AFSC statement on Buffalo mass murder and racist violence

The American Friends Service Committee issued this statement today in the wake of the hate-driven mass killing in Buffalo:

This weekend, 10 people were killed and three were injured by a white supremacist at a grocery store in a majority Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the communities in Buffalo during this time. We are holding you in the Light.

These horrifying acts of racist violence compound the ongoing trauma caused by relentless anti-Blackness espoused not only by individuals like the man who carried out this attack, but also in all sectors of the country. We are holding in the Light our staff, volunteers, and community members who are particularly impacted by these attacks and the ideology behind them, and we deepen our commitments to work for a world without racism and violence.

The suspected shooter is an 18-year-old white man whose actions were motivated by his belief in “great replacement theory,” also referred to as “white replacement theory,” a deeply racist belief that is growing in popularity and is amplified by right-wing media and political leaders. This ideology not only incites violence in the present but is used to justify and even celebrate centuries of violence. It is also intensely anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and misogynistic. We stand in community and solidarity with those also named in the manifesto reported to have been written by the killer, which targeted Muslims, Jewish communities, trans people, and immigrants. 

AFSC is committed to eliminating white supremacy and violence wherever they are found. This means being honest and accountable to our history and our present. This means we must embrace a trauma informed approach to community care; believe and support victims and survivors; and above all, make every effort to prevent such violence by eradicating its very root.

Annals of Whack, continued

I'm kind of grateful to the state of Indiana for stepping up and not allowing West Virginia to grab all the Whack limelight. The Gentle Reader will no doubt be aware of the controversy that flared up after that state's governor signed a "Religious Freedom Restoration" bill widely viewed as a means to legally discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

Not to mention the whole pizza thing...

My favorite part so far is the reaction of Matt Staver of the Liberty Council, who compared people who support non-discrimination policies to demonic, Christianity-hating terrorists. If El Cabrero had not evolved far beyond the point of engaging in snark, I might be tempted to say something like "Maybe it takes one to know one." Of course, that would never happen and I would never say something like that even in private conversation, much less in a blog post.

Perfectly legal

Back in the 1990s, when militias were making headlines and the Oklahoma City bombing shocked the nation, I did a lot of reading about extremist groups and how they operate. I was particularly interested because the home base of white supremacist William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, which inspired Timothy McVeigh's terrorist attack, was located in West Virginia.

The Pierce/McVeigh case provides an example of how such things could happen. The elders of the movement, i.e. people like Pierce, would put out ideas but never get their hands dirty with any specific act of violence. Instead, individuals and small groups, often composed of disturbed, angry and aggrieved people, would act on the hate message without leaving any trail traceable back to movement leaders. This approach was called "leaderless resistance."

From what I can gather, a lot of terrorist groups around the world, including those based on religious fanaticism, operate in a similar way. Ideas, images and techniques are put out on the web and via other means and autonomous groups and individuals do the killing. Again, the leaders who inspire such actions are often not directly involved in carrying them out.

One thing that has changed between the 1990s and today is that inflammatory speech and rhetoric has gone pretty much mainstream and conspiracy theories are telecast, tweeted, and otherwise communicated to millions of Americans every day. And when some angry, disturbed and aggrieved person acts out, those who fanned the flames can claim no involvement.

As the saying goes, for the leaders at least, it's perfectly legal.

I'm not saying anyone intended the recent eruption of violence to happen. Nor am I trying to shut down anyone's First Amendment rights. Obviously, the shooter has mental issues and there are plenty of holes in our mental health system. But people have been playing with fire and when that happens somebody is likely to get burned.

MORE ON SAME here.

HERE TOO. Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo makes a good point in this post about the need to tone down the rhetoric in coalfield controversies as well.

CLIMATE CHANGE. The CIA is concerned about it. Too bad congress isn't.

THE NOT SO SECRET WORD. When my kids were little, we used to enjoy watching Pee-wee's Playhouse. (For that matter, I still think his movie was a classic.) One regular feature of the show was the secret word. Whenever it came up, everybody was supposed to scream real loud. The not so secret word at the WV legislature is OPEB, which stand for "other post-employment benefits." Some politicians think it's the Big Bad Wolf, but a recent report by the WV Center on Budget and Policy suggests it might not be too big a threat. We'll see if the screaming continues.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON music.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The language of extremism

Carthage, by John Mallord William Turner (1755-1851).

We interrupt Goat Rope's regularly scheduled programming to share this quote from Alberto Manguel's book A Reader on Reading. It seems to be a good description of the right wing noise machine these days:

Almost everything around us encourages us not to think, to be content with commonplaces, with dogmatic language that divides the world neatly into black and white, good and evil, them and us. This is the language of extremism, sprouting up everywhere these days, reminding us that it has not disappeared. To the difficulties of reflecting on paradoxes and open questions, on contradictions and chaotic order, we respond with the age-old cry of Cato the Censor in the Roman Senate, "Carthago delenda est!" "Carthage must be destroyed!"--the other civilization must not be tolerated, dialogue must be avoided, rule must be imposed by exclusion or annihilation. This is the cry of dozens of contemporary leaders. This is a language that pretends to communicate but, under several guises, simply bullies; it expects no answer except obedient silence...

NO NECESSARY CONNECTION (BUT THERE MIGHT BE). Here's Frank Rich taking on the Manhattan mosque hysteria and its likely effects, which aren't good.

MORE OF THE SAME here.

TALKING TAX CUTS here.

NOT A SURE THING. For a long time, home ownership was seen as a way to build wealth. Anymore, not so much.

FOOD REVOLUTION. Here are some possible ingredients.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A stroke of the wet sponge

Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero has any number of superstitions, none of which are rationally justifiable but all of which persist nonetheless. One of these has to do with lucky and unlucky names. There is a part of me that believes that it is bad luck to name someone after a person or character who had extraordinarily bad luck.

One name that I really like but would never name a child is Cassandra, who is a major character in Aeschylus' tragedy Agamemnon, which has been the theme this week. To recap, she was a daughter of King Priam of Troy. Apollo fell in love with her and promised the gift of prophecy in return for intimacy. When she refused consent at the last moment, she was cursed by the god to have a accurate vision of the future but one that no one would believe.

I hate it when that happens.

Anyhow, she returned with King Agamemnon after the fall of Troy as a trophy and a slave. She knew that death awaited both of them at the hands of Clytemnestra but was powerless to avert it.

She gets the last word this week. Her last works speak volumes about a key theme of tragedy and express what Martha Nussbaum called "the fragility of goodness." Here goes (from the translation of Robert Fagles):

Oh men, your destiny.
When all is well a shadow can overturn it.
When trouble comes a stroke of the wet sponge,
and the picture's blotted out. And that,
I think that breaks the heart.

THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM, American style, is the subject of this article by Joseph Stiglitz.

HATE is alive and well. Here is Paul Krugman on the right wing media's role in stoking it

TOUGH TIMES FOR RECENT GRADUATES. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows how tough it is for many to find jobs. I guess "Plastics" isn't quite getting it these days.

GREEN JOBS are here. According to Wired Science, 770,000 Americans already have one.

NOT SO GREEN JOBS. The Obama administration reveal more of its approach to mountaintop removal mining yesterday.

SLEEP ON IT. Research suggests that deep sleep with REM (not the band, although they are pretty cool) enhances creative problem solving.

THIS IS WEIRD, but the economy of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia actually grew by 2.5 percent in 2008, way outpacing the national economy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Maps and territories

Medieval map of the world. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

One way that people can get in big trouble is by falling in love with their theories (or believing their own propaganda). In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to this as Platonizing or Platonicity.

For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Ideas or Forms were more real than the world of the senses. Most people wouldn't go that far these days, but there is a persistent tendency for people to take their model of the world for the world itself.

It's an all too human thing to construct working models of how the world works. In fact, most of the time, these models may work pretty well. But the tricky thing about our world is that it is under no obligation to act in a way that meets our expectations.

As the Polish-American scientist Alfred Korzybski famously put it, "the map is not the territory." The Gentle Reader may have discovered this for him- or herself while attempting to drive to a new destination with a map downloaded from the internet.

As Taleb puts it, Platonicity

is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on pure and well-defined "forms," whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what "makes sense"), even nationalities. When these ideas and crisp constructs inhabit our minds, we privilege them over other less elegant objects, those with messier and less tractable structures...

Platonicity is what makes us think that we understand more than we actually do...Models and constructions, these intellectual maps of reality, are not always wrong; they are wrong only in some specific applications. The difficult is that a) you do not know before hand (only after the fact) where the map will be wrong, and b) the mistakes can lead to severe consequences. These models are like potentially helpful medicines that carry random but very severe side effects.

Some healthy skepticism is called for, even about our most cherished ideas.

OH GOOD. Wall Street securities firms still have plenty on hand for executive bonuses.

SHOP TILL WE DROP? That may have just happened, according to the latest reports on consumer spending.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, here's economist Dean Baker's take on the data.

THE BIOLOGY OF HATE. Scientists may have identified the brain's "hate circuit." Meanwhile, lots of people seem to have already found it.

URGENT ANCIENT PHOENICIAN UPDATE here. Short version: they got around.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED