On torture

Digby reports on torture used by the CIA, linking to Jane Mayer's story in the New Yorker, The Black Sites as well as Marty Lederman's commentary. These are not isolated incidents; torture is a matter of policy:

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'

No one should be the least bit surprised by this disclosure.

I predict that the president elected in 2008, a Democrat, will not take the steps necessary to reasonably ensure that such torture no longer takes place. Rather, he or she will take only token measures, without teeth, without criminal accountability, and without protection for those who witness or expose torture, ensuring that torture again becomes hidden.

I make this prediction because the two leading Democratic contenders are sitting Senators—in the majority party—and they have done nothing whatsoever to expose the torture that has been known for years to exist, done nothing whatsoever to identify those responsible and hold them criminally or even politically accountable, and, by not opposing the Military Commissions Act with sufficient vigor (when they were at the time in the minority party), and not attempting to repeal the MCA in the majority, colluded in the legalization of torture.

FISA, etc. ad nauseam

I'm very depressed. The Democratic party has shown its true colors with the passage of the FISA amendment, legalizing warrantless wiretapping of everyone on the say-so of the Attorney General. This action is pathetic not just from a progressive, liberal, pro-civil-rights perspective, but also from a partisan political perspective: It actually hurts the short- and long-term prospects of the Democratic party.

The Democratic party simply cannot win as the Republican-lite party. The Democrats will probably take the White House and Congress in 2008 no matter what they do, but they've handed the Republican party enough ammunition and control over the political narrative that the 2008 administration and Congress will be completely ineffectual. The Republicans will take Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012.

Specifically we will see from the 2008 Democratic government:

• Continued occupation of Iraq
• Military hostilities against Iran
• Corporatist control of the mass media
• Loss of more primary manufacturing capacity
• Erosion of the middle class
• Collapsing housing prices
• Devaluation of the currency
• No substantial change to the employer-insurance health care system
• More working Americans without health insurance or adequate health care
• More concentration of wealth in the top 1% and even more in the top 0.1%
• More erosion of basic constitutional civil liberties
• Update: more erosion of abortion rights

We will not see:

• Repeal of FISA or its amendments
• Repeal of the Military Commissions Act
• Restoration of habeus corpus
• Universal or even near-universal health care
• Cessation of torture as military and police policy
• Any substantial action on global warming
• Ratification of the Kyoto treaty or any comparable international action
• Any high-level member of the Bush administration being held to criminal account

I'm not confident enough actually predict it, but I would not be at all surprised if the 2008 Democratic government did something egregiously evil (in addition to war with Iran and Iraq): Perhaps the first use of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction, some sort of mass detention of undesirables, or maybe outright arrest and imprisonment of progressive political dissenters. Note that Democratic presidents have done all of these things in the past.

Progressives will receive absolutely nothing of value from the 2008 Democratic government. Nothing.

Yes, a concerted progressive mass movement could, in theory, turn things around. However, this progressive mass movement simply does not exist. None of the elements are in place. Even if we knew exactly how to create a mass movement (and no one actually does knows how; mass movements coalesce unpredictably) it's far too late to have any short-term effect from a standing start.

The elements of a mass movement are in place, awaiting only some mysterious trigger to coalesce into a formidable political force. This mass movement is, of course, the extremist Christian conservative movement. They have a well-oiled propaganda machine, a consistent ideology, unfalsifiable hope, depth of leadership, and a dedicated core mass membership. They await, I think, only some severe crisis to galvanize the whole mass to directed activity. The possibility of actual civil war is, while not inevitable as are my predictions above, is anything but remote or unlikely.

We're pretty much doomed. We're too big of a country to even hope for a UK-style graceful decline. It's going to be a catastrophic failure, and our only realistic "hope" is to somehow avoid nuclear Armageddon.

The problem is that the institutions we've built over the past two or three hundred years are all failing. The press, the divided government, the economic elites, the middle class, the courts, everything. Our scientific establishment will be the last to fall, but its present erosion should be obvious.

I suspect that the democratic institutions of the United States never were particularly strong; we have been lulled by two all-too-easy expansionist economic opportunities: The conquest of most of (and the best part of) the North American continent, and our status as the sole colonial and industrial power immediately following WW II. Easy wealth hides a lot of flaws; now that wealth and economic expansion is no longer easy, our institutions are crumbling at the first hint of difficulty, not even true austerity. Our souls have not, like the Europeans, been seared by a millennium of brutal warfare, nor are we small enough to come to anything like a true political consensus.

We're facing either a brutal civil war or a generation-long, hideously painful Soviet Union-style general decline until we collapse into anarchy. And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that the 2012 Republican president (or some Dr. Strangelovian crazed general) turns out to be an Armageddon-loving Christianist and nukes the world on general principles.

My friends, we are well and truly fucked.

Fault and free will

Russell Blackford writes sensibly on free will and moral responsibility.

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with an operational definition of "free will" sufficient for me to not just infer whether someone else has it but determine whether I myself—with my privileged epistemic access to my own mental states—have free will. Until such time, the whole area of discussion bores me in the same sense that higher order truths about chmess bore me. The boredom is even more fundamental: At least chmess is well-defined; free will is entirely mystical.

Richard Dawkins mentioned the absurdity of Basil Fawlty punishing his car. He initially gets it wrong, but in a perfect example of a scientifically-minded person, actually (gasp!) changes his mind and strikes closer to the mark. It makes more sense to view ethics in terms of finding and correcting faults rather than assigning deserts to ultimate responsibility:

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil's reaction is absurd, not because the car—subject to the laws of physics and without any sort of free will, well- or ill-defined—does not bear ultimate responsibility for its failure, but rather because hitting a car with a branch is an utterly ineffective way to correct whatever fault prevents it from starting.

In a similar manner the discussion of "free will" as it pertains to ethics and responsibility, and the related idea of associating deserts to inherently wrong actions of an ultimately responsible moral agent is absurd not because it is false but because it is ineffective. Since free will is a mystical, unfalsifiable concept, it is possible that even a car has free will. It doesn't matter, though. Even if the car "chose" to fail, its just desert is to have the failure fixed.

Of course, people are not cars or computers. In addition to the quantitative difference—people are considerably more complicated—there's also a qualitative difference. We can talk coherently about what is or is not a fault in a car because there's a privileged position—outside the car's own frame of reference—to discuss what does or does not constitute a fault. A car is a slave to its owner's will: It is good if it performs the jobs the human owner expects of it, and bad if it does not do so. This principle holds even if the owner has unrealistic expectations. If the owner wants to fly, any car will be bad, but it is still the car's fault, and the owner is perfectly rational to get rid of the car by any convenient means—even to melting it down—and obtain an airplane.

Even if we rationally reconstruct our ethical dialog about human beings to be about correcting faults rather than assigning deserts, there is no uniform privileged position about which to talk about what does and does not constitute fault in human beings; or, rather, there are six billion individually privileged positions with no objective way to choose between them.

The problem of objectively determining what is faulty is not created by the fault paradigm; it's isomorphic to the problem of objectively determining what is inherently wrong about an agent with ultimate responsibility. The fault paradigm simply exposes our objectivist hypocrisy: What any person considers either a fault or inherently wrong in another is based on whether the other does or does not conform to the will of the speaker. Objective morality does not escape this basis in will, it merely obfuscates it.

Under the fault paradigm, the mystical notion of "free will" becomes irrelevant. It's not necessary to determine ultimate responsibility, only proximate causal responsibility, a coherent and feasible task. Our goal is not to determine objective ethics, find who or what is ultimately responsible, and praise or persecute it for its inherent ethical quality; our goal is merely to identify and correct faults.

The fault paradigm is just a start. We have to figure out how to determine what is faulty, how to identify faults, and how to correct them. Additionally, we must investigate why we don't currently use the fault paradigm. I'll address these issues in future essays.

Point and laugh

Dangerous nonsense, by Christopher Brookmyre:

The notion that faith - belief in spite of an absence of proof or even in the face of compelling contrary evidence - is a form of mental and moral fortitude needs not merely to be challenged, but to be given the full point-and-laugh treatment, so that we can see afresh how this absurdity deserves ridicule rather than reverence.

(h/t to Butterflies and Wheels)

Onward Christian Soldiers

Kathleen Johnson, Military Director for American Atheists, currently serving on active duty in Iraq, says:

Thought you'd be interested in this report of the first-ever meeting of Atheist service-members in Iraq under the umbrella of the MAAF-Iraq chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. This meeting was put together by the same young MAAF member who recently had his second letter published in the Stars and Stripes.

One of our members, a young Atheist enlisted soldier, thought he would like to see if he could generate some interest in MAAF meetings at his Forward Operating Base (FOB) here in Iraq (not the base I'm at, by the way). He got things coordinated and started hanging flyers, and after weeks of having to re-hang his flyers almost daily because some vandal kept tearing them down, he finally succeeded in having a small MAAF meeting. I wasn't there because the meeting wasn't on my FOB, but I knew he was holding it and was expecting to hear from him after the meeting. Keep in mind that this young soldier did everything right - he went through the Chaplain's office and jumped through all the hoops it takes to legally hold meetings that are religiously or philosophically based. Four soldiers attended this meeting - all of them very junior enlisted soldiers with the exception of one Major (an O-4), who claimed to be a "freethinker".

Well, to make a very long story a little shorter, the Major turned out to be a fundamentalist Christian who verbally berated the other attendees, accused them of plotting against Christians and disrespecting soldiers who have died protecting the Constitution, and threatened them with punishment under the UCMJ for their activities (said they were "going down") and said he would do whatever it took to shut the meetings down. Keep in mind that by this point, he had two of the attendees (one soldier fled when the shouting started) standing at the position of attention so that he could yell at them, berate them, and humiliate them. This apparently went on for several minutes at which time the Major shut down the meeting by saying he wasn't some "push-over Chaplain" and that he would not tolerate the meetings to continue.

The young MAAF member who hosted the meeting is absolutely freaked out about what happened, but he said he's going to continue with the meetings and isn't going to be bullied by the prayer warriors. I've advised him to immediately notify the Chaplain sponsor of what happened to get guidance while I try to figure out what to do next. I should hear something back from him tonight sometime and there's even a small possibility I might be able to score a mission to his FOB and attend one of his meetings in the next few weeks (if I do, I'll meet with the Chaplain in person).

As for immediate action, he's going to get me the names of his Chaplain sponsor and the name of the officer who disrupted the meeting. My intent right now is to make a formal report to the most senior Chaplain I can find along with possibly an Equal Opportunity complaint against the officer if we can get him fully identified. I may not be eligible to make that complaint because I wasn't there, but I can at least smooth the way for this young troop to make one if he elects to. At the very least, I can make the EO office formally aware of what happened there.

More info will follow when I get it, but right now, feel free to disseminate this information since I've intentionally sanitized it for names and locations. I will be happy to forward any words of support to him if they get mailed to my milatheist@aol.com address - he could really use some encouragement right now, I think.

Quotation of the day

"I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!" [emphasis added]

Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

Myers vs. McGrath

PZ Myers takes Alister McGrath apart.

This is it, folks: This is the absolute best the religious can do, and McGrath is the Black Knight to Myers' and Dawkins' King Arthur. "All right, we'll call it a draw."

Reasoning by analogy

Two times two is four; four times three is twelve
Twelve inches make a ruler
Queen Elizabeth was a ruler
Queen Elizabeth was also a ship
Ships sail in the sea
Fishes swim in the sea
Fishes have fins
Finns fought Russians
Russians are called "Reds"
Fire engines are always rushin'
And that's why fire engines are painted red.

I memorized this when I was about 10; I still remember it. For a guy with a poor memory (what's your name again?) I have some weird things in the mental attic.)

I wanna be like Osama

From Jihad The Musical.

(h/t to Hydra009 at Rants 'n Raves)

Hurting the cause

Infidelis Maximus' criticizes Brian Flemming's endorsement of the video game, Super Columbine Massacre.

Full disclosure: I lived in Littleton, Colorado at the time of the Columbine Massacre; my own children were in middle school, about two miles from Columbine High. I knew (slightly) some of the victims. I've favored, since many years before the massacre, very strict gun control; I consider the idea of unregulated gun ownership for the purpose of self-defense to be patently ridiculous. But this post isn't about Columbine or gun control.

I agree completely with one of Infidelus Maximus's opinions: I think Flemming is completely full of shit to endorse this video game. Regardless of the quality of the game (it appears to be poor), I think the premise itself is in abysmally and unacceptably poor taste.

But at another level, I have to disagree with Maximus: "When our antics spend most of their time on the tasteless side of the fence, we risk alienating the very people we claim to want to reach: the great undecided middle." Maximus clarifies in his comment:

[Brian] risks alienating the very people he hopes to reach with some of his work. If we truly want the world at large to see our side on the issues (religion, politics, whatever), common sense tells us we need to stop doing things that are inherently and patently offensive to most of them.

I think Maximus's stance here is wrong on a couple of levels.

I don't see atheism as at all a mass movement. The lack of belief in God is simply too thin around which to base any sort of movement. The "mass movement" I'm interested in is rationality, truth and the freedom to learn the truth. I think it's good to be an atheist, but that's not why I'm an atheist; I'm an atheist because I think the truth is good, and atheism is true (or so I've concluded).

I don't think it's polite or civilized to be gratuitously or insincerely outrageous or shocking. Not because doing so hurts any particular cause, but rather because gratuitous outrageousness hurts civilized discourse in general. But I see no evidence—and, more importantly, Maximus presents no argument—that Flemming is being gratuitous or insincere. Offensive, yes; Stupid, perhaps; gratuitous, no.

Maximus appears to argue, though, that we should not risk alienating the "undecided middle" by discussing topics we know they will find outrageous or shocking. The most charitable interpretation of his remarks appears to invoke the categorical imperative: "When our antics spend most of their time... We regularly drive them..." He thus appears to argue against even broaching too-controversial topics.

I have to disagree.

Slippery-slope arguments are, well, slippery, but I think a slippery-slope argument is warranted here. At what point do we decide an issue is too controversial to even discuss? I'd like to say it's when a controversial position is obviously false, but obviousness is refuted by even the hint of dissent. Should we go by the level of outrageousness? Who decides? Calling belief in God a "delusion" is itself outrageous and shocking: Witness how often Richard Dawkins (a soft-spoken man, the model of British politeness) is called strident and even militant.

People in the specifically political sphere—politicians, diplomats lobbyists, political activists, i.e. people who are trying to pass laws or otherwise directly affect the workings of a democratic government—have to be circumspect; their job is to create compromises. But crafting compromises is not our job as ordinary citizens. Our job is to be the ones between whom compromises are crafted. And if we do not sincerely speak our minds, controversial or not, no compromise can serve our interests.

If we have any primary duty as citizens it is not to the polity but to the truth and the sincere expression of our own conclusions about the truth. We have not only a right but a duty to participate fully in the great dialectic that is human discourse. If we're wrong, we deserve criticism for being wrong, but we do not deserve criticism for daring an argument.