Conversation wil Dr. Zimbardo

Interview with Philip Zimbardo about his Stanford experiment on prison torture and its conditions.

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Stanford Prison Experiment

Following up on the Milgram experiments, Zimbardo tried to see how normal people would react to being guards and prisoners. His findings surprised everyone, including himself.

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Asch Conformity Experiment

Not only are we acculturated/hardwired to follow authority, many also have a strong need to conform. Read more!

New World Order Memory Lane

In case you forgot, here's a short video ramble down memory lane. Read more!

Milgram , the British Remake

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"He was A Policeman; I thought I was Doing What Was Right"

This seems to contain information that does not appear in the segment that is available at ABCNews. What's interesting about this segment is the report of the McDonald's case. That is very odd.



NOTE: Whoever recorded this and uploaded it to the web left in the commercials. The experiment segment starts at 2:26.

part 3 of 3 of the series

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"I'm Sorry, Wrong Answer; 450 Volts" :: Milgram's obedience to authority study: parts 1-5

A re-creation of the famous study originally done in the '60's. Until recently, no one was authorized to replicate it due to ethical considerations. However, in 2007, ABC News was granted such permission and did so with many of the original researchers and some of the actual participants.





New data was also added.

This is the remake that ABC News did. It's an extended version of the segment that runs on the ABC site.

The laughter or snickering or both is an interesting phenomenon that not only appears in this sequel to the experiment but in the original video as well. Milgram commented on this. My best guess now is that the laughter here is about as close to the "baring of teeth" and aggressiveness that laughter is supposed to be related to. Read more!

War Porn: Occupation, Sex, Prostitution

Several years ago I linked to articles that report the rise of prostitution among young Iraqi girls. Many of these prostitutes serviced US military men in Iraq.



As usual, the press has ignored this story, as it has much of the reality on the ground, such as the sexual hrassment of femake US soldiers by their male comrades, the use of chemical weapons in Falluja, the atrocities committed by US soldiers, the toll on civilians of the air campaign and so on.

Now a story out of Syria, where almost a million Iraqi refugees have fled, documents a flourishing sex trade that exploits penurious Iraqis. Reuters writes:

A score of young Iraqi women in tight, shimmering gowns shuffle across the nightclub dance floor under the hungry eyes of Gulf Arabs at nearby tables.

The band blasts out Iraqi songs into the early hours as the watching youths join the dancing or summon girls to sit with them -- there is little pretence about what gets transacted at this neon-lit nightspot half an hour's drive north of Damascus.

The dancers, some in their early teens, do not want to talk, but one said she had no other way to support her family. "My father was killed in Baghdad and our money is finished," muttered the dark-haired girl in a black and silver dress.

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR calls it "survival sex", a desperate way to cope for Iraqi refugees whose savings have run out since they escaped the violence at home.

As I noted before, the human toll of war expands far beyond destruction of lives and property. It destroys human spirits. Read more!

War Porn II: Invitation to a Beheading

I share little in common with my father except nightmares and genes. Echoing through the silence of the years during which we have not spoken there winds the terror and horror of an insanity that was his and which I have guarded against. As with most shadows, though, the danger in fighting them brings the danger that you will mistake what's real for shadow and shadow for what's real.

There's no doubt that I have often taken a no-prisoners strategy in defending those I love and myself from often paranoiac fears that my father was on the highways, headed my way with a trunk full of automatic weapons and bent on a rampage that started with the death of my mother and would end with the slaughter of my children and me.

These personal comments relate to the paranoia that strikes deep in the heart of fantasy and illusion that comprise the American dream. When attacked, the US public responded with a hysteria that can only astound the rest of the world for its over-reaction. ...

While we sit and watch the fantasy war unfold, US citizens sit bemused and impotent at the sight of their representatives who are apparently incapable of doing anything to stop the madness that their own hysteria set in motion. Asserting the type of sovereignty and authority that a head of state is supposed to exhibit, the mannequin that voices testosterone-filled apothegms that beggar grammar strides the world stage like an idiot savant known for bringing death and destruction to innocents.

It's said that during the first days of the Afghan invasion Pres. George Bush once told the CIA to send him the head of Osama bin-Laden after the terrorist was caught and killed. The CIA agent on the ground took the order seriously enough that he gathered the materials required to pack the head in dry ice and ship it to Washington.

What this story says to me is that the facade created by the civilized US invasion is nothing but a charade created by a sophisticated media effort. The real, on-the-ground actions that buttress the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have never made it into the US public sphere. Instead of the decapitation fantasies of our leader, we see the US portrayed as the army of light versus the forces of darkness.

I have drawn attention to the appearance in the public fantasy show of a genre called War Porn. This genre gains in popularity, it seems, throughout the US and perhaps the world, as suggested by hits at my blog with "war porn" as the search terms.

Yet, the indecency of this genre is many-sided. What differentiates the prurient interests of adolescents and young soldiers looking for, trading, and selling this type of porn and the types of videos put on the web by the oh-so-virtuous jihadists? Consider the beheading of famous Iraqi female journalist Atwar Bahjat.

As the following description shows, the thin line separating the video of this crime and that in porn is a diminishing, if not non-existent, value:

We now know that it was not that swift for Bahjat. First she was stripped to the waist, a humiliation for any woman but particularly so for a pious Muslim who concealed her hair, arms and legs from men other than her father and brother.

Then her arms were bound behind her back. A golden locket in the shape of Iraq that became her glittering trademark in front of the television cameras must have been removed at some point — it is nowhere to be seen in the grainy film, which was made by someone who pointed a mobile phone at her as she lay on a patch of earth in mortal terror.

The scene could come from a snuff film. Yet, tragically and inhumanly, it comes from a group of brutish men who think they perform this defilement in the name of Allah.

In a book called Toxic Religion, it's stated that the religious fanatics are often plagued by sexual thoughts that are perverse and violent. I suggest that the jihadists fit this description to a tee. That these demons in the form of men believe that they are virtuous because they can carry out this brutality only shows how empty and filled with a despairing sin their version of religion is. They manifest their own sickness and wretched feelings about sexuality in crimes that reveal nothing but corrupt hearts and spirits.

I have included this description along with my personal reminiscences for a reason: in his despair over his divorce and what he considered his betrayal by my mother, my father once described for me the very type of scene that was played out in Bahjat's death. That vision--of my mother's head in my father's hands and plunked on the hood of a car--haunted my late adolescent years and still does. I cannot watch the movie Seven because the ending plays back too realistically that vision for me.

Does the personal nature of my father's insane fury obviate in any way the crime he nurtured in his heart? Does it make what these so-called men did to this woman, who simply wanted to be a woman, more or less heinous once we see it from the perspective of the crimes and despair that fill not a personal life but the vengeance-filled fantasy of our leader?

Do these thoughts provide a spectrum of ghoulish sensuality that festers in the heart of men who despair of their own humanity so much that they cannot stomach a woman leading her own life and who must therefore degrade her sexually and monstrously?

Simone Weil once wrote that we must recognize that given the right circumstances we are all capable of the most despicable acts. I believe that she was right in this, and I therefore recognize that the acts of these men and the crime fantasized by my father are also potentially acts that I myself could and would enact.

Some will say that what separates us from them is the barbarity of their acts. Yet, barbarism is a reality that seems to change once we begin to plumb the depths of our own sins. Read more!

Secularism, Nothingness, Religion, and the Secret Passwords

A lot of ethnographic, historical, and sociological evidence shows that when cultural systems decline, social and personal ills appear. You don’t need to look too far to see the truth of this conclusion. Within our own culture, the culture wars are a backlash against the destruction of traditional American cultural values. In the Islamic world, a similar reaction at seeing their culture trashed has been perhaps even more profound.

Statements by political and religious thinkers suggest some cognizance of the problem but also a willed attempt to shroud its source. Couched in the language of a clash between civilizations, the present situation assumes a world where everything that I am and that we are will die if we or I don’t return to a purified version of the traditional or founding values. ...

We face a situation in which those fighting the American culture war since the 60s against the counter-culture have come into conflict with Islamic cultural warriors who have been fighting a similar war for their cultural identity since the 60s, when the Muslim Brotherhood came to prominence in Egypt.

For many, religion has come to the fore as the main institution under attack. As a cultural system—to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz—religion is ultimately associated with ethics and social structuring in such a way that when religion withers on the vine, social chaos and personal anomie quickly ensues.

Even the so-called “evil” extremists are not anti-civilization. Indeed, that is the brunt of their message. The extremist Jihadist is as much concerned for cultural and ethical values as are PB16, Pat Robertson, or Pres. Bush himself. Seeing their culture devalued as second-rate compared to Xtian civilization—remembering the history of European colonialist nations’ attempts to carry out the protocols of manifest destiny--they bring into play the opposing view that Islam is a noble and valid cultural framework within which a human being can attain happiness.

What else are fundamentalists—whether Xtian, Jewish, Hindu and (dare I say it?) Rationalist—saying? They expect to convince me that the solutions revealed in their books, practices, rituals, holy verse, or methodologies can deliver the answers to all those questions that all humans in all places have asked. Indeed, all human desires, thoughts, and actions--these doctrines maintain—can be answered if we only find that one thing hiding the truth and crack open the shell—of faith, reason, or desire.

Where seek an answer when the locus or place of the problem is so varied—from the imperceptible movements and needs of the internal person to the profound social and historical non-human processes? The multitude of levels at which wrong, pain, and hurt can be felt pose problems enough. Modern consumer society provides numerous diversions to keep us from asking some very basic questions about ourselves and the world we implicitly give our allegiance to.

This is the crisis we face. This is the dilemma whose gates we stand before with the guard blankly asking for the secret password so we can pass through to greater awareness and understanding. We face our own alienation, boredom, ennui, self-deception, and despair and seek an answer from others who themselves ask the same questions. And when they can’t give an answer either or act in ways that rub us the wrong way, we immediately cast them in the position of being the root of our own despair.

This little Kafkaesque flourish points up the mystery of lives that have been denuded of all magic, all paradox, all byways by what used to be called spirit could entertain the visions of purity of heart, worlds beyond the world, dimensions whose hold on us made demands that drove saints into the desert. We are left with the anemic demons whose blood rituals grow in ever expanding orgies of blood lust.

On the face of it, this is a bizarre assertion. It suggests that the majority of human-kind is enmeshed in some kind of mass hallucination that hides from them the true nature not only of the world but of themselves. Not only that, it calls to mind the camp of fanatics, intolerants, and madmen throughout history; not to mention those saints and other religious aficionados who happened to escape from their faith and attain a measure of equilibrium, by which is meant producing a result that even the rich swilling at the trough of abundance and extravagance can find quaintly worthy of praise.

But there are signs of this mass hallucination everywhere. It takes on the guise of inter-religious and inter-ethnic violence, keeping up with the Jones’, scandal-mongering, apathy, and alienation. Everything from consumer shopping frenzy to stay in touch with the most recent product to religio-political programmes for civic sanitation and ethical renewal to fundamentalist rage and purification through romanticizing cults of death—all these phenomena represent a deeply ingrained despair, sometimes recognized, most times not.

Not only do these attempts to promise happiness—the ultimate Good, said Aristotle—they also promote a way of life that will ensure a society in which people within those societies can achieve happiness. If we all have the same things, then everyone will be happy. If we all look and act alike, then the lack of differences will assure peace through conformity. If we all vie for the same status and material goods, we will find stability in the struggle for subsistence itself.

The vagaries of history have favored capitalism. It is assumed by many, therefore, that it is the big winner of the cosmic lottery. Basing themselves on this apparent luck, Xtians, for example, see the hand of God at work. They believe that God is in control of all things and, like a big banker in the sky, is ready to repay all those centuries of investment by past generations who’ve sacrificed and labored in the Lord’s vineyards.

But what history, or God, gives, it can also take away. Unless of course, you think, like the savior-President, that God and history divinely ordain one group of people to spread to the rest of the world a message of peace and freedom.

Some crises are so great that falling back on the old ways and thinking simply don’t work anymore. This “not working” doesn’t just mean that we can’t make a success in life. Continuing in the old ways might indeed continue to bring success. But the success or the “working” part of our lives doesn’t mean anything. Life’s not working anymore means that the old ways just don’t make sense and do not bring the satisfaction that they did before.…

The Russian novelist Dostoevsky once wrote that one must experience evil to find good. What he meant by this is that the traditional values and ethical concepts have been denuded of meaning—that meaning that seeps into my very bones and animates everything else I do in life. Through the process of experiencing dissolution and evil I will come to know Good—that I must know what the reality of the evil is before can even begin to see the possibility of its opposite, the Good.

From this perspective, I begin to see the current ethical and spiritual chaos as an education for a higher order. I experience chaos and let its Antarctic cold tear off my face before I can even start that journey to anything else. The alternative is to lose myself in a faceless and meaningless herd mentality that promises the eternal in everyday routines and consumer Disneylands, but whose promise is ultimately empty. These Disneylands lead to much unconscious despair though emitting a veneer of pan-consciousness on the TV and computer screens of the world.

Absolute freedom promises absolute obedience. Knowing evil leads to good. Sickness brings health. In an age where all formulas and incantations to happiness have been co-opted by either a religio-political regime or otherwise colonized and turned into an advertising enthymeme, all values must become known through their opposites.

This is not a call to do evil for evil’s sake. Anyone familiar with the writings of Jean Genet understands how difficult it is to consciously pursue evil. Instead, the education of the modern age brings with it a despair that I must know and recognize, eschewing all empty phrases and jingoistic methods that deprive of something so essential to my life that I will indeed die. Violence is just another form of losing my self.

The crisis we face is two-fold: immunizing ourselves to the pain and suffering of others and the shutting ourselves off from that which would make us capable of perceiving the our true selves and thereby giving loving others for who they are. We are born with the sense for ethics; but it must engage an environment and practice that encourage its growth and continuation.

What modern secular culture does not do is to provide this environment. As a consequence, traditional cultures rebel when their cultures suffer desolation at the onslaught of secularization. Those already secularized find themselves in despair without knowing it—encased in an ever-growing cocoon of cultural anomie, social fragmentation, and personalistic isolation.

Yet, it is only through the purifying nothingness of secularism that I can or will come to know who I am. For we will learn that there are no systems that can grip with infinite value, no morals that cannot be questioned, no authority whose legitimacy is not based on egoism and self-interest, no final solution beyond the terror of mass enslavement and manufactured death.

Related Links

• God, Satan, and Katrina
  
• Robertson: Muslims 'satanic'

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All That Oil and No Bush in Sight?

I repost the following in light of arch-conservative Milton Friedman's pronouncement that "of course" the war in Iraq is about oil:

The point I was making was that if there were no oil under the sands of Iraq, Saddam Hussein would have never been able to accumulate the resources which enabled him to threaten his neighbors, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. And having watched him for thirty years, I was very fearful that he, if he ever achieved — and I thought he might very well be able to buy one — an atomic device, he would have essentially endeavored and perhaps succeeded in controlling the flow of oil through the Straits of Hormuz, which is the channel through which eighteen or nineteen million barrels a day of the world eighty-five million barrel crude oil production flows. Had he decided to shut down, say, seven million barrels a day, which he could have done if he controlled, he could have essentially also shut down a significant part of economic activity throughout the world.

The size of the threat that he posed, as I saw it emerging, I thought was scary. And so, getting him out of office or getting him out of the control position he was in, I thought, was essential. And whether that be done by one means or another was not as important, but it’s clear to me that were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture of how that part of the Middle East developed would have been different.

Reading over a recent Guardian Unlimited piece on Christopher Hitchens, I recalled Slavoj Zizek's comments that Hitchens has presented one of the best arguments for the so-called war in Iraq

:The one good argument for war against Iraq is evoked by Christopher Hitchens: The majority of Iraqis are Saddam's victims, and they would be really glad to be rid of him. He is such a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in whatever form is a much brighter prospect for Iraqi citizens. We are not talking here of "bringing Western democracy to Iraq," but of just getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical. Do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?

Of course, what Zizek gives with one hand, he takes away with another. While conceding that most western liberals are mealy-mouthed placaters when it comes to opposing real evil and tyranny, he also notes that the war with Iraq is not that kind of war--no matter what Hitchens avers. Indeed, for Zizek the Iraq debacle is symptomatic of western neoliberals and the social and economic imperialism imposed by this way of thinking.

It's an oversimplification of Zizek's argument, but it seems that he has always said that any war--no matter how noble or apparently altruistic in intent any war carried out by neoliberal countries, they will always be underpinned by less noble, more mercenary motives.

The war in Iraq is a case in point. The Bush admin has crashed and tumbled over numerous "reasons" for going to war like a drunk trying to maneuver an obstacle course.

First, we had weapons of mass destruction and the impending shadow of nuclear mushroom clouds. When that didn't pan out and no weapons were found and the nuclear threat was shown to have been based on a forgery whose origin is still unknown, the Bush admin reverted to some soporific talk of democratizing the Mideast.

Now Iraq that is slowly circling the drain into sectarian civil war, the Bush admin has supposedly dropped its mantra about staying the course in Iraq. But what has appeared unique in the new rhetoric and the old one's demise is something of a peek at the real reasons for this war and for the US presence in the Mideast.

Thomas Nadelhoffer at Truth to Power (echoing others) points to Bush's own recent statements about the reason to see the nasty deed done to the bloodiest nail and tooth:

You see, 'reasonable' citizens of the world look at these kinds of facts and conclude that we invaded Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people from an oppressive dictator. The delusional, paranoid, and conspiratorial, on the other hand, are crazy enough to conclude that the Bushie oiligarchy might have invaded Iraq for profit and oil.

A day or so after I read Nadelhoffer's comments, I heard Pres. Bush voice the same argument again; that is, that if we allow the terrorists to take Iraq that they will gain access to Iraqi oil fields and thereby threaten US security. During his Oct 25 news conference, Bush said:

The fact that the fighting is tough does not mean our efforts in Iraq are not worth it. To the contrary, the consequences in Iraq will have a decisive impact on the security of our country, because defeating the terrorists in Iraq is essential to turning back the cause of extremism in the Middle East.

If we do not defeat the terrorists or extremists in Iraq, they will gain access to vast oil reserves and use Iraq as a base to overthrow moderate governments across the broader Middle East.

Of course, few in the MSM picked up on this comment or the one quoted by Nadelhoffer (though I believe that CNN's Wolf Blitzer made passing reference to it but without pursuing its implication; CNN's own report of the news conference doesn't quote it).

And--of course--the idea is not a new one, that is, that the US' main objective in Iraq is to secure the vast oil field and reserves there. Noam Chomsky has been saying this since the beginning of the so-called war, as I have in speaking to various groups of people. Indeed, the idea that the US or another imperial power would go to war over oil was first voiced by Simone Weil in the late 1930s. I have linked several times to articles that deal with this issue, most notably the comments by former Republican strategist and insider Kevin Phillips.

While all of this may be true, I want to look at one phenomenon I have recently encountered when trying to discuss this notion about the US going to war over oil. From the beginning of the invasion I always heard people say that it cannot be about oil. That if it was about oil, it'd be ... something.

The reason I put an ellipsis there is because when people say that it can't be about oil and then are asked why it can't be, they are often speechlessly left saying< "It just can't be...". One of the more articulate responses about why it can't be is because if it is then it's wrong. That if soldiers are dying for oil it's ... just wrong.

On the face of it, there's nothing unreasonable about a country that depends on oil to run its industrial infrastructure on oil trying to secure its sources for this valuable resource. In a world where Machiavellian maneuvering displace banalities about morality, the idea seems perfectly rational, indeed overwhelmingly rational. Many people, however, simply do not want to face several factors: 1) the immense role that oil plays in our lives, 2) the effects that having no oil would have on their lives, and 3) the desire to simply deny reality when it becomes apparent when the reality is staring them in the face.

Certainly, leftists have not made enough of the oil-over-war meme. In the rather over-used phraseology of an over-worked corporate hack, leftists have not "educated" the public in this aspect of 1) the war and 2) the role that oil plays in everyday life. Yet, beyond this practical, procedural observation, there's the existential fact that even should the idea gain some discussion in the public sphere whether people would believe it, want to believe it, or simply tune it out because it is unbelievable, conspiratorial sounding, or too brutally honest that they'd rather believe anything else except that.

I have a penchant for naivety. I respect the desire to see good in all things and to trust those who tell me something. I take seriously Kierkegaard's admonition that when faced with uncertainty involving hate or love, it always incumbent to choose love:

"[E]xistence must be so arranged that you do not with the aid of certainty in knowledge slink out of revealing yourself in judging or in the way you judge. When deception and truth are presented as two equal possibilities in contrast to each other, the decision is whether there is love or mistrust in you." -- Kierkegaard, _Works of Love_

Yet, this type of stance towards life does not rule out a common sense, critical eye on the machinations of the power mongers. Indeed, as Kierkegaard would have been the first to point out, those who attempt to deceive and falsely pass off truths that exploit our deepest anxieties must indeed be exposed for the liars and corrupters they are.

That argument has the distinction of giving the leaders of this country a benefit of the doubt. Imagine, on the other hand, that the scenario depicted in the movie Syriana of oil running out is not paranoid delusions. Then the leaders of this country could be seen as acting ethically, if by that you mean for the benefit of the whole. Yet, by hiding the truth of the danger and by lining the pockets of the wealthy oil barons, that ethical dimension begins to diminish as the level of corruption grows.

Ethically, the empire's leaders should level with the American public. Not in the saccharine and sanguine terms that GW tried to do several months ago with his talk about energy dependence. This talk should be as hard-bitten and to the bone as possible. It should be as black and white as possible with all the finer shades of grey included but not for the sake of cushioning the blow of the truth but to make the true light of that truth stand in its proper background.

My guess is that the truth here will be immensely bitter. Facing the facts would entail a complete redirection of the life of the community--away from excessive consumerism and take-it-all while you can life styles. It would mean a massive sacrifice of immediate pleasures and gratifications on such a large, painful scale that the US might actually look like a Spartan nation rather the ostentatious Athens that it now does.

Such an undertaking would guarantee future generations of our children at least a future. And if it is done right, that future would not have to look so spartan nor so bleak as a world in crisis because it can't feed its thirst for oil and blood might otherwise look.

My guess, though, is that there are few politicians who have the grit to bring these truths to reality for an American public more willing to delude itself because of its inability or its refusal to face the bare-knuckled ethical problems. The reasons for this are many and include the way that the republic is organized to leave a preening mass in the dark while the so-called insider elite finds its entitled glimpse of hardcore realities reason enough to govern.

The problem is that this position in the past has allowed them to moderately profit from their insider knowledge. Now, however, the lid has come off and the profit-taking and massive plunder of the public treasure has given them a taste for more and ever more. The restraint that a Protestant ethic once inculcated in the leadership has worn away and the profiteers of the republic have nothing to stabilize or stem their greed.

Related Links

• Kevin Phillips’American Theocracy: A Study of Late Stage US Capitalism by Anthony Monteiro
  
• Craig Murray on Manufacturing Terror; Oil, Lily Pad Bases and Torture
  
• THE POLITICS OF OIL"
  
• Steve Clemons Documents War for Oil & the Cheney/Rumsfeld "War Paradigm"

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Mailer Interview

In this interview the recently deceased Norman Mailer talks about things in a voice that often evokes wisdom and compassion. Over a long life Mailer seems to have learned something--an notion I once heard him travesty--about not just abstractions and fictions but about the nitty-gritty and thorny ethical issues that make a life worth having lived.

To talk about Hitler in the way he does is illuminating. To talk about the possibility of a future life and the repercussions of one's acts in this life is edifying. Though I cast a shadow over ideas as bloodless wraiths invoked by equally bloodless souls, Mailer's thoughts and ideas come across as lived observations. Not as one trying to take a god-view of life, but one who's been educated by a power and process that refines and shapes the spirit into a personality that sees things in all their particularity. I

n this way, the wonder and awe that might lead to something bigger and beyond which perhaps begins to come into view. Read more!

The Cages of Birds in a Fat House

Like cages full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.

Their evil deeds have no limit;
they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it,
they do not defend the rights of the poor.

Should I not punish them for this?”
declares the Lord.
“Should I not avenge myself
on such a nation as this?

“A horrible and shocking thing
has happened in the land:

The prophets prophesy lies,
the priests rule by their own authority,
and my people love it this way.
But what will you do in the end?
--- Jer. 5:25-31

In a recent poll, 90 percent of Iraqis expressed growing despair in what's become a civil war in their country. Their psychological distress no doubt reflects what some have described as hell. (Also, see this essay on "The Creation of Hell.")

What is even more apparent, though, is that the US public has little comprehension of the daily terror and uncertainty of this life in Iraq. Perhaps many think of Iraq's civil war along the lines of America's own ghettos where gangs fight over turf and where innocents are killed.

I have argued in the past that many Americans willingly suppress their awareness of these realities. Perhaps it is out of apathy, busyness, or even a malicious disregard for the suffering of those we consider the enemy.

I would argue, though, that all of these excuses are manifestations of a form of despair that is spiritual and ethical in nature and that represents an evil so great that it creates the conditions for greater evils.

Talk of what led up to the war rarely broaches issues that you can characterize as spiritual. Even those religious commentators who don't simply spout the rhetoric of Xtendom facing down the enemies of civilization and Christian culture usually frame their discussion in political terms that reflect a liberal vocabulary that seems empty to me, if simply because that vocabulary is spiritually vacant.

The spiritual malaise that led to this war originates in fear and the reaction that people exhibited at the 911 attack exhibited little public virtue, as the Machiavellians might put it. Instead of facing such atrocity with any semblance of courage, the country's leaders responded as so many bullies whose worst fear had come to light: their own feelings of inadequacy and weakness.

Nor did they exhibit anything that you might call religious courage. To speak of a religious courage opposed to an ethical courage may appear odd, yet it is easy enough to cite examples of this kind of courage. The early Christian church martyrs exhibited just such courage. In the face of immense oppression and persecution, not to mention torture, these martyrs faced the possibility of extinction with joy and hope. They did not react in violence, nor did they band together to wreak vengeance.

As much as Americans hate to think that there's any meaning to corporate sinfulness—relying instead on some corrupt image of the monadic individual--this war and its aftermath must bring to consciousness exactly that realization of sin perpetrated by a horde. After all, the majority of people in the US backed this war until it started going bad. Many voted for the man who perpetrated the fiasco.

Until Americans begin to plumb the depths of their spirits and acknowledge their complicity in this monumental crime against the Iraqi people, they will never solve the problem of terror.

In all the religious rhetoric that the Xtian preachers spout--even those from the Left--few invoke the words and message of the Hebrew prophets. This is shameful. For those prophets like Jeremiah inveighing against imperial pretensions and injustice made in the name of a nation state point not simply to the leaders but also the corrupt and spiritual blindness of an entire nation.

These words might seems to echo the more fanatical cries of the Jihadis. I can only say that Americans must stand up to the hate-filled and unjust violence purveyed by these fanatics. But to do so, they must take the road of faith and repentance, with an open heart disciplined by failure and the experience of imperial folly. But not only must they hear the fanatics in the street outside but they must also hear the voices of those they invite into their own homes.

Americans must begin to see their world as larger than the environs of US borders. They must begin to see themselves as world citizens where the actions that they perform in their food market or gas station can potentially affect the lives of others. Americans must reject their narcissistic egotism that sees the world in their own image and begin to see that others are different and believe differently.

True justice demands not that we see the world as having the same desires, needs, and dreams as we do. It demands seeing ourselves in the nothingness that is common to us all in our most painful and powerless moments. It is embracing that nothingness and taking it into our hearts and forming our will around the contours of its freedom and liberating breath.

As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, any God that’s worth its/his/her salt demands justice. If that justice does not include the less fortunate and those forgotten by us in our busyness, then that simply means that we refuse to listen to the calls for justice.

It is obvious that the leaders of this country—whether left, right, or center—borrow an old grammar and vocabulary whose story will result in instituting the machinery of injustice. For the new world that is taking shape through war and struggle, the old stories do not work any longer. They are fairy tales that the nation-state nanny tells its cowed and fearful children to keep away the terrors of night.

But the terror is real; the boogeyman does have teeth and does eat children. Like so many stories of family and personal tragedy show, often the perpetrator is someone known, a relative and no stranger. The beast sits in the heart of the very fathers and brothers and mothers who are meant to protect us but whose hearts have been warped by temptation and corruption to betray and terrorize their own.

Indeed, the prophet is right. The prophets lie, the priests rule in their own name and we do indeed love it. Read more!

American Neoliberalism: Intro to Demonology 101

Talk about demons appeals to the popular consciousness. Numerous works of fiction and film exploit the idea that we humans can be inhabited and made to do things that we otherwise would not do. Evil things--evil things so horrendously heinous and terrible that we'd despair of some presupposed innocence that we're born with.

Of course, the most spectacular of these films was Peter Blatty's potboiler, The Exorcist. The film based on the book made huge bundles of cash for Hollywood and spawned two sequels. The most recent, The Exorcist: The Beginning just played last year and is now on HBO.

I watched this most recent installment the other night. Beyond the obvious absurdities, and the still quaint notion that evil inhabits another woman, what struck me most was the indefatigable tenaciousness of the priest who doesn't believe in God anymore. His spiritual journey back to faith is played out against the backdrop of his loss of faith occasioned by the massacre of innocents by Nazis. While the special effects are decent, and the story is often compelling, the movie is not very convincing in showing the true meaning of the demonic.

Two recent articles show the Catholic Church's unwavering war against demons, however. Working on empirical data that demon possession is on the rise, the Church has revamped its book of exorcism, enlisted a cadre of new exorcists, and made public pronouncements of its unerring belief in the reality of the Devil. ...

In an interview with Sign and Sight one exorcist, Rev. Pedro Barrajon, claims:

Cases of possession seem to me to be the evil flip-side of miracles, which are equally inexplicable, but which we can also observe. The devil is present everywhere that evil things happen within the normal laws of nature. In anyone who says: I don't accept love, the love of my brothers and sisters, the love of God. And in many places, in all massacres, in every murder, in physical catastrophes, in every concentration camp, in all evil. Sometimes he shows himself, strangely, but also in cases of possession. But he's much more dangerous where he doesn't let himself be seen, where he can't be done away with through exorcism. No question.

Such expressions, of course, meet with a skeptical guffaw from the intelligentsia. A scientific age cannot and will not believe in anything that cannot be subsumed under the aegis of empirical study. But the empirical is exactly what the demonologists work with. As innumerable ethnographic reports will tell you, demon possession is real--for those possessed and for those who witness it.

The point, of course, is that these cases are simply manifestations of psychological problems that proper psychiatric care can dispel and cure. Or so it is said. For anyone familiar with the incapacity of modern psychiatry to truly effect cures in the mentally disturbed, such claims as cure and returns to normal are irenic at best, self-delusionary at worst. If you think that prescribing powerful anti-hallucinogens and mood-altering drugs is a cure, then perhaps we need to redefine the concept of cure.

I am not saying that cases of possession aren't symptoms of deep and profound psychological problems. Indeed, I believe that modern psychiatry and psychology are correct in identifying the mundane causes of these symptoms and taking them out of the realm of the supernatural. No doubt, more people have been helped--however relatively--by the psychological treatments than by medieval treatments for possession. Again, however, this statement must be put into context. Traditional and indigenous methodologies show an amazing ability to cast out demons and integrate individuals back to social normality.

I've intentionally conveyed the impression here that I am skeptical of both the religionists who use demon posession to cover up their own connivance with power structures as well as the brainiacs who think that the demonic is simply the distorted manifestations of superstitious minds.
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In a recent post, I quoted Martin Matustik's characterization of Kierkegaard's understanding of the "diabolical." Contrary to every received opinion of Kierkegaard as a thinker, he was intimately concerned about the political and social events of his time. For Kierkegaard, from his post-Xtian perspective, the demonic manifests itself in ways that traditional religionists would reject and rationalists would find offensive.

In the context of US foreign policy in Iraq, Matustik identifies the the desire of Americans to appear innocent to themselves and to their friends and enemies. Matustik writes:

Known to [Frederick] Douglass but lost on most contemporary Americans is the danger of an even greater evil: what Kierkegaard called the human capacity for acting “diabolically.” The “diabolical” is anyone who wills oneself to be good without having confronted one’s capacity for evil. Such a person must cling fast to false innocence because this person despairs over the question whether he or she truly is innocent. The politically “diabolical” is any regime that in despair wills its false innocence. The desire to be the innocent source of one’s power - a phenomenon we can call the despair of America - can be confronted, says Kierkegaard, by the breakdown of the false ego and its attachment to power.

Matustik calls to attention the innate tendency of Americans to impute to itself an inherent innocence when it comes to dealing with others. In a country where difference means everything yet is itself to be erased in the great melting pot, the erasure is supposed to return us to a commonly shared humanity that short-circuits the influences of tradition and cultural conditioning. But this supposed dimensionless region of individuality is a con job since it abrogates the obvious effects that environment and socio-cultural institutions and life-forms have on humans. You can’t, at the risk of becoming wraithful non-beings, abrogate personal history or the general history of your society.

The pernicious notion that society or culture does not affect an innate innocence produces individuals who are tragically unconscious of their own responsibility for evil. We go through life believing that we are simply atoms borne about by chaotic and ultimately unknowable forces. In the popular imagination, this state produces an anxiousness about the unknown that continually beckons from fictional accounts of evil forces inhabiting otherwise decent human beings. The mass production of horror and slasher films and TV programs indicates the uneasiness that many feel about their place in the universe.

On the obverse side of this coin, the scientist attempts to reduce the anxiety to physiological processes that only a scientist or expert can understand. From the notion that we are hardwired to do what we do to the idea that environment determines all our actions, the scientific lack of imagination believes that it can explain human life and thereby serve as the keystone is an edifice of a yet-to-be-determined socially engineered utopia. That the theory changes every few months based on new studies and new data; that the final explanation of the data is always put off until more data or new instrumentation is available; all this does not deter the rationalist mind from pronouncing that the end of the search for who we are is at an end.

The ethico-religious implications of this confusion are obvious. In the face of the general uncertainty about what humans really are reinforce the demand to follow rigidly defined dogmas and a nihilistic appeal to a mealy-mouthed fideism. This fideism is not the leap into the absurd of a Kierkegaard or Camus but is instead an act of despair that ultimately bolsters the prevailing machinery of power and self-interest.

For the social engineers, the uncertainty is equally unsettling yet blinded by the starry night of scientific promise they simply point to a future age when the anxiety will end. Hoping to usurp the role of oracle and prophetic office that religion served in the past, the engineers can at least point to concrete and hardcore results that supposedly prove their truth. Yet it is a truth that benefits the demonic eye in the sky that ensures social conformity and comity. It steels the mechanics of control, feeding in to the spiritual and socio-cultural fears that no psychology will ever erase but only repress.

And in their repression they combobulate and fester and breed the swirling crimes of personalistic nightmares: the serial killer, nice guy who lives next door, the consumerist queen who will kill to stay on top of the mass production fashion hill, the angst-filled adolescents stalking the halls of revenge.

For Kierkegaard and Douglass, according to Matustik, the demonic is a massive con job, perpetrated by individuals in their denial of a self beyond self-interest, as well as selves that desire to hide from themselves their own potential for perpetrating evil acts while seeming innocent.

Kierkegaard's take on evil and the demonic is situated in the individual and his/her journey to true selfhood. Given the propensity for lying to oneself and covering over one's true motives, this search often involves outright rejection of the Good simply because it is the good. Yet, the more insidious forms of the demonic, according to Kierkegaard come in the form of those who espouse religion while secretly using it to bolster their own cherished rejection of the true demands of what the Good demands.

In its wraithful obsession with denying the other, in being like the others better than them, in fearing that someone else more rights or more things or more beauty, Americans have become the walking dead crack ho of the world. Possessed by all that it denies in others and its dreams of pie-in-the-sky happiness, we stalk the stage of history like those brain-dead zombies in George Romero’s films. For as much as Americans want to be different they are just as much envious of anyone who might find a source of life-filled meaning that does not measure up to the criteria by which we gauge real success and real equality. Read more!

Babel and the God’s-eye View of Reality

In a recent posting, biblical scholar Ben Witherington reviews the new film Babel. For Witherington, Babel’s power comes in its ability to provide what I will call the God’s view of reality by showing how seemingly random events fit into a higher, more ethical universe of meaning. The filmmaker seems intent on showing the ethical implications of actions that are disjoined by time/space.

I have not seen Babel yet, so my comments will revert to other movies, especially Crash, although I could have just as easily mentioned Syriana or Traffic. These two movies do not necessarily have the same subtext—dealing with actions and their ethical repercussion, but they do share the intent of providing a view of reality that shows the interconnectedness of events and human behavior. …

In the biblical book of Job, the apotheosis of the action is without doubt the vision that Job has of God speaking from a tornado. In his questioning of the rebellious and straight-talking Job, God questions him about his ability to see the world as God the creator and sustainer of creation does. God sees all and tends all; God sees how all things interconnect and views what no human could ever see, not to mention understand.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: "Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me.
Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?
"Deck yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor.
Pour forth the overflowings of your anger, and look on every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked where they stand.
Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below.
Then will I also acknowledge to you, that your own right hand can give you victory. (Job 40:6-14)

I have chosen a passage that stresses God’s purported justice and His ability to bring to justice those that human laws cannot or will not bow low.

The passages preceding this one emphasize God’s omniscience, as well as His omnipotence. In the modern audience such passages might elicit something of a titter, especially if you’re disposed to a healthy skepticism. In terms of His omniscience, anyone who watches National Geographic or Animal Planet could answer God back and say, “Yes, we have seen those hidden things that once were hidden to human eyes.”

As to omnipotence, the scientist would point to the fact that physicists do indeed understand the workings of the forces at play when the cosmos was created. In fact, their knowledge is so profound that they can actually create the conditions and circumstances of that birth in the laboratory.

With these remarks as background, it is not difficult to see why filmmakers believe they can provide exactly that type of cosmic vision that God gives Job. The camera eye seems supremely made to depict reality “as it is.” For this task, the camera does not filter the information that it spies. Unfiltered, naked fact speaks from every frame since the camera cannot lie. As the truism goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Indeed, what better testimony to the ability of the camera to capture truth than those videos in which criminal behavior is caught on tape and then used in court, as in the Rodney King case? The attractiveness of the camera to capture the unseen crime, the hidden truth behind the façade of custom and human pretensions, has made its way into TV programs such as COPS and its spin-off spawn.

There is the difference, though, between a film and these videos, as well as their filmic grandparents, the documentary. The most notable difference is the staging that goes into any dramatic film. As every student of Film 101 learns, every scene contains exactly what the film’s director wants us to see. Every color, every thing in the film, not to mention the actions of the characters, are dictated strictly by the director.

Even given these dramaturgical and technical details, however, we could say that God does the same thing. If God is indeed in charge of time and history, then He arranges things as he sees fit and therefore can be seen as a film director writ in large letters.

Yet, the details of any film will always be limited by the human capacity to reach that state of ex-stasis (ecstasy) or point outside of time wherein s/he can view the entirety of events and their interconnectedness. Indeed, as you will know it takes several Cray supercomputers to handle the amount of weather data and perform the chaos theory formulae on it to get what anyone—including systems architects—would call information.

But there’s more to the story than this simple inability of the human bio-computer to handle the plethora of data that world events, and their apparent chaos, entail. This issue relates to the ethical dimension of events. That is, the power of Job’s vision is that God has the frame-of-reference, so to speak, within which to make sense of the seeming injustice and meaningless suffering that humans endure and inflict on each other. Indeed, it is God who makes sure that that cosmic balance and justice are somehow maintained.

The film Crash is perhaps a film that has the more modest goals in this regard. Through inter-related stories that switch back and forth between present past and (the illusion of) the future, we see how the actions of each character bring about tragic consequences. The film’s ability to travel through time, as it were—gives us a feeling of transcending those very boundaries that capture us in their confines. Isn’t an attribute of God called omnipresence? Isn’t this power of the artist to transcend these boundaries and take us with him or her in that shamanic journey an exercise in the theophanic vision that placated Job’s rage against his own and others’ unjust suffering?

For Witherington, Babel at least examines this moral dimension of the world and its interconnectedness—not in abstract sociological terms, but in specifically ethical terms. Witherington writes:

So what is the message of this film? Interestingly enough the director seems to be making another Biblical point, [sic] and not one connected with Babel. It is that bad actions always have negative consequences somehow, for someone. This is true for the person who fired the gun, and it is equally true for the nanny who takes the children across the border, when she is illegally in the U.S. So, are we being told that despite the fallenness and the chaos that there is a moral order to this human connnectedness, or at least moral consequences to immoral actions? Yes, I think that is part of the point. But this is a movie which one needs to watch several times to catch all the nuances.

For Witherington, then, the power of the film Babel shows that despite the apparent chaos ruling events and the world as we encounter it in the news, for example, there is indeed a structure and coherence to it. The panoptic vision of the film then is able to show us that structure because of its ability to span time/space and present the intricacies of each action in the very historical, social, and cultural circumstances in which they happen.

Isn’t this what God shows Job? That despite Job’s limited perception of reality—especially as seen through his own suffering—there is indeed a cosmic structure and ethical/spiritual meaning to the world that engages us often as chaos?

"Can you draw out Levi'athan with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in his nose, or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he make many supplications to you? Will he speak to you soft words?
Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant for ever?
Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on leash for your maidens? (Job 41:1-5)

Leviathan here is the ancient symbol for chaos. Borrowed by the Hebrews from ancient Mesopotamian creation stories, it represents the primeval chaos from the creator-god forms order and all that we see and use in the world.

I just want to add one more remark in what is probably an overlong posting. This question relates to the issue of what’s to be done once I see the film? What happens after I witness the God-view that a film like Crash or Babel might give me? I want to suggest that the danger in any aesthetic artifact such as a film is that they might give the viewer the feeling that once they “experience” the God-view then they have nothing more to do. There’s no reason to change anything—in yourself or the world—since the act of being a viewer is enough.

Since I have the film, what else is needed? The film serves as a replacement for action. Knowing about something takes the place of action, whatever that might be. The options here might include a stoicism born from a feeling that “in the big picture it all makes sense so what I must do is accept it and do what I do.” There’s also the possibility that the satiation of the aesthetic experience may itself seem to satisfy any other ethical response, whether for moving on to practicing justice, say.

Not to put too fine a point on these random remarks, I respect and admire the artistic vision that tries to expand the limitations of artistic renditions of the human condition—expansions that attempt to create a bridge to the ethical dimension of our lives. Much like their literary doubles The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, August 1914, these films in their striving for the epic crash on the rocks of what the old-timers called the human existential condition. That contradiction of being beings in time capable of transcending time in glimpses and intimations but always called back to finitude and the anxiety that it inspires. Read more!

Man of Constant Sorrow

Driving home early in the morning from my other job one Sunday, I turned the radio to the local AM channel. I don't listen much to AM radio except to listen to sports events, but I hit the Scan button and the first channel it landed on was the local one.

I guess it's a Christian station for it was playing Christian Bluegrass songs. I don't know how much folks on this forum know about American music, but Bluegrass is one of those more traditional musical genres that has its roots in folk songs brought by Anglo immigrants to the US. Remembered and nurtured by the hills and dales of the Appalachian mountains, the music thrived for many years only in the minds and souls of some of the more destitute and dispossessed of Americans. ...

The more religious songs were a staple at that uniquely American phenomenon of the tent meeting Christian celebrations. Very emotional and evocative these meetings were the brainchild of Methodist circuit riders. itinerant preachers who wandered the wilderness of America bringing the salvation experience to those Americans who had no church nearby. The music recently gained some exposure as the musical landscape of the film, Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

I have a close place in my heart for this music since my mother would listen to it on Saturdays, a day off from her job as a hospital receptionist. She'd spend that time cleaning and arranging our lives to order and cleanliness. She's was not and is not a religious woman, so I imagine that the reason she listened to it is for its melodies, beautiful harmonies, and simple but evocative lyrics.

I never knew that the music was anything special until many years in college when friends played the music. From upper-class backgrounds, their interest in the music was as connoisseurs of a music that could legitimately call itself traditional American music. It had, after all, influenced many of the popular folk musicians of the 60s like Bob Dylan.

On that Sunday I drove home from work, one of my favorite melodies was on. It's gained much notoriety from the Oh Brother film. In one of those small epiphanies I am prone to, the song was especially evocative for me this Sunday morning. Its story of someone who has no roots and is enmeshed in unspoken sorrows brought home in a simultaneous moment the drift and weft of much of my own life.

I am a man of constant sorrow
I've seen trouble all my days
I bid farewell to old Kentucky
The state where I was borned and raised

For six long years I've been in trouble
No pleasure here on earth I find
For in this world I'm bound to ramble
I have no friends to help me now

It's fare thee well my own true lover
I never expect to see you again
For I'm bound to ride that northern railroad
Perhaps I'll die upon this train

You can bury me in some deep valley
For many years where I may lay
Then you may learn to love another
While I am sleeping in my grave.

It's fare you well to a native country
The places I have loved so well
For I have seen all kinds of trouble
In this cruel world, no tongue can tell.

Maybe your friends think I'm just a stranger
My face you'll never see no more
But there is one promise that is given
I'll meet you on God's golden shore.

Those words of a person wandering without roots and neither place nor home to lay his head describes several times during my own life. The loveless existence and the sorrows that you bring on yourself or into others' lives ring still true to me. And the feeling that only in the end will all find resolution and meaning still hover about my thoughts as I try to put shape and form on all I have seen and felt in my life.

In my thoughts were also some of the things I had written here before concerning the rootlessness of modern existence. The words of the song do indeed seem to embody the experience of that rootlessness that some might say is the bane of modern life. For without roots in tradition, culture, and the land what are we humans but sad wraiths looking for a home that is not of this earth?

It does seem in many ways that it is this rootlessness that defines the so-called American experience. For, as immigrants torn from the social, cultural and physical matrixes that human societies have formed to anchor the search for meaning, Americans undergo a kind of levelling that looks upon all those things as old and useless.

The uniquely American, it might be said, is the power to cut yourself from all those old life-forms that define the old world, thereby opening up the possibility of a new world. In this new world, it's believed, we create out own reality, relying on nothing but ourselves and the innate genius and character that nature bequeathes us.

This, at least, is perhaps the message that that eminently American writer Emerson hoped to bring as the good news to Americans. It was perhaps also his vision as the meaning that America itself might represent for human history, a message that others who groaned under the burden of slavery to social, political, and cultural constraints find themselves in.

Emerson was not oblivious to the potential for anarchy inherent in this experience. Rootless and without an anchor in anything except self-reliance what was to keep people from simply living out their own selfish, brutish worst selves? Emerson, I think, believed that we must understand ourselves as creatures of nature, interconnected in wonderful and ingeniously complex ways. Doing so, we could salvage a sense of purpose that transcended simple self-centered behavior and realized itself in a kind of mystical bond with all beings, human, animal, and non-human.

Many will perhaps see this Emersonian vision as naive. How many, for example, have the time or inclination to overcome that seemingly selfish nature that exhibits itself in all cultures and all times? I think that Emerson felt that the republican values instituted by the American constitution had solved many of those problems. Indeed, I believe that Emerson saw American democracy itself as a type of religion that would replace other religions. In fact, I imagine that for him this was an inevitable result of the arc of history.

I think that Emerson is the uniquely American philosopher. I say that since people from many political persuasions count his writings as support for their philosophies. Yet, in my own experience, the Emersonian vision has fared poorly when regarded in the light of that very history he perhaps identified too closely with natural forces. Instead, history has shown that to disregard the human dimension of history is to disregard the potential for death and destruction that those who idolize it wreak.

I will leave these thoughts here for the moment, as I have to go off and cook dinner. I'll finish with the following thought: the rootlessness I know in my own life and that brings so much sorrow may form the kenotic basis on which a deeper awareness of realities beyond this one have yet other dimensions of life to reveal. Read more!

Memories: Lord of the Flies 1960

This article from CCN got me to thinking:

As a child of about four or five, at my grandparents' farm for a summer week, I watched my grandmother wreak vengeance on the files in the kitchen and porch.

I took her cue, it seems, and began trying to kill them myself. I'd stalk them with the fly swatter raised like Death's scythe. I even caught and belegged them in cruel curiosity.

I called myself the Fly Hunter.



More recently, I delved into the dynamics of how hard it is to kill a fly. I realized what the CNN report says:

"We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat," Dickinson said."When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly's body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow 'knows' whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture."

I also came to the same conclusion:

"It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter," [the research said] said.

Not only I not have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure it out, but I

Of course, I should perhaps feel proud that I concluded with my own native intelligence what It took scientists to figure out over tens, if not hundreds of experiments.

Yet, I should also feel grateful to science, perhaps, for confirming my findings. That is the best spirit of science, I think. Working with others in a common endeavor to unveil the truth about the world--even the lowly world of the fly. (The tears of common effort and communal task swell my breast.)

Addenda

1. One of my favorite Blake poems is The Fly.

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

2. One of the scarier movies I saw was David Cronenberg's "The Fly." The ending suicide scene is so raw, so right, yet metaphysically terrifying. There's pity, horror at something so loathsome in humans that parades as honor and pride but ultimately stands revealed as ugly and petty. Even Geena Davis' heart-rending love for Goldbloom's character cannot tear the scab from that realization.

3. The scene in Herzog's Nosferatu, where the insane Jonathan Harker captures flies and eats them for their blood often strikes me as particularly terrifying. Being reduced to a fly-hunting speck of a human, contemptible not only in other people's eyes but your own. The object of a pity that verges on hilarity, if one were not so ridiculously self-absorbed in tasks only a spider would understand.

Read more!

The Dresden Dolls: Girl Anachronism music video

This is very good, I think. Poetix calls it "brechtian punk cabaret," perhaps facetiously.

The lyrics remind me of my daughters, not so happily I fear.

Read more!

What Are U Doing Here?!

Originally published two years ago. I wanted to update it with the following video from ABC News.



Update: This is one the most found of my posts that people find via Google and/or link. Regrettably, I do not think it is just an interest in the discussion that attracts most people. Indeed, the most used words to find this post are "kill all muslims." In fact, the 14,000th hit on the site used the search terms, "I want to kill all muslims." My advice for this person is to seek help. U others, please consider the import of the post if you really are asking the question about whether killing all Muslims is a live alternative.

The question of whether the US or its proxies or even western nations as a whole should kill all Muslims has been gaining wide support around the darker corners of the blogosphere lately. I say darker, since you'd expect it to be limited to what used to be called racist sites run by the Aryan Nation or KKK. However, you can even hear such sentiments expressed on daily talk-shows.

A recent unscientific poll at the Spengler Forum asked the members outright whether all Muslims should be killed. ....

The poll at Spengler's forum is ambiguous. Before it was locked and shut down due to the acrimonious accusations passing back and forth between the commenters, enough people voted to show that yes, 23% believed all Muslims should be killed outright; 61% did not think this; and 14% charitably believed that "killing the majority of them should be sufficient to break their will."

Perhaps these are the same people--or at least close relatives--of those who sent out a mass email that is counseling readers to “Kill ‘Em All. Let Allah Sort ‘Em Out.” According to ThinkProgress, the email contains the following statements:

A disproportionate response is the best kind. … What would a proportionate Israeli response be? Snatching two Hezbollah fighters, torturing them to death, cutting off their genitals and stuffing them in their mouths?

Lebanon used to be a nice little country, before the Sons of Allah got their blood-smeared hands on it. Believe it or not, Beirut was once…the most advanced and prosperous country in the Arab world — because a majority of Lebanese were Christians.

Israel needs to step-up its air strikes and send in the troops (can you say “massive deployment, baby?”) to do the job only ground forces can do. … To resurrect and reconfigure one of my favorite Vietnam-era slogans — Kill ‘em all. Let Allah sort ‘em out.

Again, such extreme views have always been present in modern western societies. They are usually controlled by various venting processes that occur during socialization. Although they may form a part of even everyday speech, as they are in various ethnic slurs and nicknames, they are usually stigmatized so that people do not act on them.

Unfortunately, what is happening in response to the War in Iraq is that such views and sentiments are not only on the rise but are also becoming part of the mainstream dialog and everyday speech. That is, while ethnic slurs are to be expected, the open discussion of exterminating entire groups of people is something new in the US--at least since the end of the 1930s, after the decline of the KKK as a national movement.

But this is changing, obviously. During his talk-show, Michael Savage, for example, can be heard expressing such views (via Media Matter) as the following:

In the long term, the only thing that can make a difference is a devastating, catastrophic, overwhelming victory for the Israelis, where nothing is left living in southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River.

While these comments do not express the genocide of all Moslems and Arabs, they certainly reflect a terrible indifference to the pain and suffering--whether of the innocent or the guilty--with the implication being that because they are ethnically Muslim, they should be treated in this way.

As Islamophobia Watch is reporting, traditionally anti-Semitic groups are now exploiting the anger generated by extremist Moslem attacks in the US, England, and Spain. Quoting the British Nationalist Party's (BNP) newspaper, IW posts:

"The BNP has moved on in recent years, casting off the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the thinly veiled anti-Semitism which has held this party back for two decades. The real enemies of the British people are home grown Anglo-Saxon Celtic liberal-leftists who seek to ... impose multiculturalism on a reluctant indigenous population, and the Crescent Horde – the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion."

Notice how these anti-Islamic statements are combined with the issues or liberals, immigration, and what is called "Eurabia."

This last view has various associated concepts, including the view that Europe is vanishing because of low birth-rates, and along with it something called Christendom; that is, the supposed Judeo-Christian tradition that has given birth, these proponents suggest, to the freedoms and liberties we all benefit from. What the influx of Moslems and Arabs supposedly threatens are these very freedoms and liberties, as well as the vast cultural heritage from Greece to modern secularism.

Dare one even say that these views are not just historically idiotic--it was, after all, the Muslems who maintained the very Greek tradition and its culture that these people suppose is their own--they also reflect a dangerous attachment to something that simply does not exist. That is, a homogeneous culture that has somehow statically existed in a hermetically sealed environment where influences--cultural and otherwise--have not affected it.

But these peremptory remarks will not stop those who want to eradicate a threat that seems not only to be directed at a "civilization" but perhaps even more importantly threatens them individually, personally--as though their very existence is in question when they look at the world around them.

How else explain the following view, which introduces that unscientific poll I linked to at the beginning of this post?

Why don't we kill all Muslims? All of them. As Geotima would say, we are already in a World War, let's fight like we mean it. So why don't we start to plan for their complete extermination? They are hateful and will not stop until they force everyone in the world to submit to Islam. There is no reasoning with them, we must fight them with all we have. As we all know Muslims are at their best when they are being defeated, so we cannot afford to keep them in a constant state nominal defeat lest they rise and do greater damage to the rest of us. They attack all nations that are not Muslim, every western nation, China, India, Russia all suffer from Islamic terrorism.

Since overwhelming force will not defeat the Muslims unless we kill the overwhelming majority, let's talk about how we would go about killing every last one? You know that genocide is on the top of the tongue of many of the posters here, you know that this is the only way that such overwhelming force can possibly defeat such an irrational force.

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Practice Nonviolent Communication - wikiHow

Practice Nonviolent Communication - wikiHow

Read more!