(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

It seems to have been accepted as the norm that the US has the right to declare that certain countries are free fire zones in which they can kill civilians, irrespective of whether they are young, old, men women, or children, purely because they happen to be in the vicinity of people the US has deemed its enemies. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen are now among countries where the US sends unmanned drones on assassination missions that often go wrong and result in innocent people being blown to bits. Obama has been the most enthusiastic user of such methods. If you live in any of those countries, you run the risk of being gunned down by US forces at any time.

Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported back in January that:

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.
…
Obama has ordered a dramatic increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama’s administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush, according to a military officer who tracks the attacks.

Obama also has sent U.S. military forces briefly into Somalia as part of an operation to kill Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan sought in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya.
…
In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.

Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests,” said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, “it doesn’t really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them,” a senior administration official said. “They are then part of the enemy.” (my italics)

The US government has been murdering people as a matter of policy for a long time but it used to be done covertly because it used to be considered an illegal and shameful act. Older people can remember the uproar that greeted the revelations in 1975 of the Church Committee when the government’s assassination policy was revealed. But now it is quite brazen in its assertion that it has the right to kill people at will.

The latest outrage that is passing almost unnoticed is an order by the Obama administration authorizing the ‘capture or killing’ of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Islamic cleric who is supposed to be the person who inspired and the Christmas day underwear bomber as well as the army major who murdered his fellow soldiers at an army base in the US. Awlaki is a US-born citizen who is now believed to be in Yemen.

In other words, the US government has decided that it has the right to simply murder anyone, even US citizens, whom the president has decided should be murdered. As Glenn Greenwald says:

Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?

Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That’s just the essence of war. That’s why it’s permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they’re captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we’re talking about here. The people on this “hit list” are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration — like the Bush administration before it — defines the “battlefield” as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That’s quite a power for an American President to claim for himself.

The ability to throw someone into secret prisons without trial and indefinitely deprive them of all their rights and even subject them to torture isn’t enough for Obama. He has now asserted that he has the omniscience to find people guilty and impose the death sentence on them without any trial or giving the victims the right to any defend themselves or to even know the charges against them. If King Obama says someone should be murdered, that is it. All the might and power of the US can now be used to simply gun down that person in the street anywhere in the world and no questions will be asked.

POST SCRIPT 1: Ron Paul on shredding the constitution

POST SCRIPT 2: Talk

Today (Monday, April 19) at 7:45pm I will be talking to Case people about my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom in the 5th floor Library in the Clocktower building of The Village at 115.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Yesterday, I wrote about the killing of a family of five people, including two pregnant women and a teenager, and the attempted cover up by NATO forces in Afghanistan. It should be noted that the London Times reporter Jerome Starkey reported the story of killings and cover-up in Afghanistan more than a month ago, saying that “A Times investigation suggests that Nato’s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading” but there was a lack of interest by the US media in reporting these stories

That is par for the course. The US news media rarely has the kind of inquisitiveness or the healthy skepticism of official versions of events that you would expect journalists to have and continues to report the military’s versions of events as facts, at least initially, unless they happen to have reporters actually on or near the site when the event occurred. They usually wait until the real information is unearthed and publicized by either the foreign media or independent groups like WikiLeaks before starting to question the official story and investigate for themselves.

For those who read the foreign media, the number of cases of large scale or brutal civilian deaths covered up by the US military becomes staggering. The use of unmanned drones to strike at targets, which has escalated greatly under Obama, has resulted in numerous cases of civilian casualties. Take this story that reports that up to 90 people, 60 of them children, were killed in an airstrike in Azizabad in Afghanistan on August 22, 2008. First the US said only seven civilians were killed, then much later acknowledged that figure to 33.

Tom Engelhardt describes the event and the cover up:

As many as 76 members of a single extended family were killed, along with its head, Reza Khan. His compound seems to have been specially targeted… The incident in Azizabad may represent the single deadliest media-verified attack on civilians by U.S. forces since the invasion of 2001. Numerous buildings were damaged. Many bodies, including those of children, had to be dug out of the rubble. There may have been as many as 60 children among the dead. The U.S. military evidently attacked after being given false information by another tribal leader/businessman in the area with a grudge against Khan and his brother.
…
Given the weight of evidence at Azizabad, the on-site investigations, the many graves, the destroyed houses, the specificity of survivor accounts, and so on, this might have seemed like a cut-and-dried case of mistaken intelligence followed by an errant assault with disastrous consequences. But accepting such a conclusion simply isn’t in the playbook of the U.S. military or the Bush administration.

Instead, in such cases what you regularly get is a predictable U.S. narrative about what happened made up of outlandish claims (or simply bald-faced lies), followed by a strategy of stonewalling, including a blame-the-victims approach in which civilian deaths are regularly dismissed as enemy-inspired “propaganda,” followed — if the pressure doesn’t ease up — by the announcement of an “investigation” (whose results will rarely be released), followed by an expression of “regrets” or “sorrow” for the loss of life — both weasel words that can be uttered without taking actual responsibility for what happened — never to be followed by a genuine apology.

Another horror story is the execution-style killing in December by NATO soldiers of eight handcuffed Afghan children aged 11 to 18. Once again, the US media accepted at face value the US military’s initial statement that these were members of a bomb-making ring, and it took the foreign media (again Jerome Starkey this time in The Scotsman) to investigate and report what had actually happened and get NATO to admit two months later that the dead were actually students.

Given the penchant of the US government for secrecy and cover-ups, is it any wonder that the independent news media are seen by the US government as an enemy? We are also partly to blame because we don’t seem to want to hear this kind of bad news, unless the victims are Americans. As Engelhardt says:

This sort of “collateral damage” is an ongoing modern nightmare, which, unlike dead Amish girls or school shootings, does not fascinate either our media or, evidently, Americans generally. It seems we largely don’t want to know about what happened, and generally speaking, that’s lucky because the media isn’t particularly interested in telling us. This is one reason the often absurd accounts sometimes offered by the U.S. military go relatively unchallenged — as, fortunately, they did not in the case of the incident at Azizabad.

As a result of the recent WikiLeaks video, the US has now trained its guns (at least metaphorically for now) on it, stating that the organization is a threat to national security and is trying to find out who is leaking to them so that they can punish them as a means of discouraging further leaks. Dan Froomkin writes:

Just last month, WikiLeaks posted the results of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation into none other than WikiLeaks itself. The report determined that WikiLeaks “represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.”

The report also concludes, highly suggestively: “Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the Web site that they will remain anonymous. The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.” (my italics)

You can see the secret US memo on how to destroy WikiLeaks at WikiLeaks.

The threats by the US military against WikiLeaks are not to be taken lightly. During the Iraq war, we saw how they viewed Al Jazeera as a ‘hostile’ force. Al Jazeera bureau offices in both Baghdad and Kabul were bombed by US forces even though the news organization had given its coordinates to the Pentagon, and the bombing of their head offices in Qatar was also discussed. The two people who leaked the memo of George Bush and Tony Blair discussing this last option were put on secret trial for violating Britain’s infamous Official Secrets Act, and were sentenced to prison for six and three months.

Any American news organization that questions the innate decency and goodness of the US government and the military risks being harshly attacked as ‘not patriotic’ or not ‘supporting the troops’. This is how a propaganda system is created. It is interesting that a few US media organizations (such as the Associated Press and the Hearst and Gannett groups) actually provide support for WikiLeaks, presumably because as a way of getting around the self-censorship they seem to feel obliged to practice. Once WikiLeaks publishes something, the media then has some cover to follow up on the story. As the editor of WikiLeaks says, “We take the hardest publishing cases in the world and deal with them and by doing that we create a space behind us that admits other people to successfully publish.”

As the London Independent points out, what is amazing is that WikiLeaks has a staff of just five people and yet has produced “more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years” and the article provides some background on who is behind it and how it manages this.

This is why organizations like WikiLeaks and Antiwar.com need our support. Without them, we would be at the complete mercy of the sanitized reporting of mainstream American media as they faithfully repeat the lies of the US government and the military.

Please support WikiLeaks. There are many ways to do so, not just with financial contributions.

POST SCRIPT: Stephen Colbert on the WikiLeaks video

He first talks about the video, the second clip has an edited interview with Julian Assange, and the third clip has the full, unedited interview. The full interview is well worth watching.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'WikiLeaks Military Video

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Julian Assange

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Exclusives – Julian Assange Unedited Interview

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

The WikiLeaks video I posted yesterday of the killing of Iraqis will have shocked all but the most hardened people. Most Americans, even if they think the killings were wrong, are likely to write this off as the actions of a few rogue elements because they cannot bear to think that ‘we’ can do bad things, so indoctrinated are they by the myth of America’s essential goodness that uniquely sets them apart from the rest of the world. They do not seem to realize that people are pretty much the same the world over and this kind of thing is the inevitable result of sending large numbers of soldiers to fight in foreign countries for extended periods of time. The entire population eventually becomes seen as the enemy and atrocities against civilians become routine. The repetition of this phenomenon is so drearily predictable that it is hardly worthwhile to list them.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I want to interrupt the series of posts on disbelieving priests to switch to politics, to comment on a shocking video that surfaced last week that some of you might have seen. To give you some background, on July 12, 2007 about a dozen Iraqis, including two journalists who worked for the Reuters news agency, were killed by the US military in a Baghdad suburb. The New York Times dutifully reported the military’s version of the events.

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

This event passed unnoticed since it seemed like just another routine battle taking place in a war zone. The only noteworthy item was that two journalists were among the dead, though since they were not American or western journalists, very few people in the US cared.

Two weeks after the attack, the US military privately showed Reuters officials some portions of a video taken from one of the attack helicopters but they refused to release the entire video of the incident despite repeated requests under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). The organization WikiLeaks, that is dedicated to the public releasing of information, obtained the video, decrypted it, and released it to the public. If you have not seen this video, you should, although it is very disturbing.

(The above is an edited 17-minute version. You can see the full unedited 37 minute video here. The White House has acknowledged that the video is genuine. The US military says, incredibly, that it can’t find its own copy of the video.)

For those who cannot watch videos or cannot stomach people being gunned down, the video shows a group of men wandering around in an open courtyard, talking to each other and on their cell phones. They seemed unconcerned about a US military attack helicopter circling overhead. The gunner in the helicopter then unleashed a sudden deadly barrage of fire, killing and wounding almost everyone as they scurried for cover. When later a van comes along and tries to pick up the wounded, fire is unleashed again, killing yet more people and wounding two children who were in the van.

During it all, the people in the helicopter seem gleeful, chuckling over the deaths and congratulating each other, even audibly hoping that a crawling wounded man would make what could be interpreted as a hostile action so that they could shoot him again, laughing when a US military vehicle later went over a dead body, and even being dismissive when they discover that children had been among those shot in the van. A camera and telephoto lens carried by the photographer is mistaken by the gunner for a grenade launcher, a surprising error for trained soldiers to make.

As Dan Froomkin writes:

None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon’s initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.

Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.

In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.

“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.

A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: “Come on, let us shoot!”

Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.

And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids to a battle.”

The helicopter crew, which was patrolling an area that had been the scene of fierce fighting that morning, said they spotted weapons on members of the first group — although the video shows one gun, at most. The crew also mistook a telephoto lens for a rocket-propelled grenade.

This video has been seen widely worldwide and as expected has caused outrage. But the US media, ever mindful of its role to hide the truth of war from Americans, has either ignored the story or has downplayed it or has blacked out the more disturbing images. Even when it has covered the story, it is as usual accompanied by the usual apologias, statements of regret, the world weary clichés of the ‘fog of war’, ‘war is hell’, etc. rolling smoothly over the tongue, by now repeated so often as to be almost unconscious. And of course portraying as naïve idealists those who think that even a legal war does not justify the murdering of people as they go about their lives.

Is it any wonder that Americans are always surprised when anti-American violence erupts around the world and are so easily persuaded that it must have irrational causes exemplified by fatuous statements such as that ‘they hate us for our freedoms’?

POST SCRIPT: Julian Assange is interviewed on Al Jazeera

The Wikileaks editor talks about the video and other killings and why we can believe that the video is genuine.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I have so far not commented on the Tiger Woods affair. While I enjoy salacious gossip as much as the next person and have followed the scandal in its general outlines, it is ultimately not a story with any deep significance. It is essentially a private matter for him and his family to deal with.

As far as I could tell, even before this story broke, Woods seemed like a calculating machine, using his skills and carefully controlling his image to rack up lucrative endorsements. He never used his celebrity status to address any issue of public interest that might be even remotely controversial. Mohammed Ali or George Clooney or the Dixie Chicks he was not. On the few occasions when his mask slipped, he revealed himself to be somewhat shallow. He may be a great golfer (a game whose appeal I find highly elusive) but that was about it. Basically, he was uninteresting as a person.

What I was curious about was how he would stage his comeback. There was never any doubt that he would and that this too, like every other aspect of his public life, would be carefully plotted and calculated by him and his handlers. His recent emergence and apology, consisting of a statement to a limited group with no questions, has been criticized as too obviously stage-managed but there was one mention of it in a brief report that caught my attention and that was when Woods referred to his religion. He said:

I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it. Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age. People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously I lost track of what I was taught.

Returning to the basic principles of Buddhism is not the normal statement of repentance that one is used to hearing from disgraced public figures in the US. Typically, they fall back on the standard sin-and-redemption trope of Christianity, saying that they know they have sinned against god because of their human weakness but have now, thanks to Jesus, seen the light, are truly sorry, and started a new life. This approach has a solid record of success. Max Blumenthal’s book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party describes case after case where prominent Republican and conservative public figures, the very people who loudly condemn others whom they felt were deviating from the path of Christian morality (such as sex outside marriage, homosexuality, blasphemy, pornography, abortion, unwed parenthood, and teen pregnancy, etc.) were those who, after getting caught with their pants down indulging in those very same acts, have been forgiven and received back into the bosom of their Christian followers after making that kind of apology. It seems almost like there is a set script that everyone follows, hitting all the same notes.

It seems like evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the US can’t get enough of the redeemed sinner storyline, even if it seems patently insincere to the unbiased observer. Why is this so? Maybe it is because, as Gregory Paul argues in a recent study titled The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions, increased religiosity seems to correlate with the kind of behavior that these people condemn as immoral. He says that, “conservative religious ideology apparently contributes to societal dysfunction”. Paul uses comparative data from many countries and finds that “higher levels of conservative religious practice are associated with elevated levels of racial and ethnic prejudice. The patriarchal nature of traditional evangelical marriage may contribute to high levels of violence and instability, and conservative religious values do not appear to suppress uses of pornography to levels as low as those with more liberal views.” (Thanks to Machines Like Us.)

Blumenthal’s book supports Paul’s thesis and states (p. 68) that “ChristiaNet.com, an evangelical anti-porn group, found in a 2007 survey that 50 percent of evangelical men and 20 percent of evangelical women are addicted to pornography; 37 percent of evangelical pastors… called porn addiction a “current struggle.””

Thus Christians may like the idea of forgiving what they condemn as immoral behavior by fellow Christians because many of them are also indulging in similar behavior themselves, and want to keep open that escape route if their own transgressions are also discovered and revealed.

Fox News personality Brit Hume earlier suggested that Woods’ Buddhism would be a hindrance for his comeback and that he might be better off converting to Christianity.

While Hume seemed to be concerned about how best to restore Woods’s immortal soul to good standing in god’s eyes after the danger he put it in because of his sexual escapades (because we know that the god is deeply obsessed with people’s sex lives) and received some derision for his comments, I think that viewed purely tactically, Hume was right. Woods’ public relations damage control would have been better served prostrating himself before Jesus than appealing to the teachings of Buddhism.

So why didn’t Woods take this tried and true path? Maybe his handlers thought that religious regret, whatever the religion, was sufficient to receive absolution from his fans and thus, more importantly, his sponsors. But if it is later revealed that they tried to make Woods claim to have had a come-to-Jesus moment and he resisted because he truly believed in Buddhism and would not abandon it, that would make him a far more interesting person. It would, at the very least, provide evidence that he cared for something more than making money.

POST SCRIPT: Tiger Woods announces his return to what?

The Tiger Woods story is just perfect for an Onion parody. But be warned that it has very explicit sexual language.

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Recently, President Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was in the news when it was leaked that he had referred to liberal activists who are complaining about Obama’s lack of follow through on his campaign promises as “f—ing retarded.”

While one might think that the real story here is the revelation of the contempt with which the White House views its most passionate supporters, Sarah Palin pre-empted that by once again complaining that her family had been slighted and that Emmanuel should resign for his slur that disparaged people like her son Trig who has Down syndrome. Palin seems to have decided that she can run on a platform of grievances against her family on whose behalf she demands privacy and respect, although it is she that uses them as props, Trig especially, and puts them forward in the public eye whenever it suits her purposes.

She faced some embarrassing moments when Rush Limbaugh, one of the key de-facto leaders of the Republican Party and before whom all Republicans must grovel, also used the term ‘retard’ repeatedly, but she tried to brush that off by saying that Limbaugh’s usage was acceptable because it was ‘satire’. Sometimes it seems to me that Palin actually enjoys being ridiculed.

The story developed even more legs when an episode of the animated TV program Family Guy (a comedy show that no one can accuse of sensitivity and good taste) had the son take out a girl with Down syndrome who describes herself as the daughter of a former governor of Alaska. (You can see the clip here.) The Palin outrage machine once again roared into the red zone.

But while I think Palin is in serious danger of further trivializing herself and being seen as a perpetual whiner if she keeps up this high volume campaign against slights from even cartoon TV shows, she does have a point that the casual use of words like ‘retard’ as insults should be discouraged.

Michael Berube, a professor of American literature who also teaches disability studies and has a child with Down syndrome, is someone on the opposite pole of the political spectrum from Palin but although he does not take offense nearly as easily as Palin does, he points out that it is somewhat unfair to use words like ‘retard’ to compare people who should know better and should be functioning at a higher cognitive level but are not, with people who, for reasons beyond their control, have diminished mental capabilities but yet are often exercising their capacities to the fullest and living exemplary lives. As Berube says, “Many, many morons and retards have very good judgment about some matters, whereas many, many ostensibly intelligent people make bafflingly, excruciatingly bad decisions.”

Many of the terms that are now used derogatorily are (or at least once were) clinical terms of description. As Berube writes:

Do you know any idiots? How about morons, or imbeciles? Retards, perhaps? People riding the short bus?

The first three items were once part of standard terminology in intelligence measurement: “moron” is the most recent of them, having been proposed in the early twentieth century by Henry Goddard. Before the twentieth century, “idiot” and “imbecile” were general insults, as they are today, though they too were once pressed into service as classifications. For those of you who don’t remember those days, “morons” had what we now call “mild” mental retardation, or IQs between 50 and 70; “imbeciles” had what we now call “moderate” mental retardation, or IQs between 26 and 50; and everyone below that threshold, whom we now call people with “severe and profound” mental retardation, were idiots.

A century ago, “Mongoloid idiot,” for example, was not (as so many people think) a slur. It was a descriptive term, a diagnosis.

Berube’s piece made me realize that I should re-evaluate my own occasional unthinking use of the words ‘moron’ and ‘idiot’ and their derivatives. (I never use the word ‘retard’ because that has always seemed to me to be ugly and hateful, reflecting more negatively on the person using it than the person it is directed at.) The question is what word to use as a replacement when one is confronted with people who are behaving in exceptionally stupid ways. Berube suggests that we look for a word that is descriptive of performance rather than capacity. In addition to possible Shakespearean insults such as knaves, gulls, hoodlums, and miscreants (a fuller guide to which can be found here), he also proposes fool, wuss, sap, chump, poltroon, schlemiel, and patsy as alternatives. He finally recommends the word ‘jackass’ as a good substitute. Of course this is a slur on an innocent animal that may be also functioning at a high level given its abilities, but we have to assume that the feelings of jackasses are not hurt, and that those who love jackasses will not take offense either. However, I think I will choose to go with the word ‘fool’ to describe a person, and ‘stupid’ to describe their actions, with the more exotic ones thrown in occasionally for variety.

Perhaps the final word on this should be given to Andrea Fay Friedman, the 39-year old woman who voiced the offending part in the Family Guy episode and, despite having Down syndrome herself, has a full life and active career as an actor and public speaker. In an interview with the New York Times, she manages to make two important points. One is that she thinks Sarah Palin does not have a sense of humor and the other is that she demonstrates with her own life why people with mental disabilities should not be spoken of disparagingly.

As a footnote, the Times made an interesting edit of the interview. One of Friedman’s full answers was:

I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line “I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska” was very funny. I think the word is “sarcasm.”

In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

The NYT eliminated the section in bold. I wonder why. Could it be that they did not want to flip the hair-trigger on Sarah Palin’s outrage machine once again? Too bad. It would have been interesting to see how Palin would have responded to such a sharp criticism from Friedman.

POST SCRIPT: Stephen Colbert on the ‘retard’ issue

Sarah Palin’s double talk that Limbaugh’s use of the word ‘retard’ is acceptable because it is satire was a gift to real satirists like Colbert.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Sarah Palin Uses a Hand-O-Prompter

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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Back in 2006, in a series of posts titled Why we must learn to see ourselves as others see us, I spoke of the dangers that are inherent when any group of people start thinking of themselves as possessed of some mystic virtue that makes them intrinsically better than other people. (See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.)

Unfortunately, political leaders tend to feed that very evil. President Obama, like all presidents and other political leaders before him, repeats as a mantra and without proof that Americans have to be the best in everything. So when he talks to organized labor he will say that American workers are the best in the world, when he talks to soldiers he says that they are the best in the world, and when he speaks to business leaders he says that they are the best in the world. When he talks to high-tech leaders, he says that American inventiveness and ingenuity are unsurpassed. The only place where it is politically safe to criticize America is its educational system. It gets beaten up a lot, which is a little odd when all the things that Americans are supposedly the best at depend on the educational system for their success.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

In any election to any public office in the US, all candidates have to agree that America is the greatest country in the world and its people the greatest people. This has to be asserted without proof or evidence. Even to offer proof or evidence is seen as shameful as not only must a politician take such statements as true, they must take it as so obviously true that it requires no evidence. Anyone who offers proof of any kind immediately becomes suspect as not being a true believer.
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

One place where one hears the argument about the virtues of the Noble Lie is in the case of religion.

Atheists are sometimes criticized for undermining belief in god because some sophisticated religious people feel that even if there is no god, believing in one may serve some good ends by helping people overcome personal adversity, prevent them from doing evil things, and even inspire them to do great things.

Some political thinkers feel that religion plays an important role in maintaining social order and seek to perpetuate religious beliefs even if they themselves are unbelievers. Seneca (circa 4 BCE-65 CE) argued that belief in god is a fraud perpetrated on the public in order to sustain a ruling class: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
[Read more…]

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

As children, we are repeatedly told that we must tell the truth at all times. But despite the indoctrination, all of us lie in small and sometimes big ways because we are weak or because we feel trapped in a situation where lying is the only way to escape without harming ourselves. However, all except pathological liars know that they are doing something wrong when they lie for those and similar self-serving reasons and feel guilty about it.

But while it is generally agreed that truth is preferable to falsehood, the idea that truth is a fundamental virtue that trumps all others does not always hold true. One can easily think of scenarios where lying for immediate tactical advantage is not only not wrong but is actually a virtuous act, say in order to save someone’s life by misdirecting a killer. But most people would agree that apart from such extreme situations, lying is to be avoided.

More difficult situations are those in which no serious harm is threatened but the lie might benefit others. So for example, we might lie to protect a co-worker who might lose her job if we told the truth or people may tell lies to benefit the company they work for because to tell the truth might result in the company being hurt and many people losing their jobs.

But what about in the world of ideas? Is true knowledge always preferable to false beliefs? Some would argue that even here it may be acceptable or even desirable to lie but I feel that this line should not be crossed. All people should be encouraged to seek the truth, even if it may destroy cherished beliefs. Furthermore, the reason that something is false is because either the evidence contradicts it, or the arguments in favor of it don’t make sense, or believing it leads to logical contradictions. Encouraging people to believe in false things is to also encourage them to discount the value of evidence and to abandon their reasoning skills and this can making them easy prey for liars and charlatans and demagogues.

One often hears the case made that believing false things can be beneficial. One can think of many situations where people choose to propagate falsehoods over truth for what they believe are benign or even positive reasons. For example, parents often deliberately tell their children things they know to be false (like the stories about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy) and these are thought to be harmless, because at some point the children are told the truth if they haven’t figured it out for themselves. Even though this deception is probably harmless, when children learn that they were deceived by the people they trust the most, they may become somewhat cynical.

Furthermore, there is the danger that this attitude can be extended to assert that it is acceptable to tell even adults lies ‘for their own good’. Political leaders often fall prey to this temptation, thinking that people cannot handle the truth, that they must do things ‘in the public interest’ that the actual public may not agree with, and the only way to do that is to lie. The trap here is obvious. There is a very thin line that separates telling lies for the benefit of the people being lied to, and telling lies that benefit the liars themselves. It is all too easy for political leaders to think that only they have the wisdom and judgment to understand the complexities of a situation and the action it demands, and treat the public as simpletons who must be fed some bogus story to get them to agree to a pre-determined action.

The war against Iraq was such a case. It was based on falsehoods that were clearly known to be falsehoods by those who took the country into war. Were the leaders self-aware that they were cynically manipulating public opinion in order to achieve crass goals of power and money that they knew the public would not support? Most people would agree that that would be wrong.

But what if the leaders were engaged in what they thought was a ‘Noble Lie’, because they thought they were serving a greater good that the public was too naïve to understand if they were told the truth? I would argue that it would still be wrong. The idea of a Noble Lie depends upon the notion that the people who can deal with the unvarnished truth consist of a small elite, while the mass of people are either incapable of understanding it or are too fragile to handle the truth and thus must be protected from this knowledge.

Such an attitude is condescending and profoundly anti-democratic that feeds on, as well as nourishes, the self-regard of the people who espouse it. Such people invariably think of themselves as part of the elite who can handle the truth and should know it. You never hear people demanding that they be lied to.

Next in the series: The Noble Lie as a deliberate political strategy

POST SCRIPT: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Here is a clip of Jack Nicholson’s speech in the film A Few Good Men, where he argues that a few people must make hard and unpleasant and secret decisions, even if they are criminal, in order to protect the very people who object to such acts. It is a good example of the mentality behind the Noble Lie.