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Monday, February 09, 2015

"I wish I were dumber so I could be more certain about my opinions. It looks fun." - Scott Adams

"My most popular tweets are the ones that insult dumb people. Everyone is confident I am talking about other people who have it coming." - Scott Adams



We don't remember events, we remember our stories about events.  Police interrogation techniques generate false memories of committing crimes - Boing Boing: "Psychologists terminated a study that showed the ease of implanting false memories of committing terrible, violent crimes in the recent past in their subjects -- the experiment was terminated because some subjects couldn't be convinced that they hadn't committed the crime after they were told the truth. The techniques used by the psychologists were a lot less manipulative and stressful than those routinely deployed by police interrogators who are anxious to secure confessions. It's a disturbing result that calls into question decades of guilty pleas all over the world."


Flawed Narratives, Perfect Victims, and the Columbia Rape Allegations - Reason.com: "Last week, The Daily Beast published my article about the case—based mainly on interviews with the alleged rapist, Paul Nungesser, and materials he provided—which raises serious questions about the pro-Sulkowicz narrative, partly because of her friendly behavior toward Nungesser for weeks after the alleged rape. The response from the rape-culture feminist camp has been to argue that there's no "right" way to deal with sexual assault, generating a #TheresNoPerfectVictim Twitter hashtag. But it's a straw (wo)man argument. Yes, of course victims deal with trauma in different, often startling ways. However, "no perfect victim" doesn't mean that anything an alleged rape victim says or does, no matter how it defies common sense, reason and human experience, must be rationalized as "that's what some victims do!"  in deference to the commandment, "Believe the survivor."

I should add that when I first read the New York Times account last May of Sulkowicz's claim that the university badly botched its investigation of her complaint, I thought she probably had a legitimate grievance. She was alleging a violent rape by a man who had been reported for sexual assault by two other women but had always managed to beat the rap. (At the time, my main reaction was that such cases need to be handled by real cops and courts, not campus "gender equity" bureaucrats and pseudo-judicial panels.) But as I read more details of the story, those details raised more and more questions. At this point, I cannot, of course, definitively state that the allegations against Nungesser are false. But there is more than enough doubt of his guilt to warrant exoneration not only in a criminal case—it's safe to say that no grand jury in the land would indict him, unless it was made up of gender studies majors—but under the low "preponderance of the evidence" standard by which Columbia adjudicates sexual misconduct complaints...

It is also useful to recall that only a couple of months ago,  virtually identical arguments were made on behalf of the now-debunked Rolling Stone story of a brutal fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia. The "discrepancies" and improbabilities in Jackie's story, advocates asserted, were typical of victims' reaction to  trauma, and only "rape apologists" and "denialists" would use them to brand the story a hoax...

Jelani Cobb, the panelist who did not get to say a word during my segment, gently tried to point out that checking the facts when it comes to accusations is important; as an example, he cited Joe McCarthy accusing people of being communists with no evidence and ruining their lives. Harris-Perry's response: "Yes, but he was just throwing out accusations! Women don't do that!" And so, after the Duke lacrosse team fiasco, after Brian Banks losing ten years of his life to a false rape charge, after the University of Virginia rape hoax, we're back to the rape myth of our time: Women never lie."
   

War is the new normal: 7 reasons America can’t escape conflict - Salon.com: "1.  The privatization of war: The U.S. military’s recourse to private contractors has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and prolonged wars as well...

2.  The embrace of the national security state by both major parties: Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to exercise any kind of control over the national security state.  A former Navy nuclear engineer who had served under the demanding Admiral Hyman Rickover, Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber and fought for a U.S. foreign policy based on human rights...

3.  “Support Our Troops” as a substitute for thought. You’ve seen them everywhere: “Support Our Troops” stickers.  In fact, the “support” in that slogan generally means acquiescence when it comes to American-style war.  The truth is that we’ve turned the all-volunteer military into something like aforeign legion, deploying it again and again to our distant battle zones and driving it into the ground in wars that amount to strategic folly...

4.  Fighting a redacted war.  War, like the recent Senate torture report, is redacted in America.  Its horrors and mistakes are suppressed, its patriotic whistleblowers punished, even as the American people are kept in a demobilized state.  The act of going to war no longer represents the will of the people, as represented by formal Congressional declarations of war as the U.S. Constitution demands...

5.  Threat inflation: There’s nothing new about threat inflation.  We saw plenty of it during the Cold War (nonexistent missile and bomber gaps, for example).  Fear sells and we’ve had quite a dose of it in the twenty-first century, from ISIS to Ebola.  But a more important truth is that fear is a mind-killer, a debate-stifler...

6.  Defining the world as a global battlefield: In fortress America, all realms have by now become battle spheres...

7.  The new “normal” in America is war: The 9/11 attacks happened more than 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly remember a time when the country was at peace."

 

I was an American sniper, and Chris Kyle’s war was not my war - Salon.com: "Kyle views the occupation of Iraq as necessary to stop terrorists from coming to the mainland and attacking the U.S.; he sees the Iraqis as “savages” and attacks any critical thought about the overall mission and the military’s ability to accomplish it. This portrayal is not unrealistic. My unit had plenty of soldiers who thought like that. When you are sacrificing so much, it’s tempting to believe so strongly in the “noble cause,” a belief that gets hardened by the fatigue of multiple tours and whatever is going on at home. But viewing the war only through his eyes gives us too narrow a frame...

As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death. My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good. Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled. I served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. During that time, we started to realize there were no weapons of mass destruction, the 9/11 commission report determined that Iraq was not involved in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, false sovereignty was given to Iraq by Paul Bremer, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were exposed, and the Battle of Fallujah was waged. The destruction I took part in suddenly intersected with news that our reasons for waging war were untrue. The despicable conduct of those at Abu Ghraib was made more unforgivable by the honorable interactions I had with Iraqi civilians, and, together, it fueled the post-traumatic stress I struggle with today. My war was completely different than Chris Kyle’s war. That doesn’t mean his war is wrong, and mine was right. But it does mean that no one experience is definitive. The movie depicts compounded action scenes with very little political and regional context. It was a conscious decision by Clint Eastwood, apparently, to leave out the cause of the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It was a conscious decision, apparently, for multiple characters to describe the Iraqis as “savages” and never show any alternative. When I heard of the bigoted reaction some Americans had after watching the film, I was disgusted, but not surprised. Audience members are mistaking Chris Kyle’s view of the war as “the” story about the war. No wonder someone tweeted that the movie made them “want to go kill some ragheads.” It’s sad that such a nearsighted portrayal of Iraqis has caused more people to fear Arabs and glorify violence against them."





1 comment:

  1. Good posts. History shows us that human civilization is a continuous war sporadically interrupted by short-lived outbursts of peace. That might change if more people were like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but few are. Cheers!

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