Water-boarding demo

Look at the face and listen to the testimonial of somebody who has just been subjected to water-boarding by friends at his own instruction: Begins at the 5:00 minute mark of the November 6 broadcast of Democracy Now!

The Jena Six and Gladwell on punishment

If the Jena Six affair is about anything national, it seems like it's at least about harsh sentencing. This column of a year ago by Malcom Gladwell feels relevant. Procedures can and will be racist, but egalitarian principles can be unjust too.

A terror law we do need

I couldn't be happier that the FBI is entrapping people intending to murder, maim and interfere with daily business. Just don't treat them as if they didn't need entrapping. There ought to be a suitable category of offense with which to classify and charge such actors. Call it "Criminal lack of scruple" and have a "third degree" or "Type T (for Terror)," for example. As some have more dubiously advocated for torture, require a judge-authorized warrant for which enforcers must appeal in order to entrap and draw up standards and showings enforcers must satisfy to undertake or carry through any plan to entrap. We allow planes to spray pesticides over suburbs with the approval of a public health commissioner, though the thought of wanton spraying is disturbing, and I see no reason not to consider the same principle appropriate to entrapment. If overzealous enforcement looks to be a peril, let the sentences be light--perhaps as light as probation, in exchange for which the probationer agrees to obey special rules affecting his or her liberty and privacy, including in cases of intention to commit terrorism, for example, such surveillance as the White House now seems to be applying wantonly. If easy access to technology amenable to mass murder make our legal traditions appear to be unsafe and unsustainable, then in principle revisions are apt, and to me in practice the laws relating to entrapment seem like a perfectly reasonable place to go to work.

New Credo ( or: If I Had a Bumper )

HYPOTHESIZE AUTHORITY

Genes for domesticability: All creatures great and small?

A nifty story by the Times' Nicholas Wade tells of evidence that the genetic potential to be tame and domesticated exists in the pool of all sorts of vertebrates we consider quintessentially wild. Through generations of selective breeding scientists have made whole colonies of foxes, minks, otters, rats and other typically fractious species eager to please as all get out. Somehow in the wild, the variant alleles that combine to make all things wise and wonderful seems never entirely to disappear, even in an environment where being nice seemingly never ever pays. The retention of these variants across diverse species suggests the genes have a biologically very basic function that no vertebrate can do without. In the Times the suggestion is they figure in development of the embryonic neural tube, which is a structure that appears not long after the blastula stage and gives rise to the central nervous system. The Times story suggests furthermore that even we homo sapiens are civil only thanks to good breeding our ancestors practiced.

To me the fact that sociopathy often emerges in early childhood suggests we're not a pure breed in that respect. If so, I think we'll want to know. "Crime gene" testing is part and parcel of investigating how much of behavior is genetic and how much is development and environment. Even if all serial killers carry a set of the same four alleles, so too could thirty percent of the population at large. If we don't identify in particular the genetic carriers who haven't killed, we're unlikely ever to discover what environment and what care prevents serial killing. Clearly there exists something that does when the correlation between genotype and phenotype is low, but we'll never know that unless we test and "type" people.

Do I trust my government and my insurers and my potential employers to do that? Not at the moment. Do I trust individuals not to use knowledge of a person's genotype to discriminate against him or her solely on that basis? Not ever. But preventing societal ills and individual woes are worthy goals, so why don't we think about what kind of governance and what confidentiality laws might make it reasonable for us to pursue it?

Elsberg on why he exposed U.S. lies about Vietnam

Elsberg in the L.A. Times

What was it that prompted me in the fall of 1969 to begin copying 7,000 pages of highly classified documents — an act that I fully expected would send me to prison for life? (My later charges, indeed, totaled a potential 115 years in prison.) The precipitating event was not Calley's murder trial but a different one. On Sept. 30, I read in the Los Angeles Times that charges brought by Creighton Abrams, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam, against several Special Forces officers accused of murdering a suspected double agent in their custody had been dismissed by the secretary of the Army.

The article, by Washington reporters Ted Sell and Robert Donovan, made clear that the reasons alleged by Secretary Stanley Resor for this dismissal were false (and that the order to dismiss the charges had most likely come directly from the White House). As I read on, it became increasingly clear that the whole chain of command, civilian and military, was participating in a coverup.

As I finished the article, it hit me: This is the system I have been part of, giving my unquestioning loyalty to for 15 years, as a Marine, a Pentagon official and a State Department officer in Vietnam. It's a system that lies reflexively, at every level from sergeant to commander in chief, about murder. And I had, sitting in my safe at Rand, 7,000 pages of documentary evidence to prove it.

Elsberg hopes Iraq War insiders will draw the same conclusion soon.

Prophet, hero, martyr. For real.

See the PBS documentary on Alfred Kinsey.

It's been awhile since any acquaintance or subject of a biographical portrayal has seemed to me truly worthy of lionizing, but after seeing the PBS documentary above I feel that way about Kinsey. While Liam Neeson's Kinsey in the recent "Hollywood" film almost got me there, by the movie's end I couldn't simply admire the man. That may be the rule for thoughtful films about controversial subjects. I appreciate that documentaries, like biographies in general, are liable to downplay or eliminate the negative (that is, if they don't do the reverse), but I'm allowing myself to conclude that the PBS documentary offers a truer or at least more pertinent view of Kinsey than the dramatization.

Note that's not because I doubt the dramatizers' intentions or efforts to portray Kinsey accurately. A drama offers only a theory of a person, and whereever an offense by that person hinges on the mens rea (state of mind) of everybody involved, a dramatization casts shadows of doubt. The almost inevitable mistakes matter a lot, because we sympathize or even identify with the victims in a drama.

This happened to me with Neeson's Kinsey. The movie made me think that I would not want to be Kinsey's wife. But is that true? If you listen to close associates of both of them talk about Kinsey in the documentary, you'll see a lot of love and awe for the man, despite it all. It would not be surprising if Kinsey's missteps hurt people profoundly, even were he treading lightly and with care. He was exploring sex and love. The documentary could have systematically excluded every unsympathetic voice or word, but that would be such a corrupt documentation that I highly doubt it did. My conclusion is that Kinsey was a mensch.

The documentary also caused me a new reaction to the "scientific controversy" (that is, as opposed to the cultural and political one) that attached early on to Kinsey's findings. The scientific criticisms didn't come off as untrue, but as a scientist I now appreciate them as beside the point.

Kinsey's funders sent a statistical SWAT team to review his report, with the result that they found fault with his numbers. The numbers sketched a map of the contours and peak of the true statistical distribution of sexual behaviors across society, and they were unreliable, because Kinsey's sampling techniques were unsuited to that task. He should have known, and he did know. But the norm and normalcy are obsessions of staticians and a conservative society. Kinsey's mission and method were natural history: Documenting, characterizing and sorting what exists in nature. By such an approach, Darwin refuted the Bible. By all accounts Kinsey was a master of the craft: Skeptical, thorough, careful.

Over long days and tens of thousands of hours, Kinsey and his team produced an empirical foundation from which to speak truths not heard in mainstream Western culture since the rise of Christianity--some of them for the first time ever. He stemmed a pandemic of terror and oppression that we were inflicting on ourselves and especially on those who dared pursue happiness. He may have stemmed a holocaust. How would American society have responded to AIDS, were it not for Kinsey? Would there even have been an Act Up to chop down, I wonder. Would a large enough movement have arisen to end the war in Vietnam were it not for free love? Kinsey showed us that beneath our noses--despite democratic governance and an ethos of individual liberty--we were consumed fanatically with convention and its enforcement. Not even statistical scientists were immune.

Kinsey's martyrdom was disgrace, incapacity and death by a broken heart. Let's remember him.

The fight for free intellectual property: Extreme edition

I think this project to create Islam-friendly comic books in the Middle East, though perfectly legal under traditional copyright law, nevertheless says something about the stakes over which we fight to liberate Mickey Mouse. "Free culture" is about more than the number of TV channels from which we'll have to chose. It's about how and to what extent culture evolves. Here's an excerpt from the NY Times profile:

The story concerns 99 gems encoded with the wisdom of Baghdad just as the Mongols are invading the city in the 13th century - in his version, to destroy the city's knowledge. The gems are the source of not only wisdom but power, and they have been scattered across the world, sending some 20 superheroes (at least in the first year, leaving another 49 potential heroes for future editions) on a quest to find them before an evil villain does. "To create the new, you have to tap into the old," Mr. Mutawa says of the deep historic connections in the comic.

The prospects look good for our heroes, don't they? Well, watch out! Back to the Times:

The religious dimension is the biggest risk for a product whose main market, like all new products in the region, is oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where religion and entertainment rarely mix. Mr. Mutawa has already witnessed the frustration of having a book banned. "Get Your Ties Out of Your Eyes," a children's book featuring Bouncy, a ball who wears a tie - but differently than others - was banned in Kuwait because it seemed to be commenting on the Koran.

"When you're in a place where Bouncy Book 3 doesn't pass the censors, you have to be very creative," he said.

I guess what captures is me is that a seeming natural intellectual outgrowth of a culture--one seemingly with a broad audience awaiting it--nevertheless could be barred on principle for extraneous reasons. I suppose I usually file "censorship" and "conservatism" and "free speech" in different parts of my brain from issues of "free culture," but this story got them firing at once. It made me think cultural stigma, government censorship and private copyright are all just different ways of protecting some ideas at the expense of others--and in the process restricting what everybody thinks and determining the characteristics of our culture.

Probably I'm sympathetic to comic books. If this were about protecting muslim public school cafeterias from Cheez Whiz, I might not have thought twice about it. But a free market in ideas is a nice idea too.

E.O. Wilson lays down the gauntlet

Rapprochement may be neither possible nor desirable. There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies societal conflict. The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote, the light and the way at last placed before us.

Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? Surely that ranks as one of the great unanswered questions of philosophy. It is the noble yet troubling legacy that Charles Darwin left us.*

- E. O. Wilson

Besides the above perspective, Murky Thoughts also highly recommends Wilson's autobiography, Naturalist

Good reason to impeach Clinton

What if Clinton had lied to Congress to win approval for intervening militarily in the Rwandan genocide? He'd have acted morally. He'd also deserve impeachment. Doing the right thing sometimes carries a cost, and it may be quite right that it does. The U.S. Constitution says the country wages war only with consent of the people's representatives in Congress. A U.S. president who misrepresents the case for war in order to secure this consent commits a high crime--in fact, a higher one is hard to imagine. By their lack of concern with the way Bush made his case for war, the current president's supporters suggest they see themselves worthy to inhabit the shoes of that God that so many of them believe in. They would reward Bush the forgiveness they see as his heavenly due, for scorning the artificial laws of man and listening instead to his own conscience. Well, we're still on Earth, folks, and even if this were a jury trial--which it isn't--on Earth we enforce the law. Those who see Bush as a prisoner of conscience or a martyr should just let the man be martyred. He only stands to lose his job. That's a small price to pay, don't you think, for the sake of enforcing our constitutionally prescribed rules of democratic self-government. If George W. Bush cared about his inaugural oath, he'd think so too.

Cupertino & the U.S. Constitution

In catching up on New Yorker back issues I just now read about the overtly religious teacher at a Cupertino, California public school and the moves by the principal there to cramp that teacher's classroom style. Somehow the national sensation surrounding this affair and news of the associated lawsuit passed me by.

It makes perfect sense to me that one or both sides in this dispute would reach for the constitution's "establishment clause," which limits relations between church and state. Yet the clause feels distant from the fundamental issue, and I'm afraid the constitution doesn't provide the protection we'd really like.

To me, the upset over the Cupertino teacher's religious demonstrativeness is just like the curfuffle that ensues about teachers being gay. It's constitutional and legal to be gay in the classroom (i.e. while standing alone and in clothes at the front like any other teacher), just as it's constitutional and legal to hold in one's mind the beliefs of an American evangelical Christian in front of a classroom. What raises objections are a) recurrent and overt classroom displays of particular attitudes, values and beliefs, and b) indications by the teacher--for example, through language or behavior that's identifiable with a subculture--that he or she has such attitudes, values or beliefs.

As a designated authority figure and official ambassador of civilized adulthood, as well as simply an individual on whom children are focused much of their day, a teacher cannot help but model attitudes, behaviors, values and beliefs. Thing is, we don't want every constitutionally permitted attitude, behavior, value and belief modeled for our children. We don't even want to leave this modeling to chance. School is a highly engineered environment.

Most of us like the modeling that children are subjected to by virtue of teachers being black or brown or yellow or wheel chair-bound. Such modeling says "if you're black or brown or yellow or accidentally become paralyzed, nonetheless you could be a teacher, a paragon." Note though that being black or brown or yellow or paraplegic is not something kids can emulate.

Fashion and vocabulary are things kids will emulate, and so we have objections to certain garbs and certain words. The courage and/or audacity in being "out" and the idiosyncratic mannerisms of the gay community also are "emulatable." So is disdain for the current administration. So is insensitivity to people's feelings and phoniness. Religion may not be the most easily transmitted of all emulatable behaviors, but once transmitted it is an extremely addictive and domineering one. It's entirely appropriate to take care among children in splashing it around, especially when the person liable to splash is their teacher. The classroom is under quarantine with regard to culture.

A smart constitution would provide against it's own undoing by mandating public schooling not just in the rules it sets (including rules for its own ammendment), but in the values it embodies and expresses. So even while this mandatory schooling need not (and should not) model every constitutionally protected thought and behavior, still it would teach children an abiding tolerance toward these protected thoughts and behaviors. Unfortunately, that's a lesson that starkly conflicts with most religions, and it's unclear our constitution is as smart as all that.

What we really want

Malcom Gladwell has been writing both explicitly and indirectly a lot about what I'll call "what people are really thinking" and in particular about how organizations and institutions can get to know it and better exploit it. Of course, it must have occurred to me that the same insights might be exploited for goals not shared by the rest of us, but I think the lure of a pure and attractive currency--"what people are really thinking"--made me eager to see a free market in it. I just noticed a terrible flaw in that vision, thanks to the PBS Frontline documentary "The Persuaders". Notwithstanding the eternal underlying motive of making money, I had been thinking that putting psychological and social science into marketing was the very opposite of the "sex sells" mentality or mission. I guess unconsciously I had assumed this science was all about the so-called "higher" cognitive processes. Or maybe I had forgotten that feelings and desires aren't pure manifestations of high-mindedness but originate in all sorts of ways, which can descend as low as cognition goes. Here's "The Persuaders" producer Rachel Dretzin commenting online

I think we are already seeing the impact of Luntz' preference for the "gut" over the rational.. and Dr. Rapaille's preference for the "reptilian" brain over the "intellectual" brain. In politics and in commercial marketing, it is our emotions that are played to most. Look at this past presidential campaign and the kind of emotional hot buttons that were pushed in voters from both parties.

So here we have a program that's even worse than "sex sells," because now we're learning how to drive shoppers and voters with forces as primal and potent as sex but which do not risk alienating the Bible Belt or baiting the FCC. Now, I'm not saying that all that's primal and potent in us is to be ignored. I want my shoes to be comfy, my TV dinners to taste good and above all I like my models' abs hard. But I also don't want individuals so tuned to the primal virtues of a Hummer that they never mull more complicated things like the societal good of controlling carbon emissions. I don't think the Sierra Club should have to put girls in bikinis on its Web site or tap mother love to sell socially beneficial policy goals. In fact, I think that in that direction there only lies peril. It's not just because I know they lack the deep pockets to compete with the oil lobby for production value. It's because for one, societies don't control the TV remote, individuals do. For another, it's the producers who are truly catering to our inner lizard in offering us something to consume. What the Sierra Club has to sell isn't even intelligible to the lizard. Likewise for what Kerry was selling versus what Bush was selling--fear.

Whither society when all broadcasting goes out on the lizard frequencies?