Bits & Pieces (How Thursday Evening Should Have Ended)

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

All right, I’m doing this one before the Wednesday one goes live. Yes, I’m getting ahead of myself. But there’s a reason for it:

How Toy Story III should have ended. Seriously, it should have.

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Superman: The Movie. And this is how it should have ended:

My favorite trilogy of movies may be Back to the Future (more on that in a moment), but The Lord of the Rings is practically a tie. I love those movies. And this is how the single 45 minute LoTR movie should have ended:

Remember what I said about Back to the Future? I also adore the first two Terminator movies (T3 and T:S both sucked). So, why don’t you make like a tree, and get out of here?
— KW

—Michigoose

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The Decline and Fall of Violence

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Kevin S. Willis

Apropos of the previous post on torture, I might briefly point you at this piece on Marketplace, featuring the Freakonomics guys, Steven Dubner and Steven Levitt. He briefly discusses the drop in violent crime over the past 20 years, but also touches on (too briefly for me) what a peaceful utopia we live in now–and have lived in throughout the 20th century–compared to most of the rest of human history.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/10/04/the-decline-and-fall-of-violence/

Or just go straight to the Podcast by clicking here.

I loved the anecdote from Pepys’ diary, where Pepys observes a general being drawn and quartered before going out to a pub and having some oysters.

Don’t miss the Q&A with Steven Pinker, author of the book The Better Angels of our Nature, which inspired this particular piece.

Briefly, the reason crime is down in the past 20 years: more people in prison, the decline of crack cocaine, and the legalization of abortion. Discuss.

Also, pertaining to our discussion the other day about the limits of common sense, they touch on the fact that crime has fallen in concert with a rise and poverty and our bad economy and that, in fact, that’s almost always what happens.

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Questions about Torture

Posted on October 6, 2011 by nsullivan12

A great deal of the debate about torture focuses, understandably, on whether torture, or enhanced interrogation, or what one will, is legal. Apart questions about legality, the practice of torture raises a number of interesting questions.

Do We Know Very Much About Torture?
As far as I know, we don’t know a great deal about torture. I don’t doubt that there are studies, but I find it hard to believe that there is, at present, good reliable research on torture. Given ethical concerns, I don’t see how experiments could be conducted to try to determine the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness, of torture.
And that seems to leave us with a host of questions for which we don’t appear to have answers.
Is it reasonable to expect that torture will yield actionable intelligence? Do people often lie under torture? Do people try to mislead interrogators who are torturing them?
Without more information on torture, information which I suspect, we do not have, it’s very difficult to see how a strong case for or against it could be made on the basis of the quality of the information interrogators are likely to extract.

Who Will Torture?
If torture is employed, someone will have to do it. Who? Ethical concerns would, I assume, rule out doctors. Should soldiers do it, CIA employees? Why these persons and not others? How should these people be trained? What kind of programs, if any, need to be set up to produce persons best able to extract information by using torture?

Should Law Enforcement Torture?
Assuming that torture is beneficial, should law enforcement be permitted to use it? If torture is beneficial, then why not allow law enforcement to employ that tool? If law enforcement ought not to be given that tool, then why should others be allowed to employ that tool?

How Should Innocent People Who are Tortured Be Compensated?
If torture is employed, innocent and non-innocent people will be tortured just as innocent and non-innocent people will be put to death if the death penalty is employed. How should the innocent, people who were mistaken for enemy combatants, for example, be compensated?

Does Torture Give the Enemy an Incentive to Fight to the Death?
Traditionally, fear of torture at the hands of the enemy is often a reason to avoid capture at all costs, even at the costs of one’s own life. Fear of torture may give an individual an incentive to fight to the death or to take his or her own life. That is not, arguably, a particularly attractive proposition. Enemy combatants who have a reasonable expectation that they will be treated well if they are taken prisoner may not fight as viciously and may be more willing to surrender. Assuming that an enemy less inclined to fight as viciously as possible and more willing to surrender is desirable would torture be detrimental to that goal?

Would Torture Discourage Enemies?
Would torturing prisoners discourage individuals from taking up arms or cause them to act in a less vicious manner? Would individuals interested in doing harm refrain from doing so, or do less harm, if they knew that upon being captured they could expect to be treated harshly?

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It’s a Carnival

Posted on October 6, 2011 by lmsinca

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for a post about “Occupy Wall Street” (jk). I’ve inserted a link here and there and have been looking for the best launching pad to begin a post of my own. I’ve read lots of comments making fun of the protesters or telling them to grow up, get a job, put down the pipe, you know, all the usual. That seems to be the reaction of some people on both sides of the aisle but I don’t think it’s very useful in understanding what’s going on. As these groups grow and spread out across the nation, assuming they do, I think it behooves us to understand what’s behind it and what, if anything, they’re trying to accomplish. I heard a young grad student speak to a local reporter last weekend here in LA and she said something that I’ve been thinking about ever since, which I loosely paraphrase as, we’re talking to each other and listening to each other. We don’t know if anyone else is listening or not and right now we don’t care. I thought that was really interesting for some reason and then this morning Matt Stoller authored a piece that explained what she meant without hearing her say it.

What do the people at #OccupyWallStreet actually want? What are their demands? For many people, this is THE question.

So let me answer it. What they want… is to do exactly what they are doing. They want to occupy Wall Street. They have built a campsite full of life, where power is exercised according to their voices. It’s a small space, it’s a relatively modest group of people at any one time, and the resources they command are few. But they are practicing the politics of place, the politics of building a truly public space. They are explicitly rejecting the politics of narrow media, the politics of the shopping mall. To understand #OccupyWallStreet, you have to get that it is not a media object or a march. It is first and foremost, a church of dissent, a space made sacred by a community. But like Medieval churches, it is also now the physical center of that community. It has become many things. Public square. Carnival. Place to get news. Daycare center. Health care center. Concert venue. Library. Performance space. School.

Few people, though an increasing number daily, have actually taken the time to go through a general assembly, to listen to what the people at #OccupyWallStreet actually want. General assemblies are the consensus-oriented group conversations at the heart of the occupations, where endlessly repeating the speaking of others is the painstaking and frustrating way that the group comes to make decisions.

There’s no electronic amplification allowed in Zuccotti Square. So the organizers have figured out an organic microphone system. A speaker says a half a sentence, everyone in earshot repeats, until the whole park can hear that half a sentence. Then the speaker says another half a sentence.

I felt completely included as part of a community forum even though I had not been a speaker. But what I realized is that the act of listening, embedded in the active reflecting of what the speaker was saying, created a far richer conversational space. Actually reflecting back to one another what someone just said is a technique used by therapists, and by pandering politicians. There is nothing so euphoric in a community sense as truly feeling heard. That’s what the general assembly was about, not a democracy in the sense of voting, but a democracy in the sense of truly respecting the humanity of everyone in the forum. It took work. It took patience. But it created a communal sense of power.

The premise of their politics is that #OccupyWallStreet isn’t designed to fit into your TV or newspaper. Nothing human really is, which is why our politics is so utterly deformed. It’s why they don’t want to be “on message” – what kind of human society can truly be reduced to a slogan? I’m not sure I agree with their political premise. But in the carnival they have created, in the liveliness and beauty and art and fun and utter humanity of it all, they make a damn good case.

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Thursday Thinking – Monty Hall’s Dilemma

Posted on October 6, 2011 by ScottC

Imagine you find yourself transported back in time to the 1970’s and an appearance on Monty Hall’s Let’s Make a Deal, and Monty has just selected you as a contestant. He shows you three doors and assures you that the day’s grand prize is sitting behind one of those doors. If you pick the correct door, the prize is yours. After you pick door number 1, Monty then opens door number 3 to reveal nothing behind it. He then offers you another choice…stick with your original door or switch choices to door number 2. What should you do?

(from Mike)
I hope Scott doesn’t mind my adding to his post. Here’s a link where you can play the game yourself, with both Scott’s and Mark’s scenarios (whether Monty knows where the prize is or not).

Three Door Monty

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Two Deaths

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Arcanaut

I was just working on a belated post about the killing of al Awlaki. In short, I wanted to add my two cents to any general conversation and say I don’t think the slippery slope argument is really relevant. If a man can be targeted in an area where his activities put him beyond the reach of arrest and legal proceedings, that doesn’t make it automatic that the president can and will start killing people at will on U.S. soil where they actually are subject to arrest. These are wholly different situations. And the second point, one the lawyers here might have something to say about, is that as important as the rule of law and due process are, the law itself is a construct based on our need to have rules that allow us to function together. Judges exist because someone has to say what the law means in a given situation; it’s not transparent. And in situations where there is no legal recourse–including no judges–someone else has to make calls like the one about al Awlaki. We can argue about what the calls should be, but they shouldn’t just be made on an sbsolutist notion of the law itself.

I’m shortening what I meant to say on that because I wanted to put in a note about Steve Jobs and his death. I’ve not heard it mentioned often, if at all, but the technological innovations of the last quarter century, particularly those spearheaded by Jobs, have made the world a far more manageable place for the disabled, the aging, and those with various degrees of infirmity. For people who don’t have what we would consider “normal” access to the world, the virtual world has becomes actual due to these changes. I can think of so many examples, including many quite personal ones, but my favorite concerns my friend Gogi who was born with cerebral palsy and is now in her forties. Two things transformed her life. The first was her electric wheelchair that, combined with ramps and curb cuts, meant she could physically go where she wanted to go on her own. The second was the home computer that meant she could travel the world with a few keystrokes. It was a remarkable change for her. It’s been remarkable for all of us.

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