Is the US a nation of secret socialists?

Dan Ariely of Duke Business School is quite ingenious when it comes to devising experiments to determine how people think and what drives their decision making when it comes to economic matters. In his entertaining book Predictably Irrational, he challenged the traditional notion of economists that people are rational actors on the economic stage, making decisions in their own best interest. Instead he argues that people are irrational (i.e., not really thinking things through to get the best result for themselves) but irrational in a predictable way.
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Lawyer jailed for refusing to say Pledge of Allegiance in court

Yes, believe it or not, a judge ordered a constitutional lawyer to jail because he refused to vocalize the Pledge of Allegiance, although he stood while others did so.

Judges do abuse the power they have in their courtrooms on occasion, treating it like their own private fiefdoms, but this is going too far. The Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that children could not be forced to recite the pledge but the judge thinks that adults can?

Managing the media message

Many people may not realize how carefully scripted talk shows are. When we watch people even yell at each other in seemingly spontaneous ways, we are actually watching a carefully planned show. People are selected to appear on these shows based on positions that they will take. So if you want to have a career as a media commentator, it is best if you have a predictable response to the stock issues that the media covers. It is even better if you can say predictable things in unpredictable ways, like Ann Coulter. But woe to you if you are an original thinker or a thoughtful person who actually responds based on the specifics of the situation. You are of no use to the producers of these shows because you are simply too unpredictable. The best way to understand these shows is to think of them as plays in which the actors are allowed to improvise within the limits of the characters that they play.

John Amato provides a revealing look behind the scenes at how the ‘news’ shows set up the guests for their programs, selecting guests who will only say what the producers of the shows want them to say. For one show, the producers sent out an email to someone saying, “Wanted to see if you’re available today at 4:05 for Neil’s show today. The topic is on Obama and his cockiness. We’re looking for someone who will say, yes, he’s cocky and his cockiness will hurt him.” Yes, they can be that specific.

Journalists often ‘work the phones’, as they like to call it, calling up lots of people on their Rolodexes until they have the quotes they need to flesh out the story that they have already written. I have been interviewed on occasion for some news story. When I read the story later, it is always the case that my comments have been selected to fit into a narrative that the writer seemed to have decided upon even before talking to me. The same is true for the ‘person in the street’ interviews. They may interview many, many people to get the quotes they need to drive the pre-ordained narrative.

But in order to ensure that the pre-ordained message gets transmitted, truly original or different or dissenting voices have to be marginalized. Glenn Greenwald describes how that is done:

[I]n our political discourse, the two party establishments typically define what is “sane,” and anyone outside of those parameters is, by definition, “crazy.” “Crazy” is the way that political orthodoxies are enforced and the leadership of the two political parties preserved as the only viable choices for Sane People to embrace. Anyone who tiptoes outside of those establishment parameters — from Ron Paul on the right to Dennis Kucinich on the left, to say nothing of Further Left advocates — is, more or less by definition, branded as “crazy” by all Serious, mainstream people.

The converse is even more perverse: the Washington establishment — which has endorsed countless insane policies, wrought so much destruction on every level, and has provoked the intense hatred of the American citizenry across the ideological spectrum — is the exclusive determinant for what is “sane.”
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While all of that is happening, those whom all Serious, Sane people agree are Crazy — people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul and Alan Grayson — vehemently oppose most if not all of that and try to find ways to expand the realm of legitimate debate and political alliances beyond the suffocating stranglehold of those responsible. So who exactly is Crazy?

You can read more by Greenwald on this topic.

The media is at its worst when it is implicated in wrongdoing. Then it closes ranks and stonewalls in exactly the same way that the government or businesses do. A classic case is when it was revealed that the so-called ‘military analysts’ who gave supposedly ‘objective’ views on the Iraq war were actually being briefed by the Pentagon and paid for promoting a particular view. The news networks knew this and did not reveal the information to their viewers. Even after their lack of forthrightness was revealed, the media did not cover it.

The US is governed by a corrupt and incestuous business (mostly finance sector)-politicians-media oligarchy that is slowly but surely diving the country into the ditch because of its relentless pursuit of private wealth at the expense of the public good. The only silver lining is that all oligarchs are inherently unstable and eventually collapse under the weight of their own greed, as the groups and individual members within it start attacking each other once the public treasury has been thoroughly looted. But while that is going on the general public will suffer.

What were they thinking?

Young people (and by young I mean under 25) often do stupid things. I know because I did stupid things when I was that young, casually taking risks that could have resulted in injury or even death that I would not dream of doing now. I am amazed when I recall my younger self that I could have been so foolish and am thankful that I have survived.

Research supports my thesis that young people are prone to stupid behavior since they find that the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, the part that is responsible for reasoning, planning, and making judgments, does not become fully developed until around the age of 25, which is a good reason for raising the age for granting driving licenses, since driving safely in one act that requires particularly good judgment. As a result of both the research and my own experiences, I tend to be very forgiving of young people’s indiscretions, believing that almost all of them, however irresponsible they seem when they are young, will grow up to be sensible adults.

But while poor judgment can be blamed for things like driving while drunk, performing foolish acts of bravado merely to impress the people around you, walking around in shorts in deep winter, and so on, there are some things that young people do that point to deeper problems than simply poor judgment. I am thinking at this point of the two Rutgers University students (Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both age 18) who allegedly set up a webcam to record Ravi’s roommate Tyler Clementi (also 18) having sex, and streamed the video live on the internet and tweeted their followers to watch. This ended in tragedy when Clementi was so mortified that he committed suicide.

My reaction to this story was sadness at the death and horror at what those two students had done. What were they thinking? How could they not know that what they were doing was deeply wrong? How could they not have a basic moral compass that would tell them that they had completely lost their bearings? After all, this was not even a grey area where reasonable people could disagree about whether the act was appropriate.

The blatantly wrong nature of what was done suggests that it was not merely an act of poor judgment by Ravi and Wei but points to deeper problems, both personal and societal. The personal one is the homophobia involved. Clementi was gay. If he had been having sex with a woman, I think his roommate would not have streamed the video. It is because homosexuality is still viewed as something outside the norm, a cause for teasing, taunting, and tormenting, that the perpetrators felt that what they did was ‘funny’ and that they would not face any repercussions.

The societal problem is that we now live in an age where the boundary between the private and the public has become blurred almost to the point of non-existence. Some people think nothing of freely revealing the most intimate details of their lives to the public on venues such as Facebook and YouTube. Such people are still few but the existence of reality TV has amplified their impact and made it appear as if fame, however fleeting, is sufficient incentive for people to reveal everything about their lives to a voyeuristic audience.

The government is not helping here. It claims that it has the right to snoop into our lives in order to ‘protect us from terrorists’. Businesses also think nothing of harvesting our personal information for commercial use. All these have added to the pervasive sense that people do not have the right to privacy or the expectation that it will be protected.

TV programs in the old Candid Camera mold or people like Sacha Baron Cohen (in his persona as Ali G or Borat or Bruno) have made it seem acceptable to put unsuspecting people in situations in which they say or do embarrassing things and then broadcast the result to the world. And now the internet has made it possible for reality TV or Candid Camera or Cohen wannabees to try their hand at this, not realizing that this is not a harmless prank, that violating people’s privacy is wrong, that there is deep cruelty inherent in their actions, and that the danger is high of things turning out badly. I suspect that this is what lies at the heart of what motivated Ravi and Wei to do what they did.

The harassment that young LGBT people face at the hands of their peers is appalling. And because their knowledge and experience and worldview is so limited, they may think that their entire life is going to be a continuation of their horrible adolescence. It should not be surprising that so many of them commit suicide or are harmed psychologically, with some of them even growing up to be the kinds of hateful closeted anti-gay bigots that keep getting exposed.

Dan Savage has started a great program called It Gets Better aimed at giving hope to young LGBT people that things will improve, to make them aware that if they can weather the tough early years, then as adults life will be much more tolerable. Adults have much more control over their environments, such as where they work and live and whom they interact with, and thus you can avoid the homophobes more easily. I hope Savage’s program takes off and also that we become a society that can deal with sexuality in all its diversity in a mature way.

UN report on the aid flotilla killings by Israel

The expert panel appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to look into the deaths resulting from the Israeli attack on the flotilla of vessels bringing relief supplies to Gaza has issued its report on September 27. You can see my series of posts (scroll down) on this tragedy from June 1 through June 10. Scott Horton at Harper’s has read the report and says, “The persons who prepared this report are eminent figures with no obvious prejudices one way or the other on the Gaza controversy. Their report is a model of clarity and masters an impressive body of evidence.”

Horton flags this excerpt:

The circumstances of the killing of at least six of the passengers were in a manner consistent with an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution. Furkan Dogan and Ibrahim Bilgen were shot at near range while the victims were lying injured on the top deck. Cevdet Kiliçlar, Cengiz Akyüz, Cengiz Songür and Çetin Topçuoglu were shot on the bridge deck while not participating in activities that represented a threat to any Israeli soldier. In these instances and possibly other killings on the Mavi Marmara, Israeli forces carried out extra- legal, arbitrary and summary executions prohibited by international human rights law, specifically article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
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two of the passengers killed on the top deck received wounds compatible with being shot at close range while lying on the ground: Furkan Dogan received a bullet in the face and Ibrahim Bilgen received a fatal wound from a soft baton round (beanbag) fired at such close proximity to his head that parts such as wadding penetrated his skull and entered his brain.

Considering that one of the dead (Furkan Dogan) was a US citizen, the lack of outrage from the Obama administration and the Congress and the silence of the media about the report is noteworthy.

Compare this with the fuss raised about the three Americans held by Iran for crossing into that country illegally, even though there is no indication that they were treated particularly badly and one was released on bail and allowed to leave the country for health reasons. Just imagine if Iran had done to them what Israel did to the people on the Mavi Marmara. We would be at war already.

The difference testifies to the fact that Israel can do what it likes to the US and its citizens or even its armed forces (as in the case of the USS Liberty) without fear of repercussions.