Category Archives: Random Blogging

Jean-Luc Was Right

I admit to being a shameless fan of Star Trek, the Next Generation. (Okay–also Deep Space Nine and Voyager..) The series was at its best when it tackled civil liberties issues, and one example that I’ve always remembered was a two-part story about Captain Picard’s capture–and torture–by the Cardassians. Pickard resisted the pain and humiliation as the hero of a show should. Each time the interrogator began a “session,” he would show four lights and ask Picard how many he saw. The “correct” answer was five. At the very end, when his interrogator was once again demanding that Pickard tell him how many lights there were, our hero was rescued. Later, however, as he recounted the experience to the ship’s counselor, he told her that he was about to tell his tormentor he saw five, because by that time he actually DID see five!

Turns out that science supports art in this case.

Wired magazine has an article about a new paper by Shane O’Mara in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that examines the neuroscience of using things like stress positions and abuse to get accurate information out of detainees. He bluntly calls the belief that abuse and torture are effective a form of folk neuroscience that does not conform to what we know about how the brain works.

O’Mara derides the belief that extreme stress produces reliable memory as “folk neurobiology” that “is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence.” The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex — the brain’s centers of memory processing, storage and retrieval — are profoundly altered by stress hormones. Keep the stress up long enough, and it will “result in compromised cognitive function and even tissue loss,” warping the minds that interrogators want to read.

What’s more, tortured suspects might not even realize when they’re lying. Frontal lobe damage can produce false memories: As torture is maintained for weeks or months or years, suspects may incorporate their captors’ allegations into their own version of reality.”

So–even leaving issues of humanity and morality aside, science shows us that torture does not work. It isn’t a question of ends justifying the means–which is an approach specifically rejected by our Bill of Rights in any event. Assuming that “the ends” are the acquisition of reliable data, the means don’t get us there.

Tell me again why Dick Cheney believes we should torture people?

 

What’s the Opposite of Pandering?

As readers of my posts and columns know, I’m no fan of political pandering.

On the other hand, Mayor Ballard’s speech to the Lambda dinner last night wasn’t even the opposite of pandering. The opposite would be some sort of “Sister Soulja” moment–a stern rebuke to someone who is generally a supporter when that person or organization steps out of line.

Ballard managed to avoid both kissing up to the crowd and telling them something they needed to hear. Instead, he delivered a speech that would have been far more appropriate at a Chamber of Commerce event. While he did say “Lambda Legal”–once–he didn’t use the words “gay” or “lesbian” at all.  He didn’t talk about equality, didn’t refer to anything his administration had done or planned to do about issues the gay community finds important (or even arguably relevant). He droned on about taxes and public safety to a crowd that skews liberal on taxes and has reason to be skeptical about the use of police power.

He did include one throwaway line about understanding the importance of the arts, even though he cut arts funding drastically, so perhaps he was dimly aware that an audience of gay and gay-friendly people would have more than its share of arts supporters. Otherwise, he gave a speech that was so far from pandering, it was entirely unconnected to the concerns of his audience. Not only was it irrelevant, it wasn’t even a good speech.

The word that comes to mind is clueless.

Evidence of Conservative Revival–Or Death Rattle

I’ve been in a number of conversations lately debating the meaning of the furious hordes of not-very-well-informed (okay, massively clueless) folks we’ve seen on our television screens, demanding that someone give them their country back. My own take–and I admittedly have deep Pollyanna tendencies–has been that what we are seeing is the death rattle of people who have truly been “left behind”–not by God or Jesus, but by a social paradigm shift that they can neither change nor understand.

Charles Lemos posts an  interview between Bill Moyers and the author of a recent book who seems to agree with my analysis. Here is a transcript of a part of that interview, but you should really read the whole post.

BILL MOYERS: So, if you’re right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television?

SAM TANENHAUS: I’m afraid they’re radicals. Conservatism has been divided for a long time — this is what my book describes narratively — between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We’re seeing the revanchist side.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?

SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that’s based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that’s been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for ‘revenge.’ It’s a politics of vengeance.

And this is a strong strain in modern conservatism. Like the 19th Century nationalists who wanted to recover parts of their country that foreign nations had invaded and occupied, these radical people on the right, and they include intellectuals and the kinds of personalities we’re seeing on television and radio, and also to some extent people marching in the streets, think America has gotten away from them. Theirs is a politics of reclamation and restoration. Give it back to us. What we sometimes forget is that the last five presidential elections Democrats won pluralities in four of them. The only time the Republicans have won, in recent memory, was when George Bush was re-elected by the narrowest margin in modern history, for a sitting president. So, what this means is that, yes, conservatism, what I think of, as a radical form of conservatism, is highly organized. We’re seeing it now– they are ideologically in lockstep. They agree about almost everything, and they have an orthodoxy that governs their worldview and their view of politics. So, they are able to make incursions. And at times when liberals, Democrats, and moderate Republicans are uncertain where to go, yes, this group will be out in front, very organized, and dominate our conversation.”

But as the rest of the post makes clear, their numbers–already a minority– will continue decline. Just as every move forward has been followed by a backlash (think about the end of segregation and Jim Crow, equal rights for women, states endorsing same-sex marriage, etc.), these outbursts come from people who–however dimly–recognize that they are on the losing side of history.

Comments

I think Jonathan Chait has it just about right.

If health care passes, will it be a grand historical achievement, or a crushing disappointment? The answer, I predict, will be both. The American health care system is an indefensible morass of waste and cruelty. The distance between the status quo and the ideal is therefore so vast that we could—and probably will—end up with a reform that massively improves the system, while coming nowhere close to the ideal.

If You Are Wondering….

why America can’t seem to make sane public policy, Steve Benen has a clue.

Kate Sheppard reported today on some recent Barton comments about climate change and wind power.

“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.”

 

Something to think about, indeed.

Barton is, of course, the same lawmaker who recently suggested that humans will “adapt” to climate change because we can “get shade.”

And as Matthew DeLong reminds us, Barton was, up until a couple of years ago, the lawmaker House Republicans made the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”