Free Association: Truism Chain

Inequality leads to advantage, advantage leads to leverage, leverage leads to dominance,  dominance leads to the frustration of whoever is not dominant, frustration boils to anger, anger must be released, release becomes people venting. Venting spreads hate, which leads to dehumanization. Dehumanization leads to an escalation of anger on a wider scale, which leads to wider venting, let’s say in civilized expression, let’s say—for instance—on the internet, let’s say people venting to dehumanize, or those just venting their frustrations, let’s say they vent in a place online—any of the endless venues to gripe (justifiably) about injustice (or about misfortune). Let’s say that hate vented slowly and continuously, continuously increasing, heats the whole world and blows it all disproportionate.  Then what?

-

The alternate problem with people who vent hate on the internet is that if they are in fact righteous and commendable in the object of their anger, everyone else must either affirm equal hate or exasperation, or risk being an assumed supporter of whatever side is deemed the wrong one. This only increases generalized ire, each declaration of loyalty to hatred more furious than the last, and people who refuse to judge or hate are left both judged and hated.  And that just ain’t right.

—JLE

Seeds of Conjecture on Free Will (with digressions)

I was going to make an argument positing that technology has reached such an advanced state that the very concept of “free will” is null and void. Our knowledge of the brain and how to coerce it cannot be ignored.  Knowledge of how to manipulate a person’s circumstances (financially, socially, physically) cannot be ignored either.  The science of manipulating a person’s innate desires, even—for example neuormarketing or neuroeconomics—has been honed to a nearly indomitable perfection.*  There is little chance in altering events that appear as chance; they aren’t.  We are neuro-manipulated on every level, in every encounter with every signal, every (literal) bit of information that we cross, whether we consciously recognize this or not.  

I’m willing to give humans a partiality of will which is entirely dependent on pre-existing conditions.  We can make some choices, but the set of choices we encounter each day relies upon externalities that are not possible to choose.  Particularly for the poor but applicable to everyone, what passes for decision-making, free will, does not allow enough range for human happiness, in my opinion. 

Furthermore, free will is not possible without privacy. Human nature is never itself when being constantly surveilled.  Being spied on—by our computers, phones, street cameras, satellites, by other people with whatever noble or malicious intentions—means free will is bent in light of this. Again, another reason why infringing upon privacy equates to infringing upon liberty.  

Basically, I was going to argue that one of the oldest philosophical arguments in human thought is no longer debatable; it has overwhelmingly become fact that a deep understanding of innate biology and imposed technology subjugate what would typically be defined as “will.”  It is self-delusion to think otherwise, even for those who believe themselves to be aware, able beings of their own volition.  I think we can close the book on free will—it cannot exist in current society.

I decided not to make this argument, though.  

It needs more rumination.  Instead I looked at this book: Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.  And there was a prefatory quote I liked in the beginning:

But then I didn’t know what the hangman paradox was, not in my philosophical repertoire.  Wikipedia did enough to give me the gist of it.  It has to do with the nature/clarity of language, and the nature of surprise—not of any real relevance to the Big Questions I felt like thinking about.  It would be hard to twist that into epistemology.

I also didn’t know who the above quote’s author, James D. McCawley, was. I felt compelled to do some searching about him.  Apparently he’s the first person to have written a satirical linguistics paper, though I find that a pretty dubious claim. 

The NYT helped with some understanding of McCawley.  They seem always to know how to speak of the dead: “His speech was a deeply idiosyncratic amalgam of Scotland, where he was born, and Chicago, where he grew up, further complicated by a residual trace of the stammer that had plagued him when he was young.”  

He died on campus, collapsed where he taught at the University of Chicago.  Just like that. Professors have nightmares of such things happening. In truth, I’m surprised there aren’t more of these old professors dying in progress like that; it’s one of the oldest demographics of workers aside from maybe judges.  

Anyway. Then I got caught up on the idea of generative semantics and the anti-Chomsky that was this McCawley fellow. 

Where is free will in all this?  

Nowhere.  Had the internet not existed, this information would not have been accessible in this manner, with such speed.  Had I not had anywhere to stay, or had I been living somewhere without internet access to borrow, I’d not know any of what I just explored.  Had my old roommate not given me a computer, I’d not have been able to access the internet, that is fortunately accessible, to read what I did.  Had I not been able to read English, my entire thought base would be different.  Depending on the form of censorship or marketing manipulation being applied, the path of links and searches may have been much different.  

These are just a few conditions, but any number of factors can be altered in a person’s life each day to create a different effect.   I find this hard to accept.

—JLE

*Or interpreting them…”neuroaesthetics.”  

Serious Games

I’ve been pondering this, IARPA:

The goal of the Sirius Program is to create experimental Serious Games to train participants and measure their proficiency in recognizing and mitigating the cognitive biases that commonly affect all types of intelligence analysis. The research objective is to experimentally manipulate variables in Serious Games and to determine whether and how such variables might enable player-participant recognition and persistent mitigation of cognitive biases. The Program will provide a basis for experimental repeatability and independent validation of effects, and identify critical elements of design for effective analytic training in Serious Games. The cognitive biases of interest that will be examined include: (1) Confirmation Bias, (2) Fundamental Attribution Error, (3) Bias Blind Spot, (4) Anchoring Bias, (5) Representativeness Bias, and (6) Projection Bias.

I have always supported game theory as an educational tool because I’ve seen it work.  It’s not for everyone, but it is an efficient way to teach a large number of people simultaneously in (ideally) a constantly changing environment.  

Problem-solving is a skill everyone needs to survive on Earth, and honing it never hurts.  Ridding oneself of bias is fundamental to this—anyone who’s read Bacon’s Four Idols or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave would know that. Those are the simplest, and in my opinion clearest, examples.  (This is the internet, after all.) Philosophy, in particular, is one magical area where people are the least biased because greed or dogma doesn’t interfere, but any field will tell you bias is dangerous: science, math, law, sociology—all of them.  Bias when experimenting makes us small because we are not able to compare and weigh views that may not be present in our experiential knowledge.  What did that sinister man call them?  The “unknown unknowns.”

Okay, so all of this is very rudimentary.  But you could just as easily give them a basic course in the humanities and achieve the same, or make them read the last 100 years of Nobel Prize winners in Literature or Physics.  You folks care about the ugliest aspect of humanity: war. It is nearly impossible not be biased when one’s leadership and coworkers are all killing people and doing so intentionally—as part and parcel of the employment.  Don’t say that’s drastic wordage.  All of the tools taxpayers pay dearly for (including the humans in intelligence) are designed to kill people; dehumanization is inherent.  I’ll put my personal bias against the profession of killing-for-profit aside for a minute, though.

It doesn’t take 10.5 million dollars!  Why does Raytheon get this contract, I might add?  Was it no-bid?  That is extremely fishy considering that’s not what they do. People should be learning these skills in school, and all that money that’s going to Raytheon should be going to education.   

This is seeming more and more like a way for money to move from taxpayers into the hands of people who can weasel it out of them without their knowledge. That’s a ridiculous amount of money for the government to spend for Serious Games at a time of Serious Crisis in the federal coffers.  Allowing itself to be devastatingly overcharged for everything to grease corporate palms is one of government’s main weaknesses.  These are the kind of extravagances that seem downright foolish.  Or corrupt.  Hard to tell which sometimes.  I digress.

Many experts in game development, psychology, cogsci and the like would work for much less—especially now when so many are unemployed or underemployed.  This could have been done for half a million by people with expertise, and about twenty grand by a group of savvy teenagers with common sense.  (Even they know “to assume is to make an ass out of u and me.”)  It does not take a genius to recognize the fact that people don’t always do what they say, or say what they mean.  There is a level of intuition we all have that can be reached if we simply pay attention to it.   

One last question that is bugging me: Who is being “trained”?  Intelligence?  You’re training people who had better already know to avert bias with a game?  Intelligent analysis comes from human beings.  Those who work for intelligence don’t fit that description in my opinion; they serve other people’s purposes unquestioningly, and do so to the detriment of basic moral decency.

—JLE

Disclaimer: this is pure conjecture and free-association in mode. 

Trauma

Today’s a fine day to think about trauma.  This is not a happy-ended contemplation. These are not happy times, though how or when they ever end, no one could predict.  

I see lucky people going about the largely unnecessary busywork of their lives, happy as sunlight.  I try to be happy for them, but it’s a limpid appreciation that can’t hide my take on reality.  Someone talked about a new movie, another about some shiny trinket or another, another about how so-and-so should (or should not) do this or that to be more attractive.  People get mired in this trivia and minutiae because either the alternative is unbearable—hence satire—or because they know nothing beyond a certain scope of understanding.  Today I listened to the sad complaint of a dead iPod and “lost” music.  Then someone in the Land of the Employed ranted about a co-worker’s perfume.  Or traffic.  It all sounds like blah-la-la: white noise.  In light of the great scheme of things, irrelevant.  I can’t even remotely relate.  There is a hierarchy of needs that’s based purely on disposable income, and there is also a dark loneliness in poverty like nothing I’ve ever seen.  But I’m seeing it.  However, if I’m compelled to care about materialism and court greed, I’ll decline.  

It is true on this planet people pay other people large amounts of money to tell them how to appear to be and what to say. Instead of just being.  Incomprehensible.  My moment’s concern: Autumn means biting spiders and rain, and cold.

Trauma doesn’t allow for such frivolity as worrying about how to seem. Even as time passes, it becomes heavier, more complex, and harder to cope with and contexualize trauma in light of the past’s presence in the present.  It becomes a cumulative riddle.  For those of us with a mental magnifying glass who are near obsessive about detail and find life’s value primarily in momentary experience, trauma abruptly ends all previous conceptions and expectations of the world and its inhabitants.  Experiencing this at the hands of strangers is far preferable than due to those you know. The trauma could be ongoing/repeated or a specific event—a loss, damage to one’s expectations which may or may not include blood and gore or death.  It could have been instantaneous or in slow motion for what seemed like hours.  Either way, life itself becomes cleanly bisected into the idea of life before, the concept of one’s self and other people before, and what comes after.  The after part is far more difficult than any conscious person with an active conscience could be expected to grapple with.

After trauma, everything is filled with malice.  The sky is not the same sky.  Clouds become sinister.  A gray van no longer becomes just a van. The mind draws all these incessant connections between emotion and perception, a gray van becomes a catalyst to fear or misery.  Any recognition or similarity is enough.  The more trauma, the more catalysts.  Garlic, for example, reminds me of happy times; however, garlic becomes traumatic because the past contrasts so extremely with the present, and begins again the riddle of how life should ever have come to this.  Something as simple as a type of rain can effectively ruin everything in an unnoticed instant.  Smells can take take a trauma victim to near hysterics.  It gets so it all eventually crescendos to the point where nothing is bearable to look at, listen to, or think about because all stimuli become ways to try and reprocess the trauma and try to re-negotiate the world, unveiling a knotwork of beginnings and endings.  Befores, and afters.  Even sleep is untenable.  But this all happens quietly, in the mind.

It isn’t the fear that the same thing will happen again, but rather the newfound knowledge that the universe is not apathetic, after all: it’s malignant.  When the world has proven itself untrustworthy, existing seems an exercise in self-flagellation.

Physically, trauma feels like a permanent anxiety attack.  There is a disconnect between the mind and the body.  Have you ever seen something spin so fast that it appears to stand still?  It’s like that.  Paralyzing is the best way to put it.  Like the story of the caterpillar and the bird.  Or maybe it was a centipede.  Anyhow the centipede was walking along just fine with his millions of legs thinking about eating a leaf, when a bird came up and asked him, “How are you able to walk with all those legs?  Which order do you put them in?”  The centipede never thought of that before.  As he considered it, he grew less and less able to walk, conscious of his every move, stumbling, until he was paralyzed.  It’s like that.

Luckily, this isn’t everyone.  Some people are fortunate enough not to naturally ruminate or to allow thoughts to be fleeting.  Whether or not there is a real balance to be found between considering the future beyond the moment and addressing what originally caused the trauma, the riddle, is at least some reason to wake up the next day.  And since there are so many problems in the world, and so many reminders behind them, more the reason.  There’s got to be a way to make the past and the future rhyme.

—JLE

Forensic Stylistics

Reading is an addiction for me, the Faustian dilemma of wanting infinite knowledge and experience.  I can’t get enough, couldn’t even as a child with books. Now that it’s all at our fingertips with the internet, I will be learning relentlessly until the bitter end. There are worse things that could happen.  

Every so often while reading, something worth noting pops up. In this case, it was irritating: the idea of identifying authorship through a person’s writing style. 

Gobbledygook, hogwash, nonsense.  No.  Absolutely not.  Even suggesting that’s an option is entering into very dangerous and idiotic territory.  

I believe this for various reasons I’ll speak here from experience. I taught online composition courses for years and I tutored writing, online, for years and I scored thousands of essays for the writing portion of the GRE exam.  For the anonymous ones, often I could tell a person’s country of origin by punctuation alone; people from India tended to use commas accidentally instead of periods, and multiple commas at once. Those from China tended to have especially terse, brief essays.  And in the courses I taught, if student essays weren’t properly identified or the email address didn’t indicate the person’s identity, I could often guess correctly whose it was based on a person’s repeated mistakes, or by the subject matter.

However, there’s plenty of room for doubt. This is a fallible method, and while authorship wasn’t a big deal to me—still isn’t with what I read—for something like a lawsuit* it would be unconscionable to draw conclusions in this way.  It’s wrong.

First, people’s writing styles change. This is because people themselves change.  They take classes and get feedback. They learn, grow, read something that influences them, and write differently because of it.  English is a fluid language as we all know; people absorb one another, learn new tricks, fit the form to the purpose.  I don’t even write the same way from one section of my blog to the next, or from day to day.  Depends on the purpose.  Personal is personal, argument is argument, free-association is random altogether and poetry is another thing entirely. None of it even resembles the fiction. And blogs are a free-for-all, more like talking.  Emails would be even less reliable.

Another reason I am highly uncomfortable with the notion of “forensic stylistics” is because we live in an age where Google can translate poetry, albeit roughly, and computers can pump out essays indiscernible from human ones (or grade them).  In particular, news can be generated and recycled through programming easily enough. Currently I read more than anyone I’ve ever met—print, internet, billboards, everything—and it is hard enough to tell when I’m reading whether a human or a computer wrote it, let alone which human (and certainly not which computer).  Life is basically a Turing test these days. 

Imitation is also an issue.  Accidentally, it happens: no matter how unique you try to be, there will always be many echoing your own voice or vice versa.  Intentionally, it happens too. Years back I wanted nothing more than to write like Salman Rushie, so I went through a phase where I read all of his books back to back. As a consequence, I started writing like him for about a week or so, until I got into David Foster Wallace.  Then Will Self came along and knocked the whole thing off course.  Then there was the Jane Austen phase, which I only unleash sometimes when/if I’m feeling witty.  Then the Pynchon phase.  Then Coetzee.  Then Delillo.  Then I started reading newspapers and blogs obsessively and lost creative use of language altogether.  The point here is that humans are absorbent, people are inconsistent in every way, and language is no different.  We are creatures of caprice.

This is the same reason I can’t stand psychology.  It assumes that people are consistent.  I’ll never cease to rail against people making assertions about other people based on ever-changing circumstances.  Taking this seriously in a court of law is undermining the vastness and whimsy of human ability.

However, if you disagree, there’s always I Write Like to self-test.  It’s never the same twice.  I got demoted from Tolstoy to Lovecraft in a few changed sentence structures.

—JLE

*This does not imply any support or sympathy for the subject of the lawsuit whatsoever.

What Does Congress Actually Do?

That is the question.  After some thought, it is no surprise to me that the President is less than pleased with how little gets accomplished—especially, in my opinion, considering the amount of pay, benefits and perks Congress receives from the public to whom it owes allegiance.

Surely they rarely perform the optimistic duties we were told as youths in school: write, debate and pass bills that eventually become law, bills that are supposed to represent their constituents’ needs.  That doesn’t happen.  

It is a dark truth that regardless of whatever party holds the majority, in essence conservatives (fiscally, in particular) are in control, that government itself is on its face essentially a poorly run business.  ALEC writes the bills and just hands them over.  Lobbyists write the bills.  ”Experts” representing some special interest or another write them.  Wall Street writes them.  Members of committees put their names on bills to claim authorship, or rather sponsorship, for example Dodd-Frank, but they don’t write them. In fact, Congress members don’t even read them most of the time.  Someone lesser, overworked and underpaid, gives them the gist of it all.  Whether or not they are informed as to what the bills contain has little bearing on their vote.  Furthermore, who’s to say the analysis is at all accurate or trustworthy?  Who’s to say the analysts aren’t being paid off?  No one.  To wit: Congress itself confused the debt ceiling and the deficit amendment in talks just the other day, as if they were at all the same thing.  They are not.

Debating happens sometimes; a few of our Representatives and Senators bother to show up to work when some issue or another strikes their fancy, usually non-issues like funding absurd pet projects or social control issues like abortion, drugs, or gay marriage.  Debating often happens as a team sport, just like in college, and one team has its members argue issues simply so the other team doesn’t win; it has little to do with the ethics of whatever is being debated.  I’d argue our Congress is among the least ethical in the world, with little concern for the effects their debate matches have on the lives and livelihood of those who must live under the final votes.  

So then we arrive at the notion of passing legislation.  Or we don’t.  A balanced Congress peopled by a particularly stubborn and overly demanding extreme right wing means nothing whatsoever is agreed upon with enough consensus to move forward to the President, who again likely won’t agree with it.  So I think suffice to say that what they are not doing is working to make the country function in the best interest of progress.  That, in my opinion, is what’s unconstitutional.  

What do they do, then?  They take a lot of breaks.  Congress is actually in session merely half the year, if that, without the 40-60 hour work week many of those fortunate enough to be employed must endure.  They are not required to show up to vote.  This cannot be emphasized enough, and something I believe the general public, particularly the young, are unaware of.  Often the chamber is nearly empty with only a few members with vested interests voting.  There is nothing that says they have to show up on any given day—nothing.

What else do they do?  They play a lot of golf.*  This part of it annoys me fully.  This is one way, among hundreds of others, to ostracize women from the inner and rather underhanded negotiations of politics.  Private golf clubs are one of the few sporting establishments remaining that can and do legally discriminate against women, and quite frankly, I’m guessing our esteemed female representatives have no interest in golf anyway.  They seem far more interested in actually doing their jobs.  I really can’t see Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton (in her senate days) going golfing with a pharmaceutical or oil rep.  For that matter, I can’t see the ladies on the right golfing to grease their own palms either.  Nor should it be a job requirement.

Then comes what constitutes 99% of a politician’s job: generating campaign money.  How sickening and backward is this system in which one’s career depends on how much money one has?  Where does it go?  Advertising, some would say.  Paying people to make phone calls and knock on doors.  Holding “events” for this or that sort of cause.  How is it that the reason representatives are not in session, not voting, not making progress is because they are too busy drumming up funding for the next term?  The future will not happen if the present isn’t attended to.

Lastly, they also serve as intermediaries between the corporate world and the people who work to make it richer.  This is a wide gap to close, as US income inequality is egregious and no logical person would tolerate it. They serve as spokespeople for companies, who in the name of money, find rules that interfere with it (such as environmental or consumer protection) disagreeable.  So politicians lie.  They market, they sell, they persuade, they smile with perfectly white teeth and fine clothes and create the impression they are fighting for something other than money.  Don’t let them fool you.  There is a reason actors and celebrities seek to go into politics; it’s the same reason lawyers do.  It’s also why we see so many scandalous abuses of power, sexually, financially, ethically in every way.

And the judges aren’t much better.  (I’m looking at you, Clarence).

While far superior to other extant nations in the world, I have no confidence in the system of government the Unites States operates under.  None whatsoever.  I want a new country entirely.  Things need to actually change and not simply appear to do so.

—JLE

Thank you for reading my elementary primer on how government works.  It took about 15 minutes to write, which is far more time than they’ve ever spent writing anything.

*Knew that was coming.

Transparensecrecy

In an upside-down, backwards society such as this, secrecy equals transparency and torture garners praise.

Agreed: From The Guardian on rescinding O’s Transparency Award.  

There’s no justification for this administration (or any other, frankly) to receive accolades for transparency in any fashion: quite the opposite.  This is all a matter of what the public will choose to accept, just how much mistreatment by a supposedly civilized government is tolerable, before outrage sets in.  It hasn’t hit critical mass yet, but it will.  

If anyone really knew how to compel those in power toward ethical behavior, rather than the appearance of such, it would have been done by now.  For now, the public will likely be swatting at gnats of tedium, scandal and distraction, while the drones quietly roll in and the world is shaped around them.  

—JLE

No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy*

From ifixit.com and Wired, the breakdown of a tracking device found on the car of a female animal rights activist.  

This is perplexing.  I mean, I get the science of it, just not the morality of it.  Being involved with a cause (e.g. human rights, politics, animals, health, etc), or not being involved but somehow mistaken as being involved seems to be criteria for constant surveillance.  Actually, the criteria do not seem to follow any rationale at all.  Being not involved, and hence a lone wolf, seems also to be considered cause for surveillance.  Damned if you’re part of a group, damned if you are not.

There are probably situations where violent people, those who inflict physical harm on others, need to be followed to prevent widespread harm.  There are also situations where people who inflict egregious financial harm on others need to be found.  But this doesn’t seem to be where investigators focus; they seem to be almost arbitrary in their selection of victims and mistaken in their assumptions far too often for anyone to feel comfortable that this is an acceptable practice.

The irony of the Senate currently pressing Apple and Google for information regarding their tracking using products people voluntarily purchase is not lost in relation to the FBI secretly fastening always-on monitoring to the undercarriage of the cars of unwitting citizens, particularly those who aren’t accused of a crime.

Why do they do it?  I suspect the FBI would say, “Because we can.”

There’s no shortage of examples—video, photographic, publicly witnessed, and otherwise—of police abuses, such as raiding the wrong houses, shooting innocent people’s pets, arresting people for video recording them (there’s hypocrisy for you), shooting or tasering unarmed suspects, even children and the mentally ill and disabled (in the back), breaking people’s arms.

(via http://www.flickr.com/photos/acampadabcnfoto/5765018458/)

Abuse, and the right to abuse without provocation, is so ingrained into law enforcement mentality that it would be a shock to see police being civil, using logic, and acting like decent human beings.   It’s unsettling that the least educated among us are those who are licensed to carry guns, handcuffs, tasers, pepper spray, beat people with batons, invade houses, and use all manner of brute force against citizens for little to no reason whatsoever.  One can’t paint all police with a single brush; however, by and large they are trained to overpower, subdue, kill, and to assume every person is the same: a threat.  It would be easier to reason with robots.  At least they don’t get high on the adrenaline of power.

Perhaps that is why their practices are so inhumane, and this extends to technology as well.  Warrantless wiretapping and warrantless tracking and all the undue distress they entail will never be in accordance with the origins of this nation’s belief system, regardless of whatever flimsy workarounds to the law that the law itself devises.  

When those permitted to uphold the law instead break that law (e.g. no warrant) and work against the citizens’ interest, we find ourselves in a police state.  For innocent pacifists, I don’t see any recourse other than to appeal to the intellect of those in the judiciary and (possibly) the executive.  There are dozens of logical ways to oppose this legally; for example, the EFF and the ACLU are wonderfully helpful in this area. Law abiding citizens should have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and the human rights angle is a major one.  I never thought I’d say that lawyers and judges could be the public’s saviors, but that’s the only way faced with such power to restore some balance here.  

There is also the financial waste and misdirection that goes into harassing people who don’t break the law and have no intention to do so: culling, analyzing, processing and storing such massive amounts of information is ridiculously expensive.  Why is taxpayer money being used to oppress the people who provide it?  As it stands, people are dumbly funding the violation of their own privacy.   

—JLE

*October 30: Little did I know when I wrote this on May 10, how severe police brutality would become when faced with peaceful protest.  I could have easily predicted it though.  Logic prevails again.

Paranoia

This study/poll on paranoia is nonsense. It’s only going to perpetuate misuse of the term for slanderous purposes.  (Or maybe that’s being paranoid…)

The questions listed on Brain Posts from the Institute of Psychiatry (London) in the study by D. Freeman are much too vague to clarify anything except that a person leads an active, observant, and likely challenging life surrounded by others.  Here are the questions asked and the relative statistics of people who are “paranoid”—that is, they responded yes, that happened at least once:

Paranoia Level 1: Over the past year, have there been times when you felt that people were against you? 

Everyone has disagreements, and “against you” could be anyone from a co-worker to a jealous acquaintance to an ex-spouse to someone you cut off in traffic.  The idea of “against” would really need to be defined for that to make any sense.  People are pitted against one another intentionally for everything from debate to tennis to tic-tac-toe.

Level 2: In the past year, have there been times when you felt that people were deliberately acting to harm you or your interests?

Ever heard of competitiveness?  People like stockbrokers, lawyers, politicians, cops, and military have pretty high stress jobs.  It would not be unreasonable to assume that people may be acting to harm their interest; this occurs every day in a capitalist society, and probably moreso in tyrannical ones.  What about bullies?  Is someone who is being bullied suffering paranoia? 

Level 3: In the past year, have there been times you felt that a group of people was plotting to cause you serious harm or injury?

“Serious harm or injury” would really need definition.  What if someone was a victim of a violent crime by a group of people?  Isn’t that causing harm or injury?  The word “plotting” could be a bit telling, but then again, most burglars case a house before they rob it, many murderers plan it out before they commit the crime.  Maybe “serious harm” is actually financial.  Or social.  Or maybe the person is an athlete and the other team is seeking to win the game.

Paranoia by itself isn’t even in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as psychosis.  International Classification of Diseases (ICD) doesn’t define it as a problem on its own, either.  Both refer to schizophrenia as the disorder with paranoia as one of the manifestations of it.  Even the National Institute for Heath’s website refers to Paranoid Personality Disorder as “a long-term distrust and suspicion of others.”  Long-term.  According to PubMed:

People with paranoid personality disorder are highly suspicious of other people. As a result, people with this condition severely limit their social lives.

They often feel that they are in danger, and look for evidence to support their suspicions. People with this disorder have trouble seeing that their distrustfulness is out of proportion to their environment.

Even that’s a bit broad, but limiting one’s life in response to beliefs or fears isn’t mentioned in the D. Freeman questionnaire.  Neither is any mention of whether or not it is disproportionate.  So his assessment is regardless of whether these things are actually happening or with what frequency they occur.  Just…ever at all in a year.  If these were really the questions defining this serious disorder, everyone in the world except the utterly delusional or very young children would be paranoid.

Using this kind of vagueness to define extremely charged diagnoses does a huge disservice to the already speculative field of psychiatry.  One person’s degree of rationality or fear does not equate with another’s, and it never will.  One person’s level of daily risk also cannot compare to another’s.  We live on a planet at war, in many wars, and if you don’t feel at least slightly threatened by that fact then there is a problem.

—JLE

Storytelling

I enjoyed this article by Paul Craig Roberts regarding agenda:  It’s nice to see people take a step back and look objectively at the reasoning behind the stories we are told.  

Every event has a reason, or a cause, or multiple reasons and causes, most of which the vast majority have incomplete knowledge of or influence upon; thus, it is up to the crafters of perception to shape whether these events are viewed as benevolent or malignant.  This is common knowledge.  Yet, they’re doing a bad job at this.  The world is too informationally savvy, too much in constant contact, for media to get away with any inconsistencies in the narrative, ever.

The story of the story seems more interesting than the recent event that inspired story-invention in the first place.  I know the White House has their press people and writers who have all likely gone to prestigious universities, been affiliated with influential organizations, and been vetted for utter appropriateness and favorable connections and all, but they demonstrated total ineptitude in finalizing the plotline of what would most move the public to unquestioning approval of this killing.  I could have concocted something far better: “woman as human shield” (so freaking sexist, the outmoded damsel in distress thing), “shootout” (been done, cowboy), “buried at sea” (whatever, the idea that the burial was in respect to religious traditions is ridiculous juxtaposed with the murder that brought it about).  

I believe he’s dead without question; it would be indecent to suggest otherwise and no one needs to see a head on a pole to believe it.  People who are trained to drop from helicopters and kill unarmed strangers in their sleep for a living wouldn’t lie about such things.  Assuming OBL AKA UBL (also: tangentially, when did he become Usama, and did anyone happen to notice the first three letters of this newfangled spelling?) is who we’ve been told, has unquestionably done the things attributed to him, he had it coming.  I’m sure the world would agree that capture and trial would have been far preferable, though, so all the evidence (or lack thereof) would be forced to come to light and compel a more thorough examination of what really happened on 9/11 as well.  But of course no one wants dredge up that messy business.  

I doubt this is the case since war continues, but if it’s a question between assassination and war, killing one person is far preferable to killing thousands upon thousands, which is what jihad acts of terrorism are doing.  Which is also, incidentally, what the US wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are doing.  Violence begets violence.  Maybe that is the intention.

The easiest way to end conflict is to dissolve the reason that created it, to educate and communicate, work to spread prosperity for all, encourage a respect for peace rather than a bellicose environment, but of course that will never happen because war is too lucrative for the massively wealthy contractors and the plan is too far in motion to reverse.  Nothing can be undone, only not done.

Maybe the story was so desperately flubbed because there simply is no way to spin war into a positive thing.  War uses violence to satisfy greed.  These values are universally disgraceful.  Maybe they were trying to soften the world’s view on torture.  There is also no possible way to justify torture, ever, under any circumstances or for any reason.  It is depraved and it destroys both the tortured and the torturer indefinitely—in fact, the darkest act of depravity imaginable.  Without question, is it preferable to die than be tortured:  How many of those in Guantanamo have begged for death?  I bet they all have.

Regarding OBL AKA UBL as a “mastermind,” the “most dangerous man on the planet” is a huge assumption to which I don’t readily concede since there are more dangerous and more intelligent men on this planet with far more insidious tools of violence, particularly bombs and drones and all manner of technological toys and seemingly infinite supplies of money.  

I can only hope that the world’s brightest minds can find a way to become architects for peace, which is free.  It is possible. 

—JLE

*Oh that’s lovely, in an extremely disturbing kind of way: “The general goal of IO is to “influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own” (DOD JP 3–13, 2006, p. ix) 

Yep.  

*

Oh No.

I’m watching C-SPAN again.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!  You’re all wrong.

I am going to offer a bit of unsolicited advice for both sides regarding the budget.

First off, the Republicans are lying.  They are rehearsing a script that was played out in Europe already: “Live within our means, stop spending, tighten our belts, tough decisions,” etc.  When you hear them say any of those things, know that they were told to do so, that it is prefabricated, and that it’s simply not true.  They’re just playing out what they intend to make happen regardless of what the country believes, wants, or needs.  How on Earth do they think they can get away with that? 

Sound policy is sound policy and no one believes more spending will do anything but drive the country into the ground.  The Republican plan would be reasonable except that the only people that budget seeks to squeeze are people who already don’t have any money.  That’s absurd and downright cruel. As-is, the Ryan proposal will devastate the majority of the population.  There will be riots, mayhem, no one will let this happen.   Medicare, Medicaid?  Really.  You people are sadistic.  No one wants to die.  You underestimate the strength of liberals when their sense of justice gets genuinely offended.

The Democrats are getting carried away with ideology and heartstrings and losing sight of those little things called facts.*  They need to take the high road and offer real ways to cut spending (Hello, defense?  There is more money spent on defense than anything else, and Bush-era overspending in that area needs to go.  Oil subsidies?  How about all the money dumped into the so-called “War on Drugs”?  All waste needs to be eliminated).  Instead of taking down the opposition, they need to come up with something better, other ways of doing the same thing—what everyone wants—which is to reduce the amount of money the government spends.

This is where the Libertarians are right.  CATO has excellent ideas for cutting spending that actually make logical sense.  They may be wacky, but as far as fiscal policy goes, I’d put my money on them.**

—JLE

*It’s only possible to criticize the Ds in this area; the Rs never cared about facts or even bothered with them.

**With a LOT of caveats.  Taxation needs to happen.

I can’t find the Dem alternative budget.  I’d like to read that.  For fun.

Also: Privatizing Medicare in any way would need to have very severe regulations on insurance company rate increases.  If you hand over health care for seniors to the private sector, the corporate world will take advantage—ruthlessly.

On Scholarly Communication and Collaboration

A gentleman by the name of Ted Striphas has put forth an intelligent article on scholarly communication, regarding the implications of what he terms “distributed collaboration” within the scholarly community.

The crux of it posits that the scholarly journal is a vital form which serves an essential function for scholarly communication, and that the present mode has become more interactive (peer-review) than in the days of yore (writer takes sole responsibility). The idea that more eyes, more minds contributing, can improve or cull a scholarly concept is, in fact, relatively new in the great scheme of things. He alludes to the notion that more malleable, living documents could hold promise as an alternative to the stiff permanence of how scholarly articles have been conceived and perceived in the past.

However, newer doesn’t necessarily mean better, and more doesn’t necessarily mean more correct. The ability to craft serious critique doesn’t occur naturally to the majority; a brief examination of discussions of any topic on the internet will reveal that unfounded personal attacks and oversimplification outnumber careful dissection and analysis by a wide margin. Bringing the unfiltered ideas of the masses into a specialized field is akin to bringing a kindergartener into a college classroom and expecting useful contribution. There is an assumed knowledge base within scholarly literature of any field, and it is nearly impossible to discuss the intricacies of dancing with those still crawling. In this sense, a general all-inclusive collaborative effort will not serve a meaningful purpose; the majority of effort will be in sifting through massive amounts of useless feedback to find that which serves to enlighten.

Outside of academia, public forums, discussion boards, and directories exist on every topic imaginable, from politics to astrophysics, to epistemology and metaphysics to spelunking to how to make lobster bisque. Similarly, news websites nearly all have a space for commentary and input from readers as well as options for direct feedback to writers. In any event, most have some expert input coupled with a great many novice attempts at understanding new concepts. Few differentiate between unfounded opinion and reasoned conclusions.

The question, I think, is what is considered valid information—what is deemed scholarly by the scholarly community. Some would argue that demarcation can only occur from within the scholarly community itself, and through the process of peer-review. This is debatable.

Striphas shows favor to the concept of innovation (“plastic” discussion) rather than systematic regurgitation (his example, Newton’s memorable quote: “standing on the shoulders of giants”). Thus, I was expecting him to proffer something novel: a method, a system, an example of a new technique showing promise. His own wiki effort to maintain a public collaborative document, he fully admits, isn’t working; he “cannot honestly say the experiment has been a resounding success.”  Further, educational wiki has been done hundreds of thousands of ways already, never fully accepted by scholars as valid. Why discuss it at all, then? What does that serve to exemplify? Collaboration doesn’t work? I suspect it is primarily to highlight the subject and raise awareness.

Striphas’ article doesn’t make a concrete point so much as raise a series of questions, and smart questions often give rise to unforeseen solutions:

Could the concept of peer review be expanded to encompass distributed forms of collaboration? Should colleges and universities reward this type of participation, and if so, how? What if people other than our “peers” could easily and routinely add input to our work?23 How might editors and scholarly socieities better curate academic research so as to encourage more broad-ranging engagement with it? Must published research only include monuments to the past, or can it include work of a more plastic nature?24

I’d like to take these head on.

Question one: “Could peer-review be expanded to encompass distributed forms of collaboration?” Depending on his definition of “distributed,” the answer could vary. In a sense, yes. Take a non-scholarly model like Reddit, for example, and apply that to the scholarly community. An idea is posed, thousands upon thousands of others offer their take on it, provide links to further information, interject with personal anecdotes, and offer new information that may not be widely available on the topic from people inhabiting countries around the world. Answers range from the most base to the profound, and somewhere in that continuum, readers can compile enough range to reach individual conclusions on the topic—whatever it may be.

Continuing the example of Reddit (with which I have no affiliation, other than regularly reading it as I do everything) for the second question regarding “reward,” they offer a voting system, where commentary can be voted either up or down.  (Here’s another example.) In this case being amusing seems to hold as much value as being relevant, but applied to scholarly works could be honed into something useful. While it doesn’t equate with money, which seems overwhelmingly to be humanity’s concept of “reward,” it could be applied to a scoring system that applies to students’ grades. As far as professors or the general public contributing, the rank of one’s opinion could offer further validation, could move it higher on the list of commentary to where it would be viewed first. There are algorithms for this, or they could be written easily enough.

The third question asks, “What if people other than our ‘peers’ could easily and routinely add input to our work?” This depends on how the input is added, and of course by whom. Direct input, that is, into an article itself, would be considered infringement by most writers. It’s also likely that within the scholarly community, people other than “peers” would have little interest or expertise in the topic—that the narrowness of scope in any scholarly field would help to lessen some of the mass mentality concerns I mentioned earlier.

We tend to base what someone knows on what someone has done, but these two don’t always coincide. Not everyone plays by the rules. Depending on the subject matter, there is no reason that scholarly writing need only use previously proven experts for feedback. While in science, precision is necessary—there’s little to no tolerance for unsubstantiated speculation, half-baked experiments or faulty formulas—in the humanities, speculation is encouraged so long as it offers a reasonable foundation, logical inferences, and a valid conclusion. Regardless, broadening the world view and the realm of possibility are noble goals for all research and all publications.

As far as the fourth question, collaboration could be encouraged in one of three ways, being compulsory, hip, or lucrative: 1) as a requirement for completion of coursework, or 2) with heavy promotion through mainstream media, or 3) as a profitable, paying enterprise funded by grants.

And finally, for the fifth: “Must published research only include monuments to the past, or can it include work of a more plastic nature?” This is a question of whether an argument is proven valid. In order to have a leg to stand on, so to speak, it must show the premises of its main argument to be proven true, and the premises must be illustrated through “monuments to the past.” Conversely, in order to be of interest to the future, a concept must be plastic enough to adapt to the overwhelming speed of technological change and spread of information. Simply reciting the past is only telling people where to look for consensus; envisioning the future is where we all must focus to better prepare for it. In short, it must consider both.

But I’ll leave it to the experts to sort that out.

—JLE

DARPA into Narrative?

Well I never.

Via the New Yorker, DARPA says they are looking into the notion of stories as the following:

a precursor to exploring the neurobiological mechanisms which undergird narrative processing so as to establish fertile ground for connecting our understanding of the neuropsychology of stories with models, simulations and sensors salient to security concerns.

That’s just gibberish.  What are they really up to?  They are scientists.  They have no business meddling with the humanities and arguably could never perceive poetic knowledge or understand humans in that way.  Give me a robot with a visceral reaction to Keats and I will marry it.

Yes, very fishy. If I were a pessimist, I’d say this seems like they’re seeking new avenues through which to insert DoD propaganda into the (world) narrative more effectively. If I were an optimist, I’d say they’re trying to train people cognitively to deal with war.  If I were a pessimist, I’d say the day neuroscience helps humans “progress” to the point where the physical atrocity of war is as psychologically acceptable as reading a narrative about it will be the last day for life on earth.

A story is whatever it’s declared to be.  If someone says here’s the content and everything in it is the story, that’s it.  A painting can have a narrative.  Chronology is hardly necessary; any story worth its effort can be read in any order, in fragments.  The potency lies in the fact that powerful narrative is timeless and—more importantly, authentic.  Surely you know all this, the “recognition,” blah, blah.  What makes Shakespeare piercing is the same thing that makes comedians funny: truth in observation.  Experiential knowledge.  The Great Conversation cannot be duplicitous.  Nor can it be subterfuge.

Still, it would have been fascinating to attend the meetings/workshops.

Furthermore.

—JLE

War is ALWAYS About Money: Just a Reminder

This article in The Economist is an intelligent take on the neoconservative mindset regarding war, but something is sorely missing. No one can possibly credibly speak of the neocon desire for America’s involvement in perpetual war (and that is what it is, no need to sugar coat it with new excuses for each new country), without mentioning money.

While the article focuses on a psychological/philosophical perspective rather than an economic one, ignoring the opportunism that drives neocons is disingenuous. The author gives them far too much credit for operating according to a sort of civic or nationalistic morality where America has a noble world purpose, when the only morality they know is mercantile morality. They cannot claim to value human life when they find it so easy to dream up new wars and create casualties so casually.

By casually, I mean that this decision to enter another war did not come after deliberation in the senate.  And clearly there are others who are skeptical about its development for its haste:

How it was made: it cannot reassure anyone who cares about America’s viability as a republic that it is entering another war with essentially zero Congressional consultation or “buy-in,” and with very little serious debate outside the Executive Branch itself […]To be more precise: the Administration has not made the public case that the humanitarian and strategic stakes in Libya are so unique as to compel intervention there (even as part of a coalition), versus the many other injustices and tragedies we deplore but do not go to war to prevent.

Billions of dollars in crony contracts will turn most anyone into believing they’re serving some higher purpose. Who, take a guess, is the world’s largest consumer of oil? The US military. This fact is absurd: use oil, to go to war, to fight for oil, to use oil, to go to war, to fight for oil.

[DoD Energy Support Center Factbook]

Billions will be spent in a long, pointless process of missiles and airplanes and intelligence while a select few companies strike it shamelessly rich, paying no taxes, and the middle class carries the brunt of the bill. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, countless Libyan civilians will die, homes and villages will be destroyed, and all the while funding for education and health care of Americans will be sacrificed just so grown boys can play with their new killing, exploding toys as if they were playing a video game. This is not moral; it’s utterly sociopathic.

It is unbelievable to think anyone in America under ten years of age has never experienced life without war. And they may never get to know in their lifetime what it’s like to be living in a country in prosperity and at peace.

—JLE

Elsewhere:

Indeed.

Well put!

See what I mean?

SEE!?:

Whatever they say won’t alter the facts on the ground - the graphic results of the US-Saudi dirty dancing. Asia Times Online has already reported on who profits from the foreign intervention in Libya (see There’s no business like war business, March 30). Players include the Pentagon (via Africom), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Saudi Arabia, the Arab League’s Moussa, and Qatar. Add to the list the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain, assorted weapons contractors, and the usual neo-liberal suspects eager to privatize everything in sight in the new Libya - even the water. And we’re not even talking about the Western vultures hovering over the Libyan oil and gas industry.

What to Do About Michigan?

Maddow’s take is pretty shocking regarding this bill, 4214, linked here in its entirety. 

I wish for the sake of the state that her explanation of this bill’s intent was exaggeration or sensational, but it is not.  If anything, it’s not quite complete in its discussion of just how much is being taken from the citizens under the false guise of fiscal responsibility. 

Fiscal irresponsibility is giving all power to a very few and enforcing a merciless tactical assault on the poor.  That’s fiscally, ethically, legally, and politically savage.  Too much unchecked power will directly affect the lives of everyone.  It cannot stand.  This is utterly unsound on the governor’s part; he can’t simply declare economic crisis and start pulling people willy-nilly from elected office.  Voting is not a right people will give up easily. (Ironically, voting’s what got them into this mess in the first place.) 

As it stands, 4214 will (must) be rejected, or rule of law and government itself become meaningless mechanisms exploited against the many in favor of the few. If this becomes a domino effect, the country’s states will then fragment into the rogue territories of yore—but with a new corporate-run twist.  I’ve read this story before.  Disunited states.

Americans need to get it into our heads first and foremost that we do not deserve to have basic rights taken from us and that this agenda is wrong.  We need to trust that although the current players in government are trying to attack it, the basic system of government is just and sound.  For the moment, votes still count.  We must also hope that there are some very fine lawyers out there willing to take on this cause and aid the people—which is a tall order for sure, but not impossible.  Michigan’s government is going to have to do a great deal of explaining to prove that, as the bill states, “The legislature, therefore, determines that the authority and powers conferred by this act constitute a necessary program and serve a valid public purpose.”

Not necessary (under these terms) and most definitely not valid.

To consider the other perspective, if there are economic corruptions in the Michigan school districts that the country is unaware of, or if there is some justifiable reasoning that prompted this outlandish bill, now would be a really fine time to make that clear.  The need for tax breaks for corporations isn’t one of them.

—JLE

Playing dirty, huh.  Conservatives should be ashamed to admit to being conservatives at this point.

This is going to make one heck of a novel for those political writer types…