Grab bag

El Cabrero just read his first John Le Carre novel, to wit The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. This is probably going to sound really bad but it kind of made me almost nostalgic for the Cold War. When it came to an end, while other people were celebrating, I remember wondering what other kinds of demons would be loosened which had been held in check before. It turned out to be quite a few.

 I hope I'm wrong about this, but it occurred to me then that the dangers of the future might make that nearly 50 year period of relative equilibrium, also known as a balance of terror, look like good old days.

On that cheery note, here are a few items that caught my eye today...

RATING THE SOTU. Here's Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute on President Obama's state of the union address.

DUMBING US DOWN. Working in groups can do just that.

DOGS appear to have been domesticated as long as 33,000 years ago. Next question: have they found any fossilized squeaky toys?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Another one bites the dust

Note: this picture of Wu has nothing to do with the subject at hand. I just thought it was cool.

These are tough times for true believers in the cult of the market god, although not quite as tough as one might expect if the moral arc of the universe really did bend toward justice.

(As far as I can tell, that arc tends towards randomness most days.)

We've seen the spectacle of Wall Street Masters of the Universe begging for the Visible Hand of government to rescue them from the Invisible Hand of their moribund deity.

Another sacred relic that has taken a few hits lately is the idea of humans as homo economicus, which is sort of a profit seeking organic bipedal calculator. He/she has shown up in many places in economic theory although not so much in the real world. Here's one definition from John Stuart Mill:

“a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained.”

While Mill used that purely as a model, it caught on and has become a tenet of prominent schools of economic ideology. As a recent article in Business Week put it,

This 19th-century concept, embedded in classic economic theory and still embraced today, rests on two assumptions about human nature. The first is that individuals are only motivated by self-interest; the second is that we're all rational decision-makers.

More and more scientific research suggests that humans are more like sentimental monkeys who can talk than organic calculators that can walk.

After all, the human brain wasn't manufactured from the top down; it grew from the ground up. First came the brainstem that we share with reptiles, then the limbic system that we share with mammals. Our enlarged cerebral cortex is, if you'll pardon the expression, an afterthought.

Real people have all kinds of motives, such as the desire for status, respect, fairness, honor, compassion, sex, love, fun, excellence, a good fight, knowledge, or any number of things. Don't take my word for it--just take a good look at human history. As Pascal said,

The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.

IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIR PLAY, if the idea of homo economicus has taken a hit, so has the idea of the Noble Savage. This item shows that chimp-like bonobos, sometimes viewed as a peace-loving paleo-vegan primates, have been discovered hunting and eating monkeys.

SPEAKING OF EATING. Here's a long one by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma (which, by the way, is a good book if you haven't tried it) on the politics of food.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS? This item discusses the psychology of financial panics.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SHUTTING OFF THE MORALITY SWITCH

Beelzebub, "Lord of the Flies," from Beelzebub as depicted in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is what the social sciences can tell us about human cruelty and violence. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned yesterday, social psychologist Albert Bandura's research indicates that most people have a sense of morality that includes not doing bad things to others and helping them out when they need it. To repeat, that's the good news. The bad news is that we're pretty good at shutting morality down under certain conditions. He called this "moral disengagement."

Two ways of doing this that were discussed yesterday were redefining the situation and using euphemisms. But there are other ways as well. They include:

*advantageous comparison. "We didn't do bad stuff and if we did, it wasn't as bad as what the other guys do."

*displacement of responsibility. "...and besides, we were just carrying out the orders of our superiors."

*diffusion of responsibility. "I didn't kill anybody directly--I just put them on the train/pushed a button/etc." Modern atrocities, it should be noted, often have a complicated division of labor. If everyone just does one small part of the operation, it's easy for people to think they really weren't responsible.

*disregard or distortion of consequences. "It wasn't that bad."

*dehumanization. "And besides, they were just a bunch of [fill in the blank]."

*attribution of blame. "They had it coming anyway."

Here's a final thought. According to Bandura, moral disengagement usually doesn't happen all at once. It usually starts small and escalates over time as people get used to it. El Cabrero is reminded of a quote from Dostoevsky that I've used here more than once:

Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel.

ECONOMY AND AGING. Here's more on the longevity gap between rich and poor and the nation's retirement woes.

RIDING OUT THE RECESSION. Economist Paul Krugman predicts a slow recovery.

MORALITY AND WAR. A new study suggests that war effects the moral development of children, especially on how they think about revenge.

THREE WORDS THAT DON'T USUALLY GO TOGETHER are mountaintop removal and tourism.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

IS THAT AN ARCHETYPE IN YOUR POCKET OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE?

Reynard the Fox, a trickster figure, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero is musing this week about the ideas of Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As I mentioned before, when I first ran across Jung in my youth, I was very impressed, although that wore off pretty quickly. Still, I find myself thinking about his ideas every so often. Here are a few of his main ones:

GOING DEEP. Jung believed that the unconscious included not just repressed memories and sexual desires a la Freud but also a deeper layer shared by all people. He called this the collective unconscious.

ARCHETYPES. The collective unconsciousness, according to Jung, manifested itself in the form of primordial images or archetypes that showed up in dreams, art, religion, legends, fairy tales, mythology, etc. He wrote that the idea of archetypes were

derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairy-tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams, deliria, and delusions of individuals living today.

Examples might include the trickster, the wise old man or woman, the child, the mother or father, death and rebirth, etc.

(There is no doubt that such recurring motifs exist, but there are probably other and better ways of accounting for them and they don't always mean the same things.)

PERSONALITY. Jung had a complicated theory of personality, which included conscious and unconscious aspects. When I first read about his ideas, it almost seemed like lots of other folks are living inside us. He called the part of ourselves that we present to the world the persona, which is derived from the Latin word for mask. The darker side of ourselves which we tend to deny and repress he called the shadow. He believed that men had a mostly unconscious female aspect to the personality which he called the anima. Likewise, women were believed to have a male aspect, which he called the animus. The deepest layer of the personality was the Self,

which is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness.

TYPES. Jung developed an elaborate system of classifying psychological types. Two of his terms that have entered into wide usage are extroversion and introversion, in which individuals orient themselves primarily to external people and objects or internal ones.

INDIVIDUATION. The goal of Jungian psychology is individuation or self-realization, which involves the integration and balancing of various aspects of the personality so that a person becomes "a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole.'"

There's a whole lot more, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime but that'll have to do for now.

THE SURGING LONG TERM COST OF THE SURGE is the subject of this article from Foreign Affairs.

PRISON NATION. According to the NY Times,

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

SOUNDING LIKE A NEANDERTHAL. An anthropologist studying the vocal tracts of Neanderthal remains has simulated what they may have sounded like. It looks like they didn't hear or speak the same way we do.

SPEAKING OF LANGUAGE, there's a longstanding debate about the extent to which it shapes perception. It ain't quite resolved yet.

FOR MY FELLOW CLASSICS DORKS, here's an article from the New Yorker about Herodotus, the Greek "father of history." He's showed up here at Goat Rope a time or two if you feel like dumpster diving.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

The theme this week at Goat Rope is the bystander effect and how and when people decide to intervene--or not. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Psychological experiments as well as unfortunate events have suggested that there's something about being part of a larger group of people that makes us less likely to personally take action to help other people in a bad situation.

But it doesn't stop there--sometimes being part of a group makes us less likely to take action to help ourselves.

Researchers Darley and Latane (see yesterday's post) tested this in another ingenious experiment in which naive subjects were given a routine task in a room where smoke poured from the vents. When they were the only people in the room, most people (around 75 percent) reported the smoke.

But when they were in the room with two other people who expressed no concern about it (and were instructed as part of the experiment to ignore it), only ten percent reported it--even when the room was full of smoke at the end of the six minute experiment.

When they tried the experiment with three naive subjects in the room, i.e. nobody who was "in on it," people only reported the smoke 38 percent of the time.

It seems in general that we take their cues about the nature of a given situation from other people and if others don't seem to think it's a big deal, we're not likely to either--even if it could be a matter of our own life and death.

Time seems to be a factor in the decision to act as well. It seems that the longer people wait to take action, the less likely they are to do so.

Some days, El Cabrero is reminded of one of Dylan's darker lines: "We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."

THE RECESSION AND THE WAR are the subjects of this op-ed by economist Dean Baker. Short version: it made things worse, but so did bad domestic policies and priorities.

EVANGELICALS ON THE MOVE. Here's an interesting article from The Nation about changing attitudes among evangelical voters. The religious right's lock on the group has been broken or at least challenged.

NEW BLOG FROM GOOD JOBS FIRST. GJF has long taken the lead in the fight for job quality standards, smart growth and accountability in economic development policies. The new blog, Clawback, is a welcome addition.

QUICK, ROBIN, GET THE SHARK REPELLENT! I did not make this up. According to a brief item in The Week Magazine, designers of the Shark Shield, a devise intended to keep sharks away by emitting electronic waves, may have to go back to the drawing board after a shark ate one of their units.

MORE ON CLIMATE CHANGE IN WV. Here's WV Public Radio on local responses to climate change (or the lack thereof).

RETIRING BABY BOOMERS might not signify the end of the world after all, this Foreign Policy article suggests.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FROM REAL LIFE TO EXPERIMENTS AND BACK AGAIN

Every once in a while, El Cabrero teaches an off campus sociology class. When we discuss methods of conducting research, I always try to emphasize that there are a lot of valid and interesting ways of doing it.

The method of conducting experiments is a mainstay of psychology but is less common in sociology. The value of experiments is that they are done in a tightly controlled manner, which is also their drawback, since everyday life is pretty messy. Still, some truly ingenious experiments have shed light on many aspects of social life.

Some of the most interesting have been inspired by real life situations. Some examples of this are Stanley Milgram's classic if controversial experiments on obedience to authority and Solomon Asch's studies of conformity. (Search this blog for posts on these topics.)

One horrific situation that prompted some enlightening experiments was the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York. As most people heard the story, more than 30 people saw or overheard the attack, which was repeated three times for more than 30 minutes. Yet it was widely reported that no one intervened or called the police until it was too late.

The event was sensationalized in the media. The headline in the New York Times at the time was "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" and this was the opening line:

For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Recent investigations of available data have suggested that it wasn't quite that clear cut. As USA Today reported a while back,

As it turned out, there were two attacks, not three. The prosecutor in the case later said only a half-dozen witnesses were ever found. Others have suggested that calls to the police were made (and ignored), and that the fatal second assault occurred in a location visible to almost no one.

Some who have investigated the details suggest the tragedy as it is generally recounted has become something of a parable of the Bad Samaritan and that the story has taken on a life of its own. Still, it is undeniable that people often fail to intervene when terrible things happen.

More on this and the research it inspired tomorrow.

HAPPINESS AND THE ECONOMY is the subject of this interesting NY Times piece. As you may have guessed, the economy today isn't conducive to a whole lot of it and research suggests that economic growth alone is not a valid measure of well being, especially in a time of rising inequality.

SPEAKING OF AN UNHAPPY ECONOMY, the recent drop in nationwide job numbers doesn't bode well.

MORE ON "THE SURGE IS WORKING" dogma can be found in this Gazette-Mail editorial.

IF IT DOESN'T ROT, DON'T EAT IT is the advice of author Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I don't think he meant that you have to wait till it does, however.

BIG RED TRUCK. Here is an op-ed by yours truly on my short and inglorious career as a volunteer fire fighter.

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PILLAR TALK

Samson shows the way.

El Cabrero is convinced that there's a lot we can learn from the study of conflict and strategy that can help make the world less violent and more just. That was pretty much the theme last week.

This week I'm continuing in the same vein. Think of it as a peaceful person's guide to Sun Tzu's Art of War. People from all walks of life have been studying his writings for centuries for their application in many areas of life far removed from physical conflict.

First a little review. As I mentioned before, Sun Tzu believed that the highest level of skill in conflict is to accomplish your objective without a fight.

Sun Tzu also believed that attacking one's opponents is one of the least effective approaches. The best approach is to attack the opponent's strategy, as explained here. If one neutralizes an opponent's strategy, the opponent is neutralized without being attacked.

He taught that the next best policy is to attack the opponent's alliances. This is one of several areas where his thinking meshes perfectly with the theory of nonviolent action.

According to the latter, power is not monolithic and dominant groups are not as unified as they may appear to be. There are always tensions and contradictions. Even the most absolute dictator depends for his power on the active or passive cooperation of many people. Robert Helvey in his book on nonviolence refers to these as "pillars of support."

When the pillars of support--what Sun Tzu called alliances--are removed, the power collapses.

At a less extreme level, attempting to influence public affairs in a democracy involves trying to win over people to one's point of view and isolate one's opponent. Again, this is a matter of removing their pillars of support or attacking alliances. One mark of a good strategy is that it creates more support for your position, neutralizes some who were inclined to oppose it, and isolates one's determined opponents. Vice versa for a bad one.

More on this tomorrow.

SPEAKING OF PILLARS OF SUPPORT, this study of public opinion on the state of the economy shows that there's not much holding up the Bush agenda.

WHAT RECESSION? Here's an item from the AFLCIO blog about the current state of the economy with plenty of links that suggest what to do about it. And here's Krugman on the candidate's response to recession.

A NEW DIRECTION. In a new report, the Center for American Progress lays out an agenda for progressive growth. Here's an extract:

To grow our economy and ensure that everyone has an opportunity to benefit from this growth, we need to rebuild our infrastructure to support the transformation to a low-carbon economy, invest in human capital, and help support greater economic security. We believe our nation cannot afford to wait to make these necessary investments—in universal health care, education and lifelong learning, science and technology innovation, new green energy job training programs, and new wealth-creating opportunities for all Americans—if we want our economy to remain thoroughly competitive in the global marketplace.

THE MORAL SENSE. Here's a long but fascinating article on the scientific study of morality by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

SAD HOMECOMINGS. This feature from the NY Times shows that the traumas US veterans faced in Iraq and Afghanistan have followed some of them home.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PSYCHED OUT

Photo credit: Dave Hogg, courtesy of EveryStockPhoto.

It used to be a joke that every college freshperson wanted to be a psychology major. That is the age when people are trying, generally with very limited success, to figure out themselves and other people.

El Cabrero fit that pattern back in the previous geological age. I had somehow stumbled on to Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche in high school and imagined that psychology classes would be that cool.

Would that it were so.

To my horror, I seemed to have stumbled in to a den of behaviorists. If there is one ideology I like even less than Stalinism or economic libertarianism, it's gotta be behaviorism.

I would probably have a lot less trouble learning that a good friend was a cannibal than I would to learn that he or she was a fan of B. F. Skinner. Actually, that happened recently and I'm still trying to deal with it.

Clarification: by behaviorism, I don't mean attempting to study behavior in measurable ways. That's fine. I mean metaphysical behaviorism, where people pretend that there's no such thing as conscious or unconscious mental activity and that we're all balls of stimulus response conditioning.

I remember some professors ridiculing the idea of consciousness, mind, and similar ideas and thinking "These people are idiots."

It seems to me the height of loopiness for beings who are only aware of the world through their own consciousness to deny that it exists. And I think there's something evil about reductionism, the attempt to reduce the complexity of human life to any simple deterministic factor, whether it's conditioning, genes, economics, "rational choice," etc. We're way too messy for that. Sometimes I wish we weren't.

As Dmitri Karamazov said in Dostoevsky's classic novel,

Yes, man is broad, too broad. I’d have him narrower. The devil knows what to make of it!

That was the end of my psych major.

Fortunately, it appears that the discipline has recovered from this mental disorder, thanks in part to research from many quarters, including brain science, evolution, ethology, etc., not to mention common sense.

SHOCKING IRAQ. Here's a video segment of Keith Olbermann discussing the application of the "shock doctrine" in Iraq with Naomi Klein.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. Corporate lobbyists, nervous about 2008, are pressing to grab all they can in the months ahead.

MINE SAFETY then and now, courtesy of the Gazette's Ken Ward.

TWISTS AND TURNS. There have been some strange developments in the Megan Williams case lately. First, the WV Attorney General Darrell McGraw's office declined a request of the Logan County prosecutor to offer an opinion on pressing hate crimes charges in the case. Then the AG expressed a desire to take over the the case. Both moves were not well received by prosecutor Brian Abraham.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

COLLECTIVE MADNESS

Caption: This is a mad crowd.

This week, in addition to news and links on current events, El Cabrero is passing out nuggets from the less whacked out portions of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for your entertainment and edification.

Is this a full service blog or what?

I may have used today's selection before but it's another one that should be widely posted in public places to remind us of the dangers of group behavior:

Madness is something rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

Although we are social animals and not all groups are nasty, it is the official Goat Rope verdict that the dude wasn't too far off the mark. Aside from the occasional sociopath, people tend to be fairly harmless taken one at a time. Put a bunch of us together at the same time and place, add a few other choice ingredients, and all bets are off.

(Note: the positive and negative sides of group behavior are frequent Goat Rope themes. If you're interested, search the blog for tags such as group psychology, group behavior, conflict, conformity, obedience.)

GAPS. According to a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, millions of low wage Americans struggle to make ends meet due to the gap between employer-provided wages and benefits and public work support programs. Here's a shorter article on the subject by CEPR's Heather Boushey.

ON TOP OF ALL THAT, workplace stress can be lethal.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS HOLD THEIR OWN. According to a Washington Post article on study released last week,

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study being released Wednesday.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

There's been a lot of public school bashing in the last few years, but the study found that when one controls for factors such as parental involvement, the difference in achievement between public and private schools tends to evaporate.

CHURCHES WEIGH IN. The West Virginia Council of Churches issued a statement on mountaintop removal mining last week. It stopped short of calling for abolition but urged strict enforcement of existing laws and opposed their weakening. Here's AP coverage and here's the statement.

AMERICA IN A FUNK? Some public opinion surveys would indicate one. This is a good follow-up to last week's series on optimism and pessimism.

IT'S ALL GOOD. Here's one on Reaganomics from The Onion.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

Caption: This one's for Emily Dickinson.

Along with links and comments on current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is optimism and pessimism. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

A while back, I worked on a project about hope. This was kind of ironic since at the time I didn't have a whole lot on hand.

It wasn't a huge problem for me--I can run pretty well on grim determination and Appalachian fatalism. In fact, the main thing that got me through the Bush years was the story of the hopeless struggle of Leonidas and the Spartans against impossible odds at Thermopylae (this was way before the movie came out).

Moulon labe, baby!

Back to the hope thing...To start with, I tried to look at the literature and research on the subject and found quite a bit. One book that caught my eye was an older study by Ezra Stotland called The Psychology of Hope. His definition of hope spoke to me:

an expectation greater than zero of achieving a goal.

Short and pithy. Spartan even.

It occurred to me that despite my tragic existential streak, I might not be that much of a pessimist after all. Especially if you define hope or optimism in limited and practical rather than cosmic terms.

Pessimism notwithstanding, I've generally found it to be true that if you want to accomplish something that's doable and are willing to put in the effort, then with skill, technique, allies, strategy, intuition, determination and luck you can sometimes do it--even if it's really hard.

(Note: this may require interval training or similar distasteful efforts.)

Even in a universe that often appears indifferent and drifting towards entropy. Go figure.

I especially liked some quotes on the subject of hope by Erich Fromm:

Hope is paradoxical. It is neither passive waiting nor is it unrealistic forcing of circumstances that cannot occur. It is like the crouched tiger, which will jump only when the moment for jumping has come….To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime...

There is no sense in hoping for that which already exists or for that which cannot be. Those whose hope is weak settle down for comfort or for violence; those whose hope is strong see and cherish all signs of new life and are ready every moment to help the birth of that which is ready to be born.

As pessimistic as I sometimes am, from my own experience I can't escape the truth of William James' statement that "Belief creates the actual fact." In other words, the belief or faith that something is possible often leads to the actions that demonstrate for all the world to see that this is indeed the case.

I may be an optimist in spite of myself...

SURVEY SHOWS SKEPTICISM. More working Americans are doubting the attainability of the American Dream.

GOVERNMENT BY CONTRACT. Imagine a whole government provided by private military contractors...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ASIMOV'S PSYCHOLOGISTS

El Cabrero is a big fan of audio books and lectures, especially those by The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar.

Recently, I listened to one of the latter's offerings, an entertaining series on science fiction literature by Professor Michael D. C. Drout. Drout is one of those teachers who can make just about any subject interesting and fun.

It had been years and years since I read any science fiction, but I was moved to dive into one of the old-school hard-boiled epics of the 40s and 50s, Isaac Asmiov's Foundation Trilogy.

It was kind of a hoot and an interesting social artifact. Good though.

While it's set so many thousands of years into the future that nobody can remember for sure what planet the human race started out on, the characters talk and act like classic 50s males (with a few notable female exceptions).

The plot is about the decline of the galactic empire and a plan to rebuild a new one and save the galaxy from thousands of years of chaos and destruction through the application of the science of psychohistory. As developed by Hari Seldon, this science can predict the course of future events based on a statistical analysis of the actions of large groups of people, in this case over thousands of worlds and involving billions of people over thousands of years.

There are some limits to its predictive powers, however. It can't foresee the actions of individuals and its success depends on people not knowing about it, because this knowledge could change reality. As the story unrolls, things get a little dicey.

Asimov himself was moved to write it after re-reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The thing that struck me most was how odd it seems now to imagine even in fiction a world with that degree of predictability. I think the universe and human history is open, if not for business, then at least for novelty and surprises.

THE LATEST ON THE LOGAN, WV CASE is that federal authorities do not plan to bring charges in the case of the abduction, rape, and torture of an African American woman. The state will proceed with its case, which could carry life imprisonment. I hope readers are aware that the people of West Virginia and of Logan County are horrified by this incident and that they avoid the all too human response of judging an entire population by the actions of a few. I expect this crime will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Residents of Logan will be meeting today to discuss a response to this horrible event.

THE POLITICAL BRAIN. Are conservatives and liberals really different when studied scientifically? You be the judge. Here's a start.

MORE LOSSES. Two of the soldiers who signed a recent NY Times op-ed critical of current policy were killed in Iraq. They did their duty in more ways than one.

HERE THEY GO AGAIN. Pro-Iraq war spin doctors are once again trotting out the long-discredited link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is part of a major propaganda effort to revive support for this disaster.

IN CASE YOU WERE WORRIED that the earth may not survive the death of the sun in 5 billion years, relax.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BAD CROWD, GOOD CROWD

This is a very bad crowd.

As noted in yesterday's post, crowds have a generally bad reputation--one that is not altogether undeserved. But two fairly recent books talk about the good side of groups.

Let's start with the most recent. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, recently came out with Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Her main thesis is that for most of human history, until the lamentable rise of the Protestant work ethic (from which El Cabrero is striving manfully to free himself) and the subsequent bureaucratization and commodification of the world, people used to get together and get down in group celebrations that often strike modern observers as "savage."

Relics of this tradition still survive in some sports situations, in carnival (as in Mardi Gras) celebrations, and occasionally in other settings. She argues that "we need much more of this on our crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."

Our old friend Nietzsche, Goat Rope's mascot of the week, pointed out long ago the two poles of human existence and culture: the Apollonian, based on individuation, reason, and moderation (named for the Greek god of music, prophecy, and measure); and the Dionysian (named for the god of the vine), in which people loose their sense of separateness through group revelry.

(While totally appreciative of the gift of the vine, I lean towards the Apollonian.)

The other book on the good side of group behavior is a little older: James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations, which came out in 2004.

Surowiecki writes the financial column for the "New Yorker" and this book deserves the same wide circulation as those of his fellow writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point.

I was shocked by the title, since "wisdom" and "crowd" are two words that I rarely associate. His main thesis is that large groups of people--including people who aren't necessarily the "smartest guys in the room"--often arrive at better decisions than experts:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that group's decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

And again:

The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which of course, includes geniuses as well as everyone else)instead. Chances are it knows.

But there's a catch: it doesn't work in herds. It seems to work better if you have a diverse group of people (by almost any measure) who arrive at their decisions independently, with the results compiled and aggregated. I'd say that' s aggregated Apollonianism (with no disrespect for Dionysus). There's lots of interesting data from experiments and experience in the book that make it worth a look.

SUSPICIOUS MIDDLE EASTERN CHARACTERS. I'm talking, of course, about cats. This from the NY Times:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

That's just how it starts, however. After a few thousand years, they start horfing up hairballs on your rug and waking you up in the middle of the night. It's a conspiracy....

(If you check the picture of the Middle Eastern cat on the link and check the gratuitous animal picture in yesterday's post, you will notice a strong similarity between that cat and Goat Rope Farm's Seamus McGoogle. I'm gonna call Homeland Security...)

WHY IS IT that I'm writing more about animals than economic justice issues these days? I don't even like them all that much. I'm kind of tired of them--they're a pain in the @$$. Maybe it's because justice is elusive but animals are inescapable...at least around here.

MSHA CITES ITS OWN SHORTCOMINGS. This from Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette:

Federal inspectors and their supervisors displayed an "unacceptable lack of accountability and oversight" prior to three major coal-mining accidents last year, the nation's top mine safety regulator said Thursday.

Inspectors missed or ignored obvious violations, agency managers failed to ensure inspectors did their jobs, and repeated safety problems were not hit with escalating enforcement actions, according to three lengthy internal reviews issued Thursday by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Richard Stickler, assistant labor secretary for MSHA, said such oversights will "not be tolerated" and announced an improvement plan the agency said "ushers in [a] new era of accountability."

Comment: fair is fair. Lots of people, including myself, criticized Stickler when he was nominated for this post by the Bush administration. I apologize: he seems to take safety very seriously and is a welcome change from the past.

Question: do you believe that things like coal mine safety should be left to the "market" or the whim of corporations? Some people do...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED