Moral Luck, solved?

pic: http://yoavdembak.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/whats-luck-got-to-do-with-it/

I haven't been able to stop thinking about my last philosophy essay and the problem of moral luck, because--with a shameless lack of humility--I think I may of solved it. What is moral luck? In short, there are moral implications for your actions beyond your own control, actions that you justly can't be held responsible for. For example, what if you get into a fight with somebody and accidentally kill him? Or, what if your fight results in him going to the hospital whereupon he discovers a life threatening tumor just before it's to late? Are you responsible for the death? Are you responsible for the saving of a life? Moreover, moral philosophers have been struggling to levy moral responsibility on moral agents given the power of situational, deterministic forces. How do you blame somebody for something they do if they control neither their will nor the moral implications of their actions? That is to say, they control neither the cause nor the moral effect.

This question isn't just academic, it is the question of justice in a world where we try to place blame on people who seem to be nothing but pawns. Who do you blame for prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib, the soldiers or the system? Philip Zimbardo holds that the system (the bad barrel) spoils the soldiers (turns them into bad apples). Some believe the individual is worthy of all the blame. Others, like Zimbardo and others who appreciate the deterministic forces seem to end up without any cause for personal moral responsibility because it becomes unclear what control, if any, the individual had for his or her action. My thesis seeks to preserve personal moral responsibility while accounting for these deterministic forces.

I argue that we ought to diffuse personal responsibility amongst all those that craft the environment, the collective will. Here are some highlights:

The traditional limits of moral culpability—namely, agents are culpable for their actions only to the extent that they had control of those actions—have been challenged by the immense moral implications of moral luck. The crippling of the responsible self by powerful external influences seems to of excused the agent of moral responsibility and challenged the very foundations of ethical theory by leaving immense moral implications unaccounted for. Critics have tried various ways to either soften Nagel’s account of moral luck or evade it entirely in favor of preserving the centrality of morality, but the levying of personal moral responsibility has become increasingly difficult to justify as the influence of external forces on human agency have become more apparent. The central worry here is that traditional morality seems incapable of justly attributing the important moral implications of moral luck to the agent.

To rectify this problem, I believe we need a wholesale transformation of the process of moral assessment. I will insist that the instigator of an action cannot be the sole recipient of moral blame or moral praise. I will argue in favor of a radically different target for the responsibility of moral luck, namely, the collective will. Individual agents are feeble in the face of powerful external forces when making particular moral decisions, but the collective will is such a force that it creates those same conditions conducive to positive or negative moral luck. Therefore, I will argue that the responsibility for moral luck is diffused to the collective will. . .

. . . The incredibly powerful and burdensome situational and systemic forces I have discussed impinge on individual moral agents, but they are actually an embodiment of the will of those same agents. The best way to understand this contradiction is to think of it much like representative government, a system in which the restraint placed on citizens (the rule of law) is constructed and consented to by those same citizens. We are feeble in the face of the powerful situational forces of these environments, but these environments are our creations. These environments are much like the biological restraints that Chomsky found essential to human progression, because the environments will define our moral progression, good or bad. Therefore, we can finally define the collective will as the embodiment of each person’s individual will and moral responsibility in the environments that the collective has created and now operates in. The moral responsibility for the moral luck of the instigator (good or bad) is thus diffused among every human being on Earth (including the instigator himself), proportional to the contribution his or her will had in constructing and/or preserving the environmental forces that influenced the actions of the instigator. The spectrum of responsibility ranges from somewhere above Stanley Milgram’s near total responsibility (but below agent-causation, for no such human agent exists) to the very low responsibility that some random child halfway across the world might have for the moral effect of, say, this paper (this child, even if he didn’t speak English, would still be above absolute zero responsibility, because there is always at least a potential for any human being to influence another human being). . . .

. . . .There remains an important final objection to imputing moral luck to the collective will, namely, collective moral luck. I have shown that the collective will is not subject to the same onerous pressures as the individual will, but the collective will is certainly subject to resultant luck that leads to unintended moral implications. This objection seems quite powerful, because the collective will should presumably be subject to the same test of intention as the individual when it comes to moral responsibility. For example, the collective will might have the intention of creating a prison system that genuinely reforms inmates and creates a positive moral effect, but our understanding of the motivations for crime may be so inadequate that our prison system contributes to criminality. The principle of intention would seem to suggest that the collective couldn’t be held morally responsible for collective moral luck. But where else can we place the responsibility for moral luck if not the collective will? In the case of the instigator, we found that the collective will enfeebled and coerced the instigator by using powerful external pressures that influenced not only his decision making process, but the moral implications of his decisions. Consequently, we imputed the moral luck of the instigator to the collective will (diffusing it to each human being), but the collective moral luck can’t be imputed to anyone, therefore the collective must absorb it. There is no room for further abstraction; the buck stops at the collective will. But this is the strength of the theory, not the weakness. Only the collective will is capable of rectifying negative moral luck, therefore the collective will is precisely where we want to place the challenge of our moral system. This is because members of the collective operate outside of the environmental pressures that impinge on the instigator. The collective will has the capacity, and therefore the moral obligation, to create new systems with new situational forces to rectify the negative moral luck being imputed to it by the actions of the instigators who work within the existing system. To be more precise, the collective moral luck isn’t really luck it all, it is simply the challenge that morality appropriately poses to the collective will. Therefore, morality is best understood as the obligation of the collective will to rectify the negative moral luck imputed to it by individual moral agents. In other words, only as one people can we transcend the weakness of individual human capacities.

When we realize that the atomized conception of humanity that places the entirety of blame on the instigator is the true evasion of individual moral responsibly that needs to be vehemently rejected, when we realize that the actions of our neighbors are influenced by the systems which we ourselves have created and consented to, when we embrace the view that each and every person ought to feel a sense of personal responsibility for the moral progression of humanity, when we allow people outside our immediate situational pressures to propose solutions to our moral problems, and when we realize that the universe is indifferent to our plight and we as one people are the only ones who can overcome the limits of our internal frailties and feeble individual capacities, only then will we have a hope of creating a better world for everybody.

Sexist myths are not legitimized if they come from faux-naive females

Kate Harding has an interesting piece in which she discusses the views of feminists towards Taylor Swift. Harding cringes when she hears the lyrics of Taylor Swift songs, she feels Swift simply enforces the typical myth of the female waiting for her prince charming to rescue her. Despite the stereotypical dependence Swift romanticizes, Harding considers Swift as something of a push, because commercial success as a female, in her mind, has some feminist value:

But I guess I'm a bit more optimistic about what young women like Taylor Swift are accomplishing, at least in big-picture terms. It will be a great day when more female artists are calling the shots, topping the charts and writing lyrics that don't make me cringe -- but two out of three isn't a bad start.

I feel she perhaps overvalues the feminist worth, for lack of a better term, of commercial success. She has grouped in commercial success as a female artist with feminist lyrics, but I think the latter is far more important. In fact, there is a case to be made that what Swift is doing is much worse for the status of woman, because Swift is exploiting these sexist myths and stereotypes in her songs (with a sort of faux-naivete) for the purposes of her own success. If what it means to be a successful female in the record industry is that your work can devalue woman and their individual capacity and independence, then we ought not laud the success of these female recording artists because their gender is only legitimizing these prejudices.

Horrifying and Hilarious

For Halloween I was determined to go as something original and topical, so I decided on being a fatcat from Wall Street. Yes, half cat, half Wall Street banker. My original thought was that this would just be something clever and comical, but in truth the costume is quite frightening.

The costume is so frightening because one of my props is the Wall Street Journal, the shameless Murdoch rag that has for so long trumpeted corporate America's interests, even so far as being the soapbox for climate change deniers, giving a false impression that there is a contentious debate between two equal competing camps in climate science.



However, I decided out of fairness that I would give The Journal a chance and actually read the whole thing before I went out. Here are some quick thoughts and observations about Friday's hilarious Wall Street Journal:

Let’s start with the first page, Economy Snaps Long Slump:

The most prominent article on the front page meticulously sifts through the economic numbers and reveals that this quarter’s modest recovery has largely been dependent on increasesd government spending and stimulus efforts. The export numbers are encouraging, 1.5% of the 3.5% rise in GDP, but government programs such as the cash-for-clunkers played an equally prominent role, accounting for at least another 1.5% of the rise 3.5% in GDP.

Here’s where things get strange: A Recovery At Last

The largest editorial of the day, as if they don’t read their own paper, called for a reduction in government spending because the economy has recovered. The contradiction here is laughable; you have one section saying the GDP is propped up by government expenditure, the other side employing the propped up numbers to argue for a reduction in government expenditure.

Covering the internal politics of the US Chamber of Commerce, we have, No Deal: Chamber Chief battles Obama

If you still believe big business does actually care for public welfare, read this compelling piece. In this article we are presented with the opinions of opposing farcical corporate cut-throats, neither of whom present the slightest concern for what is most probably the greatest challenge to ever face our species. You have one faction of the Chamber, nuclear energy, supporting climate change legislation because it would incentivize nuclear power, while the coal segments of the Chamber oppose climate change legislation because it could be harmful to their industry. The opponents of climate change make the strangest arguments. For example, according to sources, Fred Palmer of coal producer Peabody EnergyCorp argues against climate regulation because God has intended us to use coal. For equally bizarre arguments straight from the Chamber itself, just look to President Donohue who has argued against climate change regulation because warmer temperatures could help reduce cold weather deaths.

On House health care legislation: House Unveils $894 Billion Bill

The health care industry has contributed more to the Democrats than the Republicans, and this bill would seem to suggest they made a wise investment. The bill requires most Americans to purchase health insurance, with a government subsidy if necessary. Recalcitrants will face a steep 2.5% income tax penalty. The market for the insurance industry is poised to grow as statistics assert 96% of Americans will have health coverage by 2019, up from 83%. However, without power to negotiate costs for the government plan, its clear premiums will not be falling anytime soon.

In the WORLD NEWS section, we have a rather nefarious and misleading article about the Iranian objections to the IAEA deal for Iran to ship uranium for enrichment to Russia.

The byline claims this to be a large setback in nuclear talks. After speaking to the gravity of the setback, the article immediately makes the claim that the United States and her allies have limited patience in negotiations. Then the writer proceeds to consider aggressive policy responses. Only after citing a few anonymous sources within the administration for their thoughts on the difficulties of negotiating with such a fickle and conniving regime, and after framing the Iranians as sufficiently menacing for military intervention do we finally come to what the WSJ is so sternly concerned with:

“Details of the Iranian objections to the proposed deal weren’t clear…the UN nuclear watchdog had only received an ‘initial response’ from Tehran to the proposal.”

The article informs us of the Obama administration’s response before it even addresses what they are responding to! The article is practically drafting its war plans over something that could be the most mundane, technical objection to the IAEA deal. In fact, if you read to the very last words of the article, you might actually reach that very conclusion. The very last line of the article is: “Iranian officials in recent days had suggested they would object to any provision that would see them shipping out all of the fuel at once.”

The Wall Street Journal thinks we ought to go to war just because Iran doesn’t do combined shipping?

In the CURRENTS section we have a typical argument meant to confuse and obstruct the climate change debate.

Jeffrey Ball claims there to be a “renewed discussion of inherent shortcomings in climate change models coming on the cusp of potentially big financial commitments.” Juxtaposing the certain economic cost with the supposedly uncertain science, Ball delves into the particulars of climate change models and their esoteric and beguiling idiosyncrasies. Once everyone reading is sufficiently confused and climate change dissenters have their say, we have the conclusion that the debate simply "isn’t settled".

This is a typical tactic by business elite (also employed by the Chamber of commerce) to confuse the public as to where the scientific debate is. Ball spends a great deal of time addressing the varying scientific models between which there is some tension, pointing to this tension to suggest there is no general consensus within the scientific community as to the fundamentals of climate change. In reality, the general consensus within the scientific community is that man-made climate change is real and the world is warming at dangerously high levels, even higher than previously expected. The debate Ball is speaking to is one concerned with very narrow particulars within climate science, conflating it elemental agreed-upon truths. This is a shallow rhetorical tool to obfuscate climate discussion.

For the last and most hilarious piece, in the OPINION section we have two opposing views on net neutrality: one by the chair and CEO of Mozilla in support of net neutrality, another by two trite Republican Senators opposing net neutrality.

What’s so great about juxtaposing these articles is that they are actually making very similar arguments. Mozilla is in favor of net neutrality because it spurs innovation that allows for smaller firms like themselves to create revolutionary products that can compete with bigger firms who have failed to adequately meet consumer needs. Both pieces spend a great deal of time trumpeting various innovations and romanticizing the smart but small Internet start-up that changes the world. Only the Senators from Utah and South Carolina claim that the FCC enforcing neutrality is somehow a great obstruction to innovation, putting a bureaucrat between you and your Internet. But in fact, as the Mozilla CEO and chair point out, net neutrality preserves the integrity of the Internet and allows for the small guys to compete on a level playing field. The Senators fail to realize that those beloved innovations would not be possible if larger Internet companies had advantages that made their leads insurmountable.

The opponents of net neutrality, instead of actually addressing what they see as being the spur of innovation, roll out tired Republican talking points about government obstruction. In the reality-based community these criticisms don't even apply to this particular scenario. The government has not suggested that they will play the role of deciding which traffic or which company is worthy of favor, only that they will stop unfair industry obstruction that amounts to just that.

The "second coversation" is the only one worth having.

This morning on Dylan Ratingan's Morning Meeting the conversation between blogger Glenn Greenwald and former Bush official Dan Senor was an excellent display of the very restrictive boundaries for debate the mainstream media has crafted for the Afghan War:

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Glenn Greenwald demonstrated how reasoned debate seems wild and radical when one is forced to operate between the narrow choices provided, mainly, should we escalate our presence in Afghanistan, or should we keep our numbers steady while continuing the intractable war?

The pretense for this discussion is, quite plainly, how to deal with terrorism. The Afghan presence is justified by the danger an unstable, Al-Queda infested, Afghanistan poses to the American people. Terrorism being the main concern, Glenn Greenwald confronts it directly by asking what is the basis for anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world. But when you sit Glenn Greenwald next to Dan Senor, it seems as if Greenwald is from Neptune; it becomes clear that they are having an entirely different conversation.

So lets be clear here: the pretense for this conversation is how to deal with terrorism, but the actual conversation has to do with narrow technical questions of how the war ought to be conducted and how American power ought to be imposed on the Muslim world. When Greenwald addresses the issue of terrorism earnestly, ignoring the boundaries Senor is operating within, it becomes clear that the discussion they were meant to be having is actually the cause of terrorism, and we run into an absurdity. You debate the different methods America should exert her power on the Muslim world in order to stop terrorism, but the motivation for terrorism is America exerting her power on the Muslim world. This conversation is plainly not worth having. The "second conversation" that Ratigan says Greenwald wanted to have is the only one worth having with regards to addressing the threat of terrorism, because it concerns itself with the motivation for terrorism. Normally the hawks and the doves in the press are debating between different options within the bounds of the first conversation, the absurd one.

A plan-less party's pathetic panning of the President's plan.

Krugman is bewildered by the Republican critique of Obama's stimulus package and its alleged lackluster affect on the labor market:

By and large I’ve long been inured to the deliberate stupidity of much political discourse. But for some reason the vision of Republicans whining, “where are those 3.5 million jobs Obama promised” — less than four months after the stimulus bill was signed, and with hardly any funds disbursed — got to me.

Without presenting an adequate alternative, Republicans have no grounds to criticize Obama’s stimulus. Republican plans for economic resuscitation were retarded by a dogmatic commitment to an unadulterated free market -- an avenue which most certainly would have been worse on the labor market.

The perverted logic employed is akin to the entire Republican car dealer fiasco: Republican dealerships are closed down, prompting conspiracy theories that the Obama administration was insidiously attacking Republican supporters, but neglecting the fact that all the Republican car dealers would have been facing the prospect of closure if there were no auto bailouts.

You can’t stand on the sidelines watching somebody bleed to death and then criticize one who desperately attempts to stop the bleeding (be it successfully or unsuccessfully).

The Sotomayer attacks: destructive politics when Americans are in need of constructive solutions.

Republican's identity politics are becoming increasingly odious:

We have Rush Limbaugh:

She's got a -- she's an angry woman, she's got a -- she's a bigot. She's a racist.

Newt Gingrich goes the extra mile, and tweets his accusation from Auschwitz:

White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.

Pat Buchanan spews on MSNBC:

She is also an affirmative action pick, Chris.

And from Tom Tancredo:

I’m telling you she appears to be a racist. She said things that are racist in any other context.

Republicans are courageous defenders of those who face discrimination--right? Yglesias sees this view as problematic:

I’ve made this point a million times, but it’s fascinating to me the kind of double standard conservatives apply to these issues. You never hear Rush Limbaugh decrying everyday racism against non-whites in the United States. You never hear him recounting an anecdote about an African-American man having trouble hailing a cab or being followed by a shopkeeper. He doesn’t do stories about how people with stereotypically “black” names suffer job discrimination. He doesn’t bemoan the fact that the United States has an aircraft carrier named after a fanatical segregationist. Which is fine. Everyone’s interested in some things and not in others. Rush isn’t interested in racism. Except that like most conservatives, he’s actually very interested in allegations of racial discrimination against white people. He sees the defense of white interests as integral to his political mission.

Shouldn't they at least attempt to disguise their xenophobia as attacks on Sotemayer's liberalism? That would certainly be an easier case to substantiate (though she appears to be rather centrist). Why the ignoble attacks? Isn't the Hispanic vote becoming increasingly important? Well, perhaps not as much as you would think:

Hispanics were not a key component in Obama's win. However, this is not to say that the Republicans should not try to contest the Hispanic vote. As the last scatterplot above shows, further losses of Hispanics would make the Democrats competitive in Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. In some sense this is no big deal, at least at the presidential level: If the Democrats remain at 53% or 54% of the vote, they'll win nationally in any case. If we imagine a national swing of 3% or so toward the Republicans, so they're competitive nationally, then their big risk if they lose Hispanic votes is to no longer be viable in Florida (where we estimate McCain to have won 43% of the two-party vote among Hispanics in 2008). That's the state where Republicans really can't afford to abandon the Hispanic vote.

I figure there could still be a backlash from other immigrant groups against the Republican blitz. These unsubstantiated attacks on Sonia Sotomayer tend to be racially justified and could still be seen as xenophobic by other immigrants who would tend to identify with Hispanics socio-economically. Either way, outside the base there will certainly be some cost. This leads to a frightful but increasingly obvious conclusion: Republicans are pandering to their base with malignant bile with no concern for other groups, and/or they sincerely feel whites are being marginalized by minority voices.

Either avenue is frightening. The United States faces grave challenges and her people face genuine hardships (particularly those working class rust belt voters who inexplicably gravitate towards the Republican party). Hateful mainstream conservative discourse has done nothing in response to those challenges (no healthcare plan) and dialogue is becoming increasingly xenophobic, crowding out moderate Republican voices. The way a heavily militarized United States confronts those ignored challenges--ignored in favor of odious populist pandering--will have profound consequences for the rest of the world. Will the hapless be mobilized towards constructing a progressive plan of action or will they be mobilized towards an enemy (illegal immigrants, terrorists, drug dealers, rappers, 'activist judges', ect.) who is supposedly responsible for their plight?

The Tancredos and Limbaughs of the world have made their choice clear--a choice Noam Chomsky has encountered before:

Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, you know, end of the Weimar Republic and so on, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, which I often do—it’s interesting—there’s a resemblance. And in both cases, you have a lot of demagogues appealing to people with real grievances.

Grievances aren’t invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they’re angry. And they want to know, “What happened to me? You know, I’m a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?”

That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: “Well, it’s happening to you because of those bad guys out there.” OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it’s the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it’s kind of interesting. It’s been pointed out that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase “working class.” She was talking to the working people. And yeah, they’re the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive.

One shouldn't need to descend this far to realize that inciting populist anger can be a pernicious enterprise.

We all play identity politics, stop feigning indignation

Krugman provides a little perspective on the crude accusations that the Sonia Sotomayer pick was an act of petty identity politics:

But is this any crazier, when you come down to it, than the Cult of Bush that ruled much of Washington for years? It was positive, not negative (though there was plenty of that too), but it was similarly about identity politics — you were supposed to support Bush, not because of how he did his job, but because he was, drumroll, a regular guy

Krugman is right for pointing out the cult of personality surrounding Bush. But we can't forget that Obama-mania propped up a messiah caricature, while the President has in actuality significantly betrayed his lofty image as principled defender of civil liberties, peace, and the rule-of-law. People on the left like Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman who rightly point to Obama's contradictions with respect to the treatment of detainees and AfPak strategy can only do so given that President Obama's campaign was largely void of substance--steeped in vague proclamations of American values and propelled largely by identity politics (a dearth of specifics allows for liberals to project their ideals onto him). Don't get me wrong, the Obama presidency has been positive in many respects, but even people like myself who find a home in the left must acknowledge that the fervor created by the abstract campaign was an impressive orchestration of identity politics. Obama was even commended by the advertising industry, awarded the title of marketer of the year for his campaign. How often have you known advertisers to value substance?

That's not to say President Obama himself is shallow, or that Sonia Sotomayer was an imprudent pick (it appears that she is a rather prudent one), but lets not kid ourselves--neither party has the right to cast the identity-politics stone. Both parties will pounce on any particular decision that has the optics of political posturing rather than principled judgment. Claims of indignation ought to be disregarded entirely; identity politics is the norm, not some morally depraved aberration.

The 'Weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ' pt. 2

A couple of weeks ago I made a post regarding the increasingly pervasive influence of evangelical denominations within the US military.

If there remains any doubt of the threat these maniacal crusaders pose to the integrity and perception of the armed forces, look at Donald Rumsfeld's assault on the separation of church and state (and graphic design aesthetics).

http://gawker.com/5258524/donald-rumsfelds-judgement+happy-scary-bibilical-defense-briefing-art

A repositioning of torture

President Obama has ceased to employ the torture policy of the last administration. This rather important policy shift in ending torture policies (much like closing Guantanamo) is only symbolic when one understands the abundance of abuse that continues just a short step removed from the areas of unambiguous American responsibility. Those more ambiguous areas where torture is implicitly endorsed by the United States--undertrained Afghan jailers, extraordinary rendition, monetary support for ignoble regimes, ect--are where torture will continue. Noam Chomsky maintains that this has long been the standard:

Ordinarily, torture is farmed out to subsidiaries, not carried out by Americans directly in their government-established torture chambers. Alain Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out that "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system's torture, which is done by foreigners under US patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so." Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. Since Vietnam, "the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy -- paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed." Obama's ban "doesn't even prohibit direct torture by Americans outside environments of 'armed conflict,' which is where much torture happens anyway since many repressive regimes aren't in armed conflict ... his is a return to the status quo ante, the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more US-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."7

Sometimes engagement in torture is more indirect. In a 1980 study, Latin Americanist Lars Schoultz found that US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,... to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights." That includes military aid, is independent of need, and runs through the Carter years. Broader studies by Edward Herman found the same correlation, and also suggested an explanation. Not surprisingly, US aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, and this is commonly improved by murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists, and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.8

These studies precede the Reagan years, when the topic was not worth studying because the correlations were so clear. And the tendencies continue to the present.

Obama's decision is most certainly an important step in the right direction. Howevever, the history of surreptitious and indirect American torture strategies would suggest that we cannot be assuaged by this shift. The danger of another war justified by coerced intellegence will persist if there is no concerted effort to ensure all American allies cease their practice of torturing detainees.

Subconscious Racism

http://www.reallygoodfriend.com/index.php?category=45

I come from a country that lauds itself for being a veritable cornucopia of cultures and ethnicities. Toronto and Vancouver, large urban centers, boast immigrant populations soaring to over 40% of total population. Business is said to prosper as a result of how quickly these diverse immigrant populations become accustomed to (and thrive in) the workforce. Moreover, Canadians trumpet their multiculturalism--embracing unique perspectives rather than homogenizing them with the 'melting-pot' philosophy--and garner world-wide respect for their tolerance. All these soaring principles are pervasive in the rhetoric of the typical Canadian and customarily employed by political figures--Which is why I was somewhat surprised when I saw this in today's Globe and Mail:

You are more likely to land a job interview if your name is John Martin or Emily Brown rather than Lei Li or Tara Singh – even if you have the same Canadian education and work experience.

These are the findings of a new study analyzing how employers in the Greater Toronto Area responded to 6,000 mock résumés for jobs ranging from administrative assistant to accountant.

Across the board, those with English names such as Greg Johnson and Michael Smith were 40 per cent more likely to receive callbacks than people with the same education and job experience with Indian, Chinese or Pakistani names such as Maya Kumar, Dong Liu and Fatima Sheikh.

These findings should give any sensible Canadian pause. We must stop perpetually asserting the superficial slogans of Canadian pluralism that render genuine concerns to the periphery. There is no doubt that Canada is a particularly tolerant place, but past successes cannot allow us to become complacent in the face of humiliating statistics.

Employer discrimination likely lives in a subconscious level and presents itself through instinctive decisions within the immediate pressures of sifting through a plethora of potential candidates. To address this issue would be complicated. The statistics suggest something systemic and pervasive. The challenges of discrimination are too immense to be remedied by the typical calls for sensitivity or chants of pluralistic platitudes.

President Obama stands defiant to candidate Obama-like criticisms

Obama strained relationship with the left took another hit:

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Obama superficially rejects the left labeling Obama's civil rights decisions as substantively similar to Bush's. In response to calls for a truth commission, Obama disparages the option for being "distracting."

I commend the left for not compromising their principles and fearlessly attacking Obama sternly when rhetoric diverts from policy. What is disturbing here, if we are to believe the account of this off the record meeting, is that Obama is not willing to face those criticisms frankly and substantively. Signals that Obama has shrugged off these very real criticisms from civil rights liberals--those whose views are best articulated by Candidate Obama's rousing calls for transparent governance, the rule-of-law, and the preservation American values in the face of adversity--is an omen of impending struggles with the principled left.

Democracy and Freedom

Richard Florida discusses a remarkable new study which analyzes 59 different factors that are potentially 'democratizing'. Surprisingly, just five factors encourage the growth of democratic regimes, while four factors defend a standing democracy. Most interestingly:

The study finds that GDP per capita is negatively associated with the transition to
democracy. Contrary to "modernization theory", the study finds that richer countries are not more likely to become democracies. Richer countries are more likely to remain democracies once they become one.

This study is significant as it presents strong empirical evidence of the failure of economic liberalization in promoting the proliferation of democratic regimes. Of course, you wouldn't need to show an academic study to prove this to an Argentinean or Chilean or Iraqi who has witnessed first-hand that economic liberalization without proper democratic institutions only serves to line the pockets of corrupt politicians and multinationals. But for those who have for so long trumpeted the Washington Consensus and Friedmanian policies for their alleged democratizing effects: I would point to this study as strong support for the intuitive notion that structural reforms and their potential democratic externalities only occur when those reforms emerge from democratic channels.

Inflaming anti-American sentiment: Photography

Employing a bizarre line of logic, President Obama has decided to withhold hundreds of images of Abu Ghrraib-like detainee abuse. President Obama reversed his earlier decision to release the photos May 28th on the grounds that they would only serve to "inflame anti-American sentiment."

Such a conclusion has rather nefarious implications. First, Obama is withholding stark evidence of abuse of power while at the same time trumpeting the virtues of transparent governance. Obama's reversal suggests two dire aspirations: cultivating an electorate to trust the government's capacity to decide what information is and is not suitable; and defending the faulty assumption that abuse was simply a matter of 'bad apples' by withholding evidence of systemic abuse.

More striking though is the logical conclusion of Obama's justification for withholding the pictures: the way to defend American prestige is to hide the evidence of her crimes--as if photography is a danger to American sentiment but not what is being photographed.

First of all, even if this move successfully minimalized damage to the American image, the incident serves as a clear indication that the Obama administration will compromise its promise of transparency as long as it is politically advantageous to do so. It should not come as a surprise that governments are concerned with crafting a particular image that is sometimes incongruous with reality, but to proclaim it so definitively as Obama has done is positively Orwellian.

Not only is such a defense wrong on moral grounds--contradicting the very principles Obama is so quick to trumpet--but it obviously won't even succeed as a PR matter. The contradiction serves as fodder for radicals who can point to American hypocrisy, and sparks the imagination of those who wonder why these pictures are too much for our bleeding little hearts. Does the Obama administration not know that such teasing only serves to provoke our morbid imaginations? The shock of the initial photographs are now but a starting point for imagination to take us to new depths of sordid depravity. Isn't this a predictable psychological conclusion?

Why are threats from parents and authority figures always veiled and ambiguous? Why are the most provoking and salacious clothes not necessarily the most revealing? It is clear that we are most petrified by and most captivated by what we can't see and what we can't have. Just like the boogy man who hides underneath my bed at night, these pictures--shrouded by executive privilege--will warp fears beyond what is warranted. Only if the evidence of our systemic torture abuses is released and dealt with can we move on and justly face those who charge us with hypocrisy and tyranny. Will Obama let us confront this very real boogy man?

Tinkering with tyranny

In a recent statement President Obama has pledged to continue the use of military commissions for detainees in Guantanamo, albeit reforms proposed by the Obama administration are said to respect the rights of the accused and maintain the rule of law.

Candidate Obama decried the commissions as "enormous failures" and harsh Bush-era criticisms in main-stream press labeled the "kangaroo courts" as clear perversions of justice. Moreover, candidate Obama stated unequivocally that the standard legal avenues--courts and the Uniform Code of Military Justice--would be sufficient in keeping Americans safe. Despite condemnations, President Obama has opted for the pragmatic approach in refining the existing military commissions.

The reforms, if we are to take them at face value, are substantial:

The extra safeguards for detainees include a ban on evidence obtained by harsh interrogation; restrictions on hearsay evidence; giving detainees more leeway to choose their own lawyers and protecting detainees who refuse to testify, the statement said.

With a broad spectrum of legal voices--including Glen Greenwald and the former candidate Obama--trumpeting the ability of the existing legal framework to handle sensitive national security cases, one begins to wonder where exactly the need for military commissions comes from.

Originally:

Military commissions have been around since the Revolutionary War. But they've always been used to try spies that we find behind enemy lines. It's normally a situation, you're on the battlefield, you find an enemy spy behind your lines. You can't ship them to national court, so you provide a kind of rough battlefield justice in a commission. You give them the best process you can, and then you execute the sentence on the spot, which generally means executing the defendant.

Ultimately these 20 or so detainees are more a matter of optics than of national security concern. But optics of an executive acting, in the words of William Safire, "as investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or executioner," are not good. Obama needs to proclaim, unequivocally, that he will not waiver or compromise in his repudiation of Bush's perversion of the rule of law. But to do this would mean more than the hyperbolic value-laden language of American principle, this would mean actually employing the existing legal structure that remains the envy of the world.

To compromise with refined military commissions fundamental undermines the independent and impartial rule of law. If these detainees dubious charges will not stand in an American courtroom, then they are to be dropped. The Obama administration may not get the harsh convictions it aspires for using the just system, in which case they would likely face the frivolous criticism of 'coddling terrorists'--but to tinker with the tyranny of military commissions as a means to achieving those politically advantageous ends is still tyranny.

Greenwald put it best:

What makes military commission so pernicious is that they signal that anytime the government wants to imprison people but can't obtain convictions under our normal system of justice, we'll just create a brand new system that diminishes due process just enough to ensure that the government wins. It tells the world that we don't trust our own justice system, that we're willing to use sham trials to imprison
people for life or even execute them, and that what Bush did in perverting American justice was not fundamentally or radically wrong, but just was in need of a little tweaking.

Colbert: Closet Conservative?

A new study highlightned on Mother Jones contends that many conservatives actually interpret Stephen Colbert's caricature of a firm conservative ideologue as genuine. I always suspected that the more rigid ideological conservatives had cognitive dissonance and the complete inability to interpret material outside of an ideological prism, but this study is an incredibly frightening indictment beyond anything I could ever contemplate.

I cannot imagine anyone understanding Colbert as a closet-advocate of his preposterous diatribes and invectives. What Colbert does is arrange slogans, buzz words, and distortions in a manner that exposes the fallacy of conservative punditry logic. The slogans, buzz words, and distortions Colbert considers to be comic gold are clearly something more important for herds of Palin-ists. This is troubling because it is empirical evidence that Colbert, to some degree, hardens ideological predilections. However, doesn't it take Colbert's humor to new heights knowing that these people actually exist?

Update I

Olberman discusses the study with the author:

'The weaponized gospel of Jesus Christ'

http://newhumanist.org.uk/1681

Yesterday's Democracy Now! featured a poignant discussion of the alarming evangelical influence within the most technologically advanced killing force known to man--the US Army. The initial Al Jazeera report -- decried by the military as out-of-context -- showed then top military chaplain of Afghanistan suggesting that the role of the armed forces is to proselytize:

The Special Forces guys, they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians: we hunt people for Jesus. We do. We hunt them down, get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into kingdom. Right? That’s what we do. That’s our business.

In response to the harsh accusations that the journalism was 'inappropriate' and 'irresponsible', Al Jazeera released additional footage:

By all means, do as scripture tells you to do and share the word, but be careful how you do it. Do it professionally; represent the Christian faith in a professional manner. Proselytizing is against the rules. That means going out and just actively seeking out somebody. I’m not going to say a lot about it. Just be careful. Remember to represent the Christian faith in a respectable, professional manner. And there are ways to win people to Christ that not overbearing or offensive to people. There are ways to do it.

...Alright, let’s talk about it. What do you think? Our ability to interact with the culture here is important for our mission in this country, so we can eventually hand this thing back over them to let them do their own thing. The more that we win over the hearts and minds, the better we’re going to be in accomplishing our mission to eradicate insurgents and Taliban and everybody else who’s bad. We want more on our side, and we’re not going to have more on our side if they see us as Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, critical people. I’m not saying you don’t share the word. That’s what you do as a Christian. But you share the word in a smart manner: love, respect, consideration for their culture and their religion. That’s what a Christian does is appreciation for other human beings. But at the same time, I’m not telling you not to share the word of God. I’m telling you to share the word of God, but be smart about it, please.

Despite calls for the 'professional' persuasion, soldiers continue to act as armed preachers and provocateurs. For instance, Jeff Sharlet tells the story of a lieutenant John D. Degiulio painting his Bradley fighting vehicle with the message 'Jesus killed Mohammed.' The predictable response to the provocation:

Then, while they put the translator on the roof with a bullhorn, shouting in Arabic, “Jesus killed Mohammed,” and then training their guns, training American guns on anybody who responded, the Bradley fighting vehicle rolled out into the city of Samarra and drawing fire everywhere it went, leading the Special Forces to conclude that every single Iraqi who took offense at these words, “Jesus killed Mohammed,” was part of the enemy and therefore needed to be destroyed.

The standard military line is of course to deny these cases or to marginilize them by playing the 'bad apple' defense. However, new revalations revealing the military's support of various Christian television shows, with "extreme missionaries" -- who embed themselves with US army units and "travel the globe to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth and encourage the church to be active in the Great Commission" -- suggest the barrel may be to blame for these crusading bad apples.

Sharlet on the pervasivness of the fundamentalist elements within the military:

And then things really picked up after 9/11, when this group, Officers Christian Fellowship, started seeing America’s conflicts as what they described as “spiritual war.” And what’s really frightening is they describe it as a spiritual conflict between good and evil. They describe Mikey Weinstein as Satanic. This show would be Satanic from their perspective. And that’s the problem. They see—not only do they see those whom they’re fighting overseas as part of the opposition, but they see even those within the military who are not a part of their movement as, at best, unwitting tools of Satan.

I mean, this sounds like loony stuff, but then you look at the size of the organization. It’s 15,000 members. It’s growing at three percent a year. It’s represented on 80 percent of military installations around the world. And you see, really, the fruition of a very long campaign that predates George Bush, to view the military as what missionaries called a mission field, not a branch of government, but as a place to go and harvest souls. And they’ve been successful now. And as Mikey Weinstein says, they’re so dominant within the military that they have become, in some ways, the mainstream rather than the fringe.

"Hundreds of thousands" of translated bibles being dropped in America's obliterated theaters of war could not be a worse way to win over the 'hearts and minds' of those ravaged by American occupation. The brazen fundamental elements within the military who have ambitions to delivery the word of God while fully equipped with the most technological advanced tools of war can only serve as agitators. Shockingly, these evangelic elements -- who make it their priority to spread to word of God -- are being institutionally embraced, says Jeff Sharlet:

After Vietnam, you stopped seeing a lot of liberal chaplains from the liberal Christian denominations. They didn’t want to serve in the military anymore. It really accelerated under Ronald Reagan, who took away all the restrictions and regulations that ensured, when you saw a chaplain in the military, it really was a little bit like Father Mulcahy, you know, someone who—Father Mulcahy in MASH is Catholic, but, of course, he can help and minister to everybody, and he’s trained to do that. Reagan wiped that out, so that the Chaplain Corps became predominantly fundamentalist. Some chaplains estimate today it’s about 80 percent fundamentalist.

The military cannot assume the affectation of being a force of democratization and freedom in the Muslim world as long as it institutionally embraces staunch Christian denominations and overlooks the contemptuous machinations of its crusaders. The alarming instances that have been surfacing can only be truly confronted if they are understood with respect to a systemic insensitivity to the Muslim world. This must be repaired, the military cannot be complacent. The only remedy is to embrace liberal values, even at the steep price of compromising the religious ambitions of its fundamental elements. If sensitivity and modernity are the causalities of radical fervor, moderate Muslims will become increasingly alienated and those that raise arms to American empire will only be provided with additional fodder.

Torture and Dualism

Matthew Schmitz sees the torture debate as an opportunity to attack dualism:

The body is not property that can be disposed of however one wants. This Lockean view, that we are citizens who “have” bodies (instead of being citizens who are bodies) leads to a state that, just as it can seize property when it wants to build a highway, can torture a body when it wants to win a war. Maybe this means that we all deserve blame for torture to the extent that we buy into a shared cultural idea that undergirds many of the not-so-bad things we do, but is ultimately capable of buttressing brutality.

The philosophical ideals that legitimize dubious practices must be reevaluated in the wake of several crippling critiques. Any claim that the mind and body are separate entities is deeply flawed in light of the discoveries of modern neuroscience. Although Schmitz's torture-dualism link is somewhat tenuous, belief in the immaterial as a means to assuaging the guilt and responsibility of questionable practices is a deeply entrenched American practice. There is no doubt that men and woman in stripes seek vindication from something immaterial--a God or a flag. Furthermore, there is no doubt that men in power continue to exploit this belief of the immaterial to serve their own ends. I am troubled by those who feel vindicated -- even compelled -- by God or country to employ insidious means to reach questionable and uncertain ends. What makes this enterprise inevitably disastrous is that there is no way to gauge the legitimacy of claims with respect to the non-existent immaterial world. Any atrocity is possible when people can be manipulated by a concept where one can never, by definition, look to facts for answers.

Banks are the moral champions of the marketplace!?

Foreclosures are good for nobody. They put families out of their homes, reduce property values, and leave the bank with an albatross of a property in a poor market. One would think that the bank would take every measure to restructure and prevent foreclosure. Not so, observes Steve Meacham on last week's Bill Moyers Journal:

One of the unheralded things about this crisis right now is that there's an awful lot of owners who come to us who cannot afford their home at the inflated value, at the adjustable rate mortgage price. But they have plenty of income to afford their home at the real value at a 30-year fixed. And so why not just give them the property back at that amount? If they're foreclosed on, the best the bank that can do is sell the property at the real value. By definition, that is the absolute best.

If Deutsche Bank forecloses on Joe Schmoe the best they can do is to sell that property at real value. So if Joe Schmoe can afford the property at real value, why not sell it back to him? But the only reason the banks aren't doing that is because of what they call moral hazard. They say basically that homeowners should be punished because they signed these loan documents.

These are the same guys who have run our entire economy into the ground and who have been rewarded with billions in taxpayer bailouts and have used billions of that money to give bonuses to the very executives that drove their companies and the whole economy into the ground. And they are citing moral hazard as the reason why they can't resell that property to the existing homeowners at the real value. That is disgusting and hypocritical and in the extreme.

Percentage of Afghanistan officials that recognize the right to not be tortured: 12%

About a year ago I wrote a rather grave critique for the Leaderpost regarding Canada's complicit approval of torture and abuse in Afghan prisons. Much to my surprise, the article was spotlighted by the Canadian Forces. The article featured a dark look into some of the most wretched conditions documented by human rights groups and Canadian diplomats:

Trapped in a futile struggle, our country would continue to complicitly surrender its prisoners and its ideals to a perverted labyrinth shrouded in a veil of secrecy and misinformation. Canadian officials would document cases of abuse in mysterious Afghan prisons, while our ministers would vehemently deny any such occurrence. Heavily censored documents would detail a corrections officer's plea for footwear suitable for traversing the "blood and fecal matter" that plagues the floors of Afghan prisons. Thirty men claimed to have been "beaten, starved, frozen and choked" after they were handed over to the NDD. Additional detainees would simply disappear, no multimillion-dollar lawsuit to appease them.

A year has passed and by all accounts (but the Canadian government's) Afghan jails continue the widespread use of torture. A new Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission reports that fewer than 20% of Afghan officials even know of the legal rights of detainees:

The rights body's report, which surveyed 92 Afghan law-enforcement officials and 398 alleged victims of torture in detention, found that only 17.4 per cent of officials were aware of legal rights in Afghanistan affording the accused protection from torture. Only 12 per cent of those surveyed, who included prosecutors, police and court officials, recognized the rights of the accused as outlined in the Afghan constitution. Article 29 of the constitution prohibits torture and declares information obtained through it unusable.

Moreover, the pattern of gruesome instances seem to stem from a sharp philosophical divergence rather than a 'few bad apples':

Afghan officials have defended their practices, suggesting that foreigners fail to understand the grim reality of fighting the insurgency - an enemy that regularly tortures captives and uses hanging and beheading for executions.

The Afghan National Police, financially supported by Canadian, sees little problems with the use of torture. With only 12% of officials recognizing the rights of the accused, how could anyone imagine that Afghan detainees are being fairly treated? These jailers' explicate support for torture practices cripples any notion of plausible deniability for this government. The Canadian government must take full responsibility for knowingly sending their detainees to places where torture is widespread.

Sleeves are the new hands!

Swines are the harbinger of the end of civilization. We can only avoid the coming a-pork-alypse if we take the necessary measures to protect ourselves. This old Mercer Report video has some prudent suggestions on how to defend yourself from those murderous germs, and even an ominous forewarning of the coming swine flu:

Warning: The following message may hurt your self-esteem.

Throughout school I was always bombarded with incessant encouragement to partake in inane tasks. I sometimes wondered why climbing a wall, ringing hand bells, or team-building in the wilderness were more important than independent thought and academic endeavors. How foolish I was--of course, these childhood games that were forced upon all of us--endless meaningless activities--were all a matter of developing our little self-esteems! I never figured I had a case of the melancholies, yet it was imperative that I foster a strong sense of self by being like everybody else.

Ironically, efforts to encourage self-esteem in little children have been a giant waste of potential, concludes Margaret Wente:

For a long time, people thought that kids who felt good about themselves would get higher grades. They don't. They only feel entitled to them. Nor do they commit fewer crimes, smoke less, do less drugs, or have less of what we might call inappropriate sex.

. . ."People who have elevated or inflated views of themselves tend to alienate others," wrote social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who used to believe in the importance of instilling self-esteem, until he reviewed all the research.

It should come as no surprise that studies show bullies and blowhards have an elevated sense of self. We must stop reassuring ourselves with the delusion that people we find disdainfully egotistical have deep insecurities. One is pompous as a result of an inflated sense of self, not a lack of it. It is imperative we correct the misconception that pride is something to be lauded and encouraged through meaningless games. The most you can expect from a population that values dodge ball over humility and critical thought is a herd of jingoes--a dictators dream.

So today you might call me the federal reserve of humility. I am forced to use deflationary measures on this countries inflated sense of self. Here are a couple of videos that might help by hurting just a little: