGHTS. As mentioned last week, the Spanish parliament is considering granting some quasi-"human" rights to great apes.

IMPERMANENCE. The NY Times reports that Buddhism may be dying out in Japan. Too bad--the world could use more of it.

VERY CUTE RACCOON PICTURES here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A FEW BAD APPLES?

Lucifer. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

When the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse story became public, government sources were quick to say that the whole unfortunate affair was caused by a few "bad apples." Those at the lowest levels paid the heaviest price, while those who set up the situation and the system that made it possible have so far gotten a free pass.

It may be comforting (and self serving, in the case of the Bush administration) to put all the blame on a few bad individuals. If that were so, good people like us could never do such things no matter what. In reality, however, the line between good and evil is permeable and normally good people can cross the line when placed under extreme situational and systemic pressures.

History and the social sciences show plenty of examples of otherwise decent people who have done horrible things under certain conditions. Some of the things that make evil thrive and grow are obedience to authority, pressure to conform, ideology that justifies treating others with violence, anonymity, dehumanizing and labeling "the other," a slippery slope of gradually increasing aggression, huge power inequalities, unfamiliar situations, role identification and environmental stressors.

The situation that the untrained guards at Abu Ghraib faced--such as lack of training and supervision, ambiguous orders ("soften up" prisoners for further interrogation), physical danger, heat and cold, lack of adequate food and resources, lack of accountability, etc.--created a climate conducive to disaster.

This is one of the key arguments of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. As mentioned in earlier posts, Zimbardo designed the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, in which psychologically normal students were randomly assigned to play the roles of guards and prisoners. The experiment rapidly deteriorated. Rampant abuses by the "guards" caused the experiment to be terminated in less than a week--and those conditions were almost ideal compared to the ones in Iraq.

In the real world, there are some bad apples, but the real danger is caused by bad barrels.

The point of all this is not to excuse the behavior of anyone, but rather to point out that situational and systemic factors can often override our ordinary moral restraints. Sadly, those who created the system and situation and who most deserve to be held accountable are protected by power and privilege.

HOW BAD IS THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS? Pretty damn.

TO BE MORE SPECIFIC, 343,000 homes were lost in the last six months.

WILL SANITY PREVAIL in dealing with Iran? El Cabrero is not a betting person, nor would I be inclined to bet on this one if I was.

PREVAILING WAGE LAWS that require decent wages on public construction projects make good economic sense according to the Economic Policy Institute.

THIS ISN'T A GOOD TIME TO SELL YOUR LIFE according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Apparently, the "value of a statistical life" has gone down by $1 million in the last five years.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GETTING "EVIL SMART"

Lucifer in Gustave Dore's illustration of Paradise Lost.

One reason why we often fail to understand or counteract human evil is that we often think of it solely in individual, personal or dispositional terms. An extreme example of this kind of thinking has been supplied by the Bush administration, which holds the view that evil people do evil things because they are evil (it's no surprise that such folks are blind to the evil they have unleashed on the world).

As social psychologist Philip Zimbardo amply demonstrates in The Lucifer Effect, a great many evil acts are committed by normal individuals in abnormal situations which are created and maintained by systems of power.

According to Zimbardo,

Most institutions in any society that is invested in an individualistic orientation hold up the person as sinner, culpable, afflicted, insane, or irrational. Programs of change follow a medical model of dealing only at the individual level of rehabilitation, therapy, reeducation and medical treatments, or punishment and execution. All such programs are doomed to fail if the main causal agent is the situation or system and not just the person.

Rather than focusing solely on killing, warehousing, or treating individuals,

We need to adopt a public health model for prevention of evil, of violence, spouse abuse, bullying, prejudice, and more that identifies vectors of social disease to be inoculated against, not dealt with solely at the individual level.

SALUD! A national campaign to promote health care for all kicked off yesterday.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH, the economy doesn't have a surplus of that at the moment. Here's economist Dean Baker's analysis.

IRONIC MOMENT here.

WILL THEY OR WON'T THEY attack Iran?

ORANGUTAN UPDATE. This great ape species is in danger of extinction. The Wired Science item linked here also notes that the Spanish parliament approved a resolution granting something like human rights (life and freedom) to the great apes. It is the opinion of El Cabrero that we should give them voting rights in presidential elections too. They couldn't do much worse.

GOAT UPRISING. Arcadia S. Venus, the caprine first lady of Goat Rope Farm denies any responsibility for the following news report. But she approves...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TLALOC AND TROTSKY AND A LIZARD

Tlaloc!, courtesy of wikipedia.

While traveling in Mexico recently, El Cabrero made a new acquaintance and renewed an old one. I encountered the new one while visiting Aztec and pre-Aztec ruins around Mexico City. It was none other than the rain and water god Tlaloc, who had googly eyes and was kind of big on earrings. Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god, gets all the press, so it's high time my wet friend got his due.



I'm not sure why I bonded with Tlaloc, other than the fact that I think water was one of the universe's better ideas and that his name is fun to say over and over again. His abode was the fourth layer of the heavens, where eternal springtime and lush greenery prevailed. He did however have a certain unfortunate fondness for human sacrifice, a custom to which I am generally opposed. I guess we all have our foibles...



I also paid a visit to the Leon Trotsky Museum in Cocoacan, the site of the fallen Russian revolutionary's last home in exile and of his murder by Stalinist agents. (Leon in his glory days was no stranger to human sacrifice either.) One thing that El Cabrero has in common with Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens is that we all were impressed at one time by Isaac Deutscher's three volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. While I'm no Trotskyist, one thing I got from those books was an understanding of and a visceral hatred for Stalinism and anything that reeks of it.

And finally,



here's a lizard from Leon's garden.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL is the subject of this NPR story about the work of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, designer of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment and author of the excellent recent book The Lucifer Effect. You can expect lots more about the latter starting next week.

THE CHANGING OF THE EVANGELICAL GUARD is the subject of this abstract from a longer 6/30New Yorker article. The full article wasn't anywhere I could find it on line, but is definitely worth a look if you find a print copy.

NEXT STOP...IRAN? Here's Seymour Hirsch's New Yorker piece on the Bush administration's mad fixation on starting another unnecessary war.

HOW DOES YOUR LIST COMPARE? Here's an item from alternet about the 10 worst moments of the Bush presidency. Jeez, where do you start?

ANOTHER LOOK AT WEST VIRGINIA from the outside. This one is from the UK Guardian.

IS THAT AN AZTEC DEATH WHISTLE IN YOUR POCKET OR... Speaking of meso-American antiquities, here's an interesting item about an eerie musical instrument.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IF NOT A GOD, THEN WHAT?

Mammon from Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme lately at Goat Rope is the economy and how we think about it. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Short summary: the way we think about things matters because it can effect our actions. We often speak of "The Economy" as if it was an independent being endowed with a will of its own--and sometimes it seems that way.

In recent years, we've even witnessed the rise of a new religion, the cult of the market god--and market fundamentalists aren't a whole lot better than any other type of fanatic.

It is the view of El Cabrero that a healthy way to think about it was suggested long ago by a certain Jesus, who knew a thing or two about a thing or two. When he was busted for violating Sabbath regulations, he responded by saying "The Sabbath was made for people and not people for the Sabbath." Just substitute "economy" for "Sabbath."

TURNING UP THE HEAT. A Senate panel blasted the Bush administration for exaggerations and misstatements leading up to the unnecessary war in Iraq.

OH GOOD. Some folks think the Bush administration is gearing up to attack Iran.

BOOTY SHAKING, BEE STYLE. Bees from different parts of the world understand each other's rear-end wiggling. I just thought you should know.

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Here's a critique of apocalyptic religion.

OH MY PROPHETIC KNEE! There's scientific evidence that people with aching joints really can predict storms.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FORTUNE OR FAME?

Lady Fortuna and her wheel (in pre-game show days), courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been writing for positive social change, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

How you approach writing for social change depends on where the accent is. If your main interest is on writing, you might approach it one way. But if you're mostly after results, another approach might work better. For me, the latter has more appeal.

As Bob Dylan put it,

Up on Housing Project Hill
It's either fortune or fame
You must pick up one or the other
Though neither of them are to be what they claim

Both would be nice, but I guess I'd prefer fortune.

The main difference between fortune and fame is that people who want fame like to be front and center, whether with bullhorns or bylines. The problem with this is that the message sometimes gets all mixed up with the messenger. If it's fortune you're after, while there may be times when you'll be visible if that would help move things along, that's not the main goal. Some of the most important and effective work takes place behind the scenes.

This is also true when it comes to writing. Some of the most useful kinds are the alphanumeric equivalent of grunt work: alerts, talking points, reports, letters to the editor or officials, issue briefs. In fact, some of the most important kinds of writing involve getting other people to write.

More on that tomorrow, but first...

FIVE YEARS, THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND A GAZILLION DOLLARS LATER...


You-know-who-you-know-when, once again courtesy of wikipedia.

Senator Byrd had this to say about that.

NEXT STOP: IRAN? Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, thinks the Bush administration may try to make a bad situation much worse. One can hardly wait for the next aircraft carrier photo op. McGovern spoke Tuesday at WV State University at an event sponsored by Seneca 2. I meant to blog that yesterday. My bad.

BIG PAYOFFS. Investments in our crumbling infrastructure make sense for all kinds of reasons.

URGENT COLOSSAL SQUID UPDATE. They have eyes 11 inches wide, bigger than a dinner plate. Check out the picture.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

OF HUMAN BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

Welcome to the final day of Spinoza Week at Goat Rope. Aside from links and comments about current events, the guiding thread this week has been the thought of that great and humane 17th century philosopher. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

There seems to be a paradox at the center of Spinoza's thought. First, he makes a strong case for determinism, the idea that there is no freedom of the will and that everything happens of necessity--indeed, from the necessity of the nature of God. On the other hand, he believes that through proper understanding and awareness, we can free ourselves from the grip of negative emotions and misguided ideas.

It seems to El Cabrero that if everything happens of necessity, there would be no way of overcoming negative emotions and bad thinking and, conversely, if we could do that, then maybe everything isn't determined. But I like Spinoza too much to push the point.

At the opening of Part IV of The Ethics, he writes

Human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions I call servitude. For a man who is submissive to his emotions does not have power over himself, but is in the hands of fortune to such an extent that he is often constrained, although he may see what is better for him, to follow what is worse.

It's hard to argue with that. But Spinoza was no Spock who thought all emotions were bad. He believed all beings have a drive to persist in being and increase their power. He called that conatus. Things that increase our potential and strengthen us are good and give us pleasure (rightly understood) and things that weaken us or harm us cause pain. By pleasure, he seemed to mean something more like self actualization or the eudaimonia of the Greeks.

The problem is false reasoning, obsessions, and negative emotions--meaning emotions that have a negative affect on us and other. He called this "inadequate thinking." To the extent we are captive to these, we are really passive and helpless in their grasp.

He believed that by thinking clearly and distinctly about how the world and our minds work, we could gain power over these negative patterns and live a life of reason. That means enjoying in moderation the good things of the world, doing what we can to improve things, and accepting those things we can't change. People living the life of reason want nothing for themselves that they don't wish everyone to have and look after both their own interests and the well-being of society.

This isn't altogether different from the Buddhist idea of overcoming negative attachments and delusional thinking through right understanding and mindfulness or the modern psychological approach of cognitive therapy that helps people learn about and correct irrational ideas.

To the extent we do that, we begin to look at live sub specie aeternitas or from the viewpoint of eternity. The highest level of serenity was something he called "the intellectual love of God," which means reverence for the universe and acceptance of the nature of things. He even seems to suggest that to the extent we do this, our minds approach a kind of immortality, although he probably didn't have a heavenly Disney World in mind.

Of course, it's easier said than done but we can make progress in that direction. Here are the last words of The Ethics:

...it is clear of how much a wise man is capable and how stronger he is than an ignorant one, who is guided by lust alone. For an ignorant man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes, never possessing true contentment of mind also lives as it were unaware of himself, God, and things, and as soon as he ceases to be passive, ceases to be. On the other hand, the wise man, in so far as he is considered as such, is scarcely moved in spirit: he is aware of himself, of God, and things by a certain eternal necessity, he never ceases to be, but always possesses true contentment of mind. If the road I have shown to lead to this is very difficult, it can yet be discovered. And clearly it must be hard when it is so seldom found. For how it could it be that if salvation were close at hand and could be found without difficulty it should be neglected by almost all? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.

I don't know about y'all, but I've got a long way to go.

SAD NEWS from Illinois.

WHAT WE DIDN'T GET. Here's an item on the kind of economic stimulus we really need.

THE AFTERMATH OF WAR. Sometimes the violence doesn't stop when veterans return.

RITTER ON IRAN. Here's an interview with Scott Ritter about the Bush administration's intentions towards Iran.

ATTACKS ON HOMELESS PEOPLE are rising.

THE ONE AND THE MANY. Is a beehive one big organism or a bunch of little ones?


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THAT OF WHICH YOU NEED A BUSLOAD

Caption: Venus is a goat of little faith.

One of El Cabrero's favorite Lou Reed songs is from the album New York. The point of this very dark song is that there's not a whole lot to depend on in this life and that "you need a busload of faith to get by." Here is is by way of YouTube.

Assuming that to be true, what is faith anyway?

There is a classic definition by Mark Twain:

faith is believing what you know ain't so.

The unknown author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews famously said that

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

On the other hand, as Nietzsche observed:

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

The great Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber in his book Two Types of Faith distinguished between faith as trust, expressed by the Hebrew word emunah, which he believed was the approach of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus, and faith as belief in the truth of certain propositions, as expressed in the Greek word pistis, which he argued was the approach of Paul and dogmatic forms of Christianity.

One of the most interesting approaches to faith was that of the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, who laid it out in a powerful little book The Dynamics of Faith. He had a way of looking at theological concepts in a way that could speak to anyone regardless of religious background or lack thereof.

About which more tomorrow.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY is observed today, almost a week after his real birthday. It took a busload of faith for he and the millions of others who struggled for civil rights to get as far as they did. So here, again by way of YouTube, is his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

All kinds of events are going on today across the country to observe this occasion. El Cabrero will be attending the third annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Breakfast with amigos. Three years ago, we used it as the occasion to kick off a successful effort to raise the minimum wage in West Virginia. The focus still is on economic justice, with a special focus on keeping working families healthy and a campaign for paid sick days for workers. As Dr. King said,

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American [worker] whether he is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer.

BUSHWHACKED. Here's a good critique of Bushonomics by Larry Beinhart.

TARGET IRAN? One would hope not, but I wouldn't put it past our current clique.

LABOR ON STIMULATING THE ECONOMY. The AFLCIO recommends an economic stimulus package that includes the following:

*Extension of unemployment benefits.

*Increased food stamp benefits.

*Tax rebates targeted to middle-income and lower-income taxpayers.

*Fiscal relief for state and local governments to avoid the economically depressing effect of tax increases and budget cuts.

*Acceleration of ready-to-go public investment in school renovations and bridge repair.

SPEAKING OF BRIDGES, here's the AP on America's hugely neglected infrastructure.

FUN WITH SCIENCE (IF YOU'RE NOT AN ANT). Nature is one clever Mother. According to this Wired Science item,

a newly discovered parasite makes its ant hosts turn red and swollen, like berries. Berry-loving birds then eat the ants, and spread the parasite in their droppings.

The ants were unavailable for comment. However, a parasite spokesperson issued the following statement: "Na na na boo boo! Take that, ants!"

WV IN THE NEWS. The fallout from the WV Supreme Court/Masseygate story along with a major fine for Massey Energy has drawn a good bit of national media attention the last few days. Here is one from the NY Times about the fine and one about the Court from the same source. Here's the Washington Post on the fine. On a related note, here's Ken Ward from the Charleston Gazette on how the state has dropped the ball on environmental enforcement.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FUN WITH SUN TZU

The dude himself, courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme of Goat Rope lately is strategy and what even peace loving people can learn from the study of strategy, strife, and conflict. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Yesterday's post mentioned Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese strategist of the Warring States period (402-221 BC). His Art of War has been studied for centuries by people in many walks of life who have found useful insights for daily life there--with "war" understood metaphorically for the world's constantly occuring collisions. I learned of this classic while studying martial arts.

The book consists of 13 brief chapters, although additional related texts have recently been discovered. I'm going to highlight some passages that I've found useful in personal experience in the course of dojo sparring and several peaceful campaigns.

Here's one of my favorites. As mentioned yesterday, Sun Tzu believed that the highest level of skill was to accomplish one's goals without a fight. Here's a related insight from Chapter 3:

The best military policy is to attack strategies; the next to attack alliances; the next to attack soldiers; and the worst to assault walled cities.

Let me unpack the first part of that a little. Imagine you are engaged in a campaign to either make something happen or keep something from happening and that you face opposition. Not too hard, huh? All too often, we tend to attack our opponents, at least verbally.

Personally attacking people may make one feel better for a little while, but it usually doesn't accomplish much and can lead to all kinds of trouble. It's far more effective if one understands the opponent's strategy and neutralizes it without attacking the opponent at all.

Here's a real example. A while back, there was an effort by A to push through a potentially popular but irresponsible policy as a first step to a wider agenda. That was their strategy. Group B put together an alternative proposal that many organizations supported. The alternative addressed legitimate concerns but avoided the negative aspects of A's agenda. Group B released their proposal at the best moment. It got a good bit of attention and helped shape debate on the issue and ultimately the outcome.

Group B didn't attack anybody, but rather deprived the opponents of their strategy. Straight Sun Tzu. It was fun too. That's what I heard anyway...

Here's another simple example. Imagine a woman walking through a dark street who is being followed by a potential attacker. She crosses the street to an area with more light and more people around and continues on her way. Without engaging her potential attacker, she neutralized his strategy, which was to attack her in an isolated place. Pretty simple but pretty effective.

More of the same next week.

RICH FOOD. In response to an item from yesterday's post about the dietary divide between rich and poor, a friend in Philly sent the following link which asks the question "can you afford to eat right?" Increasingly, eating a healthy diet will require more money, more education, and more time. Thanks, MM!

FRESH FIGS. Darkness and light and challenges and responses are part of the mix in the latest edition of Jim Lewis' Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

EVOLUTION AND ALTRUISM. Here's coverage from the UK on an interesting scientific debate.

ABOUT THAT PROVOCATION AT SEA. The military isn't sure it happened. As the folks at Wired's Danger Room blog suggest, "hold off the invasion force."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

WHICH WAY USA?

Caption: This man has been squeezed out of the middle class.

El Cabrero is winding up the week of New Year by highlighting some important books published in 2007. If this is your first visit, please click on previous posts.

Today's selection is Paul Krugman's The Conscience of A Liberal. Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton but is best known for his columns in the New York Times. An earlier book of his, The Great Unraveling, is also worth a look.

(Come to think of it, this is probably also true of his earlier works, but I haven't read them. Yet.)

Conscience is a very readable guide to where we've come from, where we are, and where we might go as a nation in terms of economic policy and shared prosperity. Krugman looks first at the post-Civil War Gilded Age, with huge disparities of wealth and little, no safety net for working people, and disenfranchisement of millions of Americans.

This system was challenged by populists and progressives and was only overcome through the struggles of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and post-World War II policies which helped create the American middle class.

He calls this period, which lasted from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s as "the Great Compression." Taxes were high on the wealthy, some big businesses were regulated, pro-union policies were in effect, and government programs protected incomes, safety, education, and home ownership--and the country prospered as never before.

Things have obviously changed, due largely to the rise of what he calls "movement conservatism" (and what Jonathan Chait calls "crackpot economics"):

The American I grew up in was a relatively equal middle-class society. Over the past generation, however, the country has returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality.

Krugman offers a number of market and "aftermarket" policy measures to reverse this trend and builds a strong case for the "health care imperative"--the need to create a universal system of care. He notes that a weird reversal has occurred in our current political climate:

One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early twenty-first century is that those of us who call themselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend long-standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture.

There's a lot of history, ideas, and information here. I'd recommend checking it out. As Maude Lebowski said in that classic of American cinematography, "He's a good man--and thorough."

ANOTHER ROADBLOCK to a fresh war with Iran may have emerged. The U.S. military reports that Iran is no longer supplying training or materials to militants in Iraq.

MORAL VALUES DEPARTMENT. By way of the Washington Post, here are a series of questions religion professor R. Gustav Niebuhr would ask candidates.

UNKIND. Here's the Bush administration's latest smackdown of efforts to expand health care.

DEBT. El Cabrero has recently been trying to make sense of the massive debt/credit goat rope that is tripping up the nation. Here's a new blog by six academics on these issues: Credit Slips.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SUPERIORITY AND SOCIAL INTEREST

Caption: There they are. Superiority is on the left.

Aside from news and links about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is old school psychology and in particular about Freud's one time ally and later "rival," Alfred Adler. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Adler may be best know for his concept of the inferiority complex, but ideas of inferiority and superiority are central to his work. Everyone comes into the world weak, helpless, and ignorant. Later life experiences, illnesses, and other struggles amplify this.

In Adler's view, a basic drive in human life is the attempt to move from a perceived "minus" or feeling of inferiority towards a superior, more positive, or more complete state. As he put it,

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest...The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

But that striving for superiority is or should be balanced by what he called "social interest." In Adler's view, humans are inherently social:

Fiercely besieged by nature and suffering from considerable physical weakness, man's intellect points him to that communal living. This process of association, itself the result of personal weakness and insecurity, indicates a precondition that must be met in every way just as does the will to live, as life itself, must tacitly be accepted: Man is a social being. Expressed differently: The human being and all his capabilities and forms of expression are inseparably linked to the existence of others, just as he is linked to cosmic facts and to the demands of this earth.

Adler, who was politically a Social Democrat, disagreed with Freud's view that there was an inherent conflict between individual and society. When it happened, this was a sign of neurosis or a misguided style of life.

Speaking of which, "style of life" is another major Adlerian term. He believed that everyone, more or less consciously (usually less) has a guiding goal or narrative (sometimes he called it a "fiction") that is followed throughout life, based on their own vision of superiority. People are not so much pushed by instincts and drives, as in Freud's view, as pulled by their final goal (Greek: telos):

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.

Treatment for him involved helping people rethink mistaken goals. This aspect of his teaching has led many to regard him as a grandfather of sorts to the current cognitive-behavioral approach to therapy which seems to have the best track record of bringing good results in a relatively short time.

O CANADA. El Cabrero finally got around to watching SiCKO, with its amusing contrasts between the US, French, Canadian, and British health care system. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows the Canadian system costs much less than ours and has better outcomes in terms of infant mortality and longevity.

IRAN. Here's Robert Scheer on Bush's latest Iran contortions.

UNLEASHING CAPITALISM? Perry Mann says "No, thanks" in this op-ed.

THINK KIDS GROW UP FAST THESE DAYS? The Neanderthals were probably quicker.

OH POO--it could be the key to the diversity of life. No #($*.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED