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Rolla Peace News February 9, 2016 |
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================================= Dear Friends:In this newsletter is: 1. NOON VIGIL FOR PEACE: THIS WEEK, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2016 2. CHANGING HEARTS 3. LOOKING FOR A PEACE CANDIDATE 4. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) a) Hillary Never Met a War She Didn't Like b) Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink c) The Stanford Prison Experiment (A Review)
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We vigil for peace in front of the Rolla Post Office THIS THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2016, (and all subsequent Thursdays until peace is established) from Noon to 1:00 PM. Please try to join us. The temperature is predicted to be in the 30s. If you do not feel comfortable standing with us in front of the Post Office, please consider driving by and showing your support for our message by honking your horn and flashing a peace sign. 2. CHANGING HEARTS Ever since Bernie Sanders became a candidate for President, establishment types have been saying he hasn't got a chance, that a vote for Bernie is a vote for the Republicans, that his vision of a government that works for all the people is just pie in the sky and can't ever happen. Bernie has already proved the first statement wrong, virtually tying Hillary Clinton in Iowa, a state primary whose process strongly favors the establishment candidate, and being favored to beat her handily in New Hampshire —we'll find out about that one tonight. The second myth being bandied about might have been reasonable in the case of Ralph Nader vs. Gore and Bush, where Nader ran on a third-party ticket, but Sanders is running as a Democrat, so Democrats will have just one candidate to oppose the Republican, whoever that turns out to be. But it's the third statement that is the most damaging to the hopes of true progressives, and the most untrue. There is no limit to what is possible when people unite their hearts and minds in a common cause, with the intent to have the outcome be for the highest good of all concerned. Hillary Clinton is quoted, in a meeting with Black Lives Matter, as saying “I don't believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.” But, as Bill McKibben put it, she's got it wrong way around. It's the change of hearts that allows those other changes to happen. And that's what Bernie does best. He inspires people, and he cares about them — all of them — and it shows. As for all the mud being slung at him, as the Democratic establishment realizes that he might possibly prevail over their favored one, it just doesn't stick, and tends to make the mudslingers look petty and desperate. Why? Because Bernie is that rare bird: A truly honest politician. Here's Bill McKibben's article, and another one by Michael Winship which sheds some light on why the establishment (both Democrat and Republican) fears Bernie Sanders and his movement. 3. LOOKING FOR A PEACE CANDIDATE If you are in favor of peace in the world (and if you subscribe to this newsletter, you probably are), you aren't going to get it with Hillary Clinton as President. Forget all the crap going around about women sticking together, and Bernie is only doing so well because he's a man. Read this article. If anyone can answer the question “Why would a peace-loving person vote for Hillary Clinton?” I'd like to hear the answer. 4. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org) a) Hillary Never Met a War She Didn't Like b) Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink c) The Stanford Prison Experiment (A Review) HILLARY NEVER MET A WAR SHE DIDN'T LIKE I've been taking flack already for saying that if Hillary Clinton gets the Democratic Party nomination, I'll have a difficult choice to make between the Republican Party nominee, whomever it may be, and Big Bird, whom I voted for four years ago. Jeff Sachs lays out Hillary's disastrous pro-war record and concludes, “Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security.” And then there are the endorsements of some of the world's most evil denizens: Hillary claims she “was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better—better than anybody had run it in a long time.” Kisssinger was responsible for military atrocities from Chile to Vietnam to East Timor to the Middle East and once famously quipped of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War that killed an estimated one million people, “It's a pity both sides can't lose.” As in all wars, both sides did lose. Madeleine Albright in introducing Hillary Clinton remarked, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” and “Young women have to support Hillary Clinton.” This is the same Madeleine Albright who in response to a reporter's question about the killing of 1/2 million Iraqi children, callously quipped, “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” I wonder how the mothers of these children who “paid the price” feel about Albright's remark about “a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” Trevor Timm lays out the reason that I am not so concerned about Bernie Sanders lack of a specific foreign policy. Timm writes, “After a series of disastrous wars overseas, we should be looking for someone who has better ‘judgment’ rather than candidates who have ‘experience’ but are calling for more of the same policies in the Middle East that have led us into the mess we’re in now in the first place.” Right! If nothing else, Bernie has good judgment; and that is what every US administration since Jimmy Carter has lacked. It looks like I may not have to choose between Big Bird and a Republican. With 80% of the vote in, Bernie has received 60% of the vote in the New Hampshire democratic primary. WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE, NOR ANY DROP TO DRINK For weeks I've been calling for the arrest of Rick Snyder and his cronies on charges of domestic terrorism for poisoning the water supply in Flint, Michigan; and asking the question, “How many cities have had their water supplies deliberately poisoned by the Islamic State?” Democracy Now must have seen my posts. They write, “Where the terrorists have failed to mount any attack on a water supply, the Michigan state government has succeeded. In the city of Flint, lead-poisoned water has been piped into homes and offices since 2014, causing widespread illness and potentially permanent brain damage among its youngest residents.” Actually, residents of Flint would be far better off if the Islamic State had poisoned their water. Then we might have rushed to get Flint some emergency potable water instead of denying there was a problem until it could no longer be denied and then holding hearings and investigations. Maybe if our military wasn't so busy bombing and degrading public water supplies in the Middle East, they might have rigged up an emergency water distribution system in Flint. The US Army Corps of Engineers is supposed to be good at that kind of thing. Readers who are familiar with academia might relate to this interview with Marc Edwards, who helped expose the poisoning of Flint's water supply. As you will see from this article there are plenty of Rick Snyder cronies around who need to be charged with domestic terrorism. The government is now supplying bottled water to the residents of Flint — except if you don't have a valid id or you are afraid of being deported or you don't speak or read English. In that case, you can continue to drink poison. The title of this snippet is a famous line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT (A REVIEW) “The real secret of war for those who experience it isn't the visceral knowledge that people can be filthy and horrible, but that you, too, can be filthy and horrible.”Last Tuesday The Stanford Prison Experiment screened in Leach Theatre as part of the Missouri S&T Spring free film festival. The film is a reenactment of Philip Zimbardo's famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment in which he took willing volunteers and designated some as guards and some as prisoners at random. After six days he prematurely ended the experiment because it had gone out of control. The Guards had become increasingly brutal and authoritarian and the prisoners increasingly dehumanized and depressed. The moral (as far as I'm concerned) is that no person should be given the kind of control over another person that we routinely give to those who run our prisons over those we designate as prisoners. As Zimbardo notes: The only difference between guard and prisoner is a flip of the coin. While it may be easy to draw parallels between the experiment and “real life” we should guard against it. 1. The film is twice removed from the reality of prison life. It is a reenactment of a simulation of prison life. 2. The involvement of the experimenteur (Zimbardo) in his experiment skews the results. 3. To draw general conclusions from a scientific experiment it must be repeatable. The Stanford Prison Experiment is not. 4. To be valid, the sample population must be indicative of the general population. The volunteers appeared to all be young white college boys looking for a summer job. Hardly indicative of the general prison population. Watching the film, there were many instances from which the experiment could have gone in a much different direction: 1. Suppose one of the guards who did not participate in tormenting the prisoners had been more assertive. (In real prison life he would probably be shunted into a desk job or fired.) 2. Suppose one of the prisoners had had training in non-violent passive resistance and simply refused to cooperate with the degrading treatment. Suppose others had followed suit. 3. Suppose one of the prisoners had the skill and ability to overpower the guards or at least do some real physical damage to them. (In a real prison life, he would likely never get the chance.) 4. Suppose one of the prisoners had said something like, “Have your fun now; but this ends in two weeks and you'll spend the rest of your life watching your back for me; and that goes for you too Dr. Zimbardo.” (In a real life prison, he might never get released.) From the actor's portrayal of Zimbardo, I doubt he would have handled a threat like that very well. 5. Suppose during visiting day, one of the prisoners had said, “Mom, they are torturing us. Get me out of here.” (The real prison life equivalent: “Mom, get me a lawyer.”) Once you start down the authoritarian route, it's hard to turn back. Prison uprisings are scary indeed. Once in control, people who have been brutalized and dehumanized do not generally behave nicely. The brutalized become the brutal. I think Zimbardo realized that early on in the experiment. Disclaimer: When I was in my 30s, I lost a friend to a prison uprising. F and I used to spar together. Although many years younger, he was many levels more advanced than I and had a talent for hand to hand combat far beyond mine. On the rare occasion that I could score a point on him, it was invariably because he got overconfident and careless. While I do not know the circumstances of his death, I suspect he picked the wrong time to get careless and overconfident. Establishing complete control over another human being is an authoritarian dream — and prisons and military training camps are the research laboratories where this experiment, which is perhaps 10,000 years old, continues. The world prison population now stands at 10.35 million. Of those, 2.2 million (over 20%) are in the United States which holds less than 5% of the world population. We have prisons like Guantanamo that have no other purpose than human experimentation. Not included in these figures is Gaza, the world's largest (open air) prison which boasts 1.8 million prisoners, half of whom are children. Living under the whim of their Israeli overlords, prisoners are unable to leave and receive only what their Israeli guards allow, which is barely enough for survival. But humans are humans, not robots. The authoritarian dream of complete control is further away than ever. George Orwell's 1984 is simply a work of fiction. The prison population of the United States is falling — slowly to be sure — but falling nevertheless — not out of the largesse of authoritarians, but because people in and out of prison are demanding it. Calls to close Guantanamo strengthen. Gazans continue to rebel. The Israeli hold on Gaza is crumbling — after almost 50 years of authoritarian military rule. Humans are humans, not robots. Prison guards are as much the victims of this grand experiment gone awry as prisoners. As Zimbardo notes — the only difference between guard and prisoner is the toss of a coin. This part of the experiment is just as true in “real life” as in Zimbardo's simulation. I hope the authoritarian dream of complete control is never realized. If it is, we, guards and prisoners alike, all cease to be human. But I don't think it ever will be realized. I'm an optimist. I'm betting on the human race. ================== Rolla Peace News is distributed by email once a week on Tuesday evenings (except on rare occasions) and is posted on the web at http://tomsager.org (click on Grassroots Rolla: top of rightmost column).If you don't wish to get notices of peace events in the Rolla area, let me know and I'll take you off this list. If you want to be added to this list, let me know. Wage peace, Helen helenm (at) fidnet.com ### |